Contradictions and inconsistencies

He had very few doubts, and when the facts contradicted his views on life, he shut his eyes in disapproval.

                                                            -Hermann Hesse, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

As the polarisation between the Democrats and Republicans in the US seemingly sharpen, the media, always keen to fan the flames for their viewing numbers and click rates, ratchets up the rhetoric. Unfortunately for them, they have already, during the course of the 2016 election, and subsequently, hyper-inflated the language to the point where even Nazi references are an everyday occurrence. And there is no upwards from Nazis. Godwin’s law has been cast aside and the Nazis, what for many is the ultimate evil, have been turned into an everyday adjective seemingly applied to anything remotely disagreeable.

While it has to be said that the majority of this absurd, a-historic, histrionic and very lazy tactic has largely emanated from the Left / Democratic side (the most extreme element of it but also the most chaperoned by the media), some on the Right / Republicans have been replying in kind. As Newton said, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. However, another law that is correct 9 times out of 10 is that those who are the quickest to resort to comparisons with Nazis, Hitler, Stalin or any other of the heavy-weight totalitarian dictators of the 20^th century, know the least about these subjects. 

Christopher Hitchens used to say, whenever he was accused (on news channels of both wings of politics) of being a divider or of being inflammatory, that “politics is division by definition”. Indeed, why would anyone need politics if we were all agreed on everything? 

Politics is the art of negotiation between fellow citizens about the rules of a country in which they co-habit, of reaching a compromise without violence and blood-shed. For those on the so-called Left who bothered to read Marx at all, the essence of Marxist philosophy, derived from Hagel, is the dialectic process – the interpenetration of ideas and subsequent synthesis into something better. It is the rejection of ‘Truth’, or in other words, Utopia, and an acceptance of continuous struggle to be incrementally improved. Civilization is a place where this can occur civilly. And there are not many places in the world when and where this is remotely true.

It might be worth pointing out that the places where everybody did ‘agree’ about how they should be ruled were in totalitarian states. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un was elected with 100% of the votes in 2014, as did Saddam Hussein in 2002 with 100% voter turnout to boot. The current Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il only managed 99.9% in 2009, with less capable dictators such as Raul Castro (99.4%) and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (97.6%) even less able to persuade the kind of uniformity that the US media hosts, in attacking Hitchens, seemingly saw as a fit state for society. Hitler himself only managed a meagre 90%.

But if we can just remove Hitler from the conversation, look around and realise that there is not yet an imminent existentialistic crisis, we might be able to talk about some important, complex and interesting subjects that society faces like adults.

The Left-Right paradigm is almost completely useless. Not only is a one dimensional segregation of politics much too crude, the terms are traduced by mutation of meanings. In any case, each tag carries with it a whole wardrobe of dogmatic positions. 

Most of us have things to do and don’t have that much time for politics. But, in the realm where politicians denounce everything as Hitlerian, in the richest, most diverse and classically liberal country in the world, one might start questioning some of these people’s suitability to do the politics in our stead. It might be better, if one really cared, to take the trouble of thinking through some of the ‘controversial’ topics, from scratch, for oneself, instead of been cajoled and herded into flocks, all thinking the approved set of ideas. And if you feel uncomfortable, even for a thought experiment, to think from the point of view of your opponents, then are you thinking at all?

I have been doing some rumination of my own on the following and for some have come to a conclusion, while for others, still having the internal debate. I won’t state my opinions here, suffice it to point to some of the contradictions and internal inconsistencies in positions held by the wings of politics that have prompted me towards some cogitation, and might strike you as food for thought. It might help some to enliven from the Left-Right trenches so needlessly and mendaciously dug by the media and some politicians who frankly don’t deserve to shine your shoes. In no particular order:

The Democrats and their media megaphones continuously say that Trump and his administration is Hitler and the Nazis and yet the Democrats overwhelmingly wish to surrender guns to this administration. Also note that none of the celebrities who ostentatiously said that they would move out of America if Trump was elected has done so.

The Left who are calling Trump and the border law enforcement Nazis regarding the southern border situation 1) were completely silent when Obama implemented tough border laws (including placing children in sparse ‘cages’, with pictures of the Obama-era cages wrongly used by the media to attack Trump), and deported many more migrants than the Trump administration, and 2) simultaneously criticises Trump for poor conditions at the border and yet refused to increase funding to the border agents to better cater for the illegal immigrants under their care for months.

Despite the Nazi rhetoric from the Left, they happily embrace and champion open antisemites like Louis Farrakhan, who praised Hitler as a "very great man", and the new 'Sqad', with members such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib connected with anti-Semitic groups like Miftah, which condone, excuse and openly praise killer of children. Miftah have even promoted on their website an article from a neo-Nazi organisation that promoted antisemitism. The ability to distinguish a critic of Israel and Zionism and an enemy of 'the Jews' has seemingly disappeared from the Left, both in the US and in the UK, where the Labour party is also rife with antisemites. It is irony of the first order that now in the West, in the two countries that did the utmost to rid the world of the most virulent Jew-haters, it is now the Left you have to turn to to find antisemites. 

