Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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The worst actions of your government happen not in secrecy, but right out in the open under the narrative cover of mass media propaganda. The western empire doesn’t hide its worst deeds, it just manipulates the way people think about them.

Tomorrow we could unearth rock-solid proof that the US government knowingly orchestrated 9/11, and that crime in and of itself still wouldn’t be as bad as what the US government is facilitating in Gaza right now, in plain view of the entire world. And even if such a revelation did occur, the imperial media would probably either ignore it or spin it so that its impact is dulled into impotence.

The empire’s worst atrocities happen in the open because the empire’s worst atrocities involve butchering and starving huge numbers of people, which is impossible to do in secret. They can assassinate a government official here and sign a malignant secret agreement there without needing to do it openly, but murder at mass scale isn’t something you can conceal in the information age.

The US-centralized globe-spanning power structure therefore relies heavily on its historically unprecedented ability to psychologically manipulate global populations when carrying out such atrocities. The empire has invested more heavily in soft power than any empire or government in human history, and the science of modern propaganda has been advancing under this investment at least as rapidly as military technology has been.

That’s why you can have the most damning information imaginable about the people who rule over us sitting right out in the open, and you won’t see anywhere remotely close to the public outrage and backlash you ought to see. The US government can literally back a genocide without hiding any part of it, and the political-media class will simply manipulate public psychology into getting lost in a bunch of hogwash about self-defense and human shields and difficulties delivering food and medical supplies and hey Biden is working hard to do the right thing here and it’s all very complicated and everything bad that happens in Gaza can be blamed on Hamas anyway.

It’s a truly astonishing power that would inspire awe if it wasn’t so evil. Power is controlling what happens, but real power is controlling what people think about what happens.

Whistleblowers and investigative journalists provide an invaluable service to humanity for which we should all be grateful, but what this civilization needs more than anything right now is not so much new information about what the powerful are doing, but rather the ability to lucidly perceive the information that’s already been made public. We need people clearly seeing what’s already right in front of them, without the lens of distortion and obfuscation that the powerful have placed over their eyes.

Until we find a way to snap a critical mass of people out of the propaganda-induced coma the empire has placed them in, they’ll be able to get away with any evil they need to commit in order to secure their interests and advance their agendas. We can work on this front by doing everything we can to get people looking at the reality of what our rulers are doing at every opportunity, in as creative and interesting a way as we can come up with. The more eyes open to the truth, the more lucid perceivers there will be to help open the eyes of others.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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US airman Aaron Bushnell said the words “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal” before self-immolating in protest of the genocide in Gaza. That simple line has been reverberating throughout our collective consciousness ever since.

It seems like every day now we’re learning some horrible new fact about the US-centralized power alliance and the empire managers who carry out its malignant will for our world, because that’s just what our rulers have decided will be the norm for our species going forward.

Reports that Israel tortured UN workers to extract false testimony against Gaza’s primary humanitarian aid agency.

Images surfacing of airstrikes on Gaza occurring at the same time and location as airdrops of aid.

Gazan children beginning to drop dead from hunger in a deliberately-engineered famine that is causing sweeping starvation at breakneck speed.

The IDF kettling the population of Gaza further and further south with a horrifically destructive onslaught and then setting up an attack on the enclave’s densely-packed southernmost point.

Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: ""This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."~ Aaron Bushnell https://t.co/CWTQGRaSm6 / Twitter"

"This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."~ Aaron Bushnell https://t.co/CWTQGRaSm6

Israeli “demonstrators” bringing cotton candy machines and bouncy castles to create a fun, family-friendly atmosphere for their blockades to stop aid trucks from getting into Gaza.

The US president waxing poetically about how “heartbreaking” all the death and destruction in Gaza is when he himself is directly responsible for that death and destruction.

People in the world’s most powerful nation being told they have to choose between two candidates who both support this genocide.

A journalist locked away in a maximum-security prison for factual reporting on the same empire which claims to support free speech and a free press.

