It Didn't End With The Nazis

I have always maintained that for Jews, Europe could always return to the days of the 1930s and 40s if many factors were left unchecked. With the rise of the far-right due to counteracting a rise of Islamism, ultra-left representation and the decline of Christianity, Europe is on a tenterhook when it comes down to how antisemitism is spreading. Viruses, as we have found out more than ever, spread and infect people in the cruellest of ways. Despite what some might say about myself, I abhor and detest racism: it is an evil that leads to the most unimaginable of horrors. The far-right use it as a tool against their 'enemies', and given half the chance, would happily use what the Nazis used to decimate any ethnic minority. What we always find is that whilst racism against black people, Asian people, Hispanic people is often taken with varying degrees of seriousness, I always find that the world's oldest hatred is often undermined and pushed aside in serious discussions about racism, and that of course is antisemitism.

The reason why I write this is because of a recent experience of mine, which came from fellow Jews. I recently wrote an anonymous statement for a Twitter site that wanted Jews to document their experiences at university about any antisemitic incidences that they had suffered. Naturally, I had some of my own. In 2014, during the height of Operation Protective Edge, the Oxford University JSoc (of which I was a member), had suffered subtle, but undeniable racism. As part of a new code of ethics as given by the university's Student Union, all societies were made to sign new agreements for a new code of conduct that they must abide by. These things happen, and the JSoc President was more than happy to sign it, until there was a condemnation of Israel and Zionism in the list and a call to support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. What transpired was that we were the only society meant to do this and it was naturally agreed that this was deeply racist as Jewish students and was against our view as a pro-Zionist organisation. Though we were allowed to continue operations, we were heavily discriminated against as an organisation and were to not advertise directly as a society during Fresher's Week that autumn. We were pushed into a corner, and perhaps it was just my paranoia setting in, but many of the organisers diverted potentially interested students away from us for this reason. Eventually, things did calm down and the Student Union was more forgiving, but it had not stopped there. JSoc was never directly involved with this, but a few of us (excluding the President) had raised money for IsraAID, an organisation that would raise money for the homeless under a Jewish banner. We were headed by a former Israeli student at the university who was still involved with charity fundraising in the area and his wife. We had flyers around the university that had been ripped up and thrown away by students known to us involved (as far as we were aware) by either a university-based chapter of BDS or Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) or a local organisation within the city. Again, things like this are going to happen, but that was until our organiser's wife had returned home and found that ham and bacon had been left on the front doorstep of their home not far from the St Hugh's College campus. Our organiser (who I will keep anonymous for the safety of his family), had contacted Principal Elish Angiolini for answers, and all that came in reply (after six weeks, by the way) was 'we'll look into it.' I wasn't looking for a condemnation or even an apology, knowing for well that it wasn't Principal Angiolini's fault for what had happened, but we had all expected more than just that as a response. However, this came as no surprise to me years later, considering what the university had allowed the disgraced Oxford University Labour Club to get away with for years unchecked. Yes, the incident had happened off campus, but it had started at St Hugh's where I had been in halls of residence. Quite frankly, though I was mostly anonymous and wanted to keep a low profile to get through my studies, I did not know whether I was a walking target in someway as I continued to wear a yarmulke and observe Shabbat. For a few weeks, I did not wear one just to be on the safe side, and luckily, that had been the end of that for a while.

Why did I therefore bring up my fellow Jews to start with? Well, the same Twitter site recently saw a JSoc member, who had become a member after I graduated, recently dismissed the comment and claimed that it was 'fake', prompting the Twitter page to delete it, despite knowledge that the member was not at Oxford as the same time as me. The incident that I discussed did not even involve JSoc and I didn't mention about the code of conduct incident, just the IsraAID one. In this era of heightened racial tensions, and at a time when Jewish voices need empowering to discuss our experiences of racism on university campuses, I was surprised to see that off one 'account', my own experiences could be diminished in such a way. I have heard the term 'two Jews, three opinions' many times, and it is one that my grandfather recounted frequently when he was still alive, and we as Jews are known to argue amongst each other, but the one thing I know that we do best is look out for our own. To me, this was a betrayal of what I had always believed in and led me to think about how prejudice has shaped my own life and what final conclusion I have come to regarding antisemitism.

