A fierce and ever-widening culture war is rapidly rewriting the West’s ideas of identity, equality and freedom. Identity has become a powerful organising principle in contemporary Western politics and public life, reviving an older question about the place of dissent in society. Above, Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787). Jan H. Rosenkranz, a German writer and commentator, recently wrote in Die Welt about ‘the surprisingly conservative Generation Z’. Yet, in many countries, politically they are drifting apart. Women tend to lean to the left, men to the right. Rosenkranz explains this in sociological terms: according to the International Labour Organisation, young men work in manual and technical-industrial occupations. ‘Right-wing populist’ parties address their concerns, promising protection from the pressures of globalisation and social decline. Women are more often employed in administrative and civil service sector. Equality issues championed by left-wing parties appeal to them way more, as they favour state intervention and redistribution. Whilst all this is true, it doesn’t tell the whole story, as at least in my eyes the current clashes in the never-ending war of the sexes stem from distorted self-perceptions and counterfactual propaganda. Women no longer see men as partners. They believe what they have been told about the ‘origins of the family, private property and the state’. For at some point, feminists began to confuse Friedrich Engels with Hedwig Dohm. They fell in love with Simone de Beauvoir and the idea of being the better, stronger sex, naturally called upon to save the species from itself. The main enemies of this noble project were men, patriarchy, capitalism and the curse of motherhood. I find it just as understandable that not every woman dreams of changing diapers for whingeing little snotty-nosed brats or darning the socks of a foul-smelling old man as I do the male desire not to spend the entire working life in a dust-choked mine shaft or standing in front of a blast furnace. Changing nappies and darning socks only provide limited joys, but require less physical exertion than smelting steel. Still, both are necessary. So, I wouldn’t establish a moral hierarchy between them. Yet, for some time now, that’s precisely what’s been happening, and it has dramatic consequences. Stefanie Schmied, a chemist at the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency, was dismissed after she refused to adapt safety-related instructions to ‘gendered’ language, as she believed this would impair their comprehensibility. She took legal action against this decision. The court concluded that, whilst the agency had to rescind her dismissal due to a procedural error, there was, in principle, ‘no doubt’ that, as an employer, it was entitled to compel her to use gender-neutral language. Language is the most important tool of thought. It shapes our view of the world, moulds our feelings, reason, logic and our sense of beauty and harmony. Whoever takes that away from us robs us of our inner sanctuary. If words such as ‘mother’ are made taboo and we are told to write only ‘by ear’, we sever our connection to those who came before us and to whom we owe our very existence. From an epistemological perspective, this has a similar effect to the removal of ‘Sütterlin’ or ‘Fraktur’ from my year group’s curriculum. It erases access to the memory of previous generations. Yet it is only the comparison that fosters a sense of quality. Artificial amnesia condemns us to a present without memory and past, void of history and future. ‘Cleansed’ language is supposed to eliminate anachronistic thinking. Actually, it destroys the very ability to reflect at all. The aim of gendered language is not ‘gender equality’, but the demolition of our inherited identity. This ‘awakening’ travels under the banner of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI). According to this, power, money and status are distributed unfairly. Capitalist societies lack ‘social justice’. They are racist and patriarchal, oppressing people of colour, women and minorities. DEI promises to remedy this. Supposed disadvantage creates entitlement. Those at the bottom move to the top. Traditional hierarchies are turned on their heads. ‘White guilt’ transform into ‘black power’ and male meritocracy fosters female ‘empowerment’. Thus, achievement gives way to a victim Olympics. In the jungle of subjective sensitivities, every instance of being overlooked is a microaggression that secures ‘poly-points’. For the ‘woke’, there are only victims and perpetrators. Victims are female, disadvantaged and good; perpetrators are male, privileged and evil. The chance of birth determines who ends up in which category. ‘Wokeness’ fuses resentment and feigned concern into a unique amalgam that defies reason and logic. Paternalism supplants merit. Quotas replace quality. If things are to become fairer, ‘greener’ and ‘more feminine’, everyday life must be significantly less white, masculine and German. In theory, ‘openness, diversity and tolerance’ go hand in hand with ‘unity, justice and freedom’. In practice, however, the high priests of diversity have never been concerned with enabling different ways of life. Where does one end up if everyone is allowed to be happy in their own way? That clashes with ‘equity’. Everyone must be equally multicultural, polyamorous, transgender-friendly, postcolonial-feminist and climate-neutral. Anyone who resists – for example, by not using gendered language – blocks the path to the earthly kingdom of heaven. They are an enemy of goodness, peace, progress