In case you have not read the last post, I am using Nietzsche’s definition of metonymy as ‘the substitution of cause and effect’. Nietzsche claims that the power of this rhetorical trope was already operating in language unconsciously before it was consciously developed by rhetoricians as a trope, or trick. I claim that the trope is being employed online to excite political punishment in the form of offline violence. In this post, the second of two posts on the power of metonymy, I want to give some examples in political discourse. The last post was on the theory of metonymy as a political tactic, this will describe the use of metonymy as it was practised against me, one in a long line of victims.
Metonymy drives a discourse to justify political punishment and intimidation by substituting the punishment of the victim for his guilt. The meta-level argument of this form activism more generally is- ‘the victim is guilty of hating and this is disgusting, and thus we are justified in hating the victim and dehumanizing him’. This discourse on the guilt of the victim is used to advocate the exigency of the vengeful punishment, however it is the punishment that provokes the reaction for which the victim is condemned. This self-conscious deployment of metonymy is always accompanied with hypocrisy. The activists knowingly substitute the reaction of the victim to hostility, as the cause of hostility. Thus, metonymy in the discourse of modern activism is employed to make the groups violence seem politically exigent and morally justified.
The metonymy of hate that justifies hateful violence.
The accusation of racism
On returning to the UK, I was directed to a flat where flatmates and neighbours were ready to harass me. Besides opening my letters and putting them through my letterbox 4 weeks later, the neighbour would bang pots and run the washing machine and tumble drier above my bedroom through the wee hours. The clanging of the pots was sufficient to make me flinch, and the din of the tumble drier dislodged bits of plaster down the back of my plasterboards. I asked them if they coudl keep it down , but the husband threatened to batter me, through me out the window and kill me. I caught this on camera. The police said he would not be prosecuted so there is no point bringing charges against him.
I started to record this noise at its worst. One night, after a few pints, I narrated the footage with the voice of a snidey urban Attenborough , ‘it is 4am… and this is the sound of a woman condemned to her house, with nothing better to do than take revenge, with nothing to do tomorrow’. The group got hold of this footage when they stole my external hard drive. What did they have to garner from this footage? The woman was Asian and I received abuse for being racist thereafter. I stand by my comment. It was provoked and taken out of context on the Telegram group chat where these campaigns are organized. The group takes the reaction of the victim to abuse to create a persona in discourse that can inspire hate and offline violence in its members.
There are also scripted scenes, one examle will suffice: A colleague reports that a customer has spoken to them like they are ‘a piece of shit’, and they have been in twice already. The colleague asks if I could deal with them when they come back in. The customer repeatedly asks me questions, then in a rude tone, and I snap at him ‘does it look like it?’. I realise that the customers leaves laughing and my colleague has a smug grin on his face. The other customer had his mobile out, I realise they were filming. The customer is a Sikh man and it will apear on the group chat as if I am racist- ‘I would not have spoken to white man that way’
Of course, none of this proves I am not racist. So, to that end, it is worth mentioning that a few days after 9/11, I intervened in a racist attack. I alone put my body on the line to protect two Sikh Indian men from a drunkard over 6 foot tall. He was threatening the men and demanding to know if they were going to blow the bus up. I was a witness in court to see the racist convicted. Also, I intervened to stop an Asian woman being beaten on a train platform in Berlin, however, this was set up. My bike was stolen by feminists. No, honestly. I had been warned about this ploy practised on British men only by a polish flatmate years earlier, but I forgot at the time. By the way, I have also dated an Asian woman, but no doubt that will be taken as some shameful accident of Orientalism.
The accusation of xenophobia
After my workmate was sacked, she would sit at the bar almost three shifts a week while I worked. She attacked my identity and my self-esteem which I realised now was a coordinated campaign of Gas-lighting for a months after she was sacked. My female German colleague and my female German proprietor said I coudl ban her.However, by that time a woman I had rejected in cafe had become a regular and joined her campaign of harassment in the bar. They made me feel guilty, claiming British men hated German women, and that men do not find Berliner women attractive. She talked about how father absence had affected her and many other women in Berlin. I realise later that his was intentional, so that I would let the abuse go on far longer than I otherwise would have. Most importantly, she recurrently talked about the bombing of Berlin.
