Following the fall of communism the European Left was largely
discredited. Yet there was little
recognition that most people are only comfortable with a middle ground in their
every-day existence. The politics of
envy that communism exploited could no longer attract a mass following unless
it could surround itself with disgruntled followers who could be convinced that
an “us and them” scenario still existed. The issue was not that poverty had
ceased to exist or that injustice was no longer rife in the world but that in
only a few kinds of society was the possibility for improvement so stifled as
to create mass dissatisfaction.
80 per cent of people living in the Western world are now classified as
belonging to the middle class and the rest of the world is rapidly joining
them, thus making the pool of malcontents to exploit working class
dissatisfaction too small to pose a significant threat to societies. There is an issue here. We should care for
the poor more than we do but the Left no longer enjoys a constituency of
limitless potential to inflict damage on the establishment. It is part of the
establishment and very comfortable at that.
It has not created a political debate that would animate a significant
minority of the population to force a momentum for change in order to help
alleviate the suffering of the marginalized poor. And most of the poor are protected by some
sort of safety net. It is not that
people are not vulnerable but a critical mass of people who need our help, even
where they do exist do not automatically turn to the Left as their savior.
We do not possess clear cut definitions to tidily fit a Marxist
revolutionary model. Class definitions
based on social identity and economic capacity are no longer necessarily
connected. Social class is relatively
stable and defined by cultural affinity while socioeconomic class is far more
fluid. The lower classes barely exist
compared with the past other than as small marginalized groups whose problems
are complex and not easily fixed. The
working classes often earn far more than their professional class
‘rivals’. The working classes are likely
a sub-set of the middle classes as both an economic and a socioeconomic group.
The lower classes have been replaced by an underclass of resource poor
families and individuals and this group now includes members of the middle
classes – their common denominator is their poverty but not their education or
even their social background. The rapid
growth in food banks attests to the issue of resources as being the most
immediate problem. There is little debate about how to solve the unemployment
issue in society. Civil society has
failed to confront the ethical question behind what is a manageable, acceptable
level of unemployment or under-employment.
Instead, society treats the unemployed as a statistic, as an economic
lever that is useful for manipulating wage policy or as an inevitable aspect of
any economic cycle. The reality for
humanity is that it remains as it has always been, a damaging cyst eating away
at the vitality of every society.
The left clings to the tired cliches of nineteenth and twentieth
century envy populism to sell an anachronistic product whose starting point is
predicated on encouraging conflict and division. But today, those issues are further
complicated by religious extremism.
The countries with most pronounced inequality are unequal for all of
the traditional reasons such as structural deficiency which fails to protect
the weak from the strong, tribal domination and social stratification which
permanently traps the poor in hierarchical disadvantage.
If in previous centuries the poor were trapped by their powerlessness,
modern weaponry has changed the usual outcomes of enslavement or persecution
but it has also created the conditions for unending warfare and ever increasing
numbers of casualties. Relative
advantage is never assured but the balance of power has shifted from the state
to anyone able to buy modern weapons and attract followers.
The next change from the past is that many of the disenfranchised poor
are in the Muslim world which paradoxically contains the world’s greatest
concentration of material wealth. However in this case, class tensions are a
product of ethnic and tribal rule resulting in rising income inequality and
increasing unemployment with vast numbers of people simply shut out from any
possibility for a future not mired in extreme poverty because they are not part
of an empowered group. Egypt and Turkey, two of the largest Muslim
nations, are, in particular, guilty of this divide. It has created the
political conditions required for revolutionary change to occur. Except that
while prior to the late nineteenth century, movements were reactionary and
fundamentalist, from the late nineteenth century and onwards they were
‘revolutionary’ - a mixture of secular populism and in the Muslim world,
Islamic populism. After many decades
this mix has been proven to be successful in rallying a wider group of
disaffected and marginalized fighters but as ineffective as previous movements
in solving the issue of class-tribal inequality. Islamic populism overcame its secular rivals
by creating a social movement that at least in theory supported community,
social justice, religious authority and a return to glory days of Islamic and
Arab domination. And the religious movements learnt the lessons of past
demagogues.
Historically successful movements in the Islamic world were
horrendously ruthless in subjugating their enemies and conquering their
neighbors. The Islamic State (IS or
Daesh) as well as those movements that preceded them (such as Al Qaeda) can
quote the Koran to justify total rejection of modern civilization in favor of
extreme acts of violence and brutality.
Other faiths are condemned for having moved on from their early history.
