Oh Horror! Vandals Eat Art Installation!

This is extremely funny. Or at least it is to my twisted sense of humour. Sky News reported yesterday that a terrible act of philistine artistic vandalism had occurred. You may remember the controversy some time ago when a very modern artist exhibited his latest installation, which was a banana taped to the gallery wall. Now some amateur art critic has defaced it by taking of the tape and eating the banana. Apparently it was an art student, who said he felt hungry. Afterwards he said that he always felt that the works of the Italian artist responsible for the installation represented rebellion, but that there could also be a rebellion against the rebellion. Oh, the horror! Actually, I think it’s brilliant and exactly what this type of pretentious pseudery needs. It needs to be mocked and ridiculed, and if people deface it like that, then it only exposes even further its threadbare and specious nature. Some of us can remember the outcry from Tracey Emin back in the ’90s or Noughties when a couple of young Chinese chaps climbed on her bed at the Tate and bounced around on it. I also heard that they were arrested before they could get Francis Picabia’s urinal and use it for the purpose it was originally intended. Well, that urinal has been around since 1919 and was a caustic joke at the expense of the artistic establishment. It was a Dadaist comment on European culture, which in the view of the Dadaists, had been responsible for the terrible war that had just been fought. It was anti-art, but it’s been celebrated ever since as some kind of deep, incisive comment about art. I suppose it’s funny if you’re young and fancy yourself as a bit of an iconoclast mocking the sensibilities and artistic orthodoxies of your elders. But it’s now become something of an artistic icon itself, and seems to me to be just puerile instead of anything deeper or more significant. It was a joke, and not a very good one, but is now held up as an important piece of 20th century art by an artistic establishment that doesn’t have much of a sense of humour when its sensibilities are lampooned. I think the Russian Futurist poet Mayakovsky gave the game away when he titled a volume of his poems A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Such avant-garde works were all about shocking popular taste. Sometimes there really is a point to such challenging works, and the artistic experiments of the avant-garde produce genuinely interesting and stimulating art. But not always. And much avant-garde contemporary art just strikes me as banal. What seems to sustain it is the conservatism of parts of the artistic establishment and the ingenuity of the artists and critics in providing justifications for these pieces, in which they give reasons why the most unlikely object or installation is somehow a piece of staggering genius.

In fact, I think there are some really interesting and really skilful artistic works being produced, but they’re by people away from the artistic establishment, by amateur artists, commercial illustrators and the designers of computer games and films. I think the works of these artists deserve greater appreciation, rather than the exhibits of modern official art.

A Futurist Prediction of Military Robot Animals

I’ve an interest in Futurism, an Italian avant-garde artistic movement allied to Fascism. In their 1915 manifesto, Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero looked forward to the creation of artificial animals that would not only perform automatically, but would also be used in a future war.

‘THE METALLIC ANIMAL

Fusion of art and science, chemistry, physics, continuous and unexpected pyrotechnics all incorporated into a new creature that will speak, shout and dance automatically. We Futurists, Balla and Depero, will construct millions of metallic animals for the vastest war (conflagration of all the creative forces of Europe, Asia, Africa and America, which will undoubtedly follow the current marvellous human conflagration’.

In Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (Boston, Massachusetts: Museum of Fine Arts 1970) 200.

Depero and Balla are clearly thinking of the mechanical toys that were being created and sold at the time, and imagining them on a grander scale with the purpose of killing. They had already discussed such toys in an previous section of their manifesto. But it’s also a prediction of the robot animals, like Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot, which are being developed by robotics firms around the world. I think Boston Dynamics has issued statements that they have signed agreements not to develop war robots or modify their machines so that they could be used for war. But war robots are being developed by the world’s military, and Spot came after the development of the Big Dog robot. This was intended to be a robotic pack animal for the American army, but was eventually rejected because its electric motors were too loud.

Robots, Rock and Fashion

As you could probably tell from my piece about the very weird outfits sported by Sam Smith and Harry Styles at this year’s Grammys and Brit Awards, I’m not a fashionista. And I still remember Punk fashion designer Vivienne Westwood getting very narked on Wogan back in the 1980s when the audience started laughing at her extremely bizarre creations. ‘Why are they laughing?’, she wailed, followed by ‘Well, it went down very well in Milan’. Which it probably did, but I suspect that most ordinary Italians probably have no more patience for bonkers and unwearable clothing than we Brits or anyone else in the world.

But I am interested in robots and in art and music that includes them. And there have been a number of fashion designers who have included them in their shows. Alexander McQueen had this performance as part of his spring/summer 1999, where two industrial robots spray paint the model’s dress while an operatic aria wails in the background. The video is from the CoutureDaily channel on YouTube.

Then there’s this video of ‘Rock Meets Robots at Philippe Plein Fashion Show’, posted seven years ago on his YouTube channel by linearnetworkslive. This has the models gliding along a conveyor belt while industrial robots also move about the stage. You’ll also see the robot band Compressorhead, and the music for the show includes Kraftwerk, natch.

Plein also had another fashion show with a similar theme. This had Titan the Robot walking about the stage talking, before a giant UFO descended from the ceiling and a glamorous woman in a black catsuit walked out. Titan took her hand, and the two walked around the stage a bit more while Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ played in the background.

A female robot also made its debut at Tokyo Fashion Week as shown in this video, also from YouTube, put up by AP Archive. It’s interesting as a spectacle, but I’m afraid all the dialogue is in Japanese and their are no subtitles, so I have no idea what they’re saying.

I also found this interview posted by Dremel on their YouTube channel with the international fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht. Wipprecht describes herself as a fashion technician, who includes technology in her creations. She says that fashion is analogue, so she wanted to make it digital. One of her creations is a spider dress, which has little robotic spider legs about the neck and shoulders. It has motion sensors, which activate the legs as if they’re attacking if you come into the wearer’s personal space. Which is a bit scary. Wipprecht describes some of her techniques and tools, which includes Dremel’s 3-D printers, so the video’s a bit of an advert for the company. It reminds me a little of the short-lived vogue for wearable computers that briefly appeared in the ’90s before fizzling out.

These Wipprecht and the McQueen and Plein fashion shows are all very much in the aesthetic style of the Futurists, an aggressive Italian artistic movement that celebrated the novelty, speed and excitement of industry and the new machine age. In his ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ of 1909, the movement’s founder, Filippo Marinetti, raved about how the movement would sing of workers toiling beneath electric moons, cars and aeroplanes and stated ‘we look forward to the future union of man and machine.’ I despise the Futurists’ aggressive nationalism, their militarism and ‘scorn for women’, but do like their exploration of the machine aesthetic in their art and music. One of the pieces they composed was entitled ‘The Agony of the Machine’, while another was an opera about the love a steam locomotive had for her driver. They were also interested in fashion, and reacted against tasteful, dark clothing demanding colourful attire that positively screamed at you. These fashion shows and Wipprecht bring this aesthetic into the 21st century and the age of AI and real robots.

But back in the ’70s before the technology had emerged to incorporate real robots into pop music, we had Dee Dee Jackson singing ‘Automatic Lover’ accompanied by a robot on stage, well, a man in a suit playing a robot. It was briefly mentioned in an episode of ‘Robusters’ in 2000 AD when the band plays it in an underground robot bar. Here, for fans of 70s disco, is a video I found of it, again on YouTube, on bchfj’s channel.

Xenomorphs from Alien Sing Metallica’s ‘Fuel’

This is one for the petrolheads, Heavy Metal fans and aficionados of Mad Max. It’s another video from the Danny Huynh Creations channel on YouTube and is of another of his animatronic creations singing a rock song. In this instance, it’s a couple of the Aliens singing Metallica’s ‘Fuel’. This is an celebration of pure delights of speed and the internal combustion engine that would’ve delighted the Futurists as well as the presenters of Top Gear as well as bikers, obviously. I’ve said before that Huynh’s robots and vehicles have beaten, grungy look as if they’ve come from a dystopian future like that of the Mad Max movies. This is the case with the car in this video. If you also look carefully, you can also see other details from the Alien and Predator franchises. Mounted on the bonnet is a Predator head, whose faceplate lifts up to reveal the creature’s face. In the car’s passenger seat is a human figure, whose head is wrapped in a facehugger. And apart from Mad Max, it also reminds me a little of that other film about high octane future racing, Death Race 2000. Enjoy!

