Lest it be imagined that my next post is going to be entitled Elephants Are Not Syllabubs, please allow me to explain. There is an ongoing attempt, especially on Radio Four, to depict the Syrian Civil War as a re-run of the Spanish Civil War.
This is all horribly confused, since it seeks to identify today's British jihadi fighters with the International Brigades, but Iran with the Soviet Union. Saudi
Arabia and Qatar might at a push pass for Nazi Germany and Mussolini's
Italy respectively, but Iran is not remotely like the USSR in any
way, shape or form.
Still, it serves those indulging in this right for coming up with anything so preposterous and pernicious. Of course it does not work. I could have told them that it would not. I expect that so could you.
Yet it is a mark of their success that, however misguided such adventurers would have been, no Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Christian (especially Armenian), Assyrian, professing Arabist or professing Socialist has made his way to Syria in order to fight against the insurgency in, and invasion of, that country.
Nor even, so far as I am aware, has any Shi'ite Muslim who is not of Syrian
origin or extraction, and we have quite a lot of those from India and
elsewhere.
I say again that I am not suggesting that they would have been right to do so. But it is notable that they have not.
Whereas Sunni Muslims, again overwhelmingly with non-Levantine roots, have been and are heading to Syria in order to shed blood for the Wahhabi cause, which is completely foreign to their families, even down to a style of dress which, in both sexes, is as odd and disturbing to those families as it is to me.
No one in the Syrian Civil War corresponds to the Carlists who fought for a vision of a Social Catholic Spain which Franco had no intention of implementing, and many of whom have since ended up on the Left as conventionally defined, while all of them remain staunch opponents of liberal capitalism: conservatives in the true sense, which cannot begin to be understood within the actual or affected framework of the American Republic, including that affectation in recent years by the Spanish Right.
Nor does anyone in the Syrian Civil War correspond to the ILP Contingent, which went out to fight Fascism, but which ended up being killed by the forces of Stalinism.
The only point of comparison is that almost all British Catholics in the 1930s were Labour supporters, and indeed they provided most or all of the Labour Party's electoral base and of its organisation in their community's centres of population, yet few Labour supporters felt any urge to fight for the Spanish Republic, most actively rejected the idea, barely any British Catholics felt any urge to fight for Franco, and almost all actively rejected that idea.
Likewise, almost all British Muslims today, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, are Labour supporters, and indeed they provide most or all of the Labour Party's electoral base and of its organisation in their community's centres of population, yet few if any Labour supporters feel any urge to fight for the Syrian Arab Republic, most or all actively reject the idea, barely any British Muslims feel any urge to fight for the rebels, and almost all actively reject that idea.
Clearly, while there were also people motivated by pure anti-Fascism, for all the good that it did them, the Soviet and satellite causes were unrecognisable, incomprehensible and wholly unattractive to everyone on the British Left, and certainly to those of Labour allegiance, apart from a handful of discontented and maladjusted people, mostly in the throws of male late adolescence.
Clearly, Franco's National Catholicism (and other people have tried that one, including in England) was unrecognisable, incomprehensible and wholly unattractive to all British Catholics apart from a tiny, tiny, tiny handful of discontented and maladjusted people, mostly in the throws of male late adolescence.
And just as clearly, the Sunnism of the Syrian insurgents and of Syria's Turkish, Saudi and Qatari invaders is unrecognisable, incomprehensible and wholly unattractive to all British Sunni Muslims apart from a handful of discontented and maladjusted people, mostly in the throws of male late adolescence.
Nevertheless, they do exist. Their equivalents on the other side - the side of pluralism, of Christianity within that pluralism, and of at least the aspiration to some form of Socialism, not least as an expression of that Christianity - do not. That is very telling. Very, very telling, indeed.
Likewise, almost all British Muslims today, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, are Labour supporters, and indeed they provide most or all of the Labour Party's electoral base and of its organisation in their community's centres of population, yet few if any Labour supporters feel any urge to fight for the Syrian Arab Republic, most or all actively reject the idea, barely any British Muslims feel any urge to fight for the rebels, and almost all actively reject that idea.
Clearly, while there were also people motivated by pure anti-Fascism, for all the good that it did them, the Soviet and satellite causes were unrecognisable, incomprehensible and wholly unattractive to everyone on the British Left, and certainly to those of Labour allegiance, apart from a handful of discontented and maladjusted people, mostly in the throws of male late adolescence.
Clearly, Franco's National Catholicism (and other people have tried that one, including in England) was unrecognisable, incomprehensible and wholly unattractive to all British Catholics apart from a tiny, tiny, tiny handful of discontented and maladjusted people, mostly in the throws of male late adolescence.
And just as clearly, the Sunnism of the Syrian insurgents and of Syria's Turkish, Saudi and Qatari invaders is unrecognisable, incomprehensible and wholly unattractive to all British Sunni Muslims apart from a handful of discontented and maladjusted people, mostly in the throws of male late adolescence.
Nevertheless, they do exist. Their equivalents on the other side - the side of pluralism, of Christianity within that pluralism, and of at least the aspiration to some form of Socialism, not least as an expression of that Christianity - do not. That is very telling. Very, very telling, indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment