Re: A Plague of Terrorists

I am going to break my promise not to continue this thread, just to bash out an ultra-fast response by way of brief explanation. But first, I may have failed to grasp the point you were making (I very probably have), but it is not the case that I don't have any interest, I can assure you. When you wrote "Identity politics, political correctness, were ideologies designed to single out a despised trash class to be condemned." I was saying much the same thing when I said that the ruling class want more blacks, women, etc. in power because they want to legitimise their rule in their own eyes. These people - which you call "the Left" - are actually neoliberals. I despise the Tony Blairs of this world as much as you, but I wouldn't call those who serve the corporate elites "the Left". Maybe this is just a semantic disagreement. And I have no doubt many working class supporters of the far right do so in order to "to stick a big filthy thumb in the eye of the snooty, uppity, disdainful prigs who run the place". But the ruling class is fragmented, not monolithic, and the question is whether, in being manipulated to stick it to the disdainful prigs, they are not supporting a different wing of the ruling class. Class is defined primarily by the relationship to the means of production, and the right are completely funded by billionaires, corporations and oligarchs. These are not an alternative to the ruling class, they are the ruling class, they are the people "running the place", and they've just learnt that to defend their wealth they cannot appear as disdainful prigs all the time, or at least not quite in the same way; and their agenda certainly includes their own enrichment, as their policies make very clear. The destruction of working class communities by Thatcher (I remember well the miners' strike), all the way through austerity and Brexit, has greatly increased working class insecurity and poverty over the course of my lifetime. Not all this is down to the working class, but there have always been segments of the working class who could be persuaded to vote contrary to their material interests. Brexit was a particularly good example of this. This suggests, does it not, that "a fairly canny calculation of what's good for one's family and local community" is not "always present". The working class do not have some kind of infallible wisdom of judgement about their material interests. I have to admit I don't quite have a grip on your position, so I'm probably getting it wrong. You write "I'd certainly like to join you in saying 'neither', but won't we both, when push comes to shove, have to align either right or left? No matter how many misgivings that may involve." - Great, I agree 110 per cent (to use the somewhat illogical vernacular), and I've explained, I hope, why my objections to the right are deeper than my objections to the left. But then you say "A lurch into fascism would be the worst of all possible outcomes. For structural reasons, right now, populist Right wing totalitarianism would be worse than the Left's preferred creeping, grim, grey strangulation. But if we've reached the position where those are the only two choices, complete withdrawal from the arena seems a sensible option." We can certainly ignore politics, I agree. Of course, one can do other things. I am currently tackling the whole of the Mahabharata (10 volumes, unabridged) in Bibek Debroy's new translation for Penguin. I find that such things take me into different epochs where (frankly) I feel a lot more comfortable. The trouble is that even if we ignore politics, politics won't ignore us, and the paths ahead of us offer very different futures between which we cannot, I believe, be indifferent. At least I can't. I am personally impacted in too many ways. One of the paths seems to me to be very much worse than the other. And then there's the issue of Palestine. We cannot be indifferent to the most important moral issue of our time, an issue which the Right, with its belief in "the West", conceptualises as a superior culture being threatened by the barbarian hordes, but which is in fact the last instance of settler colonialism attempting to wipe out an entire people; and I am sure you're not indifferent either. There is always a tendency to personalise these disagreements, and I myself have occasionally been guilty of doing so, and have regretted it. But if I didn't respect your opinion, then I assure you I would not feel compelled to engage with it, even if what I write comes across as polemical. In any case, I hope I've been able to explain my position in such a way to make it more undersatndable, even if not more acceptable, to you.