Clive Simpson Video on the Nazi Persecution of Gays

I’ve been debating putting up something about a video Clive Simpson posted on YouTube. Simpson’s a gay YouTuber and critic of the trans movement. He was annoyed by what he saw as the appropriation of the pink triangle, the badge the Nazis made gays wear in the concentration camps, by a transgender group. I was in two minds about writing about it because I know that some of the great commenters to this blog have strong pro-trans views, and I didn’t want to start another debate about the trans issue. But Simpson’s video is valuable because he discusses the Nazi persecution of gay men, the numbers incarcerated in the concentration camps and how they were treated by the Nazis.

He states that they were subject to human experimentation and castration. I don’t doubt him. Castration as a ‘cure’ for homosexuality seems to have predated the Nazis and persisted after the overthrow of the Third Reich. The Futurists, who were allied with the Fascists but had a much more liberal attitude to sex and sexuality, in one of their manifestos attacked a doctor who claimed that castration was a cure for same-sex attraction. Pat Mills, the creator of 2000AD and one of Britain’s greatest comics writers, is a bitter critic of the Roman Catholic church. Much of this comes from his experience of sadistic abuse by a teacher at his old school, which was run by monks. In his book about his Celtic hero, Slaine, he talks about how in the 1950s the Roman Catholic church in Belgium had 15 youths castrated because they were gay. This was at the time when homosexuality was still illegal in England and much of the rest of the world. The legal punishment for gayness in Britain could also be nasty. Alan Turing committed suicide because the judge had ordered him to take female hormones and this had caused him to grow breasts.

Simpson’s video is also good in that it contains film footage of imprisoned gays in the concentration camp uniform, which provides a depiction of the human reality behind the discussion of the issue and the suffering caused.

Despite his controversial opinions on the people he calls ‘genderoids’ I felt I had to say something to recommend his video after the news the other day that Eric Zemmour, the French far-right candidate for the presidency, was facing legal action by six gay groups. Zemmour had been talking to another rightist, who denied that gay men had been deported from occupied France. This isn’t true, and understandably these organisations representing gay French people aren’t amused. I’m therefore recommending Simpson’s video here simply because it shows the reality of Nazi persecution, which Zemmour and his mates seem to want to deny when it involves France.

I’m not putting it up here out of respect for those commenters with pro-trans views. But if you want to get proper information on the Nazi persecution of gay men – they didn’t persecute lesbians because they believed they could turn straight at some point – then please Google ‘Genderoids Appropriate the Pink Triangle’.

A quick Google search on YouTube also throws up a number of other videos about the Nazi persecution of the gays. They include:

The Story of the Gay Holocaust, running time 1hr 12, posted by James Somerton.

How the Pink Triangle Came from Nazi’s to Pride, at 3 minutes 32 seconds, posted by Powered by Rainbows

and Rudolf Brazda, Last of the pink Triangles, tells his story, post by yaggtv, 11 minutes 20.

There are very good reasons why decent people, regardless of their sexual orientation, ought to be worried and infuriated by his denial of the deportation of French gay men to the camps.

As with Holocaust denial, it disgusting and in many European countries illegal because it seems very much that the people who deny it ever happened would very much like to do it again.

No pasaran for Nazis and murderous bigots.

Six Robot Animals from Festo Robotics

Here’s another fascinating little video about robots. It’s not just humanoid robots that the cybernetics companies are developing, quite apart from the machines that aren’t intended to resemble people, like the industrial robotic arms. They’ve also been developing robot animals. Boston Robotics did it with their ‘Big Dog’ robots, which were intended as carriers for the American army. The project eventually failed because the noise from the machines’ electric motors would have been too loud for the stealth needed on combat missions. The machines, however, do strongly resemble dogs. Festo Robotics have taken this further and developed robotic versions of various animals, as this video from Inventions World on YouTube shows. The machines are a flying fox; jellyfish; a wheelbot, that can curl up and roll along before uncurling itself to walk on crab-like feet, somewhat like the robots that Obi Wan Kenobi and his teacher first encounter aboard the Trade Federation’s craft in the first Star Wars prequel, the Phantom Menace; a bird; butterflies; and a kangaroo. Well, actually the last one is more like a wallaby. It’s not as large as an Australian kangaroo. But this one clearly has some intelligence, as the video shows a young woman telling it turn round and move to a different place by pointing. I think she’s able to control it through a device wrapped around one of her arms.

