Donald Trump Might Actually be Good for America

Donald Trump Might Actually be Good for America.

Consider this part gedankenexperiment, part the mutant child; the anti-consensus.

The mainstream narrative line, defined for so long by denial of his rise and prophecies of his failure, has seen Donald Trump progress from laughable irrelevance, through curious sideshow bloviating like some half-cut post-modern William Blake, into the Great Red Dragon himself.

“And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars from heaven, and did cast them to the earth.”

Perhaps that should read The Great Red Donald, with the heads as states, the horns as endorsements, the crowns as delegates and the stars as his rivals for the Republican nomination.

He represents, we are told, the worst of humanity. He is a fascist or a proto-fascist or a crypto-fascist, the next Hitler; a racist, a tyrant, a fraud, a buffoon. He is an opportunist, a liar, a demagogue devoid of substance and decency. He is dangerous, he is divisive, he is a threat to our future and to the future of the world; he is bad.

And so on, and so on. Donald Trump has his own record of insults and assaults and it is impressive in its size and variety, though he does have a whole world with which to fight. But that arsenal is almost if not entirely matched by that of the forces arrayed against him and him alone.

At least, that is how we might frame the difference conventionally. But that lazy phraseology is a problem, and it is precisely the reason for his success and his immunity to attacks that would fell other men: It is not The Donald against the world, because The Donald is but the face and the voice and the toupee of a movement; one that he represents though he did not create it.

Much is made in election seasons of The Silent Majority. It is a phrase typically employed by those of whom the pollsterati have been painting unflattering portraits. “Yes, the polls put Party B comfortably in the lead, but I think, come the day of the election, you’ll find that the silent majority will come out to vote for us [Party A].”

It seldom happens, of course. The Silent Majority has become something like a myth, one born of the unhappy fact that voter turnout is invariably poor and of the complacency of those who don’t care to ask why; the comforting fairytale of electoral politics. We hear of it but never from it.

Well, The Silent Majority has found its voice in America, and it isn’t happy. It was never silent of its own volition, it was made to be so by a political system and a political and media establishment that became dead and deaf to it a long, long time ago.

Forgetting Blake and his dragons: The repetition of The Donald’s rhetoric is at least worthy of Eliot.

We will build a wall,
It’ll be a great wall,
It’ll be a great wall
And Mexico will pay for it.

It is nativist, if not completely racist, but his critics often try to have it both ways when they criticise him for being flexible and malleable and dishonest and then work on the assumption that his rhetoric is honest and criticise him for that, too.

A cursory look through his history in politics, as an activist and a lobbyist for causes as varied as universal healthcare and nuclear non-proliferation, betrays no innate racism and demonstrates a flexible commitment to fairly consistent principles. (His economic populism and calls for a return to isolationism have been constituents of his political gospel since his involvement in the Perot movement of ’92.)

His talk, then, is expedient; and that at least suggests that Trump is not as bad for America as someone, like Ted Cruz, who is a genuine zealot. He won’t really ban Muslims from entering the United States. He can’t. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits it. Nor does he really hate women; his position on women’s’ issues, especially on Planned Parenthood, has been consistently liberal. Lip-service might be paid to the obligatory Republican crusade against abortion, but Trump has historically aligned himself with pro-choice movements whilst his opponents have not.

He might play to the worst sentiments of the Republican base but his comments on Mexicans, the Chinese and the Japanese are designed to get a reaction; to inflame the base and put their (sometimes legitimate) concerns at the head of the agenda.

The first was a crude amalgam of concerns regarding mass illegal immigration and the very real heroine crisis that is plaguing many Southern and early-voting states (and whether you agree with his tone or credit him with substance, both are serious issues). And that, I contend, is more honest than the dog-whistle approach employed by his Republican rivals and the neo-Dixiecrats in the Clinton campaign.

