The Neverending Battle against Empty Headed Ideologues (Gobshites)

The Dublin riots, November 23, 2023 were instigated by individuals of no property, single individuals let down by society labouring in dead end jobs who blamed immigrants for their lack of progress.

Repeat the same simple slogan, MAGA/Blame the Jews a thousand times this will remain in the minds of the mob, Adolf Hitler

Musk, the Emperor of all the eejits everywhere is going to Mars!

Self declared victims and overindulged idiots abound in the periphery of society.

Germany's definition of anti-Semitism includes not only prejudice, hatred and violence towards Jews, but also criticism of the actions of the Israeli government. Germany’s position that the Holocaust was a singular event with no comparison in history is untrue.

The unbearable violence in Gaza is not happening in isolation. The world has been shuffling towards ever greater levels of violence and dysfunction for decades now, with the rise of a violent global oligarchy, the accelerating decline in the efficacy of democratic political institutions, and the unravelling of the social fabric within and between nations. Given these precarious circumstances, the Mein Kampf reader's (above left) re-election later this year would threaten collapse into global disorder, this Gobshite is recorded coaxing, cajolling, overpromising, threatening legal consequences and threatening violence by his supporters, January 2, 2021, a charge of sedition to follow.

The 1930's was characterised by a politics of the absurd, the grotesque, the cruel, where lies had triumphed over facts so that all that remained was power, violence and empty ideologies. A time when cynical disenchantment characterised public life, and where hate was readily directed at anything and anyone. A time of awful, empty thoughtlessness of political violence. This is our time again, the attempt to extinguish the truth of humanity and replace it with a reduced and bastardised conformity has been a common aim of tyrants throughout history.

The lessons of the 1930's are threefold: to think deeply, to name truth courageously, and to love the world that is being lost hard enough to bring it back into being.

The Wannsee, Conference, May 1942 Berlin, systematically planned and carried out the mass murder of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled and the terminally ill, simply because of one aspect of their identity – being a Jew or gay, for example. Wannsee did not tolerate the existence of such diversity in human nature and culture, being incapable of seeing further than the crass one-dimensional labeling of the humanity beneath the label.

The origins of totalitarianism, and the crimes against humanity to which it gives rise, lay in the process of totalising thinking: strip an individual of the plurality of their identities, feelings and relationality; replace their true unique multifaceted identity with a false unidimensional identity as a hated, threatening other; group that inhumanly reduced individual with all other individuals whose identities and humanness have similarly been impoverished; and passionately desire to expel and exterminate such groups whose presence and very existence are seen as intolerable.

Such totalising thinking is a crime against humanity in the twin sense that it denies targeted individuals their humanity, and it aims to deprive humanity as a whole – “the people” – of our species’ true multiplicity. Furthermore, far from being a singular episode in history, that the attempt to so extinguish the truth of humanity and replace it with a reduced and bastardised conformity has been a common aim of tyrants throughout history.

The 1930's at a time of war and economic chaos which exposed just how vacant contemporary politics had become. “Rabble-rousers and demagogues”, “stepped into the gap left by democratic failure, paving the way for the big men who became such lethal cliches in what followed.” And so it is again today.

The gaps left by democratic failure were multiple. The first failure lies in creating the conditions of economic distress, underinvestment in social infrastructure, and destabilising levels of inequality, which provide rabble rousers and demagogues the opportunity to seize power. The second failure of democratic politics is not to honestly admit its responsibility in creating these conditions, instead seeking scapegoats and denying that anything fundamental needs to change.

The Neverending Fight against Empty Idoeologues, Ian Hughes, Irish Times, Book Reviews, February 3, 2024