Borrowing the enemy’s tactics — a question of perspective

It has been becoming increasingly clear to me in recent years that the same trends are cropping up all over the world. Liberal, representative democracy, the rule of law, social liberalism, and acceptance of diversity are being questioned and challenged by a new wave of populists.

This is an issue not just in Brexit Britain and Trump’s US, but also the France of Le Pen (the next big battlefront), the Germany of AfD, the Greece of Syriza, the Austria of Hofer, the Hungary of Orban, the Netherlands of Wilders, the Italy of the Five Star Movement, the Turkey of Erdogan, and aspects of it far further afield — Putin’s Russia, Abbot’s Australia, Zuma’s South Africa, Duterte’s Philippines, and many others from both left and right.

A couple of recent pieces have started to point to a way to fight this.

First useful quote (from The Economist, 12 November 2016):

“[Identitarian] activists may preach love for the homeland and its unique character, but in practice they are impeccable internationalists, mixing and exchanging ideas like other millennials. Austria’s identitarians borrowed their look wholesale from counterparts in France… Alt-right activists on both sides of the Atlantic treat a cartoon frog, Pepe, as a sort of mascot. From Indianapolis to Innsbruck, they share the same open-source politics, fume over the same grievances and chortle over the same in-jokes. Their movement is a howl of anguish at the integration of different peoples. It also epitomises that process.”

And the second — possibly apocryphal, but an interesting illustration (Charles Stross, 14 November 2016):

“A few years ago, wandering around the net, I stumbled on a page titled "Why Japan lost the Second World War". (Sorry, I can’t find the URL.) It held two photographs. The first was a map of the Pacific Theater used by the Japanese General Staff. It extended from Sakhalin in the north to Australia in the south, from what we now call Bangladesh in the west, to Hawaii in the east. The second photograph was the map of the war in the White House. A Mercator projection showing the entire planet. And the juxtaposition explained in one striking visual exactly why the Japanese military adventure against the United States was doomed from the outset: they weren’t even aware of the true size of the battleground.

“I’d like you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Japanese staff officer. Because that’s where we’re standing today. We think we’re fighting local battles against Brexit or Trumpism. But in actuality, they’re local fronts in a global war. And we’re losing because we can barely understand how big the conflict is…

“Trying to defeat this kind of attack through grass-roots action at local level … well, it’s not useless, it’s brave and it’s good, but it’s also Quixotic. . With hindsight, the period from December 26th, 1991 to September 11th, 2001, wasn’t the end of history; it was the Weimar Republic repeating itself, and now we’re in the dirty thirties. It’s going to take more than local action if we’re to climb out of the mass grave the fascists have been digging for us these past decades. It’s going to take international solidarity and a coherent global movement and policies and structures I can barely envisage if we’re going to rebuild the framework of shared progressive values that have been so fatally undermined.”

So, the real need is for liberal internationalist types like me to stop preaching, start practising what they preach — building cross-border alliances, sharing ideas, and actually acting to counter the waves of propaganda and distortions being propagated by the alt-right rather than simply talking about it.

I’m beginning to start on it.