How the left use the myth of the noble savage to keep black people poor

We are often reminded that levels of poverty across the world have fallen. We need to remember that the natural state of man isn't some sort of bucolic utopia but abject, brutal, painful poverty. Before the 19th century all but a fortunate few lived in absolute poverty, the sort of 'less than a dollar a day' subsistence that is still the reality for too many in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We also need to consider that we're not so very far from returning to that terrible past - read about the decade after WW2 or take a look at Venezuela today.

There are some people, however, who (as they would doubtless put it) challenge the neoliberal narrative of poverty decline. They are, I guess, the economics version of climate change deniers:

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.

What an idyllic description of life in Africa, India and America before bad people arrived. It's like one of those old romantic characterisations - the noble savage living a carefree life unconstrained by the hideous trappings of civilisation. From its progenitor in Rousseau through to Engels and other early socialists comes this idea that somehow man fell from a state of near perfection to a corrupt state obsessed with possessions. It is still found in literature (popular science fiction is riddled with it) and has a more troubling home in academia where it still exercises a malign influence on international aid strategies and policies.

At the heart of this argument, promoted by Oxfam as well as elite academics at top London universities, is the idea that people like subsistence agriculture (not the academics or aid workers obviously, just the darker coloured peasants). That those "robust systems of sharing and reciprocity" are in any way real. And that disease, famine, murder, rape and brutality aren't more typical of the noble savage's world. What's still more depressing is that rich white academics like Jason Hickel (whose article I took that Rousseau-esque quote from), living a lovely life among the western elite want to deny the opportunity for that life to poor black and brown people elsewhere in the world.

It is a ridiculous idea that, presented with the idea of faster travel, with piped water, with telephones and safe packaged food, people will choose to remain scraping at half an acre of garden with a blunt hoe. Yet Hickel - and so many of his fellow left-wing academics - persist with the idea that somehow there's a way to maintain the noble savage in their mythical perfection while allowing them to have (doubtless state funded) access to a few of those good things that are enjoyed by the western elite. We have an ideology so invested in opposing neoliberalism that it is prepared to use a myth, the noble savage, to justify keeping black people trapped in brutal, abject poverty.

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Do as you would be done by (a lesson for progressives everywhere)

Jonathan Pearce at Samizdata shared the corporate philosophy of Asgaard, the US weight training business and the concluding sentence struck me as spot on:

We also understand that some people have different opinions about these things, and we respect their opinions at precisely the same level of enthusiasm with which they respect ours.

This came after a statement opposing big government, over-regulation, the endless search for offence and backing personal responsibility and the good things in life. Plus clearly stating that masculinity and femininity are great but different.

You could, however, have put any list of things important to the ethos of a business and, had you concluded as Asgaard did, I would still cheer. If you want to have your worldview applauded, you have to start with understanding that not everyone shares that viewpoint and that those people are just as likely to be good, caring, loving people as you are. It is the fault of us all to believe that our prejudices, beliefs and faith contain the only truth meaning; that all those who disagree are not merely wrong, they are sinners.

I would say say that this intolerance seems more prevalent on the progressive left than it used to be. Once the left prided itself on its liberal sensitivities, on a desire for inclusion and the broadening of ideas and debate. Today, this progressive mindset - the worldview of what Americans call liberals - seems unprepared to accept that others disagree with that philosophy. Or rather that those who don't embrace the game of identity top trumps, equalities poker and faux concern about the plight of the poor are entirely without the prospect of salvation.

Perhaps we can again embrace the plurality of ideas, to recognise that there is no right answer, no perfect ideology, no sunlit uplands - just a messy, complicated old world. A world that's made easier if we do as we would be done by. It's time to start respecting ideas again, to take that quote above as a chance for a positive, an instruction that, if you treat my ideas with respect and understanding there's a better chance I'll do the same for yours.

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Antisemitism redux

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I think it's known as 'othering' - the process of making a group of people so different as to be unacceptable in society. It is, and always has been, something of a problem. Especially when that exclusion is on the basis of a characteristic a person can't do anything to change (ethnicity and gender are the two obvious examples here). In recent times, in part driven by events in Palestine, we have seen this 'othering' process applied to Jews. The return of anti-semitism.