The others form part of an appeal for economic isolationism and a reflect the real concerns of those to whom the liberalisation of trade with Europe and China has been, to use a word The Donald is fond of, “a disaster.” Given that his opposition to such liberalisation almost certainly includes the TTIP, which theoretically opens NHS contracts to US health insurance tenders and might even allow companies to sue national governments if their policies harm profits, that position would benefit us a great deal.

Trump’s expediency is designed to play off the very system he rails against. Though he makes much of his personal wealth, his disposable income is too little to allow for a conventional campaign to rival the Super-PACs of his rivals. He might even be correct, then, when he claims to be beholden to no Big Money interests and that, too, is good for a political process which has otherwise been bought by the Koch brothers and by the likes of Right to Rise and Hillary Clinton’s innumerable Big Money backers.

It is a question raised both by Trump and by Sanders, and the question is a just and pertinent one: How can you honestly claim to be against the same interests that finance your campaign?

So it is that Trump energises his supporters with promises of an independent campaign, and his more colourful language has earned him air time that money quite literally cannot buy. There are limits to how much money can be spent to buy air time, even within the United States’ campaign finance system. Trump gets his for free, thus freeing him from the corruption endemic within that system and that, too, is a good thing.

 And Trump, like Sanders, is speaking for the forgotten; for The Silent Majority; for those left behind in the States’ transition from democracy to plutocracy; for Eliot’s Hollow Men.

“This is the dead land,
This is cactus land;
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

 More specifically, he represents the frustrations of those who believe that their representatives have sacrificed democracy for plutocratic cronyism, and that is inseparable from his image: a plutocratic crony who is sacrificing the other way.

It is something the Clinton team will do well to consider if (and it is still an if) she is able to schmooze and triangulate her way past Sanders for the Democratic nomination: Donald Trump’s campaign is gorging on the support of first-time voters in much the same way (though not quite to the same extent) as Sanders’ campaign. And, should the rigged nominations system confer upon Clinton the coronation she has long expected, and in so-doing opt for the candidate of both the conventional and the dark establishment, the Democrats may well face a support deficit and a de-energised support base in the general election.

But involving more people in the democratic process: That’s another good thing.

And who are those people? In the days when I found myself more enchanted by a snappy line than by the assumptions underlying it – and those days aren’t completely behind me – I lauded Lindsey Graham’s quip on the problem the GOP has with its electorate: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

I have always considered this to be true, but I now consider it to be a necessary and not a sufficient truism. Jeb Bush, for example, was absolutely right when he realised that it was and is not only “angry white guys” who are most naturally inclined to vote Republican. Many of the immigrants vilified for years by the GOP share many of the party’s convictions on social policy. For all we might disagree with those convictions, I was sorry to see Bush abandon his principles by reneging upon past positions in a pathetic attempt to meet Trump on annexed ground.

But why are Angry White Guys so angry? Surely they do not want to be. And I would bundle them into the same category as first-time Trump voters: These are people who have been energised by the consistent failure, on the party of the GOP, to account for their concerns.

Trump, for all his ills, is giving a voice to the disenfranchised. Should he win the nomination (which is likely but not a certainty given that a contested convention is possible; mass-suicides have happened before, after all) then, regardless of the outcome of the general election, the GOP will have nominated a candidate who represents The Silent Majority for the first time in recent history.

And, regardless of the outcome of the general election, The Silent Majority will finally have been re-engaged with a political process that has hitherto sought to exclude them from the debate. They will have representation. And, if you subscribe to the view, as I do, that political extremism is often a result of disenfranchisement (and, by extension, that the worst tendencies of the electorate are the fault not of the electorate but of the politicians who ignore them) then you will be open to the possibility that, just perhaps, Donald Trump will fundamentally realign the focus of the GOP elite away from the business interests of those who fund it and toward the concerns of those who made and make it.

No democracy can thrive or excel or even survive when only one party holds the power. I speak as someone with no ideological love for the GOP, and as someone who thinks that the Democrats are right wing, and as someone who thinks that the primary and caucus systems have many flaws that need to be addressed in order for the United States to be the democracy it claims to be, but I do firmly believe that (if we must settle for a two-party system) a strong GOP is absolutely vital if the United States is to achieve all that it is capable of achieving.

