The Anti-Woke World

How Argentina is turning the tide in the culture wars...

(A word apart. Source: Getty Images)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...

Good news: The End of the World is here... and it is anti-woke! 

Welcome to the downside-up capital of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Christmas is celebrated in summer, men wear trousers to dinner and salad is properly spelled “C.A.R.N.E.” 

Yes, dear and nostalgic reader, here in the Paris of the South, we’ve finally gone back to the future... to a time when men were men, women were women and nobody cared what anyone else did between the sheets, so long as the parties involved were consenting and the rest of us didn’t have to hear about it in polite conversation...or witness it acted out in garish, month-long parades through the middle of our fair cities. 

But before we dive into Argentina’s official rejection of Antisocial Injustice Warriors, we offer a few preparatory remarks... just to make sure we’re all on the same page for today’s scandalous Note (trigger warning!):

• A woman is an adult female human 

• There are only two sexes...neither of which is a “social construct”

• Skin color – any skin color – is not a substitute for merit 

• Jimmy Fallon is not funny

Right. Now that we’ve thinned the herd a little...

Plain Speaking

The latest news on the culture front is that Argentina’s radically sensible president, Javier Milei, has banned “gender inclusive language” in all official government documents and communications. 

The statewide proscription pertains to all “inclusive language and everything related to the gender perspective throughout the national public administration,” according Manuel Adornis, spokesperson for the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s answer to the White House). 

Predictably, so-called “progressives” were quick to engage their preferred emotional default mode: meltdown.

“How ever will members of peoplekind communicate with one another (and ‘other’)?” non-binary spirit animals wept in vain. 

“What happens if someone ‘misgenders’ us?” fretted the pink-haired barista brigade. 

“How will people refer to they if they identifies as a palm tree?” bawled the species-fluid.

Then came the answer in clear, concise terms: 

“The language that covers all sectors is the one we use; it is the Castilian language, it is Spanish,” declared Sr. Adornis, noting that “gender perspectives” have in the past been used as a blunt political tool by the tut-tutting language police...but no longer. 

Milei’s government has also given his trademark chainsaw treatment to the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, which the president described as “effectively useless” and “serving no purpose.”

(One might wonder why women – strong, capable, independent women – would need a special ministry to nanny them through the perils of everyday life? Seems a condescending supposition for half the population, no?)

Marching Orders

And now, even the Argentine military have given “gender inclusive language” the ol’ heave-ho, following a resolution by the country’s defense ministry just last week. 

The purpose of the ban, according to a resolution published on the Defence Ministry's X account, was to “eliminate incorrect language use which can lead to misinterpretation... affecting the execution of orders and the conduct of military operations.”

It’s almost as though the top brass think actual triggers are more important than trigger warnings, that a nation’s defense ought to rest on the shoulders of men and women who don’t go to pieces in the face of a few “microaggressions,” and that the citizenry shouldn’t have to worry their army might at any moment be misgendered into submission.

But why is any of this important, gentle readers want to know. Doesn’t the government have anything better to do than wade into the culture wars, fraught as they are with wailing sirens, gnashing harpies and sailors in drag? 

As it so happens, the issue is more “inclusive” than first appears… 

Firstly, as Sr. Milei announced in his historic inauguration address, “no hay plata” (there is no money). To the apparent befuddlement of the economically-innumerate, Government ministries fall squarely on the “expense” side of the ledger. (The National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism alone had over 400 full-time employees around the country.) 

Put simply: No money = no ministry. 

Las Estrellas

Secondly, and more importantly, Spanish is a gendered language. That is to say, most nouns are afforded a masculine “o” or feminine “a” ending. “La cuchara” (the spoon) is feminine, for example, while “el cuchillo” (the knife) is masculine... as is “el tenedor” (the fork). 

It matters not whether the cutlery in question “identifies” as a male or female, in other words, nor which utensil does the spooning and which the forking. To put it in language even a college English major might understand: When it comes to grammar, “rules is rules.” 

Moreover, the Spanish language follows a particular structure that lends it a unique rhythm and euphony. As to the gendering of nouns, adjectives tend to agree. By way of example, “the ancient stars” (as found in Borges’ poem El Sur – The South) become “las antiguas estrellas,” while “the silence of the sleeping bird” (from the same poem) is rendered as “el silencio del párajo dormido.” 

It is this harmony which affords the Spanish language – which precedes English by about two centuries – its undulating peaks and valleys, its distinct lyrical voicing, its poetic, accentual motifs. 

Replacing an “a” or an “o” at the end of an (anyway inanimate) noun with a bland and “gender neutral” “e” or “x” or, more horrific still, “@”, not only mutilates the word itself, but also severs it from the texture and context of the rest of the sentence. 

Civilization… If You Can Keep It

Even besides all that, rejecting the claims of cultural Marxists – whether their incoherent babble be in Spanish, English or, as is usually the case, their own special form of Gibberish – the matter is more than one of “mere semantics.”

The claims made by the collectivists – that biological sex is a “social construct,” that every unequal outcome is necessarily a symptom of “systemic racism” or “the patriarchy,” that every transaction in an economy is somehow “zero-sum” and that the only way to engage commercially, political, socially is through “class struggle,” that for every problem there is a government-shaped solution (rather that the other way around) etc. – are more than just untrue... they are profoundly damaging to the fabric of what those of us who still believe in it call “civilization.”

Moreover, such claims trespass overtly on the objective reality within which society must function, if it is to function at all. It’s something of a poetic irony, then, that it was here, in one of the most dysfunctional states in the world, where the anti-woke rally call came, loud and clear.

“¡Afuera!”

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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