The Narcissistas

By Jake Wilde

You will certainly have an opinion about Donald Trump, perhaps the world’s most famous alleged narcissist, and most of us will have indulged in a bit of cod psychology to try and understand the extraordinary things he says and does.  I ask you to bear him in mind while I try and draw a comparison.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, individuals with narcissistic personality disorder present most or all of the following symptoms:

1. Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
3. Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
4. Needing constant admiration from others
5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
7. Unwilling to empathize with others’ feelings, wishes, or needs
8. Intensely envious of others and the belief that others are equally envious of them
9. Pompous and arrogant demeanour

But what if these symptoms were the reflective of the character a whole political movement? A movement that seems simultaneously immune to and extraordinarily hurt by any form of criticism. A movement defined more by its own existence rather than any coherent set of beliefs. A movement where obvious homilies are passed off as fully formed policies. A movement that prides itself on being rebellious and anti-establishment but that demands unquestioning support and loyalty from all those associated with it.

Those of you familiar with the far left have long known that they hold their views as superior, both intellectually and morally. While it’s rare, even in these forgetful times, to hear somebody come out and openly propose Marxism as a way of running an economy, everyone on the left is supposed to be anti-capitalist, and if you’re not then best start running, dog. Capitalism is not merely a different method of economic organisation, it is evil, and any proponents of it, however reformist, are similarly satanic. I’m always dismayed when I see this kind of language taken up by otherwise sensible politicians; the resort to biblical notions of good and evil rather than engagement with alternative political ideas is the refuge of the dimwit. Even the most extreme ideas of left and right, ones that propose that it is acceptable to kill human beings, can be condemned without the need to imagine their proponents guided by hoof and horn.

One of the barriers to the grand dream of a broad, united left has always been the impossibility of agreeing on ideological questions. The far left enjoy nothing more than finding the point of difference between themselves, cracking it wide open and then having a good purge. What strikes me as different about Corbynism is the utter absence of ideology. The only common word in use is “socialism”, a catch-all that enables people from fundamentally opposed belief structures to share that same label.

The Corbynistas have thus far prevented splitting and purging and managed to cope with a slow dwindling as otherwise significant individuals, from commentators to economists, have begun to cash in their chips. They’ve done this by avoiding anything any more detailed than ten pledges that would achieve consensus on any parish council. But if they’re not bound by ideology then by what? Can it really be Jeremy Corbyn’s electric personality, his oratory skills, and his clear and inspiring leadership? Er, no.

I think the answer lies elsewhere, primarily in their attitude to others. From the very beginning the Corbynista movement has defined itself by contrast. That may be as a consequence of originating in an internal party leadership contest, where narrow differences between candidates are amplified (most people mistakenly thought the denunciations would stop after the election). Occasionally it has been mistaken for a pure personality cult – that Corbynism was all about Corbyn – and thus some thought that the removal of Corbyn would see it come to an end. But if you observe what Corbynistas, from Jeremy himself down to the lowliest troll, say then it is about the sheer belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong. In fact, in the view of the Corbynistas, some of their opponents are more than just wrong, they are malevolently so, and their intentions are accordingly wicked.

The Labour Party’s broad church principle meant that in the past the party leadership always made the effort to make the tent as wide as possible. By contrast Corbynistas have defined the boundary of the tent in a very limited way and you either join (in whole, not in part) or you are outside. There are no lessons to be learnt from anyone outside the tent, and any opposition to them is either malice or conspiracy. It can never be genuine as to admit that would be to admit that there might be more than one version of the truth. Here the Labour Party has been complicit, by allowing the myth to develop that the far left are the conscience of the party, the keepers of the flame of what Labour should be. The Corbynistas took that foolishness and exploited it.

And so, just like Donald Trump, the response is devastating hostility if you cross or criticise, if you ask awkward questions, if you challenge the racism or the sexism, or if you cast doubt on their true levels of support. Jeremy is “best leader Labour has ever had”, McDonnell is somehow “the People’s Chancellor” and the likes of Long-Bailey, Burgon and Rayner are inexplicably “rising stars”. And when a Corbynista is exposed to the disinfectant of sunlight the collective behave in exactly the same way as the individual narcissist – deflection, denial and whataboutery. This is narcissism – practiced by the collective in exactly the same way as by the individual.

Narcissus’ demise came, essentially by his own hand. Drawn to his reflection in a pool of water he gazed upon himself until he died, ignoring the real world around him, entranced and enchanted by his own reflection. He will have decayed before his own eyes, yet unable to see his decline. And so the same fate will befall the Narcissistas, as they become increasingly focussed upon their own reflection. It’s not too late to break free of them.

