I can’t ignore this

I am watching my boys play Minecraft. They are for a change cooperating with each other, which is nice.

I don’t actively avoid writing about politics. As this blog has become mainly something to leave for my children to know me, I am perhaps cautious about documenting every passing thought that could be misinterpreted. And anyway, everyone wants to keep a small sense of mystery about their parents.

But I find the situation too strange and worrying. I knew Trump was not necessarily a good person, but I was quite reconciled to his election. It was an unequivocal result, which said more about how far the Democrats have drifted into strange niches that most voters do not identify with. Trump is not a political genius, he is merely an opportunist surrounded by a complete lack of talent in public life.

His initial actions were predictably eye-catching executive orders lacking all nuance, delivering simple answers to simple voters’ questions. He now needs to get on to funding the many things he has promised.  He will remove all institutions that could deliver services to groups he sees as potentially opposing and therefore threatening, and justify it with money. He is justifying the destabilisation of Europe with money. It is tempting to see him as a weak personality, but a narcissist is not really weak. They will destroy everything and everyone in their quest for validation, and as they are internally motivated, they will be very effective at doing so and impervious to criticism.

I viewed Musk as more dangerous, because he actually has convictions which are more terrifying. I’m happy to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as possible, but eventually it’s probably a good idea to believe what you see in front of you.

The main reason I am so keen to write this down is because I do not want to forget what now felt like.  The atomisation of consensus that has gathered ever faster pace for a decade means we will never agree to conscription, never agree to defence spending, never even agree on who the bad guys are. Russia invaded another sovereign nation and Trump wants to hand it to his buddy Putin on a platter, and most of the internet is ablaze with “how dare Keir Starmer suggest our children being sacrificed to defend Ukraine” – if they’re not busy being outraged as instructed about the latest woke something.

Maybe sometimes freedom needs defending at the expense of a bit of safety and short term convenience. Maybe we need to act in concert with other European nations. Maybe the things you read on the internet are in fact put there on purpose by our enemies in order to make you think and act a certain way.

There is propaganda everywhere, and the more people see it, the less they seem to recognise it. There is as much Islamist propaganda as there is Russian, and yet people are happy to parrot the talking points of both sides. They don’t apparently stop to think about the disgusting idea of moral equivalence between the political actions of Israel in the west bank with the murder of innocent children and the parading of their corpses through cheering crowds.

I don’t recall the same moral equivalence elsewhere in history. Nobody mourns Hiroshima each year with a “but” and a long diatribe about the terrible actions of the Japanese government at the time. They can hold two actions to be wrong at the same time without drawing false equivalence between them.  I’m still shocked every day by the blatant antisemitism that spills out the endless justification of terrorist atrocities that seems to only apply when Israel is involved. Nobody whose family was murdered in London on 7th July 2005 talked about how it was justified because of the many crimes committed in the course of the Iraq war. It is evident that many of Israel’s actions are vengeful and unconstructive, as are the majority member of actions taken by the US against terrorism in the last 20 years. Their aim is to dismantle terrorist structures, and the biggest risk is the civilian casualties that terrorists enable, because they stoke recruitment into terror groups. Terrorism is never justified, and only when Israel is involved do we suddenly have a BBC presenter talk about “children killed by Israel”, when the truth appears to be a lot closer to 17 year olds armed to the teeth and killing Israeli civilians. But of course right now the propaganda machine is in overdrive on both sides; I wish I didn’t have doubts about how history will represent these issues. I quite clearly remember the news flow regarding Israel in the 1990s. It was very clear who the victims were, and in Germany (where I lived at the time), the media drew no parallels with Israeli government action, because there were none. The reversal of victim and aggressor is a long standing tactic of all manipulations.

People are blinded by the daily onslaught of their online convenient truths blanket. Unless the same people who march through the streets of London “protesting” against “Zionists” can tell me that if a terrorist broke their door down, took their children and murdered them with their bare hands, that they would completely agree that this was fair enough because of the crimes of Abu Ghraib, then they are simply brainwashed, or rabid antisemites to start with.

The right wing are no better, obviously, with their hideous simplification of everything and bizarre conspiracy theories and pretence of personal freedom and choice unless you’re a woman.

The observable fact that everyone is so easy to manipulate will justify authoritarian responses by any government, of any colour, which can then be built on by a truly nefarious future government. We can be told that a free press is dangerous, because Twitter is a free press and certainly is dangerous. It must be managed for our safety. The internet must be monitored for our safety. Our phones, our conversation, our movement, our decisions – all must be managed for collective harmony. Machines make better decisions anyway. It will probably seem a relief at first, and everyone will talk about how it doesn’t affect them because they have nothing to hide…

I start to understand how every country works when faced with aggression and dictatorship. They retreat into small things. They talk about TV shows. They share courgette recipes.

All we needed to do was improve economic  growth.