For those who, like me, aren't Jewish, the problem seems small. The antics of a few idiots with unpleasant (often described as right wing views) wasn't the big deal since we could pretty much avoid these people. But then you find that it simply isn't like that. It's not a minority sport this anti-semitism, it is pretty much mainstream. Not among us right wing folk but in the polite conversation of the intelligent left.

And so my wife and I lose our moorings. We are of the Left, but are no longer welcome, unless we become “good Jews” who are not “bad, Zionist Jews”. We worry about our son. He will be confronted by Israeli Apartheid Week when he arrives on a University campus in a few years. If he is a Jew who believes that Israel has a right to be, he will be hated by many on the student Left. My son is an enthusiastic, articulate and kind boy. The realisation that he will be hated by those who will not see any of these attributes, but instead will see only one attribute – his Jewishness – chills me.

See that term 'good Jews' - those Jews who are 'anti-Israel' or 'anti-Zionist'. For a Jew to be acceptable in the salons of the left, he has to reject the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination, the right to a home. As the writer of that quotation observed, many of the promoters of anti-Jew violence are no longer sad worshippers of Adolf Hitler but radical and extremist Islamist organisations linked to the long conflict in Palestine. And the left wing folk who have long supported Palestinian rights now find themselves associating with people who are, without any question or doubt, anti-semitic.

'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'

How can an organisation committed to the extermination of Jews be called friends? Yet this - and much else besides (including reference to the anti-semitic libel 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion') is in the founding charter of Hamas. Somehow we are supposed to push aside this advocacy of genocide, this violent anti-semitism, in the cause of Palestinian nationhood. Indeed, so long as so many of the Palestine's leaders reject any solution other than a 'one nation' solution - from the river to the sea, as it's put by those Palestinian advocates - it's hard to see it as anything other than anti-semitism.

The left's problem isn't that there are no grounds for criticising Israel and Israel's government but that this criticism has blinded them to the anti-semitism of Hamas and other representatives of Palestinian nationhood. Above all those on the left feel able to condemn Israel but unable to see the dark side of Palestinian liberation:

If calls from those on the Left in the UK for the obliteration of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic Palestinian state and the sheer violence and blood lust in some comments were not surreal and disturbing enough, my wife and I have noticed something else. Silence. From friends on Facebook when my wife posts anything that acknowledges the very existence of Israel or the random horror that is being enacted on its streets.

In the last year, the number of anti-semitic incidents in the UK reached record levels - 1,168 incidents against Britain’s Jewish population in 2014, more than double that of the previous year and the rate hasn't slackened off. Yet beyond the ritual mouthing of concern, the left fails to realise that it's indulgence of anti-semitic organisations and the language of anti-zionism has played a part in this increase. It shouldn't be like this and doesn't have to be like this:

The Bradford Council for Mosques recently began working together with the local authority to raise funds for the Bradford Synagogue, to ensure the building remains a sacred space for future generations, the Telegraph reported on March 5.

“When the chair of the Bradford synagogue approached the Muslim community for help and assistance towards the maintenance of this building, it was a challenge which didn’t take us long to decide on,” Zulfi Karim, secretary of Bradford Council for Mosques, said.

So my friends, give some hope to Saul Freeman and his wife. Call out anti-semitism just as you would other forms of hatred. And say to your friends in the Palestinian movement that the first step they need to take is to accept Israel's right to be there and to take a lesson from fellow muslims in Bradford on how to respect Jewish people and the Jewish faith.

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The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is his values not just his policies

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So what is my problem with Jeremy Corbyn asks the wise man? Why, when I normally eschew personal criticism, do I focus so much on Corbyn's image and rhetoric rather than the substance of his policies?

I thought I'd try and explain that it's a matter of values. Rather than posting this picture and article, I'll explain that Corbyn's personal values embrace violence, reject personal freedom, oppose choice and reject individual responsibility.

Vicariously enjoying violence is not an unusual trait in politicians (from right and left) and especially male politicians. Whether it's the image of "a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other", Mussolini's fetishing of uniforms or John McDonnell's 'colourful use of language', politicians like violence. We're forever "attacking", "fighting for", and proposing "wars against".

