Twitteretter

Normality is slowly restored in the US political system, after the incumbent president’s failed attempt to overthrow the election. The mainstream body political breathes a sigh of relief and declares that institutions held surprisingly well and the effort got nowhere. Alas, this may be complacent. The orchestrated attack on truth, fact and reality will have long lasting consequences and could be, if not remediated, a stepping stone, increasing the chances of success of the next attempt. On thinking about this, it is worth quoting, one more time, Hannah Arendt: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for who the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist’. Through this prism, today’s outcome is not a victory, but rather a precarious truce, an adjournment, calling for vigilance and action, not celebration...

Mainstream politicians tend to coalesce with the fringes to serve short term aims, accepting coalition with extremists to get to power, expecting them to remain marginal and return to oblivion once it suits the majority partner. The US Senate made this calculation in refusing to hold a serious hearing on impeachment of a rogue, populist and nihilist president, the Spanish PP when bringing Vox into coalition government in Madrid. These miscalculations are frequent in history, each time with the same outcome. Extremists can be marginalised but, once you rescue them from oblivion, you open a Pandora’s box and no longer have the power to put them back in. Once you lend undeserved credibility to their ideas, once you present them as legitimate to the populus and accept anger, hate and animosity in politics, you lose control. Hitler, Caesar, Putin or Mussolini rode these waves, with the initial connivance and later aghast helpless horror of the political establishments they ultimately depose...

The other night I rewatched the Philip Kaufman movie adaptation of the seminal Milan Kundera novel, a book you should read, if you haven’t, and, at the very least, a movie you should watch. It makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be born, and live, in the social freedoms Western democracies afford us, secure in the protection of the rule of law. This story is a stark warning to those tempted by the easy solutions peddled by autocratic regimes. Tomas, its protagonist, pays a very heavy personal price for trying to defend his intellectual dignity, for refusing to retract an idea expressed. He sacrifices, by not yielding to the system, first his career and, ultimately, his life. Kundera, who grew and lived in an autocratic regime, describes with brutal realism the humiliating choices his protagonist must make to survive. The suffocating, crushing, relentless pressure he is put under is Kafkian in its overwhelming dimension. Be careful of letting the wolf in, tempted by false promises...