Noises Off: This is the nightmare quality of current events. That, beyond the wafer-thin screens of normality, vast beasts go prowling in the dark. We can hear them barking and roaring: sometimes far away; sometimes frighteningly close. There’s a skittering of claws on marble floors. Eyes glowing green in the shadows. And, try as we may, we cannot wake up. Painting by Otto Dix.
HOW CAN YOU TELL when a system is falling apart? That the
load-bearing walls of everyday reality are beginning to weaken? The simple
answer is absurdity. Words spoken and positions taken that simply make no
sense. Behaviour that raises suspicion of complete madness. Sums that stubbornly
refuse to add up.
Think about the extraordinary display put on by Australia’s
governing party, the Liberal Party. What was that all about? For some time the
party has been declining in the polls. So, what does it do? It convulses itself
in a bloody and ultimately pointless bout of political fratricide. Hurling
aside an urbane, accomplished and highly intelligent politician, Malcolm
Turnbull, and replacing him with an intellectually stunted and morally vacuous religious
zealot whose primary political accomplishments have been the persecution of
refugees and the punishment of the poor. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Liberal’s
primary vote has sunk to record lows.
Then there is the ongoing campaign by the United Kingdom’s
liberal establishment to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Unable to counter the Labour
leader’s policies: for fear of exposing their unshakeable allegiance to the
“loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” (thank you Paul Simon)
that constitutes the actual government of the world; these ostensibly
“progressive” politicians and journalists have embarked upon a barking-mad
effort to paint Corbyn and his allies in the Labour Party as “antisemites”. By
which they mean opponents of the State of Israel.
Now anyone who knows anything about Jeremy Corbyn (which
includes the people who are levelling the charge of antisemitism against him) cannot
possibly believe that he is prejudiced against Jews simply because they are
Jews. Corbyn’s quarrel is with the ideology of Zionism, and with the unjust and
often downright murderous actions of the Israeli state: a stance he has
maintained with admirable consistency for more than thirty years.
Clearly, the prospect of such a man being just one general
election away from No. 10 Downing Street is of profound concern to right-wing
Israeli politicians and supporters of Zionism all around the world. That such
people are attempting to undermine Corbyn is perfectly understandable. But, the
campaign being waged against him on the pages of The Guardian isn’t about Israel – or Jewish people. It’s about something
else; something all the more unnerving for being unspoken. It’s about who is
entitled to govern the UK and who is not.
Corbyn constitutes an existential threat to the UK’s governing
elites, whose formerly vice-like grip on the nation’s political and cultural
institutions has been seriously weakened by a bottom-up political insurgency
from the left of UK politics for which the veteran left-wing MP has acted as a
lightning-rod. They are calling Corbyn an antisemite because they can’t
plausibly call him a paedophile and because they are not yet desperate enough
to call for his assassination.
That’s why it all sounds so mad. Like the accusations which
Stalin levelled against the old Bolsheviks in the Moscow show-trials of the
1930s. They are lies – obvious and terrible lies – but with the power of the
apparatus behind them they risk acquiring the character of Truth. So we go on
reading the articles in The Guardian:
noting the rising pitch of hysteria between every line; and the world lurches
sideways under our feet.
And then we look at Donald Trump’s America, and Corbyn’s
woes fade – overwhelmed by the dazzling image of the planet’s most powerful
nation spontaneously combusting.
It’s all about race, of course. The whole history of the
United States has been about race. About being white, or, more accurately about
not being red, black, yellow or brown. The history of the United States of
America is a series of evermore urgent reiterations of a consistent ruling-class
strategy of making sure that the consciousness of class oppression is forever being
displaced by the awareness of racial privilege.
The election of Barack Obama was the trigger. A black man in
the White House was the ultimate symbol of white decline. From that moment on,
a majority of white Americans were seized by a racial distemper that rotted
their brains and inflamed their spleens. Though Trump has yet to speak or tweet
the words explicitly, “Making America Great Again” has the ring of a genocidal
call-to-arms. What else could it be? When demographic trends threaten to
submerge white Americans in a diverse, multicultural morass?
When Trump talks about “draining the swamp” the assumption
has always been that he is talking about cleaning up Washington DC. But what if
he means draining away or diverting the waters that are lapping at the feet of
white Americans? What if he intends to leave white America high and dry by
simply getting rid of all those forces that are threatening to swamp it?
This is the nightmare quality of current events. That, beyond
the wafer-thin screens of normality, vast beasts go prowling in the dark. We
can hear them barking and roaring: sometimes far away; sometimes frighteningly
close. There’s a skittering of claws on marble floors. Eyes glowing green in
the shadows. And, try as we may, we cannot wake up.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 30 August 2018.