To that end, and for the sake of the voters, and for the sake of democracy, and for the sake of the United States; for the sake of accountability, and for the sake of reform, and for the sake of the separation of democracy and corporate interests (Jefferson had his wall, after all); for the sake of a challenge to Clintonian corruption, and for the sake of an end to one-party, one-ideology rule; and for the sake of theatre, and for the sake of entertainment, and for the sake of the American people:

Donald Trump might, just might, be good for America.

Germany: Europe's Alpha & Omega, Beginning & End.

Germany: Europe’s Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.

Sunday, March 13^th – Chancellor Angela Merkel faces three regional elections in the German states of Saxony-Anhalt, Baden-Weurttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate that are being described, by various observers, commentators and news outlets, as a ‘test of support’ for the Chancellor’s stance on the refugee crisis.

‘Test’ is one way to describe the process, I suppose. Whilst frau Merkel might wish it to be otherwise, the sudden rise of the anti-establishment and populist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is presenting its regional campaigns as a national referendum on Germany’s open-door response to the crisis and which is polling well above the 7.1% of the vote it achieved in the European elections of 2014, is pulling the narrative away from regional affairs and on to questions of national policy.

International policy, as well. AfD, which is the political wing of the Pegida movement in all but name, is but the closest to home of the myriad of anti-immigration, anti-EU parties that are now in bloom across Europe, resplendant in colours of both the Left and the Right. Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Jobbiks in Hungary, the FPO and the Freedom Party of Austria, National Front in France, UKIP and roughly half the Tory cabinet at home – the political allegiances, goals and methods of each may differ drastically; what they all seem to have in common, and what those that tend toward anti-immigration sentiments certainly have in common, is their opposition to Angela Merkel and the policies of the CDU-led coalition government in Germany.

Angela Merkel is the public face of Germany’s official response to the migrant (or refugee) crisis. Given the unity of the opposition to that response across the right and the far-right, anti-Merkelism seems a fitting and necessary addition to their labels.

There is an essential qualifier to what I am about to say and I beg that you withhold your judgement until you have seen it: they are right to be opposed to Merkel and the German response.

This is not to say that any position defined by xenophobia is correct. This is not to give credence to any argument that is by its nature anti-migrant. But it is to acknowledge that migration policy should be open to discussion (and the argument that the encouraging of mass-immigration is itself an anti-migrant position), and it is to acknowledge that the imposition of policy without an elected mandate, nationally or Europe-wide, is anti-democratic. They are right, then, in that this issue sheds light on the cracks in the foundations of the European Union; cracks that are becoming fissures as the weight of Germany’s influence continues to grow.

You might, as I do, feel by instinct that we should help the poor and the desperate and the destitute. You might, as I do, feel a profound anger at an international community that has shown itself to be powerless to stop the savagery and the barbarism of the conflict in Syria, to which we have contributed bombs and planes and very little else. You might feel, as I do, that the promise by our own government to take in 20,000 refugees over five years is at best a negligible one.

We would, then, share the conviction that these refugees deserve far better than their lot.

But to take that conviction and hide behind it, to throw in the faces of those opposed to mass-migration the accusation that they are unfeeling and uncaring, is to be uncritical. To praise Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders is to give her credit that she does not deserve, based on the presumption that it is something that it’s not.

That decision, which I suspect was intended solely (or mostly) to win popular support for the CDU in Germany, represents the impossibility of unilateral action in the context of a continental political union. What it amounted to was the creation of a policy in Germany, for German party-political interests, which has now been imposed upon every other member state in the European Union, especially those in what has become known as the Balkans Route, without any form of democratic debate, without their consent, and without any consideration for their ability to deal with its consequences.

It shows the arrogance of a continental power, on whose industry and economy the European Union has been built, deeming either that its own interests trump all other concerns or that what is in its own interests must, by definiton, be in everyone else’s interests, too.

