Postmortem

I’ve shied away from writing too much political stuff of late, after all what’s the point, really who needs more fucking words?  Once I thought that people could be persuaded by arguments, by stories, that you could grab their attention with your words, give them a yank, and make them see, see things that were going on in plain site.  Something in my past, an inability to turn away compelled me tap out my own growing understanding of the world, a journey from dreamy naive liberal to full bore rightwing reactionary asshole, a uniform it seemed necessary to don I thought if I was going to play some small part in heading off the unfolding calamity (which proves I retained my naivety at least).  In the past, before Trump and Brexit, I wrote about what could make such things come to pass, because I thought it might create some cracks in other people’s certainty.  Looking back, what I was saying was that if we look into people’s hearts we would find they are almost all universally good, even if the outcomes where not.  But not everyone agreed with what I had to say, and so those that rejected my version of truth instead looked elsewhere, for more dangerous answers to why these things should be, what lay in the hearts of men.

And so today we are triggering article 50, and we have the Scottish government pushing for referendum 2.0, Trump removing environmental regs, bodies being lowered into graves from yet another mad jihadi. 

I think what we lack as a society is real honesty, both to be honest in the face of reality in opposition to dogma and ideology, but also honesty in how we made such errors to find ourselves here (as individuals and as a society).  How often do we hear people in power - no - how often do we hear anyone we know, tell us they made a major error of judgement, that they sided with the wrong cause, stood up when they should have stood down, burnt when they should have held their fire.  I guess what we do is go back and delete our tweets, and think we can just edit out the past? 

My own view of the world is one that tries to be balanced, as unbalanced people and their views are dangerous.  Nothing is binary, nothing, not Brexit, not Trump, not Scottish independence, not rape, not Islam, not feminism, not global warming - nothing.  Absolutism is for primitive thinkers or for those who wish to lead the gullible by easy answers, the moment you see it you must reject it.  I do not support Trump but I will defend him, and feel he’s unintentionally exposed the closed loop of power and media (something any Corbyn, Sanders or SNP supporter can also now see).  I believe in equality but don’t believe we can ever be equal, and that identity politics is rolling back the advances made by previous generations.  I find most information on man-made global warming hysterical and now sacred truth (woe betide the blasphemers), but I believe in the husbandry of the environment, that each and everyone of us needs to reject the worship of objects and waste.  I did not vote for Brexit but I think a betting man would bet on the collapse of the EU as we know it, its currency and systems due to ideological overreach.  I do not allow myself to be asked to judge other countries and how they operate, be that Russia or Saudi Arabia or China, as doing so IS most often the very racist and imperialist thinking that the one doing to asking rails against in the world.  Are such ways of looking at the world radical or just realistic?

But as I say, what is missing is an answer that lies in plain site, but no one dare say it, least of all those who rule us and wish to protect their position and their place within the system (everything as about power, the system that maintains it, and people’s position within that system).  The few people who try and speak the truth will most usually pay for it, that their name and reputation will be bundled up with some small lump of toxic poison as a way to dispose of them.  Watch on TV or Youtube when someone speaks the truth, how in the response words are added in response to make a deadly brew, ‘racist’, ‘right ring’, ‘populist’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘misogynist’, ‘post truth’, that as a ‘white sis male’ they’re view is grub like.  Good people, when hosed down with human shit, are forced away from the group - well - that is until the stink gets so bad no one cares anymore.

But to my point.  Like I said I’ve wanted to stay away from politics, wanted to be balanced in all things, but what I’m going to write may not sound like either, but then it’s more than politics.  I live in Dublin, I am surrounded by ‘others’, people from many, many nations, and I’d need several hands to number the origins of my friends.  I am not a racist, I am British, and Britain is perhaps the least racist and most open society on the planet, more so than Sweden and Norway, more so than Germany or America, and definitely more tolerant and less racist than any country in Africa, Asia or South America.  And British people love Europe, they love the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish, the Swiss, even the French.  Now before we go on just check that light that perhaps came on in your head, that my statement sounded someone ‘jingoistic’, maybe even - dare I say it - ‘nationalistic’?  Who put that light there, who made pride a thought crime?  When I see cartoons about Britain being small and grubby, shared by liberal friends, I have to ask if they know anything about history, of government and law, of human rights, even of world economics.  Where does that utter self hatred come from, that true and most dangerous racist inclination, to hate your own.  but I digress.  Brexit has zero to do with hatred at Europeans, in fact it has zero to do with the EU.  I would go further, that the British, like the Irish, welcome the Poles, Slovaks, the Latvians and the Romanians, they like cheaper roaming and LED light bulbs .  People who come to live and work hard are always welcomed, just as anyone who does not is not welcome, who come to rob and steal and rape.  For me Brexit, the rise of the right, even Trump, were the result of a single issue, but one that no one dare tackle, and instead prefer the spray their toxic shit over the whole of society, toxicity like polonium, spread like hate through social media until the whole country is irradiated, society polluted, that we think that stink is how we smell. 

