Q. I see that a certain controversial celebrity is in the spotlight again, this time for the apparent endorsement of paedophilia, but on viewing the ‘leaked’ tapes involved, I saw no such thing. Now I understand from your previous bulletin on propaganda rookie mistakes that in similar scenarios, the only people fooled by such obvious anti-factual smear campaigns are those that are already committed to the smear—the evidence merely begs the question, so to speak. This time though, I’m seeing people and institutions from all sides of the political spectrum up in arms over it. What’s going on?
A. Some material is simply ripe for lazy propaganda, and this is one such example.
The mistake, if one were to call it that, that our celebrity made was that he committed a cardinal virtue-signalling sin—he muddied the victim narrative.
People like to be outraged by sexual predators that prey on minors—it's one area where people from all sides of the political spectrum actually agree, but they really don’t like to think about it—and why would they? Instead, they have a very specific image of the crime in mind.
The victim is always faceless, voiceless, passive, innocent, irreparably damaged by the assault that they were powerless to prevent.
The adult perpetrator on the other hand is evil, active, predatory, has no sense of guilt or shame, and will do whatever he (or technically she, but not in this narrative) wants regardless of how much it hurts other people. They pluck the innocence of the young while laughing maniacally, before slithering back into the shadows.
Nuance really doesn't make a good bedfellow of a child sexual abuse victim narrative.
In a dissimilar but related fashion, reporters from combat zones are very careful not to show you the human cost of war. Talking about a decisive victory in front of a field of strewn bloodied bodies, both friend and foe, distracts the audience from the narrative they wish to weave, and may cause some people to rethink their stances on things—and the people themselves really don't appreciate that. Nuance muddies the waters in unpredictable ways, and is best avoided when hearts and minds are concerned, especially at dinnertime.
The celebrity in question effectively showed us such a battlefield. He talked about his experiences as a victim, but rather than showing us the passive, faceless, voiceless avatar of childhood innocence we all prefer, he showed us an arrogant, pubescent, sexually curious 13 year old who was an active and willing participant in his own abuse. He even joked about it. And the perpetrator—he was the one that remained faceless, voiceless.
Of course, he was talking unguardedly, and did clarify later in the interview (a part that was edited out by many propaganda merchants) that he was indeed a victim of serious crimes, and that it had a terrible lasting effect on him. Astute seekers of truth should see this for the deeper meaning it represents—that the psychological trauma of child sexual abuse is much more complicated and much much worse than we would normally assume.
But people don't want to have their perceptions challenged when they're so much more comfortable being outraged by an abstraction. They don’t like to think about the victims of child sexual abuse as being real organic people with all the idiosyncrasies that entails. They don't want to see the human cost of the crime, and especially not at dinnertime.
His breaking free of the unspoken victim narrative ruined some people's dinners, and only the worst kind of decadent sexual deviant, undeserving of any empathy, would dare do such a thing. Why, he's probably a paedophile himself, I knew it.
And that of course was his other mistake, if one were to call it that—the unspoken implications that his becoming an in-for-a-pound homosexual directly resulted from his experiences of childhood sexual abuse, and that the true nature of homosexuality is one of inherent perverse decadence, sits in striking contrast to the officially sanctioned narrative that ‘gay’ is a normal and healthy sexual orientation, and absolutely equivalent to heterosexuality.
Nobody, least of all him, actually said these things, but even casual advocates of the pro-LGBT narrative are all thinking it. The Emperor has no clothes, and the little boy must pay the price for bringing it to our attention.
With all this to one side, there is a much worse crime occurring right now that will continue to go unrecognised and unpunished. The staff of the propaganda merchants involved or complicit in the editing of those tapes to enable this coordinated hit piece are guilty of exploiting the sexual abuse of children, just to score cheap political points. The same is true of every single person gleefully denouncing the celebrity over this manufactured non-issue.
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