I remember about a year ago a hashtag called #MyFirstAntisemiticExperience, and it told the story of many Jewish and even some non-Jewish people who recalled the first time that they knew what antisemitism was after experiencing it first hand. My earliest memory was being about five or six years old, going to school at a Jewish Day School that I attended in Copenhagen. A group of Middle Eastern looking boys, perhaps about sixteen years old, had been on the corner of a road where my mother had been taking myself, my twin sister, my older brother and younger sister (who was in a stroller at that age) towards the school. My brother and I in our yarmulkes looked very obvious and stood out like a sore thumb, whilst my mother in her shawl looked also very distinguishably Orthodox (though we are Reformists). I distinctly remember one of the boys, or perhaps all three or four of them, making a gun gesture with his fingers and shouting 'dode joder' (Die, Jews) at us as my mother tried to hurry us along. I had very little understanding of what was happening, but the look of determination and relentless embarrassment on my mother's face got us to where we needed to be. I talked about this to my mother only a few months back, and whilst she didn't remember this specific incident, she did recall young Middle Eastern looking men giving her filthy looks whenever she entered shops for how she looked. Even at her first workplace where she was a sign language teacher, she recalled the disgust that her colleagues had given towards her when she wanted time off from work to observe holidays that were coming up with her family. It was subtle, not oblivious, but she said that was what 'being a Jew was all about: accepting it, because you can't change it and nobody will care.'

My youth was thankfully forgiving in terms of antisemitic incidents, but as my mother correctly said, was something that I just accepted as being normal, and to this day, experiencing antisemitism is just an experience that I have grown to accept. At the same Jewish Day School, we had an armed guard outside who was not Jewish, as far as I am aware, but just a pleasant man who had a duty to stand on the front gate every day. In my childlike naivety, I never questioned as to why he was there. Three times a year, on average, we had mass evacuations from the school building, and we were given drills on how to stay away from windows in case they shattered, stay out of sight and hide under the tables. What they were preparing us for were bomb threats, and like I said, we had these up to three times a year. Credible bomb threats too, not just average drills. I was probably about ten when I first noticed that the nice guard on the gate wasn't just a nice guard, but was an armed guard, poised and ready to shoot anybody on site who was willing to harm a bunch of children under the age of thirteen for their ethnic background. When I left the Day School, I went to a mainstream comprehensive where I was only one of three Jewish students in attendance (the other two were my siblings). I was visibly un-Jewish as my parents didn't want me wearing my yarmulke, nor did they want me even mentioning my faith in case I was discriminated in someway. I kept it quiet until it came up randomly in conversation, around Yom Kippur, which happened to land on a school day and I was not in attendance for 'religious observation'. None of my peers thought much of it, which made me feel more confident in my faith, and only minor incidents such as a few bullies making false rumours of me having some 'disease' and discouraging my friends from being near me. It was nothing major, and over the years, I've learned to grow a thick skin around the issue. One Christmas, I remember our choir teacher taking me to one side and making some comment about wanting to exclude me from any Christmas concert because 'your parents are the type to complain' about it. On the contrary, my parents were very supportive and I willingly went to all Christmas concerts for the rest of my school life. As part of a predominantly Christian society, one had to assimilate, and that is what I did.