Since the Enlightenment Europeans have slowly emancipated themselves from religion and its dogma, slowly, like indentured slaves, generation after generation, as to do so offered up chance of civilisation, free of one truth, of not one God but no God at all.  Through war and social struggle, and not imperial power, the British created a society that was as close to harmonious as could be, where there was the rule of law, and real equality - far from perfect, but as perfect as could be offered up by reality.  People may grumble, but that’s what the base do, but the good ones press on and make the best of what there is on offer. And this place became home to many different people, black and white, and slowly, year by year, the understanble friction was made smoother.  I would say that the majority of the poor of today have more than the lower middle class of yesterday, but then a luxury soon becomes a necessity.  And so by the early 90’s Britain was a heaven on earth, only one bought in Poundland or Lidl.  And far from the coal face of Britain this perfect world still exists, for those in the Capitol, but not in the districts.  There things are far from good, a world where many heads suck at a rapidly decreasing pool, where the world has become so quickly unbalanced by dangerous ideologues that they have no hope for the future.  Worst of all, those in the scrap heap cities of Britain were placed there by those they most trusted to protect their interests.  It was not the toffs who sold the working class down the river.  Yes, no government can really create work, but they can protect society.  When I walk around Hull, the poorest of the poor, and see that the city has grown ten percent by refugees from Iraq, Somalia,  Libya, Afghanistan, the poorest most desperate people, dumped her, not in Harrow, I ask were was the care and husbandry for the people who called that place home, their culture, their civilisation, their history, their reality balanced on a pin head?  And to that final issue, the breaking point, which is of course Islam, a crazed faith we’d resign to the dustbin of cults and cranks if it’s practitioners were from Kansas, one no right minded person would countenance for a heart beat.  Since 1988 Britain has been spineless in the face of its rise,  Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses just the beginning of the death of what once made us free (do you consider yourself free? Why to even read or share such a view would give you a whiff of something bad). When people voted for Brexit I’d wager that it was a vote against Islam, the site of millions of Muslims coming to Europe forcing their hands to do this small suicide , because who else would stem the flow?  Is that racist, no, it’s the base code of human’s for self-protection, to protect their way of life.  Illogical? Maybe if you live in the suburbs, with Muslim friends like mine, professional and as Muslim as I’m Christian, but that’s not the case at the coal face, a place few visit, where your grandma sits in her house surrounded by an alien reality, like a woman out of time.  In those communities, when people find that the West did not prove to be a land of milk and honey, resentment at the socialist promise, of a state granted paradise lost on the post, well people become radicalised.  Only the Koran and Sharia offers a way out, offers a future that promises to deliver.  Most people don’t understand Jihadis, get all twisted up in virgins, their understanding of Islam based on Aladdin, when really they’re easy to understand; all it takes is to know something of poverty and desperation. The Godless have bank robbers, the holy have Jihad.

The very fact, in the 21st Century, that Islam is even a thing in the UK is proof of the problem, that people sit around on panels talking about it (one Iranian friend left Iran in the 80’s to get away from Islam, but feels it’s been allowed to follow him to Europe).  Generations had fought to remove faith from Britain, to make it no influence over anything, few Britains saying ‘as a Christian’ before they made a statement anymore, the devout only to be sniggered at, the church as suspect as 70’s TV kids presenter.  But we don’t dare be so bold with an equally suspect faith, a cult that seems to have intelligent men and woman under its thrall, the great and good nothing but apologists,  their esteemed heads full of the Alhambra, but not by the Christian slaves who built it.  Maybe there is a God? 

But of course we’ve failed, it’s over, unlike the Japanese, who treat heritage as a family treasure, our culture and history is fast dying.  A baby born today may well see Stone Henge bulldozed flat in its lifetime.  Am I angry at Muslims and Islam, hell no, they’ve earned the prize of Europe, of a future caliphate. They’re played a long game that’s beyond the control of any pope, something that was bound to their DNA in the 7th century.  For it to sustain so long there must be something in it.  As for the short term, well things will only get worse, because as that pool turns to a puddle, that pool we were promised, people will look for answers, and while some will scramble to lift up the walls, others will look to their God.