What is especially galling about Corbyn is that, while embracing Sinn Fein/PIRA and assorted violent men from the middle east, he claims that this revelling in violent politics is done for the cause of 'peace', to 'stop war'. Such posturing is excusable in a 20 year-old student activist but demonstrates a sad lack of maturity in a 65 year-old professional politician aspiring to national leadership. Yet Corbyn has shown - right up to today - that his values embrace political violence and make no distinction between this and legitimate acts of self-defence by recognised nation states.

But then Corbyn also fails to recognise the idea of individual freedom:

Corbyn says that he supports the repeal of the anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s (“Yes, I do”) , which prohibited flying pickets and solidarity strike action.

This includes the reintroduction of the closed shop - the acme of collectivist systems - and (back to his relationship with violence) the sort of intimidation we saw all too often prior to the protections granted by those union laws.

Increasingly, those branded “scabs” by the strikers were targeted both at work and at home: windows were smashed, paint thrown at doors, some were even assaulted in the street. One who defied the pickets to go into Hawthorn coke works told The Northern Echo: “The more intimidation I get, the more determined I will be to stand up to them.”.

The message - one Corbyn still endorses - is that if you reject the 'collective will', you will be intimidated, pressured and attacked for that decision. If, and it seems they are, these are Jeremy Corbyn's values and the values of his sort of Labour Party I feel entirely justified in criticising.

And Corbyn's collectivism leads to him also rejecting choice and responsibility:

... Corbyn was one of first MPs to call for a smoking ban (in 1989). He has demanded ‘education and regulation’ — including bans on adverts — to try to wean British kids off junk food. He sees mankind as a pox on the planet (humans are ‘obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised’, said a parliamentary motion he signed).

This viewpoint - that we are blowing around in the hurricane of international capitalism incapable of making real choices or controlling our lives - is a common one on the left (and not so left) but when it is wedded to collectivist groupthink and the celebrating of political violence it forms a value system verging on the evil. And I know that is a strong word but if you think violence in the prosecution of political ends is fine, reject the idea of humans as individuals with free will and promote the idea that we are all victims of a shadowy entity called 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' then I struggle to think of a better word.

It doesn't matter how soft spoken you are, how nice your allotment is or which football team you can exchange banter about, if your values reject freedom and rejoice in violence I will have a problem with you. I hope - for the sake of the Labour Party and British democracy - that Corbyn's values, expressed again and again through his four decades as an activist and MP, turn out to be just words. But until this is demonstrated, I shall condemn those values and the man who espouses them.

But to return to the Brighton bomb. I have friends who were there that day. And while I understand the need to find peace and sustain that peace, I cannot find it in my heart to excuse murdering people in a political cause or people who acted as useful idiots and cheerleaders for those undertaking that political violence.

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A reminder why the left is losing...

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Perhaps not everywhere and not in every intellectual argument. But the left is losing - perhaps for the first time in fifty years - the cultural battle. And it's losing because too many of its adherents are nasty.

I am not saying that the political Right is immune from petty name-calling and self-importance. However, looking at my social media accounts alone, I lost count of the number of times I saw the words “moron” and “scum” used in reference to Conservative or Lib Dem voters. I didn’t see anything of the sort emanating from the political centre or the Right.

There has been a lot of talk of late of “shy Tories” being responsible for the electoral outcome. Is it any wonder that people had to be shy about their voting intentions when any admission of Tory solidarity would have resulted in the social media version of public stoning?

Enormous effort is invested in explaining how anyone not suitably "progressive" is motivated by evil, self-interest, greed, arrogance and a lack of compassion. All accompanied by that preening prattle about "values", "morals" and "ethics".

Out in the big bad world there are a lot of ordinary folk. People with jobs, mortgages, children to feed and school, and the regular trickle of painful bills to pay. The left - the Labour Party in the UK - offers nothing to these people except lectures about values, judgemental sermons on behaviour and the sanctifying of people those ordinary folk view as exploiters of our compassion and good nature.

