Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

[BovaryX]

There is an interesting article by Douglas Murray in the DM about the authoritarian, identity politics which have alienated Labour voters and triggered a paradigm shift in the political landscape. It covers some of the themes which Lang GC Pencils and others have been discussing in light of election result.

It is a divide between people who have real-world concerns and those focused on niche and barely significant ones...How, you might ask, have we reached such a state? There is a clue in the Labour Party’s dysfunctional reaction to its catastrophic defeat on Thursday

One of the things about oppression and marginalisation is that it creates a strong sense of identity in a people. That sense of otherness and separateness can stand in the way of equality as much as the sense of identity in the privileged group, even more so in some ways because the latter may not feel they have something to lose by integration, but the former group may feel quite deeply that they do.

You can also see that certain types of customs and practices can almost permanently set people apart and create a sense of identity so long as they are maintained. Judaism has some elements of that, some scholars have suggested that might be one of the main purposes of many Jewish customs and laws but it's clearly been an effect. Or in societies where there are people who are considered unclean, or individuals marked out as maintaining more purity, whether that's passed on through birth or some other method.

I strongly believe that some of the effects of identity politics are having a similar kind of effect. It becomes impossible to forget that we are not equal and we are even prevented from behaving as if all groups are equal or trying to make that true. We are setting up all kinds of new hierarchies based on racial and other essentialist categories. IMO much of the increase in racial and other tensions we've see over the last years comes out of this, and I've become really afraid that this is going to get worse, perhaps much worse.

Yes I agree, that's a great point. Certainly in Australia on the [authoritarian] left, identity is only OK if you are marginalised. Hmm. Food for thought.

One of the consequences of this that I've worried about for a while is that we can't celebrate the past highly significant achievements of the union movement because they were made mostly by white men. So young people are growing up not knowing what a union is, or why it needs to be valued.

Now I'm seeing why! Very interesting thread.

www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-explained.html

www.snopes.com/fact-check/dna-testing-companies-admit-altering-tests-screw-racists/

The first link is good and explains that those DNA tests have a high margin of error because of how they are interpreted.
The second debunks the urban myth that they add black in your results just for fun.

Re. Indigenous Australians - do they mostly identify with being Australian?
So a celebration of being Australian doesn't have to be a celebration of being "white European" Australian, right? Or is that just a feverish civnat dream?

No quite a lot don't call themselves Australian. The problem is the national day of supposed unification and multiculturalism is held on the day of dispossession.

“ My question is: should Britain be immune to being colonised [in a different way] by the machinations of global capitalism. After all, they did inflict it on other places with real people whose own lives, ancestral lands and traditions were turned upside down.”

I never understand this argument.

What it seems to me to be saying is that those who left British shores to colonise other lands, who perpetrated all those atrocities of which they complain, have now appropriated the very identity of those they colonised.
They therefore feel that the blame for all those atrocities against the indigenous people of their adopted land can be safely diverted onto the largely blameless ordinary people of their original land.
They can then feel virtuous as well as guilt-free.

An extremely interesting thread which covers stuff I've thought about for a long time and recognises the complexity of the human condition. Without the simple minded mud slinging usually found on MN

"What it seems to me to be saying is that those who left British shores to colonise other lands, who perpetrated all those atrocities of which they complain, have now appropriated the very identity of those they colonised."
"They therefore feel that the blame for all those atrocities against the indigenous people of their adopted land can be safely diverted onto the largely blameless ordinary people of their original land."

This is true up to a point, but I think there's also another layer of complexity, in that not everyone who ended up in the colonised lands were colonisers in the strict sense of the word. A lot of the white Australians were transported there, often for petty crimes born out of poverty which it seems extraordinary to us now would involve a sentence that draconian.

A lot of the Scots in Canada were dispossessed and thrown off their small tenant farms during the clearances - it suited the genuine colonisers, the people with business interests abroad and big estates back home - to produce this pool of indentured labour for their business and mining interests, while freeing up their estates for more profitable lines of business (sheep).