I invited her and another colleague to dinner at my place with my girlfriend, my girlfriend and I were trying to kill her with kindness. Soon after she arrived, she started talking about the bombing of Berlin again, and how it affected Berliners today. I was angry that she was attacking me in my own home when I was showing her kindness. I had already said expressed sympathy about the bombing and that Berliners did not deserve it. But now I said, ‘So what? What’s your point?’. Her point was clearly to attack and antagonise me.
It might seem unforgivable, but this was not my instinctual reaction, this was after months of harassment. After the dinner, she showed me a journalist voice recorder that her mum had bought her years ago. I do not know why she would want one or want to show me, except to show me the device of my downfall. I believe they took this recording to my PhD supervisor, because he took on a student on with my research proposal who published the work I had alread handed in to my supervisor in a different language. This feminist stalker told me after this dinner, that this is something feminists have done to British men in Berlin. I did not realise the relevance at the time. I did not realise that I was that hated. It was 3 years later, that a women told me over a dating app that someone had published a thesis on my proposed thesis, with my supervisor.
The colleague had beeen antogonzing me at work and baiting me for months to incite some sort of outburst or slack comment that could be used in Berlin to incite hatred. All our conversations could be converted to text and clips of the recordings posted on the group chat. People working in the bars and coffeeshops I frequented were asked to join the group chat if they were not already members. In this way, the substitution of cause and effect was accomplished in the discourse to garner support for the hate campaign against me. After years of harassment, I would appear as a racist to group chat members, who were convinced to spoil my coffee, or even my PhD research.
The accusation of cheating.
The men targeted by this group can only prove themselves innocent by rejecting the women who are there to entrap him, drug him, and abuse him. However, humiliating these women with repeated rejection only infuriates them. There is thus no way out for the victim once he the campaign has begun. The group does not take no for an answer. It took 1 year of harassment before I cheated and by that point, I had suspected my girlfriend of being in on my harassment. Before this happened, I told my girlfriend repeatedly I was being harassed, at that point it seemed xenophobic abuse. Later I reported that this colleague had become obsessed with me. I told my girlfriend that they threatened to tell her I was cheating, when I had not cheated. The reactions of my girlfriend were emotionally muted. Gradually I realised she might be in on the harassment. We grew distant, I was thinking about returning to the UK, so I said I needed to a brake. In this brake I did have one night stand with someone. I am not proud of that, I regrated that. As the break was supposed to reach its end, she did not get in touch. So I decided to ignore her when she did. We then had discussions about the discussions.
Looking back, I realised that the women and my girlfriend were already working in tandem. The question was, had she been fooled by these women, as I had been, or had she been in it from the beginning? Either way, it was simulation of a relationship that aimed to provoke a reaction from me. They aimed to drive me to cheat. I had not cheated on my girlfriend before, nor the girlfriend prior to that. Other women harassed me in my flat, at my workplace, in my German classes, and in coffeeshops where I wrote, and in the library. So, I moved flat, I quit my job (albeit to late), I stuck out my classes despite racist abuse, and I quite most cafés where I had once worked on my PhD. I was surrounded, and I could not even trust and lean on my girlfriend because she knew about it, at that point I did not care anymore.
Then when I returned from my grandmother’s funeral, my girlfriend did not want to see me. A few days later the woman who harassed me for 1 year, the woman who I had rejected in café and who followed me to where I worked and sat every shift until I locked up, would sexually assaulted me in the bar. This woman is a monster.
Of course, if you are part of the group, you believe I had already cheated on my previous girlfriend. This is just not true. The reasons the group tries to entrap the man is because the want to prove he cheats. However, if you must spend around 25 hours a week for 1 to 1.5 years trying to get a man to cheat on his girlfriend, and you even need to have his girlfriend working in tandem towards this goal, you are not proving the man is a cheat. Noone seems to consider that the victim realises that the women offering their body, and then later the girlfriend gas-lighting him, are all against him. This is not a loving realtionship that he is betraying, it is a simulation choreographed for abuse, and he knows it. He tries to talk to them, and then he tries to find any form of agency beyond their schemes. The group harass, stalk, coerce and sexually assault innocent men until they react in a way that they can use to vindicate their violence on the group chat. This is done with the power of metonymy to substitute the years of abuse, for the fictional persona of a cheat who is guilty by way of reaction to years of abuse.