Just like with the recent Twitter debacle, I found that it was mostly people I considered to be my likeminded peers that I felt have given me more of a reason to call out on their antisemitism than the white supremacists or neo-Nazis that just call me a few names online. Words have no meaning unless they do something. Calling me a 'kike' or a 'yid' (believe me, I've heard it all) does nothing to me. Words are empty, not violence. Free speech is what matters, and believe me, what I've heard and seen is just the tip of the iceberg. What it comes down to is simply accepting abuse, and it is something that I have come accustomed to. Remember, it never ended with the Nazis, and antisemitism is being tolerated far too much in polite society. When I lived in Germany, I had peers who said that they were 'ashamed of their history' for what happened during the Holocaust, which I never understood. Why apologise for something that you had no part in? We have modern activists from the white, middle class who apologise for slavery, but not for the 1290 Edict of Expulsion or the massacres that took part in London (1189) and York (1190)? It seems what we are entering is a New Antisemitism, by which blaming the state of Israel as a Jewish state is a smokescreen for something much more sinister. When antisemitism is not taken seriously by so-called 'anti-racists' and it is seen as nothing more as a 'Zionist ploy', the plot begins to thicken about where these people stand. It began with the boycotts of Jewish stores, calling the Jews the 'eternal enemy' and blaming them for the failures of the old and current leaderships. Whilst the far-right are obviously explicit in telling us this, the far-left are more tactile and sneaky about it. They can substitute the word 'Jew' for 'Zionist', share Shulamit Aloni memes (without context, by the way) and scream buzzwords 'genocide' and 'concentration camps', because they know the context behind them in demeaning the Shoah. They openly defend Holocaust deniers (Paul Eisen, Ayatollah Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, etc.) and make the links that the Nazis did between Jews and the control of the media, public records and governments, instead sneakily replacing the word 'Jew' with 'Zionist'. The mask is slipping on these people, and the further it slips, the more the face is revealed. It is no wonder that the work of far-right racists is also shared and seems similar to that of far-left racists.

I take heed my mother's words about accepting abuse, because at the end of the day, nobody will care. Us Jews need to look out for ourselves, and it is for that reason why I see the very existence of Israel as a necessity against the rising extreme factions of the political divide now creeping in Europe and the United States. It's very much a shame for European Jews, unlike our American cousins, that we cannot have a certain weapon that we could use to defend ourselves and be perceived as a threat against far-right and far-left racists that wish to do harm to us. Alas, we fight the good fight, but words sometimes are not enough. I don't believe in taking to the streets and fighting against the mobs: I believe in a quiet life for us all.

Why Islam Is Dying

Islam, we are reminded, is the fastest growing religion in the world. This is mainly, as outlined by Pew Media Research, due to the fact that many young Muslims, in comparison to young Christians, have higher fertility rates, but also due to other social factors such as the threats of death for having renounced or leaving the faith of Islam. We're told that to criticise the world's fastest growing faith is a 'fear', a 'phobia' one might say, and thinking about the doctrines of Islam and the tenants by which it stands on, could even brand you a 'racist' for having opposed it. The trick here is to attempt to distinguish Muslims from Islam, which is not always easy for obvious reasons.

Muslims cannot be disconnected from Islam any more than Jews can be from Judaism or Catholics from Catholicism. They are an integral part of the evolution and development of their faith. In a contemporary sense, apologists for the faith will often tie in Muslims and substitute the word for Islam, rather than consider that Islam, just as any religion, is a series of connected ideas, thoughts and faith. In a sense, it's an ideology, much like liberalism, Marxism or post-modernism. Islam has its own set of standards and rules, which are designed to ensure the natural order of things, and of course, such doctrines are displayed in its own manifesto of sorts: the Qur'an. The Qur'an is easy enough to understand, as Muslims generally learn Arabic from an early age, unlike the Bible which was initially made difficult to understand. When it was written in Hebrew, then translated to Aramaic and later Greek, the Bible was the folly of the Roman Empire. Upon Constantine's conversion to Christianity and mass emancipation of Christians in the Byzantine Empire, the Bible was deliberately translated into Latin so only the most successful and powerful within the remnants of the Roman Empire could understand it. The Qur'an spread as a means of divine fate following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, after the establishment of the Rashidun Caliphate. The spread of Islam, mostly at the threat of a sword, soon reduced the power of the Byzantine Empire and soon areas of the Roman Empire. The fall of Rome in 476 saw many of the lands once ruled become free-for-all grabs, and the establishing Caliphates soon conquered large parts of what they could get their hands on. What followed had been forced conversions, establishment of new schools and a religion that had spread like no other until Constantine.