These are amazing machines, beautiful and graceful. I wonder what a whole ecology of such robots would be like. There have been attempts to depict such an environment. There was a short-lived strip in 2000 AD, ‘Metalzoic’, set in the far future when humanity had been ousted as the dominant creature on Earth by robots with the ability to reproduce. There was thus a whole ecology of robot animals, and the strip followed the adventures of a group of robot cave people as they sought out the God-Beast, a robot mammoth which contained the master programme controlling this mechanical world. And a few years before that, Valiant ran a story in their ‘Spider’ strip, in which the brooding genius and his minions were forced into fighting another evil genius, who had created his own synthetic robotic environment on his secret island. ‘The Spider’ was a British strip that had zilch to do with Marvel’s Spiderman. According to the Bronze Age of Blogs, now sadly closed down, ‘The Spider’ was a criminal mastermind, who had decided to fight other criminals because they were too stupid or otherwise beneath him. You wouldn’t know it from reading the strip, as until art robot Kevin O’Neil introduced it in 2000 AD, artists, writers and letterers weren’t credited in British comics, but the writer on the strip was Joe Siegel, one of the co-creators of Superman! These machines would also have delighted the Futurists, although I fear they had a darker, more violent purpose for them. One of their manifestoes called for the creation of biomechanical animals to train boys in war. I’d rather have such creatures made for the sheer delight of their invention and their graceful beauty. The bird in particular reminds me of one of the characters in M. John Harrison’s science fantasy novel, The Pastel City, who makes robot birds. As a result, his castle is surround by flocks of them. Perhaps as the technology advances we might expect similar robots along with the other robotic toys now available.

Grayson Perry, Futurism and the Democratisation of Art

One of the best programmes to have been on during the lockdown has been Grayson Perry’s Art Club on Channel 4, hosted by the Turner Prize-winning potter. He has attempted to encourage people across the country to get creating their own personal works of art. They have included ordinary Brits, as well as celebrities like Johnny Vegas and Boy George. At the end of the series, the works he selected for inclusion on his programme were exhibited in one of the country’s museums. Last year’s entry’s were displayed, I think, in Manchester. This year they’re being exhibited at the City Museum and Art Gallery here in Bristol. Accompanying the exhibition was an edition of his programme last Friday, in which he went behind the scenes to show the works being put up, as well as display the pieces that he had selected and talk to their creators. Those included came from all works of life. One was a volunteer at a food bank, who had painted one of the other women working there behind the counter. Another was a transvestite, who had painted himself in feminine make-up. Johnny Vegas had produced a highly stylised human figure representing Norman. This was a young lad he remembered from school, who always seemed hunched up in his coat as if he had already been defeated and given up on life. Vegas wished he could go back and encourage him to become more positive. One of the most amazing people was Becky Taylor, a young woman stricken with quadriplegic cerebral palsy. Paralysed and confined to a wheelchair, she nevertheless was able to speak and create through the same type of computer technology as Stephen Hawking. She was able to paint a portrait of Perry by moving her eyes across the computer screen. Their movements were captured by the software, which turned them into brushstrokes. The result was an astonishingly good likeness. Perry tried to do it for himself, but unsurprisingly only succeeded in making a mess.

It struck me that Perry’s programme in many respects was close to some of the ideals and demands made by the Italian Futurists. Not that the gentle, transvestite Perry had anything politically in common with the hypermasculine, nationalistic belligerence of the Futurists, who celebrated violence and declared war to be ‘sole hygiene of the world’, and whose survivors after World War I joined Mussolini’s Fascists. But Taylor’s art and the technology that enabled her to express her creativity would certainly have pleased them, as they celebrated the new industrial Italy. Marinetti, in his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism of 1909, had looked forward to ‘the coming union of man and machine’.

But Marinetti had also called for museums and exhibition spaces to be opened up to the public, to display the works of art that were being produced by ordinary Italians. He was impressed by the number of people, even in small villages, who were artistically inclined and dismayed by how they were frustrated and crushed. In his ‘Florentine Address’ of 1919, he remarked on ‘the proletariat of geniuses’, the frustrated intellectuals of contemporary Italy, calling for their encouragement and display. He said, or, more probably, declaimed

“I wish to fill another gap by turning now to the only proletariat that remains forgotten and oppressed: the vitally important proletariat of geniuses.

It is indisputable that our race surpasses all others in the large number of geniuses that it produces. Even the smallest Italian group, the smallest village, can claim seven or eight twenty-year olds, who are brimming over with creative fervor, youths of overweening ambition as revealed in volumes of unpublished verse and in eloquent outbursts in the public squares and at political rallies. Admittedly some (though they are few in number) are little more than foolish dreamers who will probably never attain true genius. But there is genius in their temperament, which is to say that, encouraged in the right manner, they might well contribute to the nation’s intellectual dynamism.

In that same small group or village it is easy to find seven or eight middle-aged men above whose heads hovers the melancholy halo of failed genius, a halo that accompanies them through their lives as petty clerks or professionals, in neighbourhood cafes, and with their families. Remnants of a genius that never found a propitious environment in which it might thrive, they were quickly laid low by economic and sentimental necessities.

I founded the Futurist artistic movement eleven years ago in order to brutally modernize the literary-artistic milieu, to deprive it of any authority and destroy its ruling gerontocracy, to debunk pedantic professors and critics, and to encourage the reckless outbursts of young genius. My aim was to create a fully oxygenated atmosphere, a healthy, encouraging, supportive atmosphere where all of Italy’s young geniuses might prosper. I sought to encourage all of them, to increase their pride, to clear a path for them, to swiftly reduce the proportion of failed and worn-out geniuses.

It is sometimes difficult to recognise, appreciate, and encourage young geniuses. In part this is because instead of viewing their homeland as a vast malleable mass to be molded spiritually, these youths regard it as an idiotic network of abuses of power, criminal rackets, corrupt authorities, and asinine rules. And, of course, they are right. Everywhere in our country, genius is undervalued, derided, imprisoned. Only mediocre opportunists and over-the-hill, one-time geniuses are celebrated and crowned….

Many other youths – dynamic, impetuous young men, intoxicated with spiritual heroism and revolutionary patriotism – have now swollen the Futurist ranks. But a great many others remain ignorant or depressed, stifled by the atmosphere of small ultrapasseist cities. Thanks to the vast wave of stormy soirees and demonstrations that swept up and down the Italian peninsula, Futurism came into contact with nearly everyone. But the nation’s political forces will have to undertake a more systematic campaign if we are to save, re-ignite, and tap the vast energies possessed by the proletariat of geniuses.

I propose the construction in every city of a number of buildings that bear a title like the following: Free Exhibition of Creative Genius. In these facilities:

1. works of painting, sculpture, graphics, architectural drawings, machine drawings, and designs of inventions will be on display for a month at time;
2. Musical works, small or large, for orchestra or piano, in any genre, form, or size will be performed.
3. poems, prose, scientific writings of all kinds and lengths will be read, displayed, recited;
4. all citizens will have the right to exhibit free of charge;
5. works of any kind or any value, even if seemingly judged to be absurd, inane, crazy or immoral, will be displayed or read without a jury.

With these free and open exhibitions of creative genius, we Futurists wage war against an ever present danger: the danger of seeing the spirit shipwrecked on the ideological seas that swirl around the formulas of communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

From: A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. and introduced by Jeffrey T. Schnapp (University of Nebraska Press 2000) 271-3.

Some of this has been realised through recent initiatives to open up museums and art galleries to the public and aspiring artists, as well as the new opportunities for display that have come through the internet. I don’t quite share the Futurist’s artistic tastes – they were militant avant-garde artists who attacked traditional art and Italy’s artistic heritage. And there are obviously artistic, literary and scientific works that are too dangerous or immoral to be displayed or encouraged. But Marinetti had a point. Up and down Britain there are people, who have tried their hand at art or literature, and been discouraged because of lack of opportunity. They also deserve their chance. It’s great that programmes like Perry’s are there to encourage them.

But perhaps, to encourage the genius of ordinary people still further, we should build the exhibition halls he called for to show what talent is still out there, waiting to be discovered.

The Blue Man Group and Kuka Industrial Robots

The Blue Man Group are a group of performance artists and musicians, who take the form of blue men, outsiders to our world and society to explore it from the perspective of alien outsiders. In this video on andirobot’s channelon YouTube they perform in front of a pair of Kuka industrial robots spraying a car. This fascinates me because it’s a form of Futurist performance. Marinetti in his 1909 Founding and Manifesto of Futurism declared that they looked forward to the coming union of man and machine and the new machine age. This is very much in that spirit, though it certainly doesn’t share the belligerent nationalism of the Marinetti’s movement. I’m fascinated by it because it shows the way real robots are also becoming included in artistic performances.

Kojo Moe: Factories as Tourist Spots in Japan

I found this interesting snippet in the ‘Funny Old World’ column in Private Eye’s issue for 18-31 March 2011, ultimately taken from a CNN item for 26th January of that year. It’s about a recent development or fad in the Japanese tourist industry: visiting factories. I know they do this in Britain, where people tour historic factories looking at things being made, or learning how they were made in the past. A good example is Ironbridge. But this is something different. It’s about appreciating factories as objects of beauty in themselves. This is radically different to previous ideas of beauty, which are centred on the living landscape, either natural or that of the rural village. And from reading the article, it seems to have its origins partly in the beginning of the film Blade Runner, where Deckard’s car flies past a refinery belching fire. The article runs

‘”Kojo moe is an infatuation with factories,” Daigo Yokoto told reporters outside a power plant in the industrial city of Kawasaki, near Tokyo, “and it’s becoming an alternative form of tourism in Japan. The geometric patterns of metal pipes and frames, the eerie smoke and sudden eruptions of flames – it is a completely different world, and it’s less than an hour away from Tokyo, where and my friends live. It’s not what goes on inside the factories that interests us, it’s the moment where the cylindrical smoke stack sends up steam, or a furnace starts belching smoke. That’s what makes us happy.”

Over the past year, kojo moe has grown from a tiny Japanese subculture into a major form of tourism, with 4,000 yen cruises to industrial zones booked out months in advance. “I love taking photos and I love factories,” added photographer Masaki Ishitani from Osaka, “and combining the two gives me an innocent sense of enjoyment. Kawasaki factories are the biggest, the most beautiful, and most wonderful in Japan. Standing here watching a giant power plant billowing out smoke is just like being in the movie Blade Runner.”

There is a similar aesthetic over here as well, albeit to a far lesser extent. I can remember passing a refinery near Cardiff with friends on the way to a re-enactment event in the ’90s, and we were struck by its awesome beauty. It was floodlit and really did resemble the refinery from Blade Runner. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, based that sequence on a factory or refinery he used to pass when he was a schoolboy or arts student. One night as was passing he said to himself, ‘God, this is beautiful’.

I find this particularly fascinating because it’s precisely the kind of aesthetic that the Futurists were trying to promote. They were a reaction to Symbolism and hated traditional, especially neo-classical art. They celebrated instead the new, modern, urban Italy, of youth, speed, violence and the new machine age. The Futurist architect Sant’Elia designed huge modernist buildings representing the new aesthetic, designs which even now, after the horrors of mid-20th century Brutalist architecture, still look futuristic. Kojo moe also interests me because it does seem to be an instance where Science Fiction has altered or set up a different ideal of beauty. I really don’t believe that the Conceptualism that was all rage as the official art of the ’90s really has done much to push the boundaries of art. I think that’s being done elsewhere, and particularly within Science Fiction and Fantasy, in media such as computer games, films, TV, book illustration and comics. And I’d like to see it appreciated by the art establishment.

Professor Kathleen Stock Forced Out of Sussex University Due to Threats and Bullying by Trans Activists

This is appalling. It’s an attack on free speech and specifically academic freedom by violent student thugs. But unfortunately, it seems to have caused little outrage except from a few individuals on the right because those responsible for the threats are members of a minority, who claimed to be simply defending themselves from persecution.

Before I go on, I wish to make it very plain that I condemn the persecution of anyone for their sexuality or sexual identity. I don’t wish to see trans people denied jobs, ostracised, beaten or worse. I have every sympathy for those struggling with their sexuality or gender. I think it was still within my lifetime that public transvestism was illegal and punishable by a jail sentence. When I was at secondary school in the 1970s-80s we studied ‘relationships’ as part of the Religious Studies course, along with other important issues like television and media bias and influence. One of the piece in the textbook we were using was about a young man, who’d been arrested and jailed for crossdressing. This poor chap wasn’t loud and proud, but tormented by his sexuality. I’ve also got a feeling one of the methods used to treat it was aversion therapy, in which the patient got an electric shock when shown women’s clothes. I think the psychologist Hans Eysenck used this method to treat a transvestite trucker. It’s horrible, and probably explains some of the hysteria amongst trans rights activists when they falsely claim that gender critical feminists somehow want to kill them. I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that anti-trans rights feminists actually do. But it seems to me that the trans activists are afraid that if they aren’t treated exactly as women, somehow the official persecution that existed forty years ago will somehow return.

