Identity politics gets in the way of almost all sensible governance in 2017, and yet its steady advance continues unabated. What makes the dogged progress hard to nail as bogus is the definitively divisive complexity of it all. For in almost every example one encounters, there are three tricky choices for the analyst: is it natural, it is oppressive, or is it being manipulated in pursuit of other ends?
There are days now when I don’t know where to start. The avalanche of mendacity, maladministration and madness makes one feel like a skier who’s wandered off-piste, and suddenly sees that unstoppable skyscraper of snow rippling down the mountain. It is pointless, at that moment of impending certain death – if a certainty can impend – to get on the mobile phone and start yelling about the ruthlessly unfair nature of life. Because nothing one broadcasts is going to make any difference (in that metaphorical context) to the blink-brief period of life left.
But death is rarely that inevitable. So we must keep trucking on…..
Enzo Siviero, an Italian architect and megalomaniac with close ties to the loons at the Schiller Institute, is a chap keen on the idea of linking every continent with a physical bridge. His latest bit of visionary myopia is a bridge to connect Tunis to Italy, thus enabling still more economic migrants liberally sprinkled with Islamists to get to Europe not just alive, but without so much as getting their feet wet.
This is obviously going to put him in good odour with the European Commission, which yesterday suddenly requested (as in, demanded) that all its victim member States accept another 40,000 “refugees” as a down-payment on further amounts yet to be quantified, as such. Yes, the European Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs, Dimitris Avramopoulos, sent a round-Robin blithely ignoring the incandescent rage of countries screaming “Enough, already”. Included on the list circulated by Dimidiot Amahopeless was the Scandinavian country, Norway. It is not in the EU.
Jess Zimmerman, the Guardian columnist, wants to ban white emojis. Not just add more ethnic emojis mind, but ban caucasian faces from the lexicon. She employs the wonderful phrase “people of colour”…as if white people might be colourless. Like Owen Jones on the Left and Theresa May on the Right, every ideologue these days wants to ban something: but not themselves of course, because that would be unthinkably illiberal….as opposed to unthinkingly liberal. Thus, Diane Abbott wants to ban white people from some constituency MP shortlists, because she thinks white people can’t grasp the problems of black citizens.
It perhaps hasn’t occurred to Our Di that the majority of her constituents in Hackney are white, but still keep returning her to office. Because (I assume) they don’t understand the problems of black people. Or not. Discuss. But wait – there is more: for TV makeover man Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen – a person of Welsh lineage – opined yesterday that it is racist to refer to oneself as English.
He has correctly spotted that more and more people born in England (myself included) refer to themselves as English. This could have something to do with Welsh people burning English-owned holiday homes to the ground, and Scottish citizens declaring their fervent desire to be slaves of Brussels rather than owners of an unfeasibly large number of British parliamentary seats. It’s hard to be sure. But of one thing I’m certain: describing one’s place of birth accurately is not evidence of racism.
Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has said that Catalonian independence from Spain would be “the end of Europe”. What Monsieur Valls really means is that it would be the beginning of the end of the European Union…which isn’t a Union, primarily because it contains infinitely more disunity than the United States just prior to the American Civil War. Speaking on French radio, he said: “What Spain, Catalonia and Barcelona represent is too important not to say what we think, with great respect to those opinions, but what happens in Catalonia is too important not to have a strong statement from an European level.” Or put another way, an indefinable thing called Europe is vastly more important than the desire for a Homo sapiens tribe that fought against real fascists to enjoy self-determination.
Over the last decade, I’ve gradually realised that planetary events are like 4D chess. It’s not just the 15 versions of Truth that make life difficult for a media commentator: it’s the business of trying remotely to discern the difference between muddled minds and megalomaniacs….with radical Islam and Texan oil floating about like spinning electrons.
Islam is a tribe: so too are Texan oil-barons, Catalonians, the English, Bretons, Labour MPs, Guardianistas, Thatcherites, OneWorlders, architects, Oxbridges, Antifa, Ossetians, billionaires, Sloane Rangers, Goths and lesbians.
But in the end, it all comes down to a question of identity.
There are those that want their identity to be recognised for the purpose of harmless, self-regarding liberty. There are those that feel the need to oppress others, using their identity as the medium of control. And there are those élites above the tribes who manipulate the natural sense of identity for their own unnatural ends.
I leave it to the individual reader to decide, in any given set of circumstances, which identity motive is in play.
Good luck with your discernment. You’re going to need it.
The Slog 