and enlightenment. It cannot be done without coercion. This is where ‘cancel culture’ comes in. This is the Janus-faced nature of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’. Nothing in the world is as evenly distributed as stupidity, regardless of gender, race, religion or academic qualifications. Peer pressure, intolerance, scheming and guilt by association are not exclusively female traits. There are countless narrow-minded men who repeatedly stand in the way of smarter women, even though they are no match for them. Scepticism, a thirst for knowledge and the right to criticise require a suitable intellectual environment. New insights are often controversial. Innovation always demands the courage to stand up to prevailing truths. At the same time, the opportunity for the imagination to flourish presupposes an attitude that grants every rational person the right to think independently and to hold a different opinion. Only then can an individual challenge the forces of the status quo and, possibly, refute them. Incidentally, this is also the ethical foundation of any democracy – the crucial prerequisite that makes peaceful transfers of power possible in the first place. It is worth remembering this from time to time in the age of ‘firewalls.’ The Demolition of Memory Long before the word ‘woke’ appeared, the mantra of DEI was already haunting universities. Cultural relativism, post-colonialism and identity politics have stifled all positive ties to one’s own heritage. For progressive contemporaries, self-flagellation is de rigueur. The aim is to eradicate the last echoes of the Enlightenment and liberalism. Focus of this fury are Israel, the US and all Eastern European countries that still display a shred of self-confidence towards Brussels, as they remember the Soviet empire all too well. In Western Europe, things have progressed considerably further. Here, the final battle against capitalism, racism and imperialism rages in universities, the media and museums. The vanguard of the awakened have hijacked the public discourse. Initially, they focused solely on recruiting novices and isolating opponents. Then, when the great awakening began around ten years ago, coinciding with the opening of the border, they were powerful enough to stifle any resistance before it could take shape. Their disciples controlled the ‘cultural mainstream’. They had the ear of the elites. As guardians of the ‘corridor of opinion’, they dictated who was allowed to think and speak about what, and who was excluded from the debate. This is how the ‘great transformation’ took shape. Its effects are becoming palpable. State-subsidised poverty-driven immigration is destroying the social welfare systems. The middle class is impoverished. The demolition of functioning power stations and the driving up of energy prices are torpedoing the economy. At the same time, the deliberate dumbing down of young people ensures that future generations will have virtually no chance of working their way out of the hole. At German universities, the game is over. According to the ethnologist Susanne Schröter, a leaden conformism prevails there. Supporters of Sharia law have allied themselves with post-Marxists. Dissenters are marginalised; renegades are ‘cancelled’. Anyone who even mentions anti-Semitism, Islam or logical inconsistencies in postcolonial doctrine is effectively sidelined. They are no longer invited, discussed or mentioned. Officially, the DEI ideology calls for consideration for the disadvantaged. In reality, it dreams of a world that endlessly regurgitates its dogmas. The bait on the path to this paradise glitters respectably. Misogyny masquerades as feminism, anti-Semitism as pro-Palestinian sentiment, and voodoo economics serves the cause of climate salvation. All this is garnished with a generous helping of gratuitous moralising and exaggerated virtue, but it is merely mimicry – the neat façade of a cult of demolition that is disposing of the West and razing to the ground everything that recalls Rome, Athens or Jerusalem. The ‘damnatio memoriae’ is fundamental; it purges texts, cleanses libraries, guts museums and topples monuments. Once the memory of the richness of one’s own culture has been destroyed, ‘postcolonial experts’ present it as a scourge upon humanity: the very epicentre of evil lies in the West. The old continent is rotten to the core and corrupt. It has tormented the human race so grievously that Europe owes the rest of mankind an eternal apology. So young people are not merely being deprived of their language; their heritage is being poisoned. As Europeans, they are condemned to penance. Their best option is to flagellate themselves or simply convert and celebrate Ramadan from now on. Journalist Michael Klonovsky wrote that the ‘anti-racists’ had chosen the weakest of all conceivable opponents: their own children. Observing the current goings-on at the universities, one wonders how much time is left for a civilisation that entrusts the institutions that preserve its values and its memory to its arch-enemies. In modern constitutional states, we are liable only for deeds for which we ourselves are responsible. Blood feuds have been abolished; original sin is a matter of faith. Clan feuds and religious wars were, until recently, a thing of the past. If we reintroduce them in the name of ‘social justice’, we voluntarily return to the era before the Thirty Years’ War and resurrect the age of witch hunts, pyres and heresy tribunals. Culturally speaking, we have long since arrived there anyway. The Feminisation Thesis Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1620) In