Our Power-Hungry Pharisees - 1000 words

Sometimes it is 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. This, just as the suggestions that Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg are fascists, seem almost comical in their 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? 

Three things distinguish humans from other animals. They are self-aware, have free will and are moral. Indeed you can’t be truly moral unless you are free as morality implies the making of free choices between good and evil, right and wrong (which also, incidentally, explains the inevitability of the presence of evil in the world). Morality is, therefore, a facet of human freedom and a defining element of human nature however much it may seem that we have forgotten this fact. If you want to get a handle on a human that handle is usually moral. The proof of this used to be that the central features of religions, which seem to spring up spontaneously in most human societies, were moral ideas like propitiation, sin and judgement which cried out to be addressed in some manner; in other words morality matters to us and is integral to what we are. Because of this our moral fate and being known to have moral integrity is crucial to a human in society. A reputation for probity and trustworthiness matters. Everyone wants to have moral credit in the bank. Even in irreligious societies such as Hitler’s Nazi one or Mao’s or Stalin’s Communist ones the surface appearance of some version of morality (however debased and compromised) is maintained and paid lip service to. As a result someone set out to destroy a person in such societies it was often their moral reputation that was attacked first; hence Stalin’s public Show Trials. In Nazi Germany the propaganda backstory about the conniving wickedness of Jewish capitalists came first followed later by the removal from professional positions in universities and on committees, the destruction of livelihoods in events like Kristallnacht, forced sale of property, confiscations, singling out, beatings, transportation and then extermination. The complex superstructure of the attributes of a human person was systematically dismantled and reduced from the top beginning with the removal of moral standing. Once permission was given 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. Most of the time, when the thuggery is on a wide scale, even the worst thugs need to feel 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 Roman military rulers felt compelled to take into account. They 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 surviving in such an arena might be seen as a zero sum game like musical chairs.

The original Pharisees founded their power on Jewish Law observed in minute detail and in the letter rather than in the spirit. In modern times we have an identical caste wielding the most brutal, bullying and intimidating moral power, founded on ubiquitous, underpinning Marxist narratives which view everything in terms of dynamics of exploitation and oppression. These serve the same purpose for them, in terms of irrefutable authority, as the Jewish law. They know that this grievance and victimhood-based underpinning provides them with moral currency. 

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 have, consequently, lost jobs as a result. In these cases, as in many others, including that of the disabled meeter and greeter at Asda who recently 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 the Police have been bullied into hate-crime arrests. 

There is an argumentative strategy whereby false syllogisms are created. Hitler was known to like dogs and Hitler committed genocide, therefore, if Donald Trump is seen stroking an Alsatian.......... Hitler encouraged national pride - Donald Trump encourages national pride with his MAGA hat. Hitler’s Nazis turned their backs on the Communists in the Reichstag in 1930. The Brexit Party MEPs turned their backs on the EU and so on. Such conclusions are 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. However, when it comes to the destruction of people’s reputations and the stripping from them of professional posts for perceived peccadilloes, things which the real Nazis did and our modern pharisaical caste mimic, one can only consider such actions as vicious and unjust. Those guilty of viciousness and injustice at the outset seldom revert to virtue and peacefulness in what follows. One has to ask, therefore, who bears a closer resemblance to the Fascists and is most likely to follow their well-beaten paths in these cases – the ‘right-wingers’ I have listed or their Twitter accusers?