Reflections of a stormy petrel

Democracy means( Read more... )

The ferocity of American racism is becoming more intense by the day. But it may surprise you where I see it happening and why. I say that it really scares me with what hatred "white men" are described in ordinary discourse, among people who regard themselves as opposing racism and prejudice; and how impossible it is becoming to discuss any social subject without bringing in racism (of the "black"-bashing kind, of course).

Now, I cannot think that it is a coincidence that the increasingly heated, increasingly feverish obsession with "toxic whiteness" and such is moving pari passu with a dramatic and increasingly swift social change in America: the increasing pauperization of the lower and middle classes and the violent separation between the middle and upper classes. People like Lisa Denham and her repulsive father, with their disgusting duo about the coming "extinction" of "white man", are one per centers who would never have been noticed by anyone, let alone have had a media and arts career, otherwise; and the despicable little racist Sarah Jeong is an upwardly mobile person aiming to a place in the top one per cent, and doing none too badly in that goal. The more vicious the social split is becoming between the middle and the upper class in America, the more wildly "white privilege" and "cultural appropriation" are claimed to be issues.

Frankly, at this point I think a little Marx and Freud are not out of place. These people demonize the average white man because they feel guilty; they project their guilt on their victims. They feel guilty because they know they are sucking the life out of the society most of their fellow-citizens live in. Every drop of privilege among the seriously rich is taken away from the common pool of opportunity. And when we hear that more than 50% of Americans find that they aren't able to meet a sudden $500 expense, when any long-term illness is apt to reduce them to beggary, then it becomes clear that there is something to feel guilty about. When these things are left largely unspoken, whereas all the "socially concerned" persons obsess about an increasingly abstract notion of "racism" - and do so in an increasingly intolerant manner - I think we have a danger signal.

To be brutal, I believe that, consciously or unconsciously, the dominant classes intend to exclude from discourse anything that comes from "white men" as defined by them, by investing them with imagined racism and insulting ideas of white privilege, so as to disguise from themselves the reality of their own reverse class war. "See, these people themselves live somehow by robbing "blacks" and depriving them of their own proper deserts; see, when they whine about being robbed and abused, that is just yer everlasting commonplace racist black-bashing" - even if the unhappy "white" may never have either mentioned or intended colour at anytime in whatever protest they made. That Tea Partyism and all such phenomena are not only racist but essentially and basically racist is a fundamental tenet of this reverse racism, never even discussed. And that is why Farrakhan and his insane and dangerous followers are never treated as the intellectual and political horror, or as the terrible shackle on the "black" communities, that they are: because their racist resentment works very well within the reverse-racist narrative, behind which, if you pay attention, is nothing but the most brutal class war.

Certainly there is such a thing as black-bashing racism. More importantly, there is such a thing as the devastating exclusion of many "black" communities from any benefit in the common citizenship, their reduction to reservoirs of manpower for organized crime and for the armed forces. The point is that by casting the guilt for these horrors upon "white men" who are themselves increasingly in the same plight, who have no say in national social policies - because they would never have been so thrown to the wolves if they had - the two groups are made to hate and fear each other, while taking their eyes altogether off the conditions that really grind them down. "Blacks" and "whites" should stop accepting these categories, realize that they are in the same plight and that the same class is robbing, oppressing and abusing both. WORKERS OF THE WORLD ARISE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!

- ahem! - But it is true that this old-fashined Marxist analysis is the best way to understand what is going on. Yet Marxism itself, under the guise of "critical theory", has been abducted by the reverse-racist class warriors. The idea that it is about examining class discrimination - and, above all, the deformities that class discrimination forces upon the thinking of both oppressors and oppressed - seems to have been forgotten; and now we have a neo-Marxist discourse in which one per centers cast themselves as oppressed victims. Old Karl turns in his grave.

As I have been saying( Read more... )
Well, France( Read more... )In America, Fascism could have come( Read more... )

Britain’s own Blackshirt moment( Read more... )

The sorry caricature of a government led – but only in the sense that the front fender leads a car – by Teresa May has hit yet another scandal, one that should by rights lead to its collapse. But we have little hope of that, because even the least self-respect, let alone respect for habits and laws, is so absent among this rabble, that they would probably all dance naked in public rather than give up their posts.