The biosphere we depend on for survival being fed into a soulless profit-generating death machine because everything on our planet has been turned into a commodity.

The leaders of nuclear-armed states brandishing armageddon weapons at each other because a few manipulators in Washington DC and Virginia have decided that the US must maintain global hegemony at all cost.

A mind-controlled dystopia in which ordinary people are propagandized into accepting all this as perfectly fine.

This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

This madness will continue until we come together and resolutely decide the opposite.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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One point I keep trying to drive home here in as many ways as I can is that this is the dystopia we were warned about. The main difference between this mind-controlled dystopia and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that in 1984 people knew they weren’t living in a free society, whereas in this dystopia the people believe they are free.

In Orwell’s dystopia people knew they weren’t free and had to use doublethink to stay out of trouble with their rulers. In this dystopia people have no idea how pervasively they’re being dominated by their rulers; they think they came up with their ideas, worldview and political positions on their own, when in reality those belief systems were constructed inside their skulls by a profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine without their even knowing it.

All mainstream and semi-mainstream political factions are owned and operated by the powerful, and propaganda is used to get the public subscribing to them to advance the interests of the powerful. Because the overwhelming majority of us have been manipulated into espousing one of these power-serving belief systems (they give you multiple choices depending on your ideological disposition), the more overtly totalitarian measures described by dystopian novelists are unnecessary. You only need to cage a bird if it knows that it can fly.

But make no mistake: our society is no more free than those in the dark futures imagined by storytellers. If our minds are not free, then we are not free. If we’re being successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, acting, voting, working and consuming in accordance with the wishes of the powerful, then we’re just as locked down as we would be if we had chains around our necks. Collectively we could not be any more aligned with the will of the powerful than we already are, even if our brains were replaced with computer chips.

There is no more need for dystopian fiction, because the dystopia has already arrived. It’s here. In fact, dystopian fiction is actually destructive because it causes people to imagine that dystopia is a threat that exists somewhere off in the future instead of right here and now all around us.

We don’t need dystopian fiction for the same reason we wouldn’t need imaginary swords-and-sorcery fantasy novels if we we lived in a world of wizards and dragons. People living in dystopian societies do not need dystopian fiction, they need dystopian facts. Dystopian journalism. Dystopian documentaries. Dystopian polemics. We just need true information and reality-based ideas to counter the lies and manipulation we’re inundated with from day to day.

We cannot be free until we have used the power of our numbers to shrug off the control of our dystopian overlords, and we’ll never do that as long as a critical majority of us are unable to see how profoundly unfree we really are. There’s no escaping the mind control matrix of imperial propaganda until you can see the lines of code it is made of.

Our most important task then, at this point in history, is to keep pointing out those lines of code for as many people as possible, in as many ways as we can think of. The one advantage to this type of dystopia is that our rulers need to maintain their nice-guy free society image in order to preserve the illusion that we are free, so they can’t just come out and start imprisoning everyone who spotlights the myriad ways we are enslaved by lies and propaganda. They’ll never grant us a major mainstream platform on which to do this, but we can operate within the margins, waking up one person at a time to the reality of what’s going on.

So go around spreading the truth. Fighting the propaganda. Weakening public trust in the mass media and the political constructs it manufactures consent for. Highlighting the depravity and murderousness of the empire. Use any and all media and forums you find to be effective.

Everything you do on this front makes a difference, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. The propaganda machine is the linchpin of their power. It’s what holds the empire together. Without the ability to manipulate the public at mass scale, our rulers cannot rule.

Once people are no longer buying into power-serving narratives, we will gain the ability to begin working toward the creation of a truth-based society that works for everyone. But this will never happen as long as we are being successfully manipulated into believing that this model for human civilization is acceptable and serves our interests. The very first step is un-jacking our brains from the propaganda matrix.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Lesbian relationships in Britain were regulated and silenced for centuries, through the courts and though wider patriarchal structures. In an interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Caroline Derry speaks about research from her book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three centuries of regulation in England and Wales (2020) and what the portrayal of same-sex relationships in Agatha Christie’s novels reveals about attitudes towards homosexuality – and specifically lesbianism – in post-war Britain.

