UK political system withers with winds of failures
By Karma Nabulsi
LONDON: How could a prime minister destroy a country, in full view of his people and the media, and not be called to account? In 1965, a professor at Brandeis University, in the US, wrote an essay dedicated to his students. At the height of the violent civil rights struggle in the southern US and the country’s brutal immersion in Vietnam, Herbert Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance described a system where democratic institutions had begun to fail in their role of protecting and developing the essential qualities of their progressive nature. Instead of a political culture devoted to civic participation and a dynamic and democratic public space, he illustrated the precise means by which it had become a mechanism to exclude truth and knowledge, to repress the weak and vulnerable, and to strengthen those in power in increasingly unaccountable ways.
What could possibly remain of a concept so steeped in the outdated politics and culture of its time? Yet what was provocatively advanced as a new phenomenon in democratic society is today taken as commonplace. Across the ideological spectrum, people feel helpless and disconnected from political life and from being able to effect real change. The level of public debate and participation has fragmented into a cacophony of voices arguing on conflicting interests in a “tolerant” and “neutral” arena, unable to organise in an effective collectivity. Moral issues of urgency are not only avoided, but given a different reality altogether. Desperate problems — which do have answers — are obscured and then dismissed as “controversies”, as if there were two sides over which one had, at all costs, to remain neutral.
In the tens of thousands of words devoted to Tony Blair’s political legacy and his successor as UK premier Gordon Brown’s platform for future political action, Iraq is rightly seen as the catastrophe it is. But the way it is intertwined with the key issue of peace in the Middle East — and self-determination, justice and freedom for the Palestinians — has been absent. How could such a pervasive amnesia have established itself across the liberal media? From the seamless end of an era to the claim of the fresh start of a new one, spin has reached its apogee. The policies and practices of aggression, repression and occupation have been set alongside the policies and practices of resistance to tyranny, freedom and self-determination, and given moral equivalence.
The intolerable is now invisible. An entirely new set of problems have been created that are the purlieu of the security experts and ministerial committees: the “clash of civilisations”, where “terror” and “security” are cited as the most urgent priority, where political rhetoric is couched in terms of religion as opposed to the real issues driven by injustice, occupation, dispossession and inequality.
The inability of political leaders in Britain to take a sustained principled position on Palestine has been served by the mainstream media, which in the past few years have so obscured the nature of the struggle in Palestine that hardly anyone understands what the conflict is about, or what must be done to end it. Instead we have an existential war about religion and extremism, where Israel, the occupier and regional hyper-power, is cast as eternal friend, liberal, victim and hero. A recent study at Glasgow University, Scotland, revealed the astonishing fact that more than 70 per cent of young people surveyed did not know that East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza are under military occupation by the Israeli army; 11 per cent believe it is the Palestinians who are occupying that land.
The most elementary facts have been separated from the truth. To now propose foreign investment in Gaza as the solution to the expanding illegal settlements and land seizures by Israel, the increasing violence of a 39-year military occupation, the continued dispossession of millions of Palestinian refugees living in dangerous circumstances for nearly 60 years, and even today’s violence in Gaza (entirely a by-product of these larger issues) is, quite simply, to propose the death of Palestine and its people.
In his essay, Marcuse did not dwell on the ways to break out of a system of repressive tolerance in a democracy. His task was to alert a young generation to its functions and dangers. Indeed, that generation created its moment from below and changed policy on civil rights and Vietnam. Yet moments when citizens demand justice in organised protest are not only popular moments, they are also driven forward by courageous leaders. What political leaders need is acts of individual courage. Rather than evoking sanitised portraits of past political icons. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