The facts are thes. Five years ago, the government was reshuffled and the department for social security was given to a very unsuitable person, Esther McVey. This glamorous blonde, a former TV newsreader, had made such a bad impression in her previous stint as a junior minister in the same department that her own voters in a Lancashire seat had voted her out by way of thanks. She was widely regarded as having all the empathy of a rock and, in spite of her pretty features, half the charm. In fact, if Teresa May weren't notoriously straight, there would be every reason to suspect that McVey had slept her way back into office. The truth, of course, had to do with that miserable death-rattle of politics, brexit; to “balance” the factions in her government, May needed a hard-line brexiteer in the vacant social security seat, and McVey had at least some experience in the place – in the sense that a Communist union agitator has an experience of private business.

Now McVey has shown her entire quality. She has twice lied in Parliament – a resigning matter; and not only lied, but put words in a top civil servant's mouth that were the very reverse of what he had said, and implicitly charged him with incompetence. The facts are these. For the last few years, the Tories, first under Cameron and now under May, have been pushing an ugly nostrum called Universal Credit for the reform of social benefits (unemployment, disability, etc.). This meant basically taking all the state benefits and bundling them together. There have long been serious doubts as to whether this monster could possibly be implemented and as to whether it would do any good if it were, and in the last few months, the head of the Government Accounting Office, Sir Amyas Morse, has been preparing a report into the matter.

Not once, but twice, Esther McVey has stated in open Parliament that Sir Amyas had stated concerns – that Universal Credit wasn't being rolled out fast enough; that he had no problems with the reform as such; and that at any rate the report was out of date. These things seemed unlikely on the face of it, and today, two days after her second such statement, Sir Amyas Morse, head of the General Accounting Office, one of the most sensitive and senior posts in the civil service, has exploded in public with an open letter that all but calls her a liar. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/04/amyas-morse-auditor-general-universal-credit-letter-esther-mcvey

This is a resigning matter. If you lie to Parliament, you resign. That is a simple and well known principle, although of late some notorious instances have got away with doing just that. But I don't think that anyone has ever been called a liar in such an enormous matter, a primary government policy, and to such a disgraceful extent – yes means no, not just once, but all across the line. This is not only a lie, but a stupid lie – I am tempted to say, in homage to the colour of Ms.McVey's hair dye, a dumb blonde kind of lie. The only way she could hope to get away with it was if Sir Amyas turned out to be such a fantastic coward that he would allow himself to be treated like that and not set the record straight. Well, apparently McVey has no idea what a backbone is, because she seems to have been very surprised to find that Sir Amyas Morse had one.

Mrs.May needs McVey to stay in her post, for the same reason why she placed her in it: it is needed to “balance” her self-splitting government. And so McVey has been dispatched to apologize to Parliament for “unwittingly misleading” them. But above and beyond the matter of political convenicence, there is something very May about this July scandal. McVey has been guilty, basically, of thinking that if you just paper over the cracks and lie over matter of fact, your policies will move ahead by some sort of inner inevitability, and people will be convinced or knuckle under. And this is, in fact, a very Teresa May sort of behaviour; it is the same way in which May continues to sail blithely on with the Irish border issue, just talking as though everyone will soon be convinced of her magnificent brilliance. It is the “What could possibly go wrong” kind of politics.

A historian called Andreas Herberg-Rothe has written an interesting study of the famous Prussian military theorist, "Clausewitz's Puzzle: The political theory of war," part of whose thesis is that Clausewitz's celebrated study of war, though completed and published with great success, is in effect unfinished - Clausewitz wanted to rewrite, it, and it bears notable problems within itself, as Rothe points out. That made me think. A number of the most influential writings about politics are either unfinished, or self-contradictory, or both. Karl Marx' Das Kapital is unfinished. Machiavelli's The Prince bears problems of interpretation so formidable that it would be hard to find two scholars who read it exactly the same. And going back to the grandest and strangest of them all, Plato's dialogues are full of contradictory and speculative views. The two most important political texts among them, The Laws and The Republic, contradict each other in many ways, and The Republic, though one of Plato's most famous and popular texts, is also an outlier among its work in some ways, such as its doctrine of the tripartite soul, which also reflects on its politics.

