Friday 20 December 2019

Selective vision.......

The far right flows into the Tory Party as Britain First and Tommy Robinson join the Tory Party and the Prevent organisation report over 1300 cases from the far right We hear nothing from the Jewish Chronicle or Ephraim Mervis. The Archbishop of Canterbury is silent and Ruth Smeath and Margaret Hodge raise not a whisper. You would think that the heirs to the Fascism of the 1930s would raise concern and fear. As Melanie Phillips suggests that accusations of Islamophobia are largely an invention and often a means to disguise anti semeticism. The Jewish Chronicle and the Labour Jewish movement reveal quite clearly that it was never about anti semeticism but instead anti socialism it was about defending the status quo and stopping a pro Palestinian leader coming to power.

I am of Jewish origin my ancestors were from Spain and fled the persecution of Ferdinand and Isabella. I know the long tradition of Jews contributing to learning and to psycholigy and social science . I celebrate the contributions of Marx, Freud and Trotsky. Yet all are loathed by the Right and their books were burned by the Nazis. As Fascism rises again many from the Jewish Chronicle many turn away and do not see or smell Weimar and the routes to the gas ovens. As a man of Jewish origin I see the towers of Aushwitz and the logic of genocide begin to be assembled once more. These are grim days and the ovens begin to be lit again . The benefit claimeemr, the Roma, the Kurds, the other and the political activist are demonised and labels as a cancer or a disease. As the Jewish Chronicle buries it's head in a classic act of Fredian denial and projection. What will take for them to read the Daily Mail if the 1930s and the first decade if the twentieth century. The burning to as and the gas ovens are about to return in metaphor, metonymy and in a post modern design. Wake up and smell the air my friends..it was never Corbyn it is those you promoted and defended lighting the embers and collecting the kindling...

 I head for my monthly therapy appointment to Penclawdd. It seems a long time since I was there last. As I travel on the 116 it pours with rain. Are these tears for the world to come? On the news I hear the words of a Rhondda miner explaining that he voted Tory. I hear of two men living in bed sit and on zero hour contracts saying the same. As Nye Bevan once commented that the purpose of Tory policy is to persuade poverty to vote for wealth. I think of Gramsci, Bordeau talking of soft power and habitus. I realise that a whole generation has been educated to obey and know their place. Education has been used to create a docile workforce rather than to think criticall thinking. Knowledge has been broken up into disjointed, non joined up parcels. The notion of real collective thinking and solidarity has been broken into individual units of isolation and society denied. Fear walks the land as the white wotking class is isolated, made piecemeal as Jess Phillips becomes the lap dog of Rupert Murdoch. When Johnson fails, the stench of Weimar will cover the land. A mighty reckoning beckons us all and as this happens the critical thinker is mocked and knowledge devalued. This is 1984 and damage continues to reverberate around us all. The demons have escaped from the abyss and cover the land...

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