So the white settlers (barring the whites right at the top of the socio-economic tree) were often simultaneous exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed.

History is a slippery business. You need to use both microscope and telescope. Empires have come and gone throughout history. Slavery has been pretty constant throughout. Islam has conquered many lands including their presence in S Spain.
This is the history of humanity -we do some good, we do some bad.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

Tanith, it's because wealth was extracted and sent back to the metropole (the empire's own country). Britain became great because it relied on its imperial wealth.

But I think that the working classes of England, the colliers etc, were scant beneficiaries. They lived habitually with malnutrition and endured appalling labour conditions. Even today the things people mention here on Mumsnet are shocking. So I do think a class analysis needs to be used.

A lot of the Scots in Canada were dispossessed and thrown off their small tenant farms during the clearances - it suited the genuine colonisers, the people with business interests abroad and big estates back home - to produce this pool of indentured labour for their business and mining interests, while freeing up their estates for more profitable lines of business (sheep)

I'm so bored of hearing about the Clearances. And they don't excuse the treatment meted out the indigenous American people.

I think it's possible to be both a coloniser and oppressed, there is certainly a class divide in terms of who benefited from extracted wealth and who didn't.
It's not as simple as white = bad, brown/black = good.
Indigenous cultures didn't live peacefully before Europeans colonised them, they didn't deserve what happened to them either. Likewise as mentioned earlier someone sentenced to transportation to Australia wasn't exactly a conquistador.

The question is what is fairest now - what are the needs now, how do we attempt to make things fairer for those who are living with the effects of having land and wealth taken from them.
Redistribution is always a bit of a blunt instrument, it has been spectacularly unsuccessful in Zimbabwe for example. If Malema does a Mugabe in South Africa there's a good chance the same thing will happen there.
Things need to be put in place to improve people's lives for the long term.

I'm so bored of hearing about the Clearances. And they don't excuse the treatment meted out the indigenous American people.

Ah, not the right kind of exploitation. Or is it too far back?

When is the statute of limitations up on this sort of thing?

I'm so bored of hearing about the Clearances. And they don't excuse the treatment meted out the indigenous American people

Did someone say they excuse the treatment meted out to Indigenous peoples?
Frontier land grants were a ruling class initiative anyway.

Exploitation is boring when it happens to white working class people... And back we are to the start of the discussion: why Labour has lost its heartland votes.

I'm so bored of hearing about the Clearances

Replace clearances with slavery or anti-Semitism.

this thread has descended into everything I detest about identity politics.

this thread has descended into everything I detest about identity politics

But worth it for the many brilliant earlier posts!

My family mythos/narrative is about the multi-ethnic working class that sprang up in the port cities of a trading/colonial nation on one side, and centuries of sectarianism on the other side. Without this rich and complicated - sometimes joyful, sometimes painful; sometimes righteous, sometimes terrible - tapestry of heritage, I would probably have a very different understanding of the world than the one that I do.

well, the earlier posts were certainly helpful in making me feel less alone

and the later posts are a great demonstration of why I hate people asking about my ancestors. I just want to get on with my life.

I'm so bored of hearing about the Clearances

Replace clearances with slavery or anti-Semitism

The Clearances aren't remotely in the same league. And aren't still happening.

That's not particularly related to why it was brought up, though. In any case, it's actually still relevant in the lives of people today, they live in the new world rather than the old, because of pressures their ancestors felt. No one is asking them to return, though some might like them to leave. And evidently they are still judged for it by some.

Clearances do still happen all over the world, just as slavery does.

Absolutely, it's not like the migrant crises has sprung out of nothing. There are all kinds of reasons populations find themselves pressured into moving.

The clearances were in no way comparable with slavery.

Clearances do still happen all over the world, just as slavery does

The context here was the Scottish Clearances. I'm very bored of hearing whinging about them.