Our Power-Hungry Pharisees - New English Review

by Guy Walker (October 2019)

Christ at the Column, Caravaggio, 1607

Boris Johnson’s tactical prorogation of Parliament led to strident denunciations that this amounted to a ‘coup’ and that he was a ‘dictator.’ This is evidence of the neuroticism and paucity of imagination of the modern mind. It is neurotic because it can’t deal with the emergence of the new and the unpredictable in the present moment. Instead it tries to manhandle such events into the comfortingly familiar templates of a past which is fixed and cannot surprise us. It lacks imagination because it can only interpret the excitements of the present according to what has already happened. It simply can’t believe that there is such a thing as the new and, if it does believe in it, it is afraid of it and cannot adjust to it.

On a similar theme, it is sometimes pointless to mention Godwin’s Law in order to restore balance to a conversation because it is already too late. This is the case, a little while back with an intemperate Tweet by Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, with great assurance, likened Donald Trump’s regime to that of Adolf Hitler’s fascist one in its alleged use of thuggery, ‘militias’ and concentration camps. Similarly, fairly recent suggestions that Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg are fascists, add to my designation of such behaviour as neurotic and unimaginative a comical disproportionality and historical illiteracy. One is left with the question, though, if there is totalitarian brutality and bullying in the Western world, where does it actually reside?

de jure by anathematising a person’s moral quality with a plausible narrative then the de facto power asserted by the thuggery of Mussolini’s Black-shirts or Hitler’s Brown-shirts was authorised to follow on with the destruction of property and then the person itself. Most of the time, when the thuggery is on a wide scale, even the worst thugs (apart from a few psychopaths) need to feel public moral justification for their acts.

This is not new. The realisation that the moral is the place where the lever is inserted in order to direct human affairs is also what empowered the Pharisees in New Testament Palestine. They understood that if one gained control of the moral sphere one had access to real power over other people and a power that even their militarily potent Roman rulers felt compelled to take into account. The Pharisees made the simple calculation that it was infinitely preferable to be the accuser rather than the accused, the judge rather than the judged and to wield the pitchfork rather than to have it at their back especially when, given a somewhat paranoid view of human affairs, they suspected that surviving in such an arena might be seen as a zero sum game like musical chairs.

Not very long ago we have seen this caste in action in the attempted destruction of the reputations and the consequent impact on the professional careers of Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Toby Young, Danny Baker and Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt all of whom have had their reputations and integrity impugned and who, consequently, lost jobs. In these cases, as in many others, including that of the disabled meeter and greeter at Asda who lost his job for posting a Billy Connolly video on social media, these victims of the Twitter mob and the scourge of the ruthless modern liberal mindset have suffered exactly what European Jews suffered at the hands of Nazi propagandists. It is the first stage in the totalitarian un-personing and dehumanising process and presages much worse things to come if given its head. We already have ‘doxxing’ and legislators and the Police have bent the knee in response to being bullied into hate-crime laws and arrests.

In terms of methodology for how this is achieved, there is an argumentative strategy whereby false syllogisms are created.

A) Hitler was known to like dogs and B) Hitler committed genocide, therefore, since Donald Trump is seen stroking an Alsatian . . .

A) Hitler encouraged national pride and B) Donald Trump encourages national pride with his MAGA hat, therefore . . .

A) Hitler’s Nazis turned their backs on the Communists in the Reichstag in 1930 and B) The Brexit Party MEPs turned their backs on the EU, so . . .

This can also be expressed in terms of overlapping sets in Venn diagrams. My set overlaps with Hitler’s in that I, too, like dogs. Therefore I overlap in every respect with Hitler’s set. Such B-must-follow-A conclusions are, of course, unwarranted because, while national pride and public protests can be encouraged for bad purposes they can also be encouraged for innocent or good ones. There is no pre-destined necessity that they will lead to evil not least in people who are perfectly aware of recent history and have the usual attributes of human freedom and choice.

In our times people’s reputations are being destroyed and professional posts stripped from them for peccadilloes which are misrepresented as felonies. Our modern pharisaic caste are, therefore, mimicking what the real Nazis and Stalinists did by beginning at the top of the human hierarchy with the moral. One can only consider such actions as vicious and unjust. Those guilty of viciousness and injustice at the outset (rather than of neutral actions, like Johnson’s, Farage’s or Trump’s that merely have a shadowy and superficial resemblance to past events) seldom revert to virtue and peacefulness in what follows. One has to ask, therefore, who bears a closer resemblance to the Fascists and Stalinists and is most likely to follow their well-beaten paths in these cases—the generally conservative people I have listed or their Twitter accusers on the liberal left? While not setting ourselves up as Christ-figures perhaps, intelligent people should, in imitation of him, implacably oppose the tyranny of this new caste who are sometimes styled as ‘liberals.’ Ironically they are, in reality, the tyrants in opposition to which true Liberals and lovers of liberty should be defining themselves.

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Guy Walker a retired French teacher living in the South of England. In addition to writing poetry, Guy has published articles on political and health issues in The Conservative Woman. He is technically a Catholic with a predilection for a conservative outlook. He blogs at roseatetern.blogspot.com.

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