I have a suspicion that sufficiently ambitious and brilliant studies of human society and history will always either taper off into silence, or include severe self-contradiction, or both. Of all objects of study, humanity in action is probably the most complex and confusing. It is possible that, at the highest levels, these things are not signs of failure, but of as much engagement with the subject as a single mind, however brilliant, may manage.

PROGRESS

Except perhaps for the most mindless and extreme rainbow cheerleaders, I can't imagine that anyone living in our time can honestly say that they see a good future. Politics, in particular, is broken. We think of Trump with weary revulsion, but he is not an exception, not even the worst figure around. Different kinds of buffoonery prevails in Canada with Justin Trudeau, in Britain, in Italy, in Turkey. Who is up to the challenge? The heads of state and government of India, China, Japan, and Russia make crass use of the lowest kind of nationalism, coming, especially in India, to support the most cruel and superstitious brand of Hinduism at the expense of scholarship and civil peace. Where democracy is not subverted or absent, it is made such use of as to sicken the sight. In half a dozen European countries, popular rage has borne up out of nowhere parties with Fascist or Nazi antecedents or cruelly nationalistic attitudes. In Hungary and Italy, these people have reached government; in Germany and Sweden they are the official or actual opposition. Not only is nobody happy; nobody can see a way for matters to improve. Optimism, except for a few fanatics, is dead.

Now what occurred to me may not necessarily help or do anything to point to a solution; rather, it is a small matter – of what might be called style. Or even content. Of the things we take for granted even if we rape our language in so doing. Just how many of us do not use the word “progress” in an unmitigatedly positive meaning? Even though this word, in its daily use, has no such meaning. We may speak of the progress of a cancer, of a dictatorship, of an avalanche, without any sense of incongruity. And yet “progress” as such is uniformly taken as positive. To understand just how absurd this is, try to think of a good disease, a good tyranny, a good avalanche. Absurd, isn't it? Or if not absurd, at least weakening the subject to the point of near-vanishing. A good dictator, surely, is a man who is almost not a dictator; a good cancer (yes, there is such a thing as a benignant tumor) is one that is practically ineffective. And I defy you to think of any circumstances in which an avalanche may be said to be good. But what is more, these things have progress just in so much as they are not good. It is a malignant tumor that progresses; an avalanche is the more destructive, the more it progresses; a tyranny progresses in so far as it gains further and further control.

Our politics has now gained pretty much the character of the progress of a cancer or of an avalanche – the advance of a progressive and inevitable misfortune. It was not always so. For a few centuries, riding the progress of European power and European science, improvement in material matters seemed to everyone the inevitable lot of our society. That was the progress of our society, and it was good. Then came the period of revolutions and reforms; and people, by unconsciously squinting and editing all the bad and allowing themselves to see only the good, confirmed their acquired view that “progress” is good as such. Most of the revolutionary work was indeed good, restoring European civilization to its natural inner balance as seen in the Middle Ages; but along with it went fanaticism, violence, and above all falsehood – and that falsehood was primarily provoked by the increasingly irresponsible concept of progress.

To me, it looks as though we should be at the end of this cycle. The “progress” of world and local politics is so increasingly bad, everywhere, that it would take iron shutters over one's eyes to preserve this concept of “progress”. Indeed, the “progress” of recent politics is in only one direction, only it is not a direction that can be defined as political at all. The American presidential elections, the Brexit referendum, the Italian elections, the Irish abortion referendum, are occasions where the party that lied the most won; where hucksterism and mendacity were not only used without shame, but triumphantly. No amount of well-argued refutation of the lies of Trump, of the Brexiters, of Di Maio and Salvini, of Leo Varedkar and his accomplices, could make a dent in the will of the majority – or of the victorious minority. Why? IN part because the electors hated and despised the opposition – that was the case with America and Italy – so intensely that they did not believe a word they said, and all responses went in one ear and out the other; and in part because of the corrupt and committed role of the media – both Brexit and Irish abortion were won by revolting abuse of media power. And these two things go together; because a vague awareness of the corruption and mendacity of the media is one of the main reasons, if not the main one, why answers from an enemy who is perceived as having always lied are not believed.

We should at least get rid of this increasingly grotesque joke of a concept of “progress”. We should be aware, even if we hate each other so much, that however we regard moral improvement, it is not here and it is not happening. But the concept goes on occupying the background of our minds, idle, hollow, damaging and unchallenged. Why is this?

I would say, because of the need to sell. The mass media are only a part of the big-business skeleton of our society, and big business has a natural interest in making people believe, one, that things are always changing, and, two, that they are always changing for the better. “Progress” is certainly a good thing in, say, computers. Except where it isn't – printers have become worse, not better, with the passing of the years. But above all, this way of thinking, that is natural to people who always have to promote something to the public, is never challenged, because it would not occur to corporate persons to think that there is anything radically mistaken about it. They spend their lives in a progressive environment, how can they think that there is something mistaken about the concept? And the mass media dominate our communications across our society to the extent that they pretty much decide what is important and what not.

And this brings out another important point. The inevitable goodness of progress is the typical view of the huckster. If selling is the main business of your life – selling, that is, in itself, as opposed to selling some product you made and that you regard as good – then the first thing you say is that it is new, never used before (and so your prospective client is made to think he ought to try it) and improved on previous models. Is it a coincidence, you think, that ours is the age of hucksters, with salesmen such as Berlusconi and Trump dominating politics?

There is plenty of blame to go around. Nobody is innocent, although the guiltiest parties will no doubt turn out to be the local Tory administration who seem – to judge by the fact that the police say that they may never know how many people died – not to even have had an updated list of the residents. How could anyone not know who lived where? And the matter of the cladding – which now turns out to be illegal in America; always, after such disasters, it turns out that some other administration had banned the thing which caused the disaster; and the suggestion that it was only put in as cheap insulation to meet green targets.

Then there is the building itself. My American friends with the Ayn Rand addiction – direct or indirect – will of course be blaming the very idea that the public sector should see to the housing of the working classes, as if no private homes had ever gone on fire. I know the cant by heart.
. But the matter is by no means so simple. London, like most other European cities, is full of popular homes built over a century, mostly but not exclusively by local socialist administrations. In London you can clearly see that the vast housing estates built between the nineteen-tens and the nineteen-fifties, by architects driven mainly by a sense of need and purpose – build the best houses you can at the least price, but with dignity and duration – produced buildings that nobody complained about: modest but dignified blocks of flats surrounded by green areas. But around the sixties, the sense of purpose was lost and the architects decided that their own artistry was the most important thing. The result was oversized, immense buildings of bare concrete, surpassingly ugly and often monstrously tall, which everyone except the architects loathed. The materials used – bare concrete and metal – seemed custom made to last badly and become ugly in English weather, unlike the tile and brick facing of many older GLC and Peabody Trust estates, and mixed with desolating and constant precision with garbage and dirt. I lived in one of them for a few years, and I can tell you that whatever you did to dignify and clean your own living space in the flat, as soon as you stepped out the door and into one of the bare concrete outside walkways so beloved by seventies architects, the depression set in. Everything about them was wrong; and while nobody is thinking of knocking down any of the older popular housing, many of the concrete carbuncles (thanks, Prince Charles) of the sixties and seventies have been righteously knocked down and replaced with old-fashioned English houses. (Even though that is itself a backward development, since London is in fact building more and more blocks of flats, in an obvious reaction to the insane price of land. But the hateful and traumatic nature of the concrete-and-steel erections is obviously such that people prefered to go back to the past.)