her article “The Great Feminisation,” the conservative US columnist Helen Andrews establishes a direct link between quota-based promotion of women, female preferences and ‘wokeness’. Andrews focuses on gender dynamics and social upheavals. In 2021, she published Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Her article The Great Feminisation appeared in October 2025. According to Andrews, women have benefited enormously from equality policies. Sociologically speaking, a fundamental shift is taking place. Women are occupying domains once dominated by men in academia, research and everyday life. This is changing society as a whole, because women, as a group, behave significantly differently from men. They place greater value on security, control, harmony and ‘compliance’. This goes hand in hand with significantly less tolerance for dissent, divergent views, controversial innovations and the willingness to take risks. Consequently, feminisation leans towards ‘safe mediocracy’, political correctness and ‘cancel culture’. It stifles alternative discourses and those supposedly toxic male traits that communities need to correct themselves when things go wrong or when they have to protect themselves from threats. At no point in history have women ever dominated as many areas of society as they do today, writes Andrews. In the education sector, the media and the judiciary, they are already beginning to displace men. Through affirmative action and quotas, entire disciplines at universities are now in female hands – not only in the social sciences, literature and languages, but also in psychology, medicine and law. This feminisation has serious implications for the atmosphere and character of academic life, but also extends far beyond it, because women as a group differ significantly from men. They set different priorities, paying far greater attention to emotional sensitivities and the specific harmony within the group. This affects the culture of debate, the handling of epistemological questions and the intensity with which academic controversies are conducted. In general, women place greater value on consensual conflict resolution, conflict avoidance and conformity. They are less tolerant of dissent and tend to marginalise opposing views, meaning that their supposedly more socially oriented perspective and peaceful approach bring about a fatal paradigm shift in the traditional understanding of evidence-based scientific rigour. Men think and act on a factual level. They are object-oriented and operate within hierarchies based on the division of labour. They tend to act individually and autonomously. They resolve conflicts directly. They are less bothered by differences and tolerate divergent idiosyncrasies. Women, on the other hand, tend to define themselves through social bonds. They care deeply about the welfare of the group as a whole, because its cohesion is essential for the survival of their own offspring. For this reason, they place greater value on empathy and consideration, offer criticism indirectly, prefer to resolve conflicts collectively and favour the appearance of flat hierarchies. For them, the flourishing of all is fundamentally more important than the protection of dissenting views. Where the group’s welfare demands it, they therefore tend to marginalise dissenters as whingers and troublemakers. Provided they do not get out of hand, social virtues can be wonderful. What sets us apart as a civilisation, however, is not an aversion to conflict born of a craving for harmony, but freedom of conscience and the associated appreciation of dissenting opinions. This has proved extremely fruitful in the past. Creative dissent has enabled countless philosophical, scientific and technological achievements that have made the West the most successful model in history for 500 years. There are simply differences between the sexes that one is just as entitled to acknowledge as cultural contrasts or individual idiosyncrasies. These are not reprehensible in themselves. There is no need to ascribe moral qualities to them. Anyone who laments systemic injustice and calls for quotas is welcome to turn their attention to the plumbing sector or animal carcass disposal. For it is in these areas that women are genuinely under-represented. ‘Equity’ pits the sexes against each other in a battle in which both sides lose. If one balances male and female strengths, everyone wins. The solution to the puzzle is not competition, but complementarity. Equal rights unleash potential; enforced equality destroys it. Moralism is the opposite of morality, and ideology is the mortal enemy of reason. In this respect, the systematic ‘deconstruction’ of patriarchy by DEI-inspired ‘feminists’, their denigration of traditional masculinity and the castration of masculine virtues are likely, at best, to result in a short-term triumph. Ultimately, it remains a Pyrrhic victory. In the long term, such a politically-driven Barbie utopia has no chance of survival. In the end, everyone will fail. Women will pay the highest price, especially the freedom-loving and the intelligent ones. After all, there are enough hungry, young men within Europe and in its immediate neighbourhood who have not yet been conditioned to accept politically correct non-violence. They are itching to finally drive the effeminate Kens out of Barbie-land and show their luxury women what they’re made of. (The writer is an historian and novelist. His latest book Das Migrationsparadies focuses on Germany’s migration crisis. Views personal.)
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