Arjan Dirkse wrote:Of course that does not make it alright. I think countries have a duty to protect certain national cultural and political attributes but this is not the right way to go about it, making non-Jews second rate citizens. However I suspect this is how it works in many countries all over the world, that there are many laws in many countries apart from Israel that discriminate in some ways against some of their citizens.
And therein lies a basic dilemma of progressive politics. How to preserve values regarded as worth preserving, without acting at variance to some of those values. If you're opposed to discrimination, preserving core values becomes something of a tightrope walk, if those values are perceived, however erroneously, as being the purview of a particular group. The way forward, of course, is to provide evidence that preservation and maintenance of certain values,
is being conducted for everyone, with the specific aim of dispensing benefit to everyone via said maintenance of those values. That includes, of course, those who
don't share our values.
Of course, the big danger of proceeding along this path, is that duplicitous enemies will take the expression above of the relevant objectives, and corrupt those objectives irredeemably, by pressing the expression thereof into apologetic service for policies that are anathema to the progressive cause. A danger made all the more pressing by the rise of right-wing propaganda of unreality - namely, the wholesale discarding of any notion of 'reality' as understood by the rest of us, in favour of the view, fatuous and pernicious in equal measure, that reality will reshape itself to conform to the propaganda, if only said propaganda is shouted loudly and frequently enough.
This fatuous and pernicious view, that reality is malleable to one's own ends, if only one exerts enough propaganda effort, is dangerous enough in the hands of those driven by ideological motives, but so-called 'neoliberalism' has seen the rise of an even more dangerous deployment of the tactic, on the part of those who have a commitment not to ideology, but to crude personal gain. Who, furthermore, will take full advantage of the aetiology of ideology, to further that personal gain, whilst regarding any ideology presented not as the ideologue does, as a sort of 'divine revelation', but simply as a convenient tool of manipulation.
That's the distinction we, as progressives, need to stress time and again - that we are motivated by
ethical, not mercenary, concerns. We are motivated by the extension of well-being to the widest possible cohort of recipients, not making it the exclusive preserve of a financially privileged few. We are motivated by the desire to see a better world for all, in direct opposition to the service of sinister ends pursued by the already over-powerful and over-endowed. We are motivated by the concerns of the entire human species, not the limited desires of a small but rapacious coterie of ruthless hoarders. That message needs to be presented, vigorously and robustly, because failure to do so, could have dire consequences.
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