Grenfell Tower was a survivor of the bare-concrete age, kept standing in order to house the least fortunate locals. One reason why Britain does not have the devastating homeless problem that blights the USA is that local administrations have a statutory duty to find housing for the homeless. This reduces the blight on the streets, but at the risk of turning certain areas into human dumping grounds – which it is quite clear that Grenfell Tower was. This has been exasperated by the criminal idiocy of successive British governments. Margaret Thatcher – or, as I prefer to call her, Meg Thug – forbade local councils from building any more housing. At once, the largest single source of building orders in Britain dried up; and, guess what, in a few years people were complaining about a housing shortage. They never stopped. This insane order, an absolute triumph of blind ideological prejudice over sense and experience, was aggravated by the otherwise unexceptionable law that enabled residents of council developments to purchase (or better, lease for several decades – the tricky English property status known as leasehold) their own homes, and, less admirably, to lease council housing for rent to third parties. This meant that, while pressures on public housing increased, the stock diminished. To increase it somehow, the local authorities were driven to make deals with private developers and dubious “housing associations”, in the name of the all-holy Private Sector, more expensively and less efficiently than they had been able to do in the past – but at least keeping the stock going somehow and finding places to send the homeless. When Tony Blair – or the Tory Blur, as I prefer to call him – came to power, he, in his eagerness to flatter Thugcherism and Thugcherites, would not even consider altering these senseless restrictions, and the housing crisis continued unabated. That is why Jeremy Corbyn blamed these Tory laws for the disaster, and he had a point. Incidentally, the reason for Corbyn's otherwise unaccountable popularity is his recovery of a simple and by no means extreme left-wing program full of the things that the Tory Blur had wiped from the slate, thus forcing the whole arc of British politics in a tight and Thugcherite stranglehold. Corbyn's own predilections for the likes of Hamas may be unlovely, but in general and especially domestic policy he has done nothing but recover the ordinary and not at all subversive policies of any left party before the Tory Blur blurred things.

One of the horrible things about tower blocks and skyscrapers in London – and while seventies tower blocks are thankfully going down, monstrous skyscrapers, much taller than the most pretentious of blocks, are going up all over the city in a phallic homage to the pretensions of international wealth – is that, whether or not it is at all possible for a fire department to fight a fire in one, it is not for the London fire brigade. Their equipment only reaches to the twentieth floor; a limit that doomed the miserable people, God rest their souls, seen calling for help, any help, from windows thirty and more floors above the ground. I know nothing about firefighting; I certainly do not know whether equipment that can deal with fires above twenty floors up even exists. But this I do know, because it has been clearly said as the horror was unfolding, that if such equipment exists, the London fire brigade don't have it. And this in a city whose politicians and developers seem hell-bent on turning its traditionally low-rise landscape into a forest of skyscrapers. Today it was the working-class and unemployed of Grenfell Tower who suffered; tomorrow it may be some absurd conglomeration of Russian and Arab expatriate millionaires, equally doomed to a horrible death in a heaven-reaching trap with no hope of escape. (Yes, I imagine their internal fire defences will be much better than those available to the poor Grenfell Tower victims. But I am talking of a worst-case scenario – sprinklers failing and such – and such scenarios have a nasty knack of materializing.)

Finally, and I am sad to have to say this, because it is about a body of men I admire and respect. But whoever wrote those instructions to the Grenfell Tower residents – in case of fire, stay put and wait for rescue – has blood on his hands. The point is clear: it is the usual dislike of specialists and bureaucrats for the messy, ignorant, loud public getting in their way. But in this case, the excuse for this idiotic order – that the fire service would take no more than an hour to reach the high floors – in a raging fire and among hundreds of terrified people to be evacuated somehow – is nothing more than a fantasy. A literally homicidal fantasy.

There is plenty of blame available for everyone, as you see. And I hope the promised public inquiry will deal it out in large doses.

The appointment of Cressida Dick to lead London's Metropolitan Police - the body known across the world as Scotland Yard - is an apalling scandal. It is scandalous enough that the lady should still be working at the upper levels of a police force; to place her at the most senior post in all British policing is an outrage.

Cressida Dick is the woman responsible for the slaughter of Jean Charles de Menezes. In case you had forgotten, or never heard (though a couple of hundred million Brazilians certainly have, and I assume they will be making their views known), this young Brazilian electrician working in London was butchered by eleven police bullets while sitting in an underground train. His only fault was to have a rather dark complexion, like many Brazilians, and to live next to a terrorism suspect. Now no matter how blundering and wrong the actual policemen who shot de Menezes were, they were only the executors of a disastrously misconceived and misperformed plan. The commander was Cressida Dick; and the commander is responsible when something goes wrong.

But Commander Dick had long since been singled out for high promotion - probably since she enlisted, with an Oxford degree to smooth the way. I am an alumnus and I love Oxford, but there are two Oxfords. One is the great research university, respected across the world, with a couple of dozen Nobel prizewinners and umpteen top scholars; and the other is the pons asinorum intended to licence people for political careers, which produces most of England's ministers and Prime Ministers. If you are studying a science subject, or a humanities research subject, you are probably part of the former; if you are reading English, Theology, or, God help us, PPE - Philosophy Politics and Economics, the course for budding politicians - you belong to the latter. I suspect Commander Dick was. She was certainly slated for the top before she got de Menezes killed. And in any country but England it would be incredible that she could survive such a disaster; in England it's not even surprising - though it is deeply disgusting - that she did.

