And we are expected to ‘understand’ the people who voted for this man
Why not just force Muslims to wear a yellow star? Then you wouldn’t need all this complicated hassle with a register.
Attempts have now begun at trying to bully and browbeat those of us who have nothing but contempt for electors who vote for people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen into seeing that what we should really do is “understand” them. Because if we “understand” them, and speak nicely about them, then they won’t turn bitter, weird and nasty and vote for Trump/Farage/Le Pen/whatever.
What a great idea. Because, of course, the very best way to counter warped reasoning is to encourage it further by portraying it as entirely normal and justified, instead of fighting it all the way.
The trouble with the fight against the far right is not the arguments or the fact that reason is on our side. The trouble is that the only people speaking out against the far right in public are exactly the sort of people those most likely to support the far right can’t stand.
You never get Mr and Mrs Joe Zammit or Mr and Mrs John Jones speaking out against the far right. They keep their mouths shut. So the impression is created that the front against the far right is made up entirely of ‘liberal media types’, actors and singers, and ‘bleeding heart journalists’. But it isn’t, is it?
The division is what it has always been, what it is in everything else: between those who can think and analyse and those who can’t, between those who are informed and those who are not, between those who are able to put things into historic and current context and those who can’t, and between those who have a moral (in the non-religious sense) character and those who don’t.
No prizes for guessing which class of characterists drove the Trump vote: the same class of characteristics that drove and still drives the Muscat vote in Malta, predominant among which are the inability to analyse information and situations, and the lack of moral fibre – which is far more common than you think and has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with religion.