This arrogant assumption of power is, in fact, no assumption at all. Power in both the Eurozone and the European Union has never been properly codified to rest in any one elected body; it has its own freedom of movement and, like money, like people, it is drawn to the one place power is known to coalesce of its own volition: power itself. Germany, by virtue of the strength of its economy, is the power in Europe. As such, it has become not only the economic hub but also the political centre of the continent. Dealings between EU member states, and between the EU and other nations, happen through Germany with the official apparatus serving as nothing but a seldom-used fig-leaf.

Greece, which harbours the firsts ports to which migrants and refugees arrive from Turkey on their way to Germany, provided just one of a series of examples of Germany’s monopoly on power. When Syriza swept to electoral victory on the promise of rejecting and then reversing the economic doctrine imposed upon them by the Troika, it was Germany which led the counterrevolution. It demanded control of the Greek economy. When it failed, it demanded the imposition of its own austerity doctrine on the Greek state, effectively using different words to make the same demand.

The charismatic Yanis Varoufakis, during his brief stint as Syriza’s finance minister, primarily dealt not with members of the Eurogroup (comprised of the finance ministers of those countries within the Eurozone) but with Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister and architect of the ‘deals‘ imposed upon Greece that Syriza had been committed to reversing. When Varoufakis attempted to discuss the changes proposed by Syriza, he was met with a steadfast refusal to compromise. Shauble’s view was, according to Varoufakis, that “‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.”

Varoufakis was subsequently removed from the negotiating team, resigning from his post in the Syriza government shortly afterwards, and Schauble got his way.

Greece now has unemployment standing at 25% and it remains to be seen whether it will be able even to service the debt on the last round of bailout funds. Its economic policy, created in and imposed by Germany, leaves it in an untenable position. And now it is expected to shoulder the burden of Germany’s immigration policy, even as that same policy has led to countries along the Balkans route invalidating the Schengen agreement by unilaterally closing their borders. That move has been condemned by frau Merkel, but yet again it is a display of arrogance. Germany is allowed to unilaterally set the immigration policy of the European Union (and beyond – Macedonia has been a candidate for accession since 2005, is not yet a full member, but is amongst those with new fences along its borders) but others, like Hungary, are not allowed to do the same.

Germany is, meanwhile, leading the team negotiating with Turkey on the issue of migration. The vast majority of boats arriving on the borders of the now-dead Schengen zone leave port in Turkey for an often treacherous journey across the Aegean. Given the nature of the Erdogan government, it would be very difficult to imagine the Turkish negotiating team doing anything other than exploiting the migration crisis to suit their own ends: visa-free travel for Turkish citizens within the EU in advance of fasttracked admission to the Union proper. And, given the nature of the Erdogan government, it is tempting to ask quite how committed Turkey is to stopping the boats given that each one serves their political purposes quite nicely.

Any deal struck between Germany and Turkey with provisions for faster Turkish integration with the EU will be yet another example of EU policy set and pursued by Germany without even the pretense at democratic negotiation with its supposed equals.

This is the state of things as they are and there is no hint of any improvement to come. The migration crisis, the nature of which warrants an article of its own, is playing into a crisis in Europe; a political union in which the only demos with any power are the German people. It is they alone whose votes, under the current system, have any real influence on European policy. We have our own referendum to focus on, but should we vote to stay, there will be another referendum soon afterwards; a referendum on the nature of the European Union under the guise of a German general election.

The domestic debate in Germany, a debate of domestic policy, is then not domestic at all. Pegida and the AfD, along with parties like the Greens, represent a continent’s worth of dissatisfaction with a deaf establishment. And it is a damning indictment of the structure of the European Union, a provocateur of the extremes to which the disenfranchised will become suseptible, as well as the complete and final proof of its lack of anything even resembling a democratic process, that burden of responsibility now rests almost entirely on the shoulders of German voters.

