The USA and Britain, societies devoid of justice.

I have not posted for some time because I am watching the gradual disintegration of our political systems on both sides of the Atlantic due to the quite deliberate and sustained assault by the political classes on our traditional norms and values, but only as they impact on them, they are still required for the rest of us. Poisoned by so many years of entrenched free market ideology it has now become the one prevailing norm that the political and economic elites must not be restrained in any fashion and that their behaviour must not be subject to traditional forms of regulation, that they should be able to act, and say, anything they want free from accountability or restraint. I have also been wondering if there is any point in writing such things as there is no one listening. I'm beginning to suspect that the White House Moron was quite correct when he said that he could shoot anyone in the streets and get away with it as he is beginning to resemble Der Furher in his language and behaviour and apparently in the eyes of his supporters. A similar state of public paralysis bedevils the UK with an unbelievable display of recurring incompetence in both government and opposition. What is most worrying is the contempt that our political elites display for the law and conventional decency.  

If I may I seek your tolerance to return to a recurring theme of this blog, let me remind you how Adam Smith told us that society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another and that justice is essential to the existence of society, indeed he tells us that the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy society. According to Smith, justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice that is society and that if justice is removed the great and immense fabric of society must in a moment crumble into atoms. He tells us that few men have reflected on the necessity of justice to the existence of society, regardless of how obvious that necessity may appear to be. Thirteen hundred years before Smith, Augustine of Hippo reached the same conclusion telling us that if you take away justice, what are nations but massive gangs of thieves? He tells us that where there is no justice there is no commonwealth. His term, commonwealth derives from the Greek, res publica, the public realm. Thus, without justice there can be no public realm, society will be atomised and fractured. Thus as Smith told us, there is no society.

I don't think that many intelligent people would argue with the notion that both the USA and the UK, dominated by an addiction to free market ideological dogma, have become characterised as massive gangs of thieves and that our public realms are both fractured, divided and atomised. Yesterday we had the EU warning us that the United Kingdom will probably not survive Brexit as it will almost certainly lead to Scottish Independence, with the further possibility of Irish unification thus causing the UK to lose two of its four constituent parts. This is because the UK has now become devoid of any forms of justice, with intolerance, inequality, open hatreds and the demonisation of large sectors of our populations now quite accepted as the norm.

You see justice and the free market are incompatible, they are mutually exclusive. As the free market demands the continued deregulation of human behaviour and activity, justice demands the opposite, because justice is a form of regulation. Justice is a constraint, it regulates human behaviour and particularly the behaviour of the powerful, redressing the gulf between power and powerlessness. Justice demands that people restrain their greed, their selfishness, and prevents abuse and damage. It redistributes opportunity, a certain amount of wealth and life chances. It is the realisation of the truism that all people are born equal, that fundamental concept that has been abandoned in both the US and the UK by those at the top, the worst in society whose governments now can be truly defined as kakistocracies. Our problems are fundamentally ideological. It is the ideological obsession with a particular political and economic dogma that has shaped the institutional structures of our respective societies and has unleashed greed and ruthlessness and the determination to utilise power to do whatever the powerful want in their own interests, regardless of the effects on the rest of us. The result is that we are in danger of watching our nations crumbling into atoms because we tolerate and indeed support, organised gangs of thieves masquerading as politicians. As a result, the worst has risen to the top and we are getting what we voted for. This is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan. I trust we can live with the consequences. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat   

It will have to get worse before it gets better

Well it looks as if its the end for the Spider, brought low by his own overweening arrogance, a case of classic hubris. He will of course limp along, clinging on to his parliamentary constituency, but he must now be surely discredited, branded a Poundland version of the White House moron. We may even be spared any more idiots assuring us that he is an intelligent man. What his latest disgraceful episode does highlight, however, is the destructive divisions that beset this sorry nation and demonstrates the deep seated racism that characterises the British public, or at least the English public and the media that encourages them and people like the Spider.

Johnson is only the latest manifestation of the horrendous racism and division brought to the surface by Brexit. As I write, we have a national scandal being played out that plagues both of our national major political parties. Labour is at war over anti-semitism and the danger that the Labour party poses to the Jewish community, and the Tories are at war over anti-Islamism and the danger the Conservatives pose to the Muslim community. All commentators are agreed that Johnson's jibes at Muslim women were aimed at garnering support from the Tory grassroots Muslim hating supporters. It was, in his own imbecilic manner, an attempt to position himself for the Tory leadership. What that tells you is the nature of the Tory grassroots. At the other end of the spectrum, Labour assumes that every Jewish person is a quasi-fascist, Palestinian hating Zionist. This is a sample of the narratives that drive national party politics in the UK. I am confident that Corbyn and his Jewish hating supporters don't even know what a real Zionist, or indeed Zionism, is. By the same logic, the Tories assume that every Muslim is a closet Jihadi terrorist, just waiting for a call to turn themselves into a suicide bomber. Politics in the UK is not in the gutter, it has sunk well below that. Indeed it is significant that Johnson's Telegraph article came on the heels of his meetings with Steve Bannon and his circle. 