The Byzantine Empire would still exist for another millennium even after the spread of Islam took over. The Caliphates had one thing that they could use: the Silk Roads to China and the spice trades through India. The spread of Islam had gone from areas such as Medina and Mecca in modern day Saudi Arabia from its most easterly point in Pakistan to the western points of Moorish Spain. The Byzantines had their own diplomatic, religious and economic enemies on their doorstep, and unlike the expanding Islamic empires, the Byzantine Empire was soon seeing its own problems in dealing with different people groups. Rome had the same problem, hence its sacking by Barbarian tribes. The Holy Roman Empire, still the remains of what had been the glorious Roman Empire, had its own tribulations, but that was mostly between the two people in control: the established Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope. The Islamic empires had only the caliphs to answer to. What came to be in the 8th century was the establishment of the Islamic Golden Age: an era of challenge, arts, science, mathematics and literature that can only be rivalled as a great period of intellectual thought by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. What is more is that both these periods had been preceded by this age of glorious thinking, reimagining and redesigning intellectual challenge that helped cement the Islamic world. During the early days of the Caliphates, Islam had to deal with a challenge that had befallen the Roman Empire: the art of dealing with many differing people groups. More specifically, how could the Islamic empires deal with the issue of the Jews of Europe? European Jews had been persecuted heavily in Europe, kicked out of Judea some seven-hundred years earlier by the Romans and the land renamed Syria Palestina to remove any Jewish connection to it. Muslims came in, turning the land as commanded in the Qur'an into a city of their own: contrary to popular belief, a place where Jewish movement was heavily restricted and many temples had been ransacked and new places of worship for them were built on top of important Jewish holy sites. Following the destruction of Solomon and Herod the Great's temples by the Romans and Babylonians by 70AD, the incoming Muslim conquerors established the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the eighth century on top of Temple Mount. Whilst European Jews had initially fled from Christian lands to avoid persecution to the new Islamic Caliphates, particularly in Spain, Jews were guaranteed protection, but were treated as inferior by their new rulers. The 1066 Granada Massacre, expulsion of Jews in Morocco in the twelfth century, and the Fez Massacre of 1465 are perhaps the most famous examples of these and how Islam started to become an authoritarian, almost savage institution.

For the past five centuries, nothing of importance has been written in the Arabic language. Islam itself, whilst growing in numbers, has started to die a long and painful death that did not just simply begin with the insurgence of modern Islamic fundamentalism, but has been an integral part of its survival and its DNA. Why Islam has survived and its leaders have not fallen as quickly as that of the Roman, Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires is that it has simply taken out the competition. Rome couldn't deal with the expansion of its lands, particularly as better fighters were able to conquer and take over. The Byzantine Empire could not defend itself and the Holy Roman Empire fell under its own disorganisation and because of how Napoleon could expose its own weaknesses. Islam has adapted to become more ruthless and tactile in order to survive. In the turn of the twentieth century, political Islam began to take hold. The Ottoman Empire found itself conquering the Byzantine Empire, taking over Constantinople in 1453, forcing the Orthodox Church into submission, defeating the Holy Roman Empire and controlling much of the Balkans. By the Crimean War (1853-56), the Ottoman Empire was in decline and Russian territories were fighting back against it. Women were roundly raped by the Ottoman forces and censorship of the press was regular in order to keep the Islamic ideals of the Empire alive. With Christians overtaking in the Balkan regions, the Ottoman's would eventually come to see what had happened in Rome: dealing with other peoples would see the end of a glorious empire. Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Romania pulled away and declared their independence. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 is still widely unrecognised in Turkic spheres of influence, a testament of shame and showing the true nature of totalitarianism within Islamic doctrine and its distain for Christians.  In the Middle East, pogroms against Jews were regular before and after the turn of the twentieth century as Islam was facing a new challenge: Zionism. By the mid-nineteenth century, Zionist Jewish organisations cropped up over Europe, with one of its main spokespeople in Theodore Herzl believing that Jews themselves had no place in Europe and the great destiny of the Jewish people was to return to the Holy Land and establish a new Jewish state there. The challenge of Zionism is that it was a challenge to Islam, which believed that in its conquering of North Africa and the Middle East that it was the only religion that had the right to survive and thrive there. In the late nineteenth century alone, there had been riots and pogroms against Jews by Muslims in Aleppo (1850, 1875), Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890), Beirut (1862, 1874), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Jaffa (1876), Jerusalem (1847, 1870 and 1895), Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901-02), Mansura (1877), Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901-07), Port Said (1903, 1908) and Damanhur (1971, 1873, 1877, 1891). This all came before the mostly ignored Hebron and Safed pogroms of 1929 and the Farhud of 1941 in Iraq. The latter three came in response to the proposal of a Jewish state in the Middle East: the Jews of the region needed to be punished in the most notorious of ways. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an influential leader within the Islamic faith, had made a pact with Hitler ensuring that Jews in the region would be handed over to the Nazis or even massacred in their own lands. Bosnian Muslim soldiers were trained by the SS. Islam was in open ideology with the Nazis. Antisemitism, open extremism and censorship skyrocketed under Islamic rule once Israel could not be defeated in 1948 and after the Six Day (1968) and Yom Kippur (1973) Wars. For Islamic leaders, these defeats were an embarrassment and has caused much frustration across the Islamic world, so much so that it has spilt over to Muslims living outside of those lands.

