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Review of Eve's Bite, by Ian Wishart © Peter Zohrab 2007

 

The 2007 paperback Eve's Bite, by Ian Wishart, doesn't hang together as a coherent whole -- it reads like a miscellaneous collection of Ian Wishart's favourite hates and conspiracies -- but it is worth reading, despite that. In fact, it is hard to work out if the book is even meant to have a central theme -- certainly the title seems to have little to do with the content, since neither Feminists, women, Eve herself or apples have a starring role.

To be fair, the subtitle is: Seductive, Deceptive & Dangerous: the Trojan Horse ideologies poisoning our country and destroying the West, and the book does deal with Radical Islam, Marxism, Eugenics, Atheism, Feminism, Evolution (as opposed to Creationism), Homosexuality, Birth Control, Abortion, Sexually Transmitted Disease, Euthanasia, and Political Correctness in Education. Wishart seems to hate all of those, and to think that they are destroying the West -- and it is certainly true that they are destroying (or have destroyed) the kind of West that he would like to live in. The reader is forced to deduce what Wishart's positive beliefs are from all the various aspects of society that he attacks. My guess is that he is a conservative Catholic.

However, if you get all the way to page 246 (which I did by selecting what chapters I had the stomach to read), you find a clear statement of the book's aim:

"... the purpose of this book is not to browbeat per se but to make you recognize the social conditioning surrounding you on a range of issues. Instead, what I'm asking you as readers to do is to step back from everything you think you know, take a more objective look at the real factual matrix, and then see if it matches the conditioning."

Now, I was already on his side, as far as that view of social conditioning is concerned -- I only wish that he had taken the above paragraph as the starting-point of his book, instead of having it as a sort of afterthought plonked down more than two-thirds of the way into it! In other words, this could have been a really good book -- it just needed some time and organising. Little of either seems to have been employed by Wishart.

It is also hard to work out what kind of reader the book is aimed at, and it is hard to decide who would be convinced by what he writes, if they didn't already agree with him before reading it. It is written in a lively style, and is not very academic -- it has no references section, for example. Despite that, the book attempts to connect together a lot of the social phenomena that Wishart hates, and these connections are made so hurriedly, and on the basis of so little evidence, that a reasonable reader would (I think) remain unconvinced. If he had taken the time to do more research and to write a more academic book, maybe he would have convinced more readers (I'm just guessing here).

Wishart diminishes his own credibility by more or less labelling as Marxist almost anything that is Left-Liberal, and he does that because he really doesn't understand that people can have a concern for the underdog without being Marxist. Or maybe he just knows that there is no point in accusing people of being liberal, because that would be seen as a compliment! This concern for the underdog can be (and is) abused to manipulate people in some of the ways that he outlines in his book. Another thing he does not seem to realise is that his credibility as a rational exposer of myths is undermined by the fact that he is clearly religious himself. Western society is now so secular that religious people are widely regarded as believing in myths, so the danger is that it will only be people of his sort of religious faith who will be able to take his views seriously.

For me, the most plausible parts of Wishart's book are where he talks from personal experience. I found it heartening to see him, as an insider (a former television journalist), say the same things about media propaganda and manipulation that I have been saying as an outsider:

"There were times when one would cover a stage-managed protest on some worthy liberal issue, with barely anyone there, but the point of the story was to give favourable publicity to the worthy liberal issue" (p. 32).

"TV news is heavily manipulated -- not overtly but by the social views of the journalists themselves -- and presents liberal views as orthodox, and conservatve views as quaint or outdated" (p. 33).

 

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