Where the Left meets the Right

Many years ago, as an undergraduate member of our Union board, it fell to me to chair a meeting at the University of New England in Armidale.  After all those years I can't honestly recall what the meeting was about, but it must have been provocative because the 'rads' (as we used to call our leftie fellow students in those days) decided that they would break it up.  The verb 'no-platform' wasn't in use then, but the effect was the same.  They filled the front row carrying red flags and shouted me down, so that nobody sitting behind them could hear a word from the platform.  The meeting, naturally, was a washout.
 
That was during the Vietnam War, and I have to admit that I was myself  a bit of a 'rad' in those days, but the events of that evening changed me forever.  I looked into the eyes of people, some of whom I had thought of as friends, and saw - what?  A sort of blankness, a vacancy in many, but a kind of mocking hatred in some.  Those lefties certainly knew how to hate, we discovered, every bit as intensely as the pro-war activists on the extreme right.
 
Well, that war is history.  I suppose in a sense the left won it.  They certainly weakened the fabric of western society by undermining our trust in our institutions and in some cases in the US bringing some soldiers to the brink of mutiny, and there is ample evidence to show that this strategy of demoralising the west was deliberate.  But now the ground has shifted to the social fabric of western societies, a much easier target after the traditional religious and moral underpinning has been weakened.  Will they win this round, or have they chanced their arm too far? 
 
It's not easy to be optimistic.  In the matter of gender the world really seems to have lost its wits. It’s one thing to honour any person's wish to use particular pronouns, but it's quite another matter to demand (even on pain of dismissal) that employees of universities and big corporations nominate their preferred pronouns in every item of correspondence.  This is beyond stupid.  It is actually abusive bullying, and it's still happening.
 
Even more serious is the issue of late-term abortion, now allowable up to birth, and the practice of leaving survivors of so-called 'failed' abortions, children who have survived the procedure, to die alone and untended.  This is all monstrous to people who retain any knowledge or awareness of the obligations of humanity.  But the horror of the situation is highlighted by the current feeding frenzy surrounding ex-Prince Andrew.  How can members of a society that permits (and even funds) late-term abortions adopt a posture of outraged hostility towards the kind of child abuse that the Epstein mob committed?  This is the pot calling the kettle black, raised to a higher level of infamy.  The only possible explanation, in my view, is that even the most crass have some kind of vestigial conscience and need to convince themselves that there are evil people in society who can be sacrificed as scape goats for the rest of us!
 
Nowadays anybody the manic left disagrees with is labelled a fascist.  That word has been bandied about with such feckless abandon that it has almost been evacuated of meaning.  Worse still, its overuse insults and trivialises the sufferings of those who really endure misery and even death at the hands of tyrants. 
 
Let's be clear: there are tyrants (fascists, if you will) at both ends of the political spectrum.  Politics are often viewed as a sort of linear polarity ranging from left to right, but a circle offers more useful imagery: if you wander far enough to the left you'll end up in a heap at the bottom with all those nasty types who strayed to the right.  Bigots, abusers, bullies, liars, haters - they're all the same really, regardless of which side of the spectrum first spawned them.


Dr David Daintree
Emeritus Director of the Christopher Dawson Centre