You may interpret it as you like when I say that it is a burden we should do our part to alleviate them of.

Saudi Arabia is Going to Execute a Poet.

On the Perversions of our ‘Allies’ and a Defence of a Poet.

(This piece was originally written for The Heythrop Lion's 'THIS' Magazine

 

There are few occasions on which the United Nations is able to disgrace itself more effectively than when it comes to making appointments to committees and sinecures. Iraq, for example, was due to take the chairmanship of the special committee on disarmament in 2003; a move prohibited not by any common sense on the part of the U.N. but because the US-led intervention in that same year made such an appointment impossible. Iran has recently been re-elected to a seat on the U.N’s Commission on the Status of Women. Robert Mugabe, the subject of a wide-ranging travel ban, was asked to be an ambassador for tourism in 2012, and the Human Rights Council  - which counts amongst its membership such bastions of human rights as Pakistan and Uganda and the Holy See – is currently chaired by Saudi Arabia.

It should come as no surprise that the U.N., which makes no firm commitment to anything save the moral imperative to create ever more useless, ever more profligate committees, will express no opinion on the matter of Saudi Arabia’s chairmanship. Rather more depressing, though, is the silence on the part of our own government (which, by taking part in tactical vote-trading with Saudi Arabia, ensured that country’s elevation to its current lofty position) on the crimes against humans and human rights being committed almost every day by the head of the UNHRC.

The Kingdom’s recent history – and by recent I speak of the past few months – is a hideous collection of sundered heads and bloodied bodies. The execution of the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was at least granted some coverage in the Western media, though the Obama and Cameron administrations declined to condemn it in anything but uncertain terms. The sentencing of the human rights blogger Raif Badawi to 10 years in prison and one thousand lashes (a punishment that has had to be staggered given the very real chance that it might have killed him) has received less attention than that, possibly due to the fact that it did not cause embassies to be closed or burned, but it, too, has been covered.

But whilst the first example can be understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of its not-so-cold war with Iran, and both cases can be seen as the desperate actions of a regime seeking to re-establish sure-footing following the death of King Abdullah and the destabilizing effects of Islamic State (and how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!), it is the impending execution of the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh which speaks most clearly to the character of the House of Saud.

It serves no purpose as an act of geo-realpolitik. Nor is it part of a wider attempt at suppressing political dissent. The sentence of death in this case, for the related but distinct crimes of apostasy and ‘spreading blasphemous ideas’ in his art (charges he denies), are symptoms of a deep-rooted loathing of art and music and freedom of thought and expression; a loathing which is a necessary consequence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist iteration of Sharia. It should be of great concern to all of us that that is the iteration which we in the West are made to import into our own countries, often through Saudi-printed and Saudi-approved copies of the Quran with which we stock our prison libraries, and also in the form of ‘generous’ donations to mosques and madrassas made by the Saudi state. The exporting of evangelization and religious coercion, often in radicalizing forms, is one of the largest and least spoken-of facets of Saudi trade policy.  

(And it is no coincidence that the same aversion to aesthetics and thought can also be found in wide swathes of Pakistan, in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan and in the territories in Iraq and Syria governed by Islamic State. But, of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.)

I cannot attest to the quality or beauty or insightfulness of Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry. I cannot read his works in the language in which they were written and I am increasingly of the opinion that poetry can never be properly translated without suffering some essential loss. I cannot even support Ashraf’s claim that he is innocent of the charges levelled against him. Fortunately, I do not need to. For it should go without saying that apostasy and blasphemy are not considered crimes under any sane system of justice, and the decisions by the Saudi authorities to deny Ashraf anything like a fair trial, not to mention access to a lawyer, are so obviously in contravention of international law and of human rights as enshrined by the UNHRC – yes, again, the very body now chaired from Riyadh – that there really is, on our side, no case to defend.