Caroline Derry will speak at a hybrid event hosted by LSE Library, Agatha Christie, lesbians, and criminal courts on Thursday 15 February at 6.00 pm.

Q: In your book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, you speak of lesbianism being silenced in upper-class British society “because of acute anxieties about female sexual autonomy.” Where did these anxieties stem from? 

Women’s autonomy posed a profound threat to patriarchal structures. Marriage, particularly for elite men, was central to maintaining those structures: transfer of property, inheritance, and control over their household all depended upon it. Legally, the wife’s existence was subsumed in her husband’s, giving him power over her property, actions, and sexuality. This was not only true in the 18th century, when the book begins; it persisted through the 19th century and has only slowly been dismantled over the past century and a half. For example, the legal rule that a man could not be convicted of raping his wife was finally abolished in 1991.

There was anxiety that if women ‘discovered’ lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined.

There was anxiety that if women “discovered” lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined. That was explicitly stated by lawmakers at various points in history. In 1811, Scottish judge Lord Meadowbank said that “the virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners”.  In 1921, judge and MP Sir Ernest Wild asserted in Parliament that “it is a well-known fact that any woman who indulges in this vice will have nothing whatever to do with the other sex”. And the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which proposed reform of the law on male homosexuality, spoke of lesbianism as damaging to “the basic unit of society”, marriage.

Q: Why do you write in Lesbianism and the Criminal Law that “Patriarchal oppression […] made the criminalisation of lesbianism almost redundant”? 

There were many other ways of regulating women’s lives and relationships that could offer more effective control and less public scandal. These included economic constraints: in the 18th and 19th centuries, married women of all classes had little or no legal control of their own money. Single women without private incomes were little better off. For example, servants’ employers regulated most aspects of their lives under threat of dismissal without a reference.

Social norms set strict limits for unmarried women’s behaviour and gave families a great deal of control over them – although this could sometimes be evaded, as we know from Anne Lister’s diaries! Religious regulation of moral conduct was important, while medicalisation became more significant from the 19th century. Lesbian relationships were pathologised as a symptom of mental illness and the consequences could be awful: an extreme example was the use of clitoridectomy by surgeon Dr Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s. In the 20th century, “treatments” included aversion therapies and even brain surgery. And until relatively recently, the courts themselves had the power to detain young women in “moral danger”.

Q: Although lesbianism may not have been strictly outlawed, you refer to a “regulation by silencing” of lesbianism within the British court systems. How did this operate? 

Legal silencing was based on the assumption that if women – particularly “respectable”, higher class, white, British women – were not told that lesbianism existed, they probably wouldn’t try it. Eighteenth-century models of sexuality assumed women craved men’s greater “heat”, while 19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire. It was unlikely that two passive and desireless creatures would discover lesbian sex for themselves.

19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire.

In the criminal courts, silencing worked in several ways. The most obvious was to avoid criminal prosecutions altogether, because court hearings are public and could be reported in the press. So, there has never been a specific offence criminalising sex between women (unlike sex between men, which was wholly illegal until 1967). However, when a prosecution did seem necessary, silencing could be maintained by choosing an offence which concealed the sexual element of the case. There is a long history of prosecutions for fraud where one partner presented as male (cases relevant to both lesbian and transgender history). In the 18th century, this was supposed financial fraud to obtain a “wife’s” possessions; in the later 19th and 20th centuries, making false statements on official documents. And throughout these periods, women have been brought before magistrates for disorderly behaviour and breach of the peace – although few records survive.

Q: What does analysis of the defamation case Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon (1810-1812) reveal about how legal discourses defined morality in relation to race and class? 

