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

‘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.‘

Who is supposedly asking about this immunity though? God? Justice? As a 21st century liberal democracy the people who should get to decide our fate are the British people. Why would we choose to make our own lives worse?

The Scottish clearances are very important for understanding contemporary global events, because they’re so well documented. They are an important part of international history.

Yawn.

And this is part of why Labour lost, if anyone needed a neat little illustration. Don't tell people you don't care about them if you want them to vote for you.

If somebody really weren't at all racist, they would accept that any group of people, given the right circumstances, would be capable of dishing out the same behaviour as any other group. I reckon nearly every successful human culture has cleared, enslaved or wiped out another one at some point along the way at one scale or another, even if another one has come along and done the same to them in turn.

Asking if it's time somebody else got colonised as payback doesn't seem to have ever turned out to be a very...helpful approach.

Antibles agree.

It's fairly common for a power reversal to result in the formerly powerless dishing out exactly what they received, whether to the formerly powerful who oppressed them, or to other people.

So I suppose it is just the same now, really. That's a bit depressing.

George Orwell again (Animal Farm)

Yes, as the bullied sometimes start in turn to bully