But there is undoubtedly a case to be prosecuted, and every passing day on which the wider international community remains silent is one in which our supposed commitment to support human rights and values is side-lined by spreadsheet morality; by concerns over arms deals and oil exports. Remember when, following the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the streets of Paris were treated to a parade of world leaders, all of whom voiced their commitment to uphold the rights of freedom of thought and expression? Well, where are they now? Where is their support now?!

It should be beholden upon all of us, and not just those who claim to speak for us, to combat the forces who prefer and who act in the hopes of achieving an unfeeling, unthinking, beauty-less world. But it should be particularly important for us, we subjects of this disunited kingdom, to speak more loudly and with an especially firm commitment to purpose in matters such as this. For we have known its antithesis, and it has cost us dearly in the past.

The case of Ashraf Fayadh bears the hallmarks of the affairs of both Salman Rushdie and Oscar Wilde. The facts of the former should be so well-known that they need no restating here – the sentencing to death of a writer for the crime of writing is abhorrent to us, isn’t it? Laws against blasphemy and ‘offensiveness’ are loathsome and infantile, are they not?

But the second might perhaps require something more by way of explanation. Indeed, its inclusion here caused me to think and think again, but I have concluded that it is right to include it and the point it makes is more than salient. For the ruin of Oscar Wilde, like the attack on Mr. Fayadh, are both proofs that can be used against W.H. Auden’s fatuous claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ And both are examples of individuals sent down by forms of love. To quote from Alfred Douglas’s fateful poem: a love ‘that dare not speak its name.’

The ‘Shame’ spoken of and felt (and, yes, acted upon) by the likes of Wilde and Bosie, which was a crime (and remains a crime in places like Saudi Arabia), is just as natural and vital to us as the ‘crime’ for which Ashraf Fayadh has been condemned. It is natural to us because it is of our nature! The dignity of our species, in other words, demands that we use and are able to use, free from fear of punishment, our ability to think and to write what we think, and to portray beauty, and to practice it and feel it with all the pain and reverence and hard work befitting any fundamental Love. To deny the freedom to think is to deny the freedom to love. They are, in that sense, two forms of the same virtue. And it allows one to accuse the House of Saud, and religion, as being opposed to love. Which it is; which they both are.

I have penned a poem – The Ballad of Burning - which shares its sentiment with that expressed within this piece.  I had thought to close with it. But as there is a place set aside in this august journal – a poets’ corner, of a kind - for works of rhyme and rhythm and metre (and sometimes those that lack the same, but that is an argument for another time), I have decided instead to close with the words of another.

Part of the title of this piece is taken (and then reworked) from Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s polemic, published posthumously, entitled ‘A defence of Poetry.’  It is amongst the most eloquent cases ever made for art and for the meaning and the importance of art. I encourage the reader to peruse it in its entirety, but it closes as follows:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

The point, if I have done my job, is clear. And I hope that you will join with me, and with the good people at PEN International, and Amnesty International, and the innumerable poets and writers and musicians and ordinary human beings in doing what our government is too cowardly to do on our behalf: condemn this sentence, condemn this crime, and work for the freedom of Mr. Ashraf Fayadh.

Let Them Eat Dog.

Let Them Eat Dog: The Spectacular Hypocrisy of the Anti-Yulin Movement.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” said the great princess. And how contemptibly naïve she was. For those words would hasten forth the ringing of the death knell for the French monarchy.  L’Autrichienne had issued a statement so trite, so appallingly unaware, so out-of-touch with popular opinion in France that the people, the French people, normally so calm and considered and averse to the idea of strikes and demonstrations, had no choice but to revolt.

The mass ‘anti-brioche’ movement had been born, and, with overwhelming verve and vigour, the people signed en-masse a petition condemning such cruelty to Vienoissaries, and calling on the government to ban such a gross demonstration of culinary immorality.  

There followed a revolution, during which sense and decency was restored. Brioche was allowed to live a long and happy life, bread was restored as the basic ingredient in the national diet, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Except that it isn’t.