The Labour Party will continue to lose support - and fans - until it offers something to these workers, stops demonising profit, ceases portraying the private sector as a bad place peopled by sharks or thieves and above all packs in with insulting those who disagree with them. We're not morons, we're not scum and were not without care or compassion. Today - and the Labour Party better get used to this - we are the party of workers, of those people with regular private sector jobs, mortgages and a desire for a better life.
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In which the left remind us they hold the electorate in contempt (if they vote the wrong way)

 

I've no time for UKIP at all. Not only are their policies confused, swaying from gung ho libertarianism to proposing frightening degrees of state control, but the Party's strategy is entirely defined by Nigel Farage's desire to damage the Conservative Party. I find UKIP's approach almost as opportunistic as the old Liberal Democrats - chap down the pub complains about the smoking ban and UKIP want to scrap it. And when he moves on to not liking gay people getting hitched UKIP bounce onto that bandwagon.

But it's not the bloke in the pub's fault that UKIP act as an echo chamber for his prejudices, he's just doing what he has always done - sounding off about the ills of the world. And some of what he says is right - the smoking ban killed thousands of pubs along with the jobs of people who worked in those pubs, the EU is an undemocratic and unaccountable nightmare we'd be better off without and there are too many jobsworths at the Council.

But disagreeing with that bloke isn't a justification for being rude about him, for treating him with contempt. Yet this - and the poster above reminds us - is exactly how the left think we should campaign against UKIP. By calling the people who vote for that party "thick". Now I know this is the default view that the typical Guardian reader has of the working class or lower middle class voter, perhaps it reflects a deep disappointment that some of those voters no longer dutifully vote Labour as they're supposed to do (this may reflect the fact that the Labour candidate they're given - middle class, university educated, full of fancy words - doesn't hold or respect those voters' values). But it displays an utterly appalling arrogance.

If the left really want to respond to UKIP (rather than hope enough damage is done to the Conservatives that Ed Miliband gets to be PM on the votes of a third of the electorate) then they need to start listening to what the bloke in the pub is saying. Responding to his concerns about immigration, trying to understand why he's bothered about gay marriage and discussing what's wrong with the EU. Calling him thick is to guarantee that he'll carry right on voting UKIP. Why on earth should he vote for someone who thinks he's an idiot and isn't prepared to listen to what he's saying?

These are ordinary voters who are worried about things they see around them. They aren't stupid, they're not thick and they deserve our respect. If the left can't do that it deserves to be wiped out.

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Quote of the day...and why the right are so much nicer

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Great piece from Paul Goodman on 'The Hate of the Left' including this quote:

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, dead, dead, dead,” scream the protesters as they file past the Midland hotel in Manchester. It is a cruel greeting for the Conservative party as it gathers in this most un-Tory city. “Filth, you’re a waste of space, a waste of oxygen,” they shout at the shiny young delegates as they pass.

As I've remarked before, this sort of behaviour has characterised the left's approach to politics for all my life - I even penned a brief memento of 35 years as 'Tory Scum'. But what Paul does is remind us of something - don't stoop down to the left's level:

There is a lesson here for the Right.  We must never, ever become like the Left.  Vigilance, energy, sharpness of eye, persuasiveness, wit: all these are necessary in the long effort to convince others that the Left is wrong.  Hatred is not – at least when it comes to people rather than ideas.

And this is one reason why Conservatives are so much nicer - our philosophy (in so far as we have one) is not based on hatred or conflict. Indeed the left - now joined by mushy BBC liberalism - seems completely obsessed now with hatred and offence (and the confused conflation of the two - if I offend you it is because I hate you).

There are other reasons why we're nicer - Conservatives see politics as part of the problem rather than the solution. Indeed we value self-reliance and independence, the very antithesis of the left's childlike faith in government as the means to secure betterment. So Conservatives, when they gather together, don't worry endlessly over political niceties but would rather consider the finer things (and maybe one or two less fine things) about life - Conservatives believe politics is boring, a necessary evil not something to relish.

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The EDL in Bradford: a suggestion...

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Next weekend those lovely people, the EDL are popping in to visit Bradford. Not for a spot of shopping and certainly not for a curry but for that most un-English of pastimes - marching down the street waving banners.

Not surprisingly the Council and the cops are in a bit of a funk over this - last time this charming bunch of neo-Nazis visited the city, we rolled out 1,700 policemen to welcome them (not sure how many came but is was fewer than 100).