This Scottish case offers a really potent example of those discourses. A half-Scottish, half-Indian teenager, Jane Cumming, told her grandmother Lady Helen Cumming Gordon that her schoolmistresses were having a sexual relationship. Cumming Gordon urged other families to withdraw their daughters, forcing the school to close, and the teachers brought a defamation claim for their lost livelihood.

The court had to wrestle with difficult questions: could two middle-class women of good character have done what was alleged? If not, how did their accuser come to know of such things? At the initial hearings, the judge’s answer was that the story must been invented by a working-class maid. But when witness evidence was heard, it became apparent that the story originated with Jane Cumming. Attention then shifted to her early life in India. The climate, the supposedly immoral culture, her race, or – in a mixture of race and class discourses – the bad influence of “native’” servants were all blamed.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism. Greater awareness of the horrors of violence, corruption and exploitation by the East India Company made it difficult to present their activities as legitimate trading. Instead, a moral justification was claimed: that Indian people needed to be rescued from iniquity by the imposition of superior British law and standards, exemplified by virtuous British womanhood. Many of the judges and witnesses in this case had connections to India, so it is unsurprising that these discourses made a particularly powerful appearance here.

Q: What were the legal implications of the 1957 Wolfenden report for homosexual activity in Britain? What did the report (or its omissions) reveal about attitudes towards women’s sexuality? 

The Wolfenden Report recommended partially decriminalising sex between men, but barely acknowledged sex between women. The few mentions implied that lesbianism was “less libidinous” and thus less of a threat to public order. That was important because politically, equality for gay men through full decriminalisation was not attainable at that time. Wolfenden therefore took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law, and focusing on arguments specific to male homosexuality. It was successful: Parliament eventually implemented the recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Wolfenden […] took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law

Nonetheless, the Report was a watershed event in the legal regulation of lesbianism. Until then, the law had treated male and female sexuality as very different things. Wolfenden introduced the term “homosexuality” into law, and lesbianism became seen as “female homosexuality”. Combined with the Report’s characterisation of lesbians as less sexual than gay men, this meant that lesbianism was treated as a lesser variant of male homosexuality – an attitude that has never gone away.

Q: Was it remarkable that Agatha Christie included or suggested homosexuality in her novels? 

Yes and no. These were not issues that were generally discussed in polite conversation. At the same time, lesbian (and gay) people were a fact of life, even if not directly acknowledged. In 1950, most people knew of women living quietly living together like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd in A Murder is Announced. Christie walked a careful line in that book, portraying an intimate and deeply loving relationship but showing nothing explicitly sexual about it.

By 1971, when [Christie] wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society.

And of course, Christie was a rather more daring writer than people often realise: it’s unfair to treat her as a narrowly conservative author of formulaic novels. By 1971, when she wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society. But Christie was in any event happy to engage with difficult issues in her work, even quite taboo ones like child murderers.

Q: What insights do these portrayals provide into the criminal justice system’s attitudes to lesbianism in post-war England? 

Christie’s novels reflect wider middle-class attitudes at the specific times they were written, so they offer insights that we can’t get from court reports alone. They also come from a woman’s perspective rather than that of the elite men who mostly made the law, and gender does make a difference here. Men were convinced that respectable women did not know of such things, but women didn’t necessarily agree!

The novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings.

In particular, the novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings. If we look at medical, psychological and sexological work on women’s same-sex relationships in post-war Britain, the courts seem hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison. But Christie’s books show us that outside expert circles, attitudes were indeed decades behind the latest science. In other words, the courts were reflecting and contributing to mainstream opinions, not falling behind them.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: A still from the the episode, “A Murder is Announced” of the BBC Miss Marple series (1984 to 1992), adapted from Agatha Christie’s novels, featuring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple (left) and Paola Dionisotti as Miss Hinchcliffe (right). This image is reproduced under the “Fair Dealing” exception to UK Copyright law.