For one, the great princess to whom Rousseau attributes that memorable phrase was almost certainly not Marie Antoinette. But that is a minor quibble. No, the most important fact of the matter is that the first iteration of the French Revolution was not a popular reaction to the Dauphine’s goute immorale but a protest against the appalling conditions faced by the French citizenry; conditions that, incidentally, had forced many to resort to far more desperate acts and means than being cruel to man’s best friend. 

The anti-Yulin protest is as inaccurate as the above parody. The Yulin dog-meat festival, a ‘tradition’ that has been celebrated in the Guangxi city of the same name since the mid-‘90s and that received State approval in 2009, might appear to be an expression of particularly poor taste. But, as is so often the case, those campaigning against it are disinclined to explore beneath the surface of the issue. I contend that the festival, and the uncountable equivalents which will escape condemnation by avoiding the attention of viral-moralists, is caused by human suffering. I contend that those who truly wish to see an end to expressions and exercises of barbarous cruelty would better serve their mission by focussing not on one trivial example of it but on that which causes such things to be popular.  

Friends and colleagues have been inclined to highlight the hypocrisy demonstrated by signatories to Change.org and other petitions; those who will lambast the Chinese government for allowing such a festival to occur before settling down in front of the television with a burger made of the less-appetizing remains of a tortured pig or cow or chicken. They are correct to do so. And, as someone who unashamedly salivates over the prospect of a good sausage, I could hardly claim to be bastion of coherent morals if I were myself to have signed the petition. 

But my objection to it, and the particular hypocrisy which I have found most galling, is different. And I should request here, now that I find myself just past the outset, that the reader does not mistake this as a piece by one in favour of battering Chihuahuas to death with sticks and stones. (I am not. Not least because, if the purpose of this capital punishment were that the executioners should be able to devour the carcass, it would be more efficient – it would produce a higher yield - to find and kill a real rat.) Rather, the objection contained herein is to a moral theory that places fluff and paws and cuteness above the rights and liberties of nasty, carnivorous human beings. 

It’s inconvenient, isn’t it? The Chinese… no, the human race in its entirety is not particularly attractive. We’re not fluffy and cuddly. Our noses are often protrusions of unappealing dimensions. Our faces so often lack the features necessary to redeem their lack of symmetry. Our ears are dull, we have hands and not paws, we lack tails, and we are obese and bipedal. And we kill and maim and butcher each other every single day. It’s hard to care, isn’t it? Human suffering produces human apathy. It’s an unpleasant truth, but a truth nonetheless.

But it is worth remembering that China contains perhaps the largest population of disenfranchised people on the planet. Its state, its Party, suppresses dissent with violence and oppresses its people with means that (and clichés are occasionally necessary) can only be described as Orwellian. It brutalizes its ethnic minorities, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, where it is deemed necessary in order to assuage the Han majority. It is slowly but inexorably bringing its overseas territories and provinces, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, under the complete control of the mainland, against the wishes of their peoples. This is but one facet of a resurgent, aggressive nationalism that is expressed elsewhere in the form of dangerous and flagrantly illegal irredentism, as demonstrated by the hard line and tough stance taken by The Party in its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku islands, and with territorial disputes in the South China Sea. 

The Party, in an exercise in newspeak reminiscent of Airstrip One, counters claims made about its almost total lack of respect of human rights by international observers, not least those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, by saying that it adopts a different definition of the same. The Party defines human rights in relation to the Four Cardinal Principles, which are: 

1. We must keep to the socialist road.
2. We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3. We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party.
4. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

More recently The Party has expanded its definition. Human rights in China are now considered in relation to its ‘national culture’ and its level of economic growth. (George Osborne would doubtless approve.)

