A glitch in the system yesterday meant there was a duplication in the Daily Thoughts posts. Please accept our apologies – today we are re-sending the following one, which should have been posted today. Normal Daily Thoughts flow will resume – along with the rain!
The Daily Thoughts Support Team
The national leader has not come exactly from nowhere, but certainly he was not fully present in the political forecast for the country. Ideologically, to say the least, he is not very strong, but his populism is magnetic. He portrays himself as The Saviour in a situation of moral, social and political decline. He seems unstoppable.
There is no doubt he is at the very right of the political spectrum, but, right or left is not here or there for him. He is who he is. God’s answer to Moses’s irritating question about his identity, ‘I am who I am’, applies here.
The real right wing ideologues love this guy . They can believe their luck. The Saviour has arrived and offers them a formal home, a permanent audience, open doors. The religious love him, bless him, pray with him and for him. They really believe, and fully broadcast to the brotherhood accordingly, that he has been anointed by God, therefore giving him supreme authority on almost anything.
The supreme leader is not a saint but the ideologues and the church are very much willing to condone anything troublesome on behalf of the greater good. And for that greater good to come as Great Kingdom, the world around has to be simplified. Whatever pretentious critical thinking people may think, it’s very simple: you are with us or against us. And in that divine ‘I am who I am’ world, there is actually no ‘us’. Him or the deluge, and he has just saved us, the ‘bases’ say. The country was already polarised but, he elevates polarization to is highest level.
On his (or His?) right, the conservative, the right, the religious, the pro this and that, the defenders of perennial values, and the real representatives of ‘the people’. On his left, the left, the socialists, the Marxists, the atheists, the destroyers of values, the against this and that, the liberals, and the sexually deviant determined to brainwash our children.
The party of the Supreme Leader, his ‘base’, and the ideological machinery that supports him, because he did not have one of his own, despises ‘the intellectual’ unless he or she has declared full allegiance. Soon there is only one version of the truth. The rest is a conspiracy. Conspirators will be oppressed and suppressed. Pain will be inevitable but, hey, it’s all God will.
There is a long standing consensus to described the above. It’s called dictatorship and/or fascism.
I was reading about all the above at the end of my holiday. That dreadful, scary, nightmarish, unbelievable, lasting scenario. How on earth did we get into that?
That book about my country’s Civil War in the Spain of 1936-1939 and beyond was really good.