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Free speech is the antidote to Trump

Eyes up in Britain

Benjamin Franklin got it right. By DonkeyHotey; CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

The polarising president is a threat to truth itself. Beating him requires a renewed commitment to the most fundamental western value of all.

We can see where this is going. Donald Trump has promised a crackdown on media companies which cover him unfavourably. He tweeted an attack on the New York Times while soldiers he commanded were taking part in a failed raid in Yemen. He held a press conference where he berated the media for more than an hour.

His and his cronies’ lies have become ‘alternative facts’. His spokeswoman has cited a non-existent massacre as justification for his most controversial policy. He has lashed out at the intelligence agencies and begun a review which threatens their independence.

This wannabe autocrat is not just a threat to a 240-year-old republic founded on small-l liberal values…

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2001 again

By Jake Wilde

I’ve never been much of a joiner. At university the assorted political parties of the far left, or their front organisations posing as single issue groups, revolted me and none of the major political parties offered anything that interested me. In hindsight I think that’s because I was following a path that had more resonance in the United States than in the United Kingdom, where the anti-Stalinist left had embraced the principles of democracy, personal freedom and liberty more commonly associated with American conservatism. I hold a general view that the state has key role to play in delivering essential services to its citizens and can and should do things the market can’t and won’t, but that individuals need to have the freedom to operate economically outside of state control, and to have complete freedom of political thought. The problem I always had with Marxism was that the cobbler could never make a pair of shoes for his daughter, and the problem I always had with Leninism and Stalinism was the mass murder. In short, although I didn’t know it at the time, I was more of a neoconservative than anything else and in the late nineties there really wasn’t much interest in attracting the neocon vote.

When Tony Blair became the first Labour Prime Minister of my adulthood I was pleased but no more so than any other Labour voter. It never occurred to me to join the Labour Party as it still tolerated the kind of people we now call Corbynistas. When I started work and became a trade union representative I encountered these people every day, and they moved in the same sphere and held broadly the same views as those in the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party. There was no obvious distinction between those of them who were members of the Labour Party or those who were in the fringe parties. Any differences between them seemed to be more about which personality cult they favoured.

The single event that prompted me to join the Labour Party was the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. Finally here was a political party actually prepared to fight fascism, rather than to pretend to do so in order to promote its own agenda. It’s often said that the far left have been at the forefront of the fight against fascism, sexism, racism and homophobia. This is nonsense. The far left have always hijacked those campaigns to use them for self-promotion, to swell the numbers seemingly prepared to foment revolution or simply to use those causes to rail against capitalism and The West. This is not an essay about Iraq, but I remain firmly of the view that the liberation of the Iraqi people ranks alongside the creation of the NHS and the introduction of the minimum wage in the pantheon of achievements by the Labour Party.

It strikes me that, in the same way that “Iraq” has become the standard retort to any defence of Blairism, “Syria” will be the single word used to define the Labour Party’s post-Iraq cowardice. Unlike Iraq, where military action would have taken place even without UK involvement, the military action against Assad did not occur solely because the UK did not participate, and precisely because of the attitude of the Labour Party, as directed by the then Corbyn–led Stop The War Coalition.

Thus where the liberation of Iraq led to democratic elections and a multicultural society (as reflected in today’s Iraqi army), the non-liberation of Syria has led to a fascist, torturing, murdering, sectarian dictator remaining in power. The Labour Party should take credit for the former and must take the blame for the latter. Jeremy Corbyn has far more blood on his hands than Tony Blair.

So with the reason for my joining Labour now treated with disgust, and the party under the far left’s control, I am back where I started. I was only ever what I’ll call a CBeebies Blairite – of a generation with young kids when Blair was at his height, and only needing a elementary understanding of what Blairism was in order to support it. I doubt that there will ever be a political party that fully represents my views but in that sense I am no different from those who share my viewpoint on the other side of the Atlantic, who must have found themselves looking at Trump and Clinton in the same way as I look at May and Corbyn. Nevertheless I regard myself as lucky to have been, for a short time in the mid 2000s, in the right place at the right time.

Why is any of this relevant in 2017, you may very well ask. I may be being overly self-centred, even by my standards, but I don’t think I was the only person who felt politically seasick during 2016. I’ve read countless articles about how everything has changed, how populations across the world are rejecting elites, about a revolt against liberalism. It’s seductive stuff because everyone, especially those who write political articles for a living, likes to think that they live in historic times. I just don’t think it’s true. No grand realignment has occurred, there has been no massive change in the way people think and Trump, Corbyn and Brexit are not reflections of a populist uprising.