I have written before, and do not apologise for repeating it, that what we are witnessing is the end product of Thatcherism and her determination to destroy the normative and value systems of British life. She saw a society she hated and determined to destroy it. She has been spectacularly successful, I hope she is proud. Thatcher set in motion a systemic agenda to destroy the public and collective nature of British society, to atomise it and reduce all values to an economic price imperative. She promoted a policy of aggressive and ruthlessly selfish individualism, and we now have a nation of aggressive and ruthless selfish individuals. In modern free market Tory Britain, if anything has no  monetary value, if it cannot be priced, then it has no value, it is worthless, and that includes people, the type of people the Nazis called the ballastexistenzen; untermenschen to be discarded and eliminated wherever possible. If you read this from outside the UK I trust you are aware of how frequently the Tories are referred to as cruel and heartless as they target the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, those people who have no market value, the worthless. Coupled with that is their demonstrable racism towards immigrants and foreigners in general. They openly display a genuine loathing of non-whites. This is what a significant section of the British electorate persistently vote for. If England ever becomes an independent country, its declaration will begin with "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all white, English, Christian men are created equal." The Spider is the role model for this form of English nationalism. It should also be asked why the Daily Telegraph commissioned and published his article if you think he is a lone eccentric voice, or why the Prime Minister was careful not to personally condemn him, contenting herself with agreeing with others who did.

What we see around us is the wreckage of free market Thatcherism, but she never gets the blame. It is always the scapegoat, the unions, socialism, immigrants, and above all, the EU. As you know I sincerely hope that we get the hardest of Brexits because not until the British get their noses firmly rubbed into the filth that results from their own stupidity, until it becomes too obvious even for Nigel Garbage, Liam Fox or Michael Gove to deny, will we be able to begin a meaningful recovery. That will require a new politics and a new political class. The signs are not hopeful. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

The free market is an illness that will destroy the body politic

In the UK we are ruled by ideologues, the very worst kind of person to have in government. Government is the art of the possible, requiring compromise and the ability to consider other opinions and the necessity to be able to admit that you may be wrong. Those qualities are completely absent from British government and the mainstream political class. In the USA we see a person who is psychologically incapable of even contemplating that he is not totally correct in everything he says and does, we know that because he keeps reminding us how omnipotent he is. Thus in both our nations we are governed by people who are unwilling, indeed determinedly unwilling, to consider alternatives or compromise. This is government of the worst kind.

At a time when a coherent and active opposition is absolutely essential the British Labour Party are immersed in a quite insane ideological war within itself over antisemitism, with a leader who is a dogmatic ideologist of the worst kind, rendering it incapable of mounting any serious challenge to anything this most incompetent government does, whilst in the US, the Democrats hold blindly to the dominant economic narrative of free markets and therefore fail to offer any coherent alternatives to an imbecile. That is a serious state of affairs, when a major political party in the most powerful country in history cannot mount a serious campaign against an ignoramus who is demonstrably deranged. In the UK Labour has ensured that it has lost any chance of support from the Jewish community and those sympathetic to them and from anyone who intelligently sees that this is not a party that will support a wider constituency than those who ideologically support them. They simply will not compromise, and as I keep reminding you, is why they continually fail to hold any credibility in Scotland where they are widely regarded as a branch office of the London Labour elite (a branch office was what they were branded by their own Scottish leader).

That is the same story we have with the Tories, whose ideological commitment to the free market is an obsession. As you know, I maintain that there is no such thing, nor can be any such thing, as a free market. It is an illusion, and a fraud. Free trade is one thing, a free market is quite another, but no-one in this sorry society seems prepared to challenge the assumption that they are different and normally incompatible. That is why I hold modern economics, and modern economists in such contempt. Even so-called socialists today believe that there can be free markets, they just don't want them. They seem oblivious to the fact that they are a nonsense. As a result, the dominant narrative goes unchallenged, and it is the dominant narrative that is the problem. That is what has given us Brexit, The Know Nothing, and the descent into barbarism we are witnessing throughout the world.

The free market narrative has very successfully campaigned over many years against restraints, against regulation, and this anti-regulatory mentality has spread into every corner of our lives. We now habitually complain about any kind of restraint on our behaviour and activities as some kind of breach of our human rights. As a result, far too many people believe that their behaviour should be uncontrolled, and this extends to language, both verbal and print, leading to people believing they have the right to abuse whoever and however they please. This has its worst manifestation in government and in the political classes, but it percolates right down throughout society. The Know Nothing takes any form of restraint on his language and behaviour as a personal insult and launches a tirade against whoever or whatever seeks to hold him to account, be it the press, the judiciary, foreign governments, or his political opponents. In the UK we have a similar phenomenon that is more widely diffused throughout society as we have some of the most odious media outlets who are prepared to say anything they like regardless of truth of fact. This again spreads throughout society causing racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner hatreds and violence. But they all refuse to accept responsibility or be liable to constrain their language and behaviour. Thus, the free market has destroyed decency, self-respect and respect for others. It has fostered hatred, violence and division. The free market, both in its economic and political manifestations is a sickness that is rotting the body politic. 

But the worst crime of the free marketeers is that they persistently preach about freedom and liberty without having the faintest idea what freedom and liberty mean. To the free marketeer, freedom means being able to do exactly as they wish free from being held accountable to anything or anyone, including the law, and the rule of law, and most certainly not the electorate. In addition, freedom and liberty only apply to them, not to the rest of us. To the free marketeer freedom means that they must have the freedom to remove freedom and liberty from the rest of us and reduce us to a state of slavery, poverty and dependence, because our freedom and liberty means that they will have to sacrifice some of their wealth, but more importantly, the mechanisms by which they gained that wealth. We must never be allowed freedom to challenge them or campaign for real concrete and meaningful freedom and liberty, from poverty, from austerity, from unemployment, homelessness etc, all goals that the free marketeer insists must be our legacy whilst they enjoy the fruits of their selfish criminality. This is what Toryism represents, this is what the Know Nothing and the Republicans represent, this is what Brexit represents, this is what so many of you voted for. Keep believing in your free market paradise and keep it in mind in your coming slavery. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat