The State as Rootless Transient

Yesterday's observation that we should nix the cheap Nazi comparisons because they are insufficient to the moment prompted a lot of reader response, a big chunk of which was along the lines of: Are you serious, Steyn? You're saying we're in for millions of deaths?

Well, I hope not. But there is blood-lust in the air - I don't mean in Gaza (it's always in the air there) but in the streets of western cities. In our comments, Ian Cory, a First Day Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club from southern England, put it this way:

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Britain is known as 'Airstrip One'. In 2023 it is becoming Gaza Strip 2!

Hamas are not alone in cynically using the Palestinians as human shields. The rest of the world uses them as such, too.

The rest of the world uses them as human shields against their own conscience ('I'm not an anti-Semite, I'm pro-Palestinian').

Ah, but, in the malign alliance between Islamic supremacists and the polytechnic left, who's playing whom? As I have said for decades, "The 'oldest hatred' didn't get that way without an ability to adapt"....

Once upon a time on the Continent, Jews were hated as rootless cosmopolitan figures who owed no national allegiance. So they became a conventional nation state, and now they're hated for that. And, if Hamas get their way and destroy the Jewish state, the few who survive will be hated for something else. So it goes.
The latest adaptation is "the oldest hatred" meets the new religion of "identity politics" - which is Lenin's old who/whom paradigm applied to every one on the planet. So a murdered Israeli baby can never be a victim, because, even at four months old, he is part of the oppressor class.

We're taught it in school. If a white girl in kindergarten is already an avatar of "white privilege", then we are all not our brother's keeper (for this, sadly, is an age of only children) but our great-great-great-grandfather's keeper. If a white six-year-old bears the sin of what white men did in the eighteenth century, then why wouldn't a French Jewess in Lyon not be a legitimate target for those who wish to protest the Gaza "occupation"? This is the hideous dehumanising logic of "identity politics".

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