Above and beyond any design to promote a woman to the top spot, which was indubitably part of the issue, you have to remember that the English suffer to a quite extraordinary extent from the syndrome called doubling down. To become obstinate in the defence of something just because you suspect you might be wrong is a universal humain failing; but in England, it's a national bad habit. The English are ALWAYS at their most obstinate when they are in the wrong. And so it is not at all surprising that a woman who should have been drummed out of the force for homicidal incompetence is now being put at its head.

One of the worst things about Trump is that he is bringing out the worst in his enemies. He is so ghastly that they feel entitled to vomit out the worst of their vanity, group hate, racism and narrow-mindedness, in the unacknowledged certainty that any stick is good enough to beat Trump and Trumpies with, that hate for Trump validates itself and is obviously right. People are saying things that would have been beyond the pale (or only said in the presence of ideological partners) two years ago.

I have had to defriend and block one of the great of comics art, Bill Sienkiewicz. The reason why is behind the LJ-cut, except for what are to me the key words, which are in plain view: ( Read more... )
It's scientifically proven ( I'm not going out to post links- they re everywhere for anyone who wants to stray from their comfort of the FOX/ breitbart bubble) --- that conservatives are genetically wired, and innately predisposed to being afraid-- fearful- of new experiences ,and also that a vast majority of people who voted for him are equally stunted and lacking ithe ability for scrutiny and follow factual evidence. I'm not saying they're all stupid, but evidence supports the case that many cannot process information, lack critical thinking, relying instead reactionary responses, emotions and solutions based on fear and anger.( Read more... )

Bill Sienkiewicz made himself responsible, in a public post, for this kind of outburst. After that, breaking contact with him was the only way I could keep my self-respect.

To me, the repulsive clashes between "protesters," police and "deplorables" are an ugly sign of things to come. People on both sides have lost, or rather have never had, the ability to live with defeat. Trump is a detestable creature, but he is largely the creation of a political culture that no longer allows dissent or difference, because it is genuinely convinced that it contains all legitimate "diversity" - that diversity it always demands that we should celebrate - and that is therefore incapable of recognizing real diversity. Half the free world feels despised, limited and squashed by the pressure of this diversity without difference, and has for a long time now been trying to find a way to react. Trump has given them the perfect vehicle to do so.

There are ladies and gentlemen and people of sterling honesty in the diversity party, people like my friend Michael Rosenblum, who would go out in the rain to pay a penny debt, or Anna Maria Ballester Bohn, kindness incarnate with a funny face, or Carla Speed McNeil, artistic genius and good person, or half a dozen others, the kind of people who brighten the lives of their friends and leave a clean smell when they leave. I do not doubt their sincerity, but I doubt their knowledge of the world. Time and again they make remarks that just don't agree with my experience of the opponents. The effect of the views they follow is ultimately oppressive and aggressive. Firmly convinced that they are righting injustices and setting up new rights, they are in fact - not personally, never in a million years personally - trampling on established rights and working to silence and persecute truth. And there is a streak of persecution complex that is set to do a lot of damage. They are sincerely convinced that Trumpies are coming to brutalize and rape them. In this mood, even understanding the enemy is experienced as a kind of temptation: why should you try to understand a bunch of vicious, misogynistic racists?

I have never been of the enemy party either. My loathing of Ayn Randism and my contempt for gun "rights" make it impossible for many of them to even speak with me. The gun nuts especially reason with the logic of addicts. As with the rainbow party, understanding the enemy is not something to do but a temptation to be avoided, because anything that might undermine your precious hold on your piece of murdering iron would expose you naked and helpless to a terrible, homicidal universe. You cannot reason with a man who has willingly made himself an addict to his own fears. Like the rainbow nut's vision of the Trumpies, an undifferentiated mob existing in an ecstasy of rape and murder, the gun nut's world is one huge threat from which only his murder implements protect him.

I don't want to go further. I think you can imagine what I fear in a country where two opposing forces have many members in this state of mind.