The Road To Unfreedom

The Road to Unfreedom is one of those tomes that American academia can produce - the outpourings of a suave professor (in this case Yale no less) that can knock on the door of the bestseller lists. And, as it happens, quite right too. Enticingly written it ranges over Trump, Putin, Brexit and much else and has serious things to say about serious subjects.

Snyder and I would disagree over Brexit (like most Americans he doesn't get it) but we can park that because my enemy's enemy is my friend. And Snyder clearly loathes Putin and the man he regards as that rogue's Manchurian candidate, our old mate Donald Trump.

We are in the realms of Right Hegelians (Lenin) and Left Hegelians (Ilyin and latterly Putin). We are in the danger zone where an inevitablist view of history disappears up its own behind and abandons the field to the eternalists. We are in the death-zone for individualism.

The politics of eternity cannot make Putin or any other man immortal. But it can make other ideas unthinkable. And that is what eternity means: the same thing over and over again, a tedium exciting to believers because of the illusion that it is particularly theirs.

 

 

A Funny Old Thing

Life, that is. I find it hard to abide either Donald Trump or Jeremy Corbyn but, wonder of wonders, I find myself incapable of a knee-jerk reaction against either of them on certain recent and select issues. Am I growing old, is my political knee no longer working?

Big Fat Pig's new mates

Trump is an odious creep. His attitude to women is antediluvian; his reaction to the latest school shootings was immoral and sententiously boastful. However his cut in corporation tax makes some libertarian sense and (at a stretch) his goading of North Korea may just have forced that rogue state to the negotiating table. Now the libertarian streak in me should not approve of the threatened trade war with China, but I have a particular animus against China (bet that's got them quaking in their boots) and if the free world is going to pick an economic fight then it should be with China. Trump is an inexcusably horrid man but, as any idiot savant, he has his moments. I still hope that he is hounded out of office in disgrace and that he will be shunned by his wider public. Fat chance.

Corbyn is a middleweight at best (even as I type this I feel an apology to all middleweights coming on) but his muted reaction to the Russian poison attack strikes me as the right one. The rush to condemn Russia has a strong whiff of the 'dodgy dossier' about it. Theresa May should be very alarmed that her stance has attracted support from the invariably wrong David Miliband - mind you Miliband did use the word 'revanchist' in his interview and I have to admit that it's a top-hole word I plan on using at the first opportunity. Russia is a kleptocracy and Putin is plainly a wrong'un but pick your fights guys, or at the very least establish your casus belli and lay it open to public scrutiny.

So that's me then, managing to be an 'apologist' (current political commentary's most overused word) for Trump, Putin and Corbyn all at the same time. Mind you after weeks of slobbing around I did run/trudge three miles this morning so I'm not a complete lost cause. Maybe my brain has gone as flabby as my body.