Barbara Bush is dead at 92 and to her family and obituarists, the former First Lady’s end was a reasonable concern. We could argue that concern expressed for this death by a major Western feminist movement  was unreasonable. But to make this case, we must agree from the outset that major Western feminist organisations can produce true reason. This would be, to use the cant of major Western feminist organisations, “problematic”.

Major Western feminist movements have become unreasonable. And, no, this is not due to woman’s perceived unreason, a truly lethal deceit. No, no. When believed in the middle-ages, this falsehood produced genocide. Falsehood can do that. Cf. Mrs Bush’s husband swearing that Iraq posed a threat to Saudi, or Mrs Bush’s son swearing that all this Weapons of Mass Destruction stuff was totally true.

We might say that the Women’s March — prominent organisers of that peaceful 2017 post-inauguration day protest, which drew close to 5 million — commemorated Bush only as a member of an oppressed “class” of women, and felt she had nothing to do with the countless lives claimed by her family members in the Middle East. Certainly, Bush did state that she wanted no knowledge of a more measurable loss: that of US military personnel. As the US prepared to devastate Iraq in 2003, George W.’s mum appeared on Good Morning America and said, “But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths … So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

Major Western feminist movements do not waste their irrational minds on war. They give them over, as do their sisters in liberal press, to beautiful thoughts about formidable women with real hearts who nurture the American dream with tiny acts of kindness.  

Women, like Barbara, who refuse to dye their hair — oh, the courage of the feminist that shuns cosmetics! Women, like Barbara, who speak their minds — oh, the pluck of the woman who speaks out at great personal cost. Sure, Barbara once spoke out about the victims of Hurricane Katrina — in her view, much better off than they were before the disaster. But she also once said something about abortion not being so bad, and she did boldly oppose Donald Trump!

Bold opposition to Donald Trump is the raison d’être for the Women’s March organisation. Opposition to war, other than that waged in pink pussy hats against something — this movement, like many Western feminist movements, are none too clear on the nature of the enemy — is not on the cards.

Major Western feminist movements will talk of war only when it is to be waged against a nation-state that apparently fails to raise authentic women like Barbara. They now weaponise women’s liberation, and spare men the bother. As Leila Ahmed recounts in her work on gender, Islam and empire, British Consul to Egypt Lord Cromer, had a News Corp-level interest in the covered heads of Muslim women. To remove this “obstacle” would be to civilise a nation.

Western feminism is devout in its attachment to empire. It is a feminism that endorses war, or flirts with its potential. A sexist utterance by Putin is cause for an Australian establishment feminist to name his nation a “gangster fiefdom” with no democratic values, then to conclude (somehow) that her suffering as a “powerless” woman was begun in the Russian Federation.

At any other time in history, this could be dismissed as a failure of reason, or an oversupply of what Western feminist machine now produces. Now, as a cold war re-heats, it’s reprehensible. Please. Don’t let the ladies, or the gents, who love war — or who publicly pretend that it is not war when overseen by Hillary Clinton, the personification of Western, white, imperial feminism beloved by Women’s Marchers, Labor hacks, DNC loyalists and makeup-free journalists — write “rest in power”.

This epitaph is the creation of black activists — those troublesome people said to “divide” the Women’s March with their minor quibbles about racism. It is the name of a new documentary on slain black US teen Trayvon Martin. Not to be fastidious about cultural appropriation, but you’d think those Women’s Marchers would have learned not to pinch slogans from black activism, given that they’d already stuffed up by first naming their now establishment, Bush-endorsing movement “The Million Woman March”, a title used by black women in 1997, and then the “March on Washington”, an event of which you may have heard.

These disagreements might all be called “divisive” or unhelpful to the traditions of feminism if the traditions of feminism in the West had not been returned to mere renovation of Western systems: don’t move a thing but those “obstacles” that prevent the creation of inspiring ladies who speak their minds, sometimes without makeup. Rest with your white Western sisters, Barbara Bush. Your “beautiful” mind is as dead as their reason.