TODAY’S DANGEROUS LUNATICS HAVE FRESH FACES, AMIABLE NATURES & LIKEABLE SMILES

Let’s forget the obvious lunatics of Ukraine for a while, those skinhead freaks with the swastika tattoos. Let’s look instead at the lunatics existing among us, those who are completely unaware of the status I am giving them. These are the young, liberal-minded, interestingly coiffured, well-dressed, politically correct individuals who are just as convinced as the American neoconservatives, that they know what’s best for the entire world. The views of such individuals will be well known to you as they are virtually the only young people who you will come across in western media who are perceived in a positive light. Yet I assert they are dangerous lunatics. Why? Perhaps if we take a broad but necessarily brief look at world history you will begin to understand why I have this view. The categories I would suggest are most informative are chapters of world history where one ethnic group or combination of groups from several nations decided that they either knew best about others in nations not part of whatever larger grouping they belonged to. Going back the furthest for our purposes I would suggest looking at what lessons regarding this could be taken from the white settlers who came to the Americas and what transpired there regarding their interaction with the native populations they found there. Then we have the slave trade and its route from Africa via the British Isles to the Americas. Following this we have the attempt at religious conversion of the native populations of Africa by white missionaries. In each case those which the white individuals encountered were seen as either lesser, mistaken or in some other way in need of changing so that they could become more like us, whatever that ‘us’ may have been. Then came the Nazis, another white race with the belief that they were the crown of creation and that various ‘others’ who they singled out as lesser beings and in some cases, sub-humans necessitated a cull which would replace them or put them to useful work for the white race. In recent times we have seen various regime change wars initiated again by the predominantly white-faced brotherhood against almost completely brown-faced peoples. These were all unimaginable in almost any other context except the strong against the weak. Only in very recent times indeed have those who initiated these wars begun to contemplate attacking powers which equate or almost equate to their own power and destructive potential. So it is that as night follows day throughout world history we have the ‘us and them’ situation writ both large and small. Great power politics within what was known in a previous era as ‘The Great Game’ prevailed with a constant chess game of strategic attacks one upon another with that ‘other’ demonised to greater or lesser extent. Within each culture also we have those that demand respect and those that are laughed at, scorned or actively attacked, usually by the general grouping that demands most respect. My general contention is that these chosen divisions, these attitudes of rightness and wrongness, predicated always upon some inherent conception of one group having superiority over others, of being exceptional whereas others are very much unexceptional, that ‘we’ have a duty to change others, ostensibly to be more like ourselves, is at the root of so much mischief in our mutual history that we share with the world. Each war sees the designation of the ‘other side’ as iniquitous and worthy of elimination. How could it be otherwise? And now, in our most modern war of all (no, not the Ukraine war) one group of people once again see themselves as superior beings holding all the right attitudes that they have some duty to ensure is taken up by those ‘over there’. (Referring momentarily to the Ukraine situation, those who have embraced all the narratives on offer concerning Ukraine received from their fellow liberal brothers and sisters that are universally given the only platforms to deliver their received notions that exist in the mass public sphere, hold absolute sway.) The terms of the changes of elimination and replacement offered by those who do so can sound very reasonable. To undermine and replace authoritarian regimes. To force everyone everywhere to adhere to the strict letter of what ‘we’ conceive to be inalienable human rights. And so on down a mutually held list of precepts, tenets and (to them) unquestionably and unarguably ‘the right things to do, the right way to live and the right way to govern’. You may say they are right and that every nation on the planet should be a liberal democracy such as Sweden, Germany or the United Kingdom. You might, who knows, even be right. But this is not my point. My point is the absolute chaos, death, destruction and general mayhem that will be caused by pushing that agenda in the ways we are seeing now, in part through the lens of the Ukraine war. The collective west is clearly determined to create whatever chaos, death, destruction and general mayhem in its attempt to fast-forward this goal. (On this subject John J. Mearsheimer gives an outstanding presentation entitled, ‘The Great Delusion’ in which, in my view he correctly states that this goal of creating liberal democracies everywhere will always fail and due to the greater power of nationalism.)

For these reasons I name the accepted positive face of western liberalism, that seen throughout academia, throughout western cultural hierarchies and deeply embedded within the elite political and media spheres of the western world dangerous and its urbane, comfortably confident, nice-smiling, reasonable and liberal adherents dangerous lunatics.