The peculiar nature of Islamic society is that its civil society has never been
separated from its religious infrastructure (except in Turkey during the
Kemalist period spanning 1923 and 2010) and so the faithful justify everything
by claiming fidelity to the violence and barbarism of Islam’s Seventh Century
of the Common Era (A.D.) foundation.
Classic concepts of cultural and physical conquest are based on ferocity,
fear and theft; it represents a rational assessment of historical Islamic
precedents of conquest. Slaughter
everyone who resists you and the next area you invade will either fight you to
the death or will collapse in fear, more likely the latter than the
former. Islamic history has glorified
this strategy and it has nearly always worked.
The Arab Spring truly became a winter of discontent (and
bloodshed). The only way the extreme
left could justify its existence is by allying itself with a Pan-Arab kindred
spirit. And that is frightening because,
given what we now know of their brutal suppression of opposition, this
partnership places the extreme Left squarely alongside the Nazi political
continuum. The kindred spirit to which they aspire to cooperate in
“revolutionary resistance to Western society” is Muslim.
If pan-Arabism and Islamism are both viewed as progressive kindred
spirits then their religion is untouchable, beyond criticism. In their Manichean world Israel is a
malformation that must be excised from the region for the greater (Muslim-Arab)
good. This is the well-spring from which
all Jews are damned, unless that is, they are Jewish Uncle Toms, the
professional anti-Semites who wield religious identification as a sword to
strike down their coreligionists. The
ideological basis for this antisemitism is as ruthless as it is consistent
with the historical record of brutality they try to conceal.
Fascism is a movement that aggressively denies its foes any voice in
protest against their persecution. It is
dependent on regimentation and suppression of contrary ideological
positions. Albert Camus, writing in “The
Rebel” says that “Fascism is an act of contempt. Inversely, every form of
contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares the way for, or establishes,
fascism.” And Leon Trotsky (on National Socialism in 1933) “Fascism has opened
up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but
also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth
or the thirteenth (century)….”
In its desperate need to prove that it is still relevant the Left has
moved towards the hinterlands of political activism by its unquestioning
embrace of Arab - Islamic causes. Though Islamofascism threatens to further compartmentalize
the Middle East into mutually intolerant ethno-fascist cantons, the Left
continues to drift further into a democratically fatal accommodation with them.
Israel will one day have to make peace with bad people. But it must not compromise on either the
issue of lack of trust or the ongoing incitement, which negates any efforts to
construct a solution that serves the cause of peace - for both sides. Prior hostility is the root cause of present
day racism-antisemitism and it predates Zionism. Western ‘liberal’ fascism has collaborated
with antisemitism for too long and it makes the task of achieving peace all
the more difficult. This is because that hostility to Jews in Europe as well as
in parts of America makes trust almost impossible to prove.
The credibility of political fascism is based on the assumption that
demanding a blood sacrifice will placate the butchers for whom 1,400 years of
blood and conquest has only created greater enthusiasm for killing, not
less. The theory of appeasement has
never worked but its enthusiastic supporters do not stop trying because they
never have to make the sacrifice. Where
time and again it was the Jewish peoples “turn” for sacrifice it is now
Israel’s turn. So appeasement is
justified by first preparing the public.
The assumption that the Jewish people will be coerced into placing their
collective heads into the gluttonous Islamic lions jaw, and that their probable
sacrifice will assuage the blood lust of a faith for whom cultural conquest and
physical domination are intrinsically theologically fused into a single vision
of a world ruled by them and for them only - is fundamentally flawed. Appeasement never works. But society is only accustomed to a flawed
status-quo where we scapegoat others to compensate for our failures.
The Islamic inheritance is not entirely the responsibility of its
Muslim followers. But prejudice and
intolerance, theological and political violence are a historical part of the
Islamic heritage that helps to explain the flood of Western Muslims to Daesh
(IS). The ethics of decapitating ones
enemy with a rusty knife is not part of current Western discourse nor is it
part of OUR civilized behavior. To
outgrow twentieth century fascism the Muslim world needs to have experienced
shame, not humiliation. Humiliation is
what it feels because of a perceived “War on Islam.” The secular order understands and condones
attempts at appeasement because it does not attach any importance to an Islamic
threat to that order, at least not in the Western World.
Shame is something altogether different. In this century alone, millions of people
have died so that those on the Left can feel comfortable not facing up to their
own ideological prejudices, myopia and historic failures. Maintaining silence
and ignorance about Islamic theological outpourings sanitizes the crimes of the
Left as well as those of Islam and the absence of shame encourages and
facilitates further atrocities. There can be no respite from terrorism and no
movement towards peaceful co-existence anywhere in the world while Israel and
Jews are demonized for the sake of the appeasers, not even for “Peace in our
Time.”
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