IT IS easy to become disillusioned. Wherever you look, identity politics is pushing equality politics to the sidelines. The individual has become more important than the collective.
And even the collective is eroded by factionalism. Religious extremism then pulls apart the remaining weave of integration, inclusion and social solidarity.
In India, you can see it in President Modi’s opening of a Hindu temple at Ayodhya, the site of an ancient Muslim mosque destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992 and disputed ever since.
The crowds cheering Modi on found themselves standing on the shoulders of mobs who would happily deny Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and non-believers any equal place in Indian society.
It is a pattern replicated across the subcontinent. A nation once praised for its multiculturalism is seeing its politics dragged into sectarian divides. Modi doesn’t care. It’s what his politics are all about; the event marked the unofficial opening of his election campaign.
In Israel, Netanyahu’s obliteration of Gaza serves the same purpose (in addition to keeping him out of prison). His political survival is rooted in a reliance on ultra-right factions in an increasingly polarised and intolerant society.
Trump’s bandwagon campaign for the Republican Party nomination in the US’s forthcoming presidential elections draws on the same polarisation and denigration. Wherever you look, fascism is making its way back, carefully hidden under neoliberalism’s cloak of “freedom.”
This isn’t an accident, but a carefully orchestrated plan underpinning the new age of corporate feudalism.
The deregulation of global markets pushed through from the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, has shovelled wealth into the pockets of an ever narrower global elite. Protecting this has become the only thing that matters.
Some of today’s over-rewarded feudal lords may have ended up in Britain’s House of Lords. Many more are tucked away in corporate boardrooms and off-shore dominions. This is where today’s accumulation of wealth and influence is found.
Divide and rule
The gap between the uber-rich and the rest is so wide that only a deeply divisive politics can sustain it. This is what today’s neoliberal think tanks, lobby groups and propaganda machines have been designed to deliver. It is what lies behind the demonisation of refugees, the denigration of public-sector workers and the criminalisation of climate protestors.
In earlier feudal times, barons would send in bunches of hired ruffians to foment division and disagreement among the poor. Today they use GB News and social media to do the job. Moreover, as more and more neoliberal policies fail to deliver societal well-being so the emphasis on “discreditation” and division increases.
The National Trust found itself the target of alt-right entryism, amid charges that its equality policies “betrayed British values.” The BBC faces sustained attacks from the same lobbyists, denouncing its “left-wing bias” when the reality is that whole tiers of compliant management have been shoved into the BBC to drive it further to the right.
Apologists from an array of climate-denying and tax-evading interests have elbowed their way onto BBC panel discussions when they barely merit a place on a children’s merry-go-round. Most sinister of all, though, is the Mossad-inspired capture of any BBC suggestion that what Netanyahu’s ultra-right government is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) might be referred to as war crimes.
Even the assassination of unarmed Palestinian civilians, conspicuously carrying white flags, sees the BBC unable to describe this as the arbitrary killing sprees they amount to.
