All primitive societies, and modern ones that have abandoned rationality, eventually seek to explain their internal contradictions by inventing demoniacal, omniscient opponents. The Independent Enquiry into Child Abuse promises to be such a witch-hunt. With its proposers suggesting that there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of ‘survivors’ of child abuse, all other priorities can be set aside. Why worry about NHS waiting lists when sex abusers are stalking the land?

Sex abuse cases are especially useful because the normal rules of evidence are abandoned. An innocent man can be convicted on the anonymous denunciation of a ‘survivor’ hidden behind a curtain in court who stands to be paid huge sums in compensation if the court believes him or her. Much of the evidence will be uncorroborated memories going back as far as 50 years. In some cases evidence will be put forward of abuse that the survivor cannot remember but has been discovered by ‘experts’.

With the enquiry holding a mandate to investigate virtually every social institution in the country having anything to do with children, the entire population is likely to be caught up for the next ten years in the pursuit of paedophiles in the same way that in Stalin’s Russia the population were caught up in the hunt for American Imperialist Agents. Many of the radical left’s ideas, gay marriage, transgender rights, the concept of the patriarchal family as oppressive, censorship, contempt for the popular vote, are like Stalin’s ‘reforms’, societal wreckers. They depend on disorientating the population by standing a country’s civil society on its head, by creating an imaginary army of secret enemies, defining what once was right to be wrong and what was once wrong to be right, by setting family members against family members, friends against friends. We face the creation of the apocalyptic chaos described by Boris Pasternak in Dr Zhivago. The doctor returns after years of war to his family home to find it taken over by brutal strangers.

Myles Harris