So it is quite proper, says the Party, that China be allowed to execute people (more than every other country that still utilizes capital punishment put together in the ‘90s) who have never seen a trial let alone a jury and then to harvest their organs. It is quite proper that the One Child Policy, and the bizarre and inhumane rules and laws that have spawned from it, should be celebrated; maintained where necessary and redefined elsewhere (with the effect of exacerbating problems of sex-selective back-street abortions and abandonments). It is absolutely right that The Party should maintain strict control of the press, and indeed of all information. It is necessary that it should permit those religious and superstitious practices and traditions that it can control, such as Yulin, whilst seeking to eliminate (in the case of Falun Gong) or impose its own doctrine (in the case of Tibetan Buddhism) on those that defy The Party’s rule. The Party is the religion, and all condoned festivals and ceremonies and traditions are condoned because they conform to its doctrines. More on that later. 

It can maintain the absence of a judicial system and workers’ rights. It can treat its rural and migrant workers as subhumans. It is proper that freedom of political expression and opinion be suppressed and that their advocates be treated as ‘counterrevolutionaries’. It is essential that The Party maintains the myth of a common cultural enemy. Orwell’s dystopia never really required anything other than Goldstein and a one-at-a-time rotation of a foreign foe to achieve this effect, but The Party in China has demonstrated its flexibility in continually coming up with new dangers, new pariahs, new enemies.

I am flirting with crass and artless danger. Perhaps there is already too much paint on the canvas. Suffice it to say that all of the above, and the rest of the exhaustive list that I have not the space or the time to include here, are not just condoned under The Party’s definition of human rights; they are the Party’s definition of human rights. All of this, all of these crimes, are human rights, according to The Party, because they are necessary to ensure the upholding of the Four Cardinal Principles and the continuation of economic growth.

What, then, is the real problem? Is it that some Chinese people (and not, as many Twitter morons seem to believe, the entire population of China) have taken part in the ceremony? Is it that some Chinese people eat dog and cat meat? Rest assured, Yulin does not represent the sum total of animal cruelty and questionable culinary tastes in China. Or is it rather that festivals like Yulin are created, and are popular, because the conditions in which the people of Guangxi are forced to live in, and those of other states and cities and provinces, make them popular? 

Surely it is telling that the official response in China, the state-sponsored backtrack, has coincided not with the advent of a large and international animal rights protest – for the festival has been the subject of international protests for years – but by the involvement of China’s rapidly growing middle class; the social group that is becoming increasingly vital in maintaining the country’s economic growth; the class with access to education; the class with expendable wealth; the class that can afford to keep pets, such as dogs, for pleasure. They have the luxury of being able to afford to care; the money to back the morals.

 I return again to the point made previously; that The Party is, intends, and has always intended to be the religion of China. People will often cite the country as a part of a desperate and misguided attempt to defend the crimes of religion. What they seldom realise is that The Cultural Revolution did not seek to eradicate religion. It sought and it was successful in its quest to adopt the religious impulse itself. It has its own clergy, it has its religious hierarchy, it has its scriptures and its incontrovertible truths and its contempt for free thought and liberty. It is especially ironic that The Party, which still occasionally boasts of its adherence to Marxist-Leninism, is itself the very essence of that which Marx argued so forcefully and ably against.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

That the Yulin festival has been the subject of an international outcry; a great popular movement that claims to decry cruelty, is, then, spectacularly hypocritical. The Yulin festival is but one tradition, one expression, one festival that was created with the express purpose of maintaining the totalitarian religion. In limiting ourselves to attacking its expression, we ignore the fact that the denial of the rights of the Chinese working class to indulge in such activities will only increase the human suffering (and, by extension, the suffering of animals) whilst The Party, the summum malum, that which creates these illusions to glorify itself, remains in power.

A mass movement? Great. A popular revolt? Fantastic. But it is my firm belief that the eliciting of such a sentiment by nothing more substantive than the suffering of a few cute animals is worse than impotent; it is counter-productive.

It is not unworthy of us, it is not a sin, to focus our attention on human suffering, on the abject facts of the human condition, and on the causes of human depredation and exploitation. Perhaps, if we were able to be exercised by these, and if we were capable and more inclined to direct our ire at that which truly deserves it, we might achieve something more meaningful than the downscaling of one minor festival.