You Want it Darker.. He kills the flame. -Is this the point when Liberalism becomes a fighting creed?
Stephen King has no monopoly on evil clowns. We Brits can certainly compete with Boris Johnson, a kind of inverted vampire clown (he shrivels when out of the spotlight). Buried in his mischievous 4000 word article for the conservative daily the Telegraph was a paragraph on what he describes as -split allegiances- that made my blood run cold. The phrase goes to the heart of the Brext debate and the re-assertion of nationalism with its fixed and singular identies. It suggests that we must place nation (blood and belonging) above all else. here is the offending paragraph. - "I used to look at the Brussels bumper stickers saying -Mon patrie, c’est Europe- and think it was a bit of a laugh, and that they would never engender a genuine Euro-patriotism, or compete with people’s natural feelings for their own country. I have to say that I am now not so sure. I think I was complacent. I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked on their faces and I am troubled with the thought that people are begining to have genuinely split allegiances."- This is a world view that denies the inevitability of multiple allegiances asking us to choose or be labled unpatriotic. I am being asked to choose whether I am more Jewish, or European than British.. Johnson’s speaks for many in the Tory party as we witnessed at last year’s Party Conference address by Theresa May declared that - if you think you are a citizen of the world you're a citizen of nowhere- There is a chilling echo here of the Russian anti-Semitic campaign after World War II in which Stalinist theatre critics created the term -rootless cosmopolitans- to describe Jewish intellectuals. It also reminds us that the classical liberal’s position of deliberative tolerance which asserts that we must listen carefuly to the arguments of our adversaries as a way of testing the truth of our own position puts the classical liberal at a permanent disadvantage. There comes a time when even liberalism must become a fighting creed.
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