The accusation of cad
I believe sex-footage of me with women from tinder has been circulated. Either that or they have gone to great lengths to make me think that it has distributed. This footage comes after 2 years of me staying in my flat alone. I barely went out for two years after I was sexually assaulted at work and had to quite my work. I was drugged in my flat for most of that time. This will be the topic of another post. As will a description of the effects of the drug of choice in another post. Suffice it to say just now, that it is not the laxatives that women usually turn to for revenge. I would lose the capacity to speech, lose my vision, lose my balance, and lose my sense of time, and sometimes I collapse. However, it is the change in mood and the way it incapacitates you that is most sinister. This is torture, in the most common literal sense. It was only when I returned home that I realised how different I was. I knew I was not engaging with my family like I normally would. I decided that I needed to push myself to get back out and meet people in Berlin. I had not been on any dating apps in my life before this. I was not meeting any women when I was with my first or second girlfriend while in Berlin.
The accusation of elitism
As expected by the activists, the victim seeks counselling to help with stress or anxiety. In another post I will discuss how the group directs the victim to a flat in the catchment area of a particular mental health practice. Everything said at the practice is recorded and shared in a Telegram group chat to humiliate him. One statement has followed me ever since, ‘How many of these people have actually read any feminism?’. This has been used to fool Glaswegians, particularly working-class men, into thinking that I think them stupid. I was trying to point to the hubris of people who think they know better and are thus above the law. My position is humbler. I would not take the privilege, take a private [privy-] law [-lege] unto myself, to deny others their rights and dignity. Even if I were offered this power without any fear of consequences. I did, In fact, refuse to tamper with drinks in the bar when asked by feminists in Berlin.
The popularity of riding rough shod over human dignity is not the result of Thrasymachus going viral. On the contrary, they undermine human rights and dignity because they believe they are the good. They dehumanize others in the name of social justice, not because they believe only fools want to be just. Yet they present no argument for justice. In fact, they do not engage with people with a differing viewpoint. They do not allow the accused to give an account of himself. They remain on the group chat, in the warm glow emanating up from their iPhone. While ensconced in their echo chamber, they are unable to develop a robust account of their feminism, nor their activism, because they do not expose themselves to different viewpoints in dialogue with others.
It is not their academic record that bothers me. It is their willingness to follow the orders of the anonymous group chat administrators, and to never speak their mind, nor speak to anyone outside the group chat about their actions. This discipline and obedience betrays a fascist tendency. It reminds me of what Berliners pointed out of the AfD rallies in Germany. You do not see any interviews in the news coverage because the tens of thousands of people protesting are under strict orders not to engage in conversation. Most think this is because they would make a fool of themselves, but they believe they would be tricked and poorly represented by the status quo. This can be said of the new activism, and it helps explain how their insecurity was easily piqued by my comment.
My comment was also inspired by the feminists in Berlin who claimed that every man that is approached by the group is eager to help. They do not believe that every man is a feminist though. Not one man considers the possibility that he might be held with as much contempt as the man they are asked to abuse. No, every man thinks he is special. These co-conspiraters are disdained by the hardline feminists. To them, every man goes through their life seeking women who will tell them they are special, as their mother did, and feminists are happy to use this eagerness to please.
For my part, I was only provoked into making the comment by the number of people that have become enthralled with dehumanizing violence in the name of social justice. They claim that my criticism of their dehumanizing treatment of me shows that I am an elitist, and this is why they dehumanize me. The power of metonymy fabricates an elitist persona to blame the victim for the dehumanizing abuse he suffers, at the hands of people who have an absolutist belief in their own righteousness.
In conclusion
The new form of activism throws as much dirt as possible to tarnish the target’s character and generate as much moral condemnation from as many people as possible. They endeavour thereby to provide a morally edifying justification for their hateful violence. The longer the campaign of humiliation and violence is sustained, the greater chance that the victim will do or say things that they can use to destroy his character. I suspect many people in the group chat do not realise that the gas-lighting and abuse starts long before the man has ever cheated and long before he has ever said anything critical of any political movement. The group persists until an error is mad that can retrospectively justify their actions. All the harassment is designed to suffocate the target and put pressure on him until he makes a mistake. This tactic developed naturally from the projective identification on the part of the women who cannot handle rejection, but also cannot accept the ugly feelings of resentment and hatred at being rejected. They generate a political movement by substituting cause and effect of their hostility, and thereby camouflage their projective identification with an edifying political discourse.