Leo Strauss, one of the founders of neoconservative thought, was writing in the 1960s when he said “the crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose” but his view equally applies today. In America liberals call Trump a sexist but then defend the burqa, while conservatives laud the importance of freedom to the human spirit but then forcefully deny it to those from different continents. The notion that what we call liberalism and conservatism are vastly different becomes a nonsense when contrasted to the world view held by Islamists, for example. Yet Obama can’t bring himself to confront Islamism and Trump is happy to consign moderate Muslims to their deaths. As a consequence no political leader in the US is entering 2017 with any credit or a clear vision about how to lead the world’s response to the threats to the unifying Western principles of democracy, freedom and liberty.

I’ve written before about my astonishment that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls seems to be the only senior Western politician prepared to recognise Islamism for what it is and challenge it but, crucially, attempt to preserve Western values while doing so. He knows that tolerating the apparently softer edges of Islamism, such as dress codes and segregation, fuels extremism, rather than assuages it and by normalising Islamist ideology and practice we accept it when we should be rejecting it. He also knows that the first victims of toleration of Islamism are Muslims, Muslims who would and should be at the forefront of opposition to Islamism. But politicians such as Trump make the critical mistake of lumping all Muslims in with Islamists, rather than acknowledging that Muslims are the Islamists’ first and most frequent targets. They then compound their error with precisely those Muslims who are looking to the West for help, by suppressing them, failing to give them safe refuge or ignoring their pleas for help in fighting back against Islamist (or other forms of) oppression. Western leaders need to learn that secular democrats who happen to be Muslim are vital in the war against Islamism. There’s no difference between Obama and Trump on this, albeit for different reasons.

That’s one of the reasons why I see the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations as little different to the handover from Bill Clinton to George W Bush. During the 2000 election campaign Bush had criticised Clinton, and by connection Al Gore, for being too interventionist: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.” This is precisely the objection Trump raised against Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy plans. And while Bill Clinton did intervene on occasion his failure to effectively deal with Islamism would prove to have devastating consequences. After an equally controversial election, demonstrations accompanied the 2001 inauguration, as there will be for Trump’s, and Bush also started his presidency by pushing through tax cuts and controversial environmental initiatives that some saw as being driven by his links to big business. If you set aside Donald Trump’s talent for courting publicity through manipulating media controversy, then there is little to separate him from the 2001 pre-9/11 version of George W Bush.

The Labour Party, in the manner of someone who hasn’t had a hangover for a while and is sat in the pub drinking like there’s no tomorrow, has forgotten just how electorally damaging left wing ideology is in this country. The British far left always turn to the comfort of religious scripture, interpreted for today’s world by the next round of Marxist prophets, and cast judgement upon those made impure by having to make real decisions that matter. That’s why their greenest bile is reserved for Labour governments. We should be thankful of the greatest check against extremism that this country possesses – the British electorate. The current leadership of the Labour Party are there simply because not many people are members of a political party and all of the far left wing ones have joined Labour. It’s no more complicated than that, and it has no meaning to anybody who is not a member of the Labour Party. It is only once the electorate start to hear what Labour now offers that the true horror of what has happened to the party dawns upon the general population. Lost deposits in by elections are not freak results, they are what happens when Corbyn’s version of the Labour Party meets the real world.

Voting in the EU referendum saw people across the UK discard their party political home and vote according to their instinctive sense of what the EU represented to them. None of the major political parties, not even the SNP, were able to deliver “their” voters to support their preferred outcome so it is understandable but incorrect to regard the outcome as a rejection of traditional politics. That the country should be split on their view, and most didn’t even have a view, of an organisation that none of the major political parties particularly liked to talk about surely shouldn’t be a surprise. The EU has been variously painted as a bogeyman or a sugar daddy, punishing small businesses with red tape that Whitehall would never impose, or protecting workers with legislation that Westminster would never have allowed. Neither is true but both are believed with equal religiosity by their proponents. In the end the electorate were forced to rely upon a personal interpretation of a binary question about what an unknown future held and yet people have the nerve to tell those who voted the other way that they were wrong to do so.