The 'Right' insist on defending the second amendment without giving an inch. While I completely understand why it was a good idea at the time it was written, and even why it might be a good principle now, it is surely inconceivable that a weapon designed solely to damage and more convenient to smuggle than drugs, is easier to get than a driver's license. 

The extreme ‘Right’ argue that abortion at any time of the pregnancy and under any circumstances is morally evil due to the sanctity of life, yet the death penalty, the state-sanctioned killing of people, is to many in that camp morally fine. Even though the best estimates put 4%, or 1 in 25 of those sentenced to death as likely to have been innocent. And even though Jesus taught to turn the other cheek and let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Mutatis mutandis, for the extreme ‘Left’, the death penalty for even the most heinous crime is morally tainted, but killing an innocent unborn child (which is by definition true even if conceived in horrendous circumstances such as rape) that is healthy and viable is not only ok but only require the woman’s decision, with the father’s consent deemed irrelevant in the new legislation passed in Illinois this year. Furthermore, regardless of your position, surely all cases where an unborn child is aborted is a sober and somber affair. The scenes of people ecstatically celebrating the future deaths of babies, as if they’ve won the lottery, is unsavoury. 

The ‘Left’ seems to have an odd dispensation of compassion. They were up in arms with Liam Neeson for telling a story from his youth of when he didn’t use violence in response to his friend having been raped, as a warning against violence. They were also rabid towards some teenage boys from Kentucky, with death threats and complete maligning of minors, their parents and their school, all resulting from their own misunderstanding of a situation, rushing to judgement over a short video clip, and blinded by their prejudice against conservatives. Yet within the Left there is a movement to normalise paedophilia as simply another sexual orientation that deserves our compassion. This position is not new, but has its history deep within the Left of the 1968 generation, with luminaries such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvior, the ex French Health Minister Bernard Kouchner and the ex French Education Minister Jack Lang signatories on a petition in 1970 arguing for the decriminalisation of paedophilia.

The ‘Right’ claim to operate from principles and yet pander to frauds of the first order like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who claimed on TV, while the 9/11 rubbles were still smouldering, that the terrorist attack which killed almost 3,000 people, is punishment from God for allowing abortion and homosexuality.

The Leftists claim that sex differences arise solely as a social construct, but at the same time claim trans-sexual people, say a man claiming to be a woman, is a case where a man was born with a female brain. One cannot argue in one case that it is a pure social construct and in another it is purely rooted in biology (the evidence suggest both, but probably favouring biology having stronger influence than social construct).

The ‘Left’ claim almost unanimously that borders are terrible, yet many of the most adamant and influential voices live in gated communities with 24hr security and CCTV monitoring. For example, Zuckerberg, who said that “instead of building walls, we should be building bridges.” built a 6 foot wall around his $100 million estate in Hawaii, blocking the view of the sea for his neighbours. 

On the ‘Right’, Pope Francis, who pontificates against the proposed border wall, lives in the fortress that is the Vatican City, with a huge wall, armed guards and hundreds of CCTV cameras, all built from the selling of indulgences, without taxes. Paying tourists, for the privilege of entering the gates of any of the complexes such as St Peter's, have to line up for hours, have their bags searched and go through metal detectors.

These are just a few of the cognitive dissonances in positions that are largely unquestioned by the media or by those who holler the loudest at protests. The world is very complex, and those who try to reduce it to two 'sides' and, rather than argue with opponents with superior evidence and logic, try to shame them into submission, are not to be trusted.

That is why the best people to read and challenge oneself with are the ones who seem to those preferring simplistic versions of history and politics to be hard to place on a Left-Right spectrum, especially the way they are defined now. With writers and journalists like George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, H.L. Mencken, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Douglas Murray; scientists like the Weinstein brothers, Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris, Jordan Petersen and Jonathan Haidt; philosophers such as Roger Scruton, Chantal Delsol, Bernard Henri Levy and A.C. Grayling; historians like Andrew Roberts, Bernard Lewis, Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, Francis Fukuyama; activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Asra Nomani, Maajid Nawaz and Raheel Raza. And even YouTube personalities like Dave Rubin, Sargon of Akkad, Lauren Chen, Tim Pool, and more. They are from across the political and cultural map and disagree about many things, but they can do it civilly, and never resort to the low tactic of assuming that the reason why someone might think differently is because they have malicious and morally depraved motives. 

Living in countries that allow it, unlike those places with unanimous votes and total turnouts, one mustn't give up the right of internal disputations, however painful it might be. In any case, it can often be enjoyable and always nourishing.