Wanjiru Njoya is a former Rhodes Scholar from Kenya and has a Ph.D. in law from the University of Cambridge (St. Edmunds, 1998). She is the co-author with David Gordon of Redressing Historical Injustice: Self-Ownership, Property Rights and Economic Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Wokism is an increasingly aggressive and extreme movement, and many think this is the beginning of its end. Are they being overly optimistic?
There is reason to be optimistic, in that more people are now aware of the threat, but those who say that we’re witnessing the end, or even the beginning of the end, are wrong. DEI is still mandatory in many universities and corporations, with no sign of abating. On the contrary, some CEOs have reported that they’re stepping up their DEI efforts.
Some believe that the woke ideology will destroy itself because of its contradictions or that woke can be used against woke. For example, a Spanish military man has declared himself a trans woman and a lesbian. By becoming a non-gestational parent, ‘she’ has more rights to see her child than as a father. There are more and more cases like this one.
These types of ‘clever’ uses of wokery can indeed bring it into disrepute and cause many of its supporters to realise that it’s ridiculous. A similar example would be the people who are ‘weaponising’ Scotland’s new hate speech law by flooding the police with reports of hate. However, I would caution that those behind wokery are extremely focused and determined, and they will not stand down just because people are laughing at them. Their methods work in attaining power, and they won’t give up the chance to have even more power simply for fear of being laughed at.
There is a phrase: “Your oppression will go out of fashion,” which sums up well what is happening. Women, once oppressed, are now oppressors and transphobes if they don’t agree with trans laws. Where is the end?
There is no logical end to it. Every day, new oppressed groups emerge. Now we have people who claim to identify as a different age, people who claim that their sexual orientation is towards trees and plants, all manner of new groups that claim to be vulnerable and marginalised. As long as social and political power is derived from being marginalised, new groups will constantly emerge, each with more power than the previous group.
Besides the ridiculousness, isn’t a society that is unable to define what a man and a woman are a much weaker society?
No, everybody knows what a man and a woman are, even though they might never have taken a biology class and might not be able to offer a scientific definition. The strength of society is not based on its citizens’ ability to define words whose meaning is plain. Philosophers have interesting debates about how to define things—for example, how would you define a chair? It would be difficult to construct a definition that covers all types of chairs and also excludes any furniture that is not a chair. But the inability to define ordinary words in no way impedes social interaction. On the contrary, it could be said that when political discourse is dominated by sophistry and the government is constantly issuing ‘guidance’ on the meaning of plain words, giving instructions on who should go into which bathroom, that is a sign of a society in decay.
In the 1980s, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov spoke of the demoralisation of the West. Fifty years later, his words seem prophetic: Is wokism the consequence of the cultural war waged against the West at that time?
Bezmenov’s words do indeed seem prophetic, but following the advice of John T. Flynn (in The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution, 1949), I am reluctant to look outside the West for the most significant source of the threat facing Western civilization. Flynn warns that the real enemy is within. He cautions that while we must not underestimate external threats, the greater threat comes from internal enemies who have the advantage that they are “not tainted with the odium of treachery.” Internal enemies are regarded as harmless because they are ‘one of us,’ and their intentions are always assumed to be good, no matter how much havoc they wreak. This gives them a huge strategic advantage in marching forward unopposed. For example, after the chaos surrounding Scotland’s new hate speech law, The Times reported that the law had “good intentions” and had only failed in so far as it did not protect so-called gender-critical women from being charged with hate crimes. A survey by The Telegraph found that three-quarters of English schools allow children to change their gender at school; again, they are working on the assumption that the law is well intentioned.
Surely no one in the KGB would have imagined that the RAF would not have enough fighter pilots to fill the diversity quota.
The prospect of RAF planes grounded while they await the training of ethnic women fighter pilots or the Royal Navy decommissioning warships as they have too few sailors to man them would indeed be beyond the KGB’s wildest dreams.
Earlier, you mentioned the new Scottish ‘hate speech’ law. The police of Scotland admit they are understaffed to enforce the radical new law against ‘hate speech.’ According to this law, what is not ‘hate speech’?
The stated grounds of hate speech in the law are “age, disability, race, colour, nationality (including citizenship), or ethnic or national origins, religion, or, in the case of a social or cultural group, perceived religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity, and variations in sex characteristics.” In practice, ‘hate speech’ law protects everyone except heterosexual white Christian men. Many people derived great satisfaction from reporting Humza, Scotland’s first minister, for the notorious speech in which he complained about too many people in Scotland being white. But we know from previous experience in the enforcement of diversity ‘protected characteristics’ that the police will simply select which types of ‘hate’ to prosecute and which types of ‘hate’ to overlook. Hate speech enforcement has always observed double standards. The best example of this is South Africa, where chanting “Kill the Boer, Shoot to Kill” has been ruled not to be hate speech even though hearing such chants would be distressing to anyone, but displaying the old South African flag has been declared hate speech because black people said seeing the flag makes them feel distressed.
You are a staunch supporter of Afrikaner farmers, a group that has suffered systematic violence for 30 years in the face of media silence. Why are you so committed to this cause? Should we in the West take note of what is happening in South Africa?
The case of the Afrikaners is particularly concerning because it shows that even violence and murder will be overlooked and ignored if the victims are of the wrong race. We should all be very concerned about that. If the seriousness of murder depends on the respective races of the victim and attacker, then nobody is safe. In particular, the West should be concerned about events in South Africa because the West is primarily responsible for the vulnerable situation in which these farmers now find themselves, having wrongly intervened in the twilight years of apartheid through sanctions and boycotts. The vast majority of South Africans of all races wanted an end to apartheid and should have been left in peace to work out a new constitutional arrangement without economic sanctions and harassment from the hypocritical UN declaring apartheid to be a “crime against humanity”—the same UN that now turns a blind eye to attacks on white farmers who are targeted for their race.
Is there hope in the face of the civilisational suicide that Wokism represents?
There is always hope. It is not necessary to persuade everyone to fight back against civilizational decline; it is only necessary to persuade enough people. Every day, more people are realising this and stepping up to do whatever they can to help.