That’s why I think 2016 was no different to any other year. There was no populist revolt, no death of liberalism, and no rejection of elites. Trump is no more a fascist than Obama is a communist. Corbyn is less a threat to the establishment than he is a part of the establishment. Brexit was a consequence of slightly more people guessing that Leave was a better option than Remain. 2017 is more like 2001, with a two-term Democrat handing over to a Republican widely ridiculed by the left, a UK government untroubled by an incompetent and ideologically unpopular opposition, and our relationship with Europe still a mystery to pretty much everyone. So perhaps in a couple of years someone will come along who will make me a joiner again. They need not rush.

The Muslim leader who can defeat Islamism

By Jake Wilde

After the terrorist attacks in Brussels three months ago I wrote about the danger of under-reacting, in particular about not making the mistake of thinking that Daesh were comparable to traditional European “liberation” movements such as the IRA.

“Daesh are not attacking European cities in order to conquer them. Or to force countries to leave them in peace in their so-called caliphate. They attack because they wish us dead. If they had nuclear weapons they would use them. There are no demands from Daesh because they have none. There are no warnings before bombings because this is not about terror, it is about death. There is nothing to negotiate, nothing to discuss over a cup of tea.”

I think this is being missed in the analysis of the atrocity in Orlando, described by President Obama as terrorism (and there are other factors involved too). This is understandable shorthand for ideologically based mass murder but it is incorrect. The purpose of terrorism is to induce fear amongst a population in order to modify behaviour, such as the withdrawal of troops or political concessions, or flight amongst a civilian population. Daesh have no such motivations. They do not demand that the United States stop their bombing campaign. They do not demand peace talks. These are not terror attacks, these are death attacks.

In my previous piece I also drew the contrast between Al Qaeda and Daesh, in that the latter have generally relied upon radicalised national citizens to undertake their attacks, either as part of a centrally organised and coordinated campaign using cells and networks, or inspiring individuals to act alone without any direction. This is covered in greater detail in an excellent piece by Kevin D Williamson today in National Review:

“We speak of “lone wolf” jihadists as though this phenomenon were somehow independent of the wider Islamist project. It is not. The model of “leaderless resistance” in the service of terrorist projects is not new, and it has not been employed by the Islamists at random. If Omar Mateen turns out, as expected, to have had little or no substantive contact with organized Islamist groups, that fact will demonstrate the success of their communication strategy rather than the limitations of their reach.”

Max Boot, writing in Commentary today, also makes the point that there is no magic bullet for stopping the “lone wolf”, but diligence and extensive (occasionally undercover) intelligence:

Of course, the best human intelligence-gathering depends on the cooperation of the communities where you are trying to gain information. Thus, maintaining good relations between the American Muslim community and various law enforcement agencies is of critical importance. Unfortunately Donald Trump’s crude anti-Muslim rhetoric and his calls to “ban” foreign Muslims (which would not have stopped the American-born Mateen) detract from this goal by sending Muslims a message that they are less than wholly American. Part of the reason why there has been less terrorism in the U.S. than in Europe is that we have done a better job of assimilating our Muslims. It would be a costly tragedy if that achievement were to be undone.

The multi-layered Islamist war upon non-Islamists claims lives across the world, in Iraq and Syria, in Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Western Europe, the United States and countless other countries and regions besides, with the fifty people murdered in Orlando the latest western casualties. The Islamists involved in this war are a mixture of conventional troops, cell-based terror groups and individuals motivated to act alone. The latter two concentrate upon, almost exclusively, “soft” targets amongst the civilian population. As Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister who is still the clearest voice in The West on what needs to be done, observed after the Paris Attacks “We are at war”. So why are we not behaving as though we are? There is no sense that we, as a society, have been galvanised to do anything other than mourn when yet another atrocity is committed.

We need to be honest with ourselves. We have an enemy, and that enemy wants us dead. We must abandon our normal concepts of an enemy that can be subdued, educated and brought back into the fold. I fear we have yet to convince people, especially in the West, that this is not like the terrorism they are either used to or have read in history books. The blunt truth is that the only good Islamist is a dead Islamist. This is a difficult concept for our Western liberal sensitivities to accept.

But we forget that we are not the only enemy of Islamism and we need to work harder to build alliances at home and around the world, not just with Muslims but with everybody who isn’t an Islamist. This requires genuine leadership. It is understandable why some have mistaken Donald Trump’s overblown, ill-conceived and insubstantial rhetoric for leadership.

The controversy surrounding Owen Jones’s appearance on Sky News illustrates what needs to happen. People who attend a gay-friendly nightclub are targets in the same way as Nigerian schoolgirls, Jewish shoppers, or Parisian rock fans. Gay people are targeted because they are gay, and that, to Islamists, is an additional crime upon their broader crime of not being Islamists. It follows that there should be common ground between the LGBTI community and every other non-Islamist section of society on this one issue if nothing else, and this is important enough to be called a matter of life or death.

