LETTER FROM NOTTING HILL JANUARY 2015
Thoughts On The New Year, Politics and Anti-Semitism
The odd thing about the first few days in January are that whilst
they are supposed to represent a fresh start, a time for new beginnings, in
reality they are infused with the stale debris of the year just gone. This in
the form of discarded Christmas trees, decorations needing to be placed in bags
and boxes, to be stored away until Christmas comes again. You did this last
year and the year before that, stretching back in time. Thus the New Year is
stained by familiarity, nothing changes.
I was lifted from these rather depressing thought by the
arrival of freezing fog. I have always like fog, the way it cloaks the
familiar, shrouding the trees and houses in mystery; things look different,
unfamiliar. The best writing about fog I have ever read comes from Jean Paul
Sartre’s classic existential novel, Nausea. He inhabits the fog with a real
sense of menace. In fog, as Sherlock Holmes would know, murders are
committed.
Nausea had a major impact on me when I read it at 18. At the
time suffering from a severe broken heart and feeling deeply inadequate, it
provided me with something firm to hold onto, a world weary cynicism that
proved a wonderful antidote to feelings of inadequacy. I was at one with the
protagonist Monsieur Antoine Roquentin. The novel helped me to survive.
Literature, like music, having the ability to do that.
We are now already in a general election campaign, with
lies, damn lies statistics and semantics pouring from every orifice of our
political masters. We now also have a Prime minister who makes up facts, “child
poverty has fallen,” – it hasn't it’s gone up – and when confronted by
uncomfortable truths simply parrots “I don’t accept that.” It’s certainly a
novel way to be in the world, making up your own reality as you go along. Thus
the Prime Minister is able to say, “I don’t accept that today is Monday, it is
Sunday and I am going back to bed.”
After the referendum on Scottish independence however things
will never be same again, the whole dynamic of British politics has changed. Having
lost the referendum battle the Scottish Nationalists appear to have won the
war. It is a curious sort of victory, with the SNP on course for an electoral
landslide in May’s general election, the level of bile and bitterness has risen
to disturbing levels. Across the Scottish nation the immortal cry of losers
down the century is heard, “we was robbed!”
To get a blast of this bile you need only go on Twitter and,
as I did, have the effrontery to comment on Scottish politics from this nest of
Satan, London.
Having followed Jim Murphy’s courageous performance during the
independence campaign, I was interested in his election as leader of the
Scottish Labour Party. Amongst other things Jim is a member of Labour Friends
of Israel. This in particular seems to have irked some on the nationalist fringe.
On Saturday, having ‘favourited’ one of Jim’s tweets, I was drawn to the level
of abuse that this mild and jokey tweet had produced.
“Don’t U just love it when a friend after a long night drinking spree knocks
on your door at 2 in the morning to offer you political advice?”
Trawling through the comments, and on checking out some of the
posts on a number of these users’ timelines, I soon came across the tell-tale
signs of anti-Semitism. “Friend of Zionist’s and bankers”…Zionist puppet,” are
just two examples. This prompted me in turn to tweet. “Disturbing level of anti-Semitism amongst Scot Nat’s Opponents of Jim
Murphy.”
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| Cartoon Depicting Jim Murphy Placed on Twitter |
My tweet was the signal for the sky to
fall in. I was inundated with mostly abusive, often moronic, tweets. “Bollocks”…
“Ignorant name calling wankstain tosser,”… “Lowlife,” again to give just a few
examples. I was also informed, somewhat superfluously, that for my information
Jim was a Catholic. Perhaps the most comic and revealing tweet was this one; “Disturbing level of colonialism coming from
London.” It seems that some nationalist supporters now believe they are
living in an English colony. The once proud Scottish nation infected by a
victim culture, the battle cry of the Scots reduced to a whinge.
This experience made me feel a lot less optimistic about the
future of the UK, when the rot has set
in this deep relations may well be beyond repair.
That anti-Semitism is enjoying a resurgence only requires a
visit to twitter to confirm, with the code word Zionist liberally sprinkled in
tweets barely able to contain the hatred expressed. That this resurgence owes
much to the rise of Islamism and election of Palestinians to the role of symbolic
martyrs to the twin evils of ‘American imperialism’ and the perfidy of Europe,
is I think beyond dispute. It also speaks much for the corrosion of left
internationalism that barely concealed anti-Semitic sentiments can now be found
circulating in far left circles.
I am currently reading Pascal Bruckner, the Tyranny of Guilt. Bruckner has much to say on this subject and on the whole growth of a culture of guilt, blame and victimhood amongst the intelligentsia of ‘the West.’ Reading a book like this is for me like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, the parts fit together, and the picture makes sense. I will be returning to Bruckner’s book in another post.
Now the fog is lifting and Notting Hill looks tired and
grey.
HAPPY NEW YEAR.
A T January 6th 2015