It is a self-evident fact that laying on massed hordes of policemen and making their visit the top of every agenda and every news broadcast delivers precisely what the EDL want - publicity. Plus of course that other bunch of nutters - the anti-democratic left - will turn up. Sadly George Galloway and the EDL deserve eachother - they are cast from the same unpleasant mould.

I do however rather agree with Dave Green (this is not a common occurrence) when he says:

...stay away from a protest by the far-right English Defence League (EDL) and any counter-demonstration in the city later this month.

I would go further and say to those who are tempted to go and shout (or worse) at the EDL as they shamble past dragging their knuckles on the flags - don't bother. Do something more practicable - take the kids to the park, go for a walk along the canal, watch football on the telly, pop into your local pub, have a McDonald's,  sing folk songs in the garden, climb a tree, play board games, wash the car, fix that dripping tap you've been meaning to fix... Anything but go into Bradford and indulge the EDL's power fantasies, anything but pretend there is any value of purpose in having a "peaceful multicultural celebration" right in front of this bunch of mindless thugs. That is just plain stupid, is bad for Bradford and simply reinforces the views contained in the EDL's brain cell.

Ignore the EDL march. Don't grace them with the attention they crave. Don't provide them with justification for holding another march. Don't pretend you can face them down. Don't take it on yourself to "confront" their evil message. Just ignore them, treat them with the disdain they deserve. Do something else.

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Sinistral wiccaphobia

The witch is a central figure in European folklore. Or rather the medieval characterisation of the wise woman as evil is a feature of folklore.

Away, away, you ugly witch
Go far away and let me be
I never would kiss your ugly mouth
For all of the gifts that you could give

Temptation is placed before us - an apple, a gingerbread house or the array of gifts Alison Gross offered her victim - a shirt, a mantle and a golden cup. Sometimes we are sucked into the witches spell despite the witches ugliness. Maybe her glamour blinded us to the truth of her face. Or perhaps our greed led us into the spell.

But this is just a fairy story. A mischaracterisation of the witch. For that witch is more like to be simply someone who tells us the uncomfortable truth, who sits us down to say that we can't have all the glories of the world and that good things are the consequence of effort or good fortune never entitlement.

Some though persist with the image of the witch as an evil hag - more from their own doubts about female achievement than anything else. These sorry sinistral folk persist in hating witches, in painting them as the devil's servants and as monsters better dead.

The rest of us know different. The witch, they say, is dead. But her spirit lives on, the thought and wisdom still guides and advises. And new witches, inspired by that dead witch's achievement, will arrive, ready to spread the wisdom.

And to curse that sad sinistral wiccaphobia.

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Socialism died in 1989 - now we must destroy its shadow

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Socialism died at the end of the 1980s. For sure, its corpse twitched and jerked for a few years but there's no doubt that it died. And that it won't be missed. Here's Dan Hodges reminding us:

She won. Hers was not a superficial victory, but a final settlement. In the 1980s the Left framed the battle with Thatcherism as a final reckoning. And they were right, it was. And it was Thatcher who emerged victorious.

In truth it wasn't just Margaret Thatcher or even her and Ronald Reagan. It was a catalogue of great men and women - Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Helmut Kohl, even Gorbachev from the evil empire.

Socialism died. The trouble is so many didn't get the news. They didn't see how free enterprise, free trade, privatisation and free capital movement - that lovely neoliberalism - was making the world a better place. Wealthier, happier, more equal - all the things those socialists claimed for their failed creed. Except for the actually working bit.

It beggars belief that intelligent people continue to delude themselves that we can plan, organise and direct all the economy. That clever men can make better choices for you and me than we can make for ourselves. Eastern Europe - all those Poles, Slovaks, Romanians and Bulgars we fear will flock to England - is poor because of socialism. It really is that simple.

The next generation has to destroy the shadow of this dead creed. Or else we will watch as other places - places we once pitied as starving basket cases - start to catch us up. Watch as we squander the inheritance of our past success on a make believe economy - one where public spending, the modern equivalent of taking in each others washing, creeps ever higher and where the chimera of borrowing-driven consumption eats away at wealth and prosperity.

If we don't slay socialism's shadow, we will all be poorer. And for some that may mean the relative poverty socialists bleat about becoming real poverty. A poverty created by the vainglory and hubris of the socialist.

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