Black and white thinking takes us closer to fascism

The National

16 hours ago

Both of those things are enough to remind me that while communication in black and white is possible, it quite often seeks to create contrast where none is appropriate or desirable.
We do not, for example, live in a world where the people of Israel are wholly good or wholly bad. Likewise, we do not live in a world where the same could be said of Palestinians, or the US government, or even – and perhaps this is the most difficult to admit these days – the Parliamentary Labour Party.
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There are good and bad people in every one of the groups I have mentioned. The numbers of those who are good and those who are bad might vary within them but to pretend everything is a simple question of groups being good or evil, or right and wrong, is mistaken.
The reality of human life is that such simplistic claims can never be justified. In every group, every society, among people of every ethnicity or race, and in every state, and every organisation, we have to recognise good and bad can coexist, and sometimes simultaneously even in the same people.
I know this makes life much harder. But, if we succumb to the temptation to subscribe to generalisms about any group, anywhere, at any time, and believe blanket descriptions can apply to them without taking into account the diverse nature of humanity, then we succumb to something that is best called fascism.
Fascists have one political goal, which is all too easily seen among some politicians in both the UK and the United States at present. They seek to describe some group in society as the 'other'.
They then ascribe to that group a range of characteristics which can, in truth, be found in any group in any society, anywhere, but which they claim are commonplace or universal within the group they deem to be the 'other'.
They then blame all the ills in a society upon that 'other'. The extermination of that group becomes their political focus, all the while disguising the fact that what they are really doing is pursuing an agenda that, almost without exception in the case of fascism, is intended to advance the interest of some (but not all) among the wealthiest in their society, at cost to everyone else.
This is most easily seen in the US, where the support of some (but I stress, not all) within the tech community for the agenda pursued by Donald Trump and far-right think tanks is resulting in the 'othering' of those they describe as illegal immigrants.
US president Donald Trump They are then indifferent to the suffering of all those who might share ethnicity with those they 'other'. All of this is being done to advance the interests of a white, male, evangelical Christian anti-feminist elite within that society over the interests of all others.
In the UK, we see a similar exploitation of so-called illegal immigrants, even though no-one is an illegal immigrant in the UK until their application to be resident here has been formally declined.
It is easy to identify far-right politicians from Reform UK and the Conservative Party who are undertaking this activity but, as Keir Starmer has reminded us, not least with his 'island of strangers' speech, this is something Labour are also all too keen to do.
Division is now a political strategy when not so long ago our whole focus was upon the creation of integrated communities so that people might live in harmony.
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The change has been dramatic and appears to have been quite sudden but in practice it can be fairly easily traced as having begun in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Then, it became apparent to many that our economy was being systemically structured to ensure some got all the advantages of the actions the state undertook as a consequence of the banking collapse.
The majority, and most definitely those on median incomes or less, enjoyed no gain at all, and quite probably suffered losses.
People were told there was growth, that there was no such thing as austerity, and that government services were being maintained by additional government spending. But what they experienced was something entirely different. They were not better off. Services were worse. The society in which they lived was very definitely suffering, and they were angry about that.
Then, despite the fact that this was actually because of the exploitation created by some bankers and others in a wealthy elite (and again, I stress, this was not universal), some politicians, acting with the outright support of those who were benefiting the most, chose to blame those they call illegal migrants for the situation the majority of people found themselves in.
The anger and disillusion people quite reasonably felt as a consequence of the deliberate failure of the Tories to meet need was redirected for the political advantage of the elite that was actually exploiting people and, in the process, something once described by the German historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt occurred.
As she explained, the constant lying of our politicians is not intended to make people believe the lies that they are told. Instead, its goal is to ensure no-one believes anything any more. The intention is to ensure no-one can, with any degree of certainty, distinguish between truth and lies, and so between right and wrong.
People deprived of that power are, in Arendt's opinion, also deprived of the power to think and judge and, as a consequence, are then unwittingly subject to the rule of lies. This then means politicians who wish to manipulate a population for their own advantage are free to do so.
That is what happens when we give up on nuance. That is what happens when we give up on believing we have more in common with others than that which divides us. That is what happens when we forget there is right and wrong, but that there is no-one, or any group, that is at all times and in all places possessed of either quality on every occasion.
That is, in effect, what happens when we give up on judgment. We become exposed to manipulation and so to abuse.
And this is where we are. This is why politicians think they can lie to us, on Gaza, on the state of the UK, on Scottish independence, and on almost anything else. It's because they believe we have forgotten how to determine the truth in among the noise that those who wish to distract us deliberately create.
It is our job to work out what is really happening and to form a judgment upon it. That is what politics and political economy demand of us.
It's hard and it sometimes leaves us confused and feeling alienated, but that is the price we have to pay if we are to continue to believe in humanity and decency, and to believe there are things we must do because they are simply right.