But the trans rights activists are still perpetrating violent intolerance of their own, and this needs to be fought like any other kind.

Last week Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at Sussex University, finally gave up the struggle and announced she was moving on. Stock had been subjected to a campaign of threats and intimidation, including, I believe, smoke bombs, simply because she believes that transwomen aren’t women and that sexual identity is based in biological sex. That’s it. A group of anonymous students issued a series a threats demanding her removal. I think the university initially gave in, but then pivoted and backed her. Unfortunately, her union, the UCU, refused to do so. Despite support from the university, Stock announced she was leaving. The University gave her a very gracious farewell praising her and her work.

The trans activists and certain sections of the gay rights movement were highly delighted. There were gloating comments about her departure by an anonymous individual, Sussex Against TERFS, the Pink Paper and an SNP MP, all of whom saw this as some kind of victory. But while it might be for them, it is an attack on genuine free speech and democracy.

Western democratic society is built on free speech, and much of the west’s intellectual progress has come from the ability to investigate, research, examine and discuss without interference or censorship. These freedoms have been hard won, and as we’re seeing from the Tories’ assault on the right to protest, they are still under threat. Now free speech is not an absolute right. There are laws against certain types of speech, such as incitement to racial hatred the promotion of paedophilia and so on. The argument trotted out by the Trans Rights Activists in their attacks on gender critical feminists and their supporters is that somehow the denial that transwomen are women is an attack on trans people’s very lives. J.K. Rowling has been accused of wanting to kill trans people, simply because she said that transwomen weren’t women. Russell T. Davies, the creator of the Channel 4 gay soap opera, Queer As Folk, who revived Doctor Who nearly a decade and a half ago, gave a bizarre speech last week attack the LGB Alliance. This was set up by gay men and women as an alternative to Stonewall, because they felt that the latter was concentrating on trans rights at the expense of defending ordinary gay people. They have no animus towards trans people. They merely regard trans identity as a separate issue which should have its own organisation. But because of this they were attacked as ‘transphobic’, ‘Nazis’ and Fascists. In his speech, Davies left the endings off various words, and then declared that ‘when you exclude the ‘T’, you kill’.

What? No-one is talking about killing trans people, except the trans activists. It’s a nasty, malign accusation.

But the accusation unfortunately believed by all too many trans people, and is motivating some to acts of violence and death threats, such as those against Prof. Stock. Her departure from Sussex University has been covered by the Lotus Eaters and Alex Belfield, who states that he doesn’t believe that real trans people are behind the threats. He says instead that it’s probably their supporters. One of the Lotus Eaters states that the threat of violence were so serious that when Stock came to talk at his old university, there were bouncers on the door checking peoples’ bags to make sure they weren’t trying to smuggle a bomb into the auditorium.

This is not defending the rights of a minority. This is terrorism and Fascism. Almost literally.

This might sound incredible, considering that trans rights is generally considered to be a left-wing issue, but sections of Italian Fascism would have supported it solely because of the violence of its supporters. The Futurists, a radical avant-garde artistic movement linked to the Fascists, idealised ‘youth, speed and violence’. They praised ‘the slap, the punch, as the decisive argument’. And while they were vehemently hypermasculine and opposed feminism, they were impressed with the Suffragettes because of their dynamism and acts of violence and terror. In the 1940s the movement’s leader, Marinetti, raved about a coming war between lesbians and homosexuals, who would then united against normal men. Well, the violence and terrorist threats issued by militant trans activists aren’t quite like that, but they’re close, especially as Stock is a lesbian.

These Fascistic threats and violence should be stopped immediately. Anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Kean has said that the students responsible for them should be expelled. I agree. People have every right to protest, but this should not include threats of violence and real bullying.

The students making them are not defending democracy, but trying to destroy through a determination to stamp out any belief that disagrees with their own. It’s time this was halted.

Real tolerance is not only tolerating views you agree with or find acceptable. It is tolerating those you don’t. And it is time that the students responsible for these threats realised this.

Here are the video from the Lotus Eaters and Alex Belfield commenting on this. Yes, I know they’re terrible right-wingers, but this is such an important issue that I feel they should be heard. And I agree with Belfield when he states that he is horrified more people aren’t condemning Stock’s bullying. Absolutely. I wish more people were doing so too, especially from the left.

Because I don’t believe real threats and violence should be used against anyone in a democratic society, except perhaps real, violent Fascists.