To create such an alliance between the LGBTI community and non-Islamist Muslims is certainly a challenge but we have, in Europe, an example of the leadership that is required. Earlier today I tweeted about the importance of Muslim leaders like Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi:

In the fight against Islamism leaders like @HashimThaciRKS are vitalhttps://t.co/H2Kmdxiw4Khttps://t.co/hMx3wW4OXLhttps://t.co/78gSamFpKB

— (((Jake Wilde))) (@Jake_Wilde) June 13, 2016

President Thaçi is a Muslim who fought to liberate his country, not to impose a caliphate but a liberal democracy. He is the fifth President of a country that saw 314 of its citizens join Daesh in the last two years. Constitutionally secular Kosovo has found itself at the centre of the broader conflict between the old West and the new East. This is from Carlotta Gall’s detailed piece for the New York Times on Daesh’s Kosovar recruits:

They were radicalized and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.

“They promoted political Islam,” said Fatos Makolli, the director of Kosovo’s counterterrorism police. “They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.”

In May of this year President Thaçi was at the head of Pristina’s first ever Gay Pride march. Those who think that it is impossible for Islam and the LGBTI community to work together against hate and death need look no further than President Thaçi. More than that, he also knows the perils of failing to act. Carlotta Gall again:

Why the Kosovar authorities — and American and United Nations overseers — did not act sooner to forestall the spread of extremism is a question being intensely debated.

As early as 2004, the Prime Minister at the time, Bajram Rexhepi, tried to introduce a law to ban extremist sects. But, he said in a recent interview at his home in northern Kosovo, European officials told him that it would violate freedom of religion.

“It was not in their interest, they did not want to irritate some Islamic countries,” Mr Rexhepi said. “They simply did not do anything.”

Writing in The Guardian towards the end of 2014, while Prime Minister, Thaçi said:

“Kosovo is a country where the majority of the population declare themselves to be Muslim. But Kosovars wholly reject the religious dogma proposed by radical strains of political Islam, and we shall not allow it to endanger our path towards eventual NATO and EU membership.

We will crush any cells that believe, wrongfully, that they can find cover in Kosovo. Just as my former guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army rejected offers from jihadists who wanted to volunteer in the 1999 war, we now reject the new evil that is stemming from Islamic State and related groups in the Middle East.”

Here is the model then, for both Western countries and Islamism’s enemies amongst Islamic countries, to follow. Kosovo have turned the situation around, destroying the networks that acted as recruitment to Daesh and putting the perpetrators on trial. The result has been popular support for Hashim Thaçi’s election as President in February and Kosovars having the highest approval rating in the world for the United States.

Writing after Austria’s Presidential election saw a narrow defeat for the far right candidate, Norbert Hofer, Thaçi explained the potentially crucial role that Kosovars, and other Balkan citizens, could play in the quest for a peaceful future:

“Hofer’s platform, like other far-right movements in Europe is based on the Huntingtonian concept of the clash of civilizations and on promoting the theory that Islam is incompatible with Europe. For us in Kosovo, Albania or Bosnia, with large strata of our societies belonging to the Muslim faith, this effectively excludes us from feeling part of the continent where we have lived for centuries, indeed millennia.

Besides, Kosovo is not Muslim: our society is secular and civic.

Kosovo became the first Balkan country to elect a woman president in 2011 and is the only Balkan country to have recognised the LGBTI community in its constitution. I led the LGBTI Pride Parade in Kosovo last month to mark our support for this community precisely to show our citizens and the wider world that extremism and prejudice has no place in our midst.

Neither are we a safe haven for extremists. Our security services have made 110 arrests and secured 67 indictments and 26 convictions against ISIS supporters in our country. US Secretary of State John Kerry noted in a recent visit to Kosovo that Kosovars are the regional leaders in combating violent extremism.”

The bombastic soundbites and the vague military strategy offered by Donald Trump needs to be rejected, not because the use of force is not the solution, but because Trump suggests that he can solve the problem without Muslims. That is to ignore the most fundamental of simple facts – more Muslims die at the hands of Islamists than anyone else. Islamism is a far bigger problem for Muslims than it is for The West and Muslims like Hashim Thaçi have proved they have the answers to destroy Islamism while retaining a commitment to liberal democracy. If it’s a strongman you want then at least look to the real thing.