Martyrdom and extremism have never been modern concepts, nor have they been exclusive just to Islam. Take the likes of Joan of Arc and Thomas More, who went with grace and decorum in the name of their faith: as Christian martyrs, they are beatified and celebrated by the Catholic Church. They were described as heretics by their opponents. Christian and even Jewish extremists do exist: take the likes of Meir Kahane, Anders Breivik or the Ku Klux Klan as classic examples of these. Islamic fundamentalism in tactics are much different to that of lone killers. The KKK and the Islamic State are very similar in ideology and in tactics; show a Klansman the doctrines of Islam and read Qur'anic quotes and say their about white people and they would support it. The Islamic State is well organised, working on suing modern technology in order to spread the ideology in a way that they could never do in Medieval Islamic times. The new Caliphate in Iraq and the Levant is ideologically similar to that of the old Caliphates which had been celebrated and are still held up as glorious examples of the successes of Islam in the world. The old Caliphates destroyed monuments of their enemies, and the Islamic State (or ISIS), has done the same. The difference is with social media, we can see the true horrors of Islamic doctrine on camera, through propaganda videos and live executions. The murder of Daniel Pearl (2002) by insurgents in Pakistan, the September 11th attacks and various beheadings carried out by the likes of Al-Qaeda and ISIS have helped shift public opinion on whether Islam is compatible with Western civilisation. The uncomfortable truth is that it is not.

Whilst the West has started to modernise in a world where traditional and even Judeo-Christian values have started to become diluted, Islam has remained in its own fifteenth century values and mindset. It is important for religions to hold onto their values and traditions, but for religions to survive, they must also adapt. The creation of the Church of England by Henry VIII shows this, the reformation by the Catholic Church also shows this. Islam, as controversial as it might hear, has not moved on since the days of the Caliphates. What is worse is that it can never move on from those days. Islam has many enemies, from Zionism to a more liberal 'prostituted' Western system, but its greatest enemy is that of freedom of speech. Islamic apologist Medhi Hassan once described Indonesia as being a good example of a country that is both 'Muslim and a democracy', though according to the Economic Intelligence Unit, it is only that of a 'flawed democracy' at best. The Joko Widodo administration roundly imprisons political opponents, though it has slowed down. Questioning Islam could land one up to five years in prison, and over the internet to spread information could be a further six years. Homosexual intercourse is forbidden and torture is used against LGBT citizens. Apostasy is still a crime in the Indonesian constitution and carries a capital offence. The state supported the issued fatwa on Salman Rushdie. It is a special kind of 'Islamic democracy', on might say, but one that cannot form itself into Western identity. Not that values of the west should be forced upon people as you cannot make people assimilate into values by which they are not used to. That is why Islamic terrorists use tactics that would otherwise make others submit to their understanding. September 11th was the first televised example of this, but this was specifically attack against America and its growing influence in Middle Eastern geopolitics: attacks on freedom of speech specifically would soon form. In Denmark, I had witnessed first hand the tide of Islam changing with the Muhammad cartoon fiasco (the Muhammedkrisen we called it) in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The riots and violence exhibited by Muslims for the depictions of the prophet led to some 250 deaths across the world and violence against Danes and their embassies changed the narrative on the compatibility with Islam and freedom of speech. The Charlie Hebdo massacre of 2015 also exhibited these same traits. People did not share #JeSuisCharlie as an act of 'racism' as some like antisemite George Galloway had suggested, but rather as a solidarity and expression of freedom of speech. Charlie Hebdo, contrary to popular belief, did publish cartoons depicting Jews and Christians in the most vulgar of manner, but it did not lead to the consequences that we saw in 2015 and most recently with the murder of Samuel Paty. Moderate Muslims have also, whilst not glorifying the violence necessarily, come in the defence of censorship and even going so far as to boycott France as the French people are beheaded and slaughtered by radical Islamists, as if to say that they had brought it on themselves. Whilst Emmanuel Macron has been a flawed leader in so many ways, his defence of French values of liberty and fraternity have been reiterated by his strong stance on this, unlike his predecessor Francois Hollande.

So, where do we go from here on this? Should freedom of expression be substituted for a life of pandering and fear? The honest answer is no: so long as you are a Westerner with a working mind and a love for either Judeo-Christian values or liberal ideas, then you are a target for Islamists. It is not what you represent but who you are. Freedom of speech is what has made Europe what it is today, which tried to rid itself of its own shackles of Christian authority for centuries. One must always draw the line as narrowly as possible. Pope Francis even once said that in cases like these, religion has a certain privilege over others, which is nonsense. Even speaking as a religious man myself, it is absurd to believe that just because you believe strongly in something means that nobody must challenge you. That is what Islam has become, and unfortunately is a stain of what it once was and what could have been. Islam needs its own reformation and a glorious renaissance that can take it forward, and it will need it soon, just like Christianity, if it wants to survive, otherwise the life support will soon by removed by something far more powerful than it.

References

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20150429153811/http://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/03/PF_15.04.02_ProjectionsFullReport.pdf

Ruggerio, Guido. A Companion To The Worlds of the Renaissance.

Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

Beard, Mary. Rome In The Late Republic.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1941-pogrom-sends-iraq-s-jews-fleeing-1.5272284

Levin, Iatmar. Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries.

Bashkin, Orit. New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbN_ii-I8GY 

Horseshoe Theory: How The Far-Left And Far-Right Work

Along any campaign trail, you will hear the usual taunts and tirades of audiences caught in a rush of the moment. Nobody can have just one point of view, that is certain, and the use of strawman has been used to the point where cohesive arguments can no longer be sustained without them seeming 'irrational', based on emotive response or even seem radical. This has not just been a phenomena in the last four years, in particular since a certain multi-billionaire businessman from New York took to the centre stage upon an escalator to announce to the world that he would be running for the presidency of the United States. Likewise, this isn't just an issue within the American sphere of politics, for it is started with Europe, and has been on the rise since the end of the eighteenth century.

In 1848, a German philosopher by the name of Karl Marx published his magnum opus: 'The Communist Manifesto', which would set the turn for (perhaps) some of the greatest revolutions of their time. It would be redundant and even absurd to suggest that it was Marx's ideas that led to the start of German reunification or Garibaldi's conquest in Italy. Liberal revolutions had infected and spread through Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, an era that has no specific starting time, but ultimately came to a head with the beginning of the French Revolution. Looking inwards, one might suggest that Marx had some influences from this era, though we cannot say this for sure, but fears in Britain, Spain, the remains of the Holy Roman Empire and Russia feared that the ideas of the Revolution would soon spill into their lands. Luddites in England had been rising in this period, but posed no real threat against government intervention, and riots were often quashed against the working man, such as those at Peterloo in 1819. The Napoleonic Wars had an adverse affect on the British economy, the Corn Laws kept the price of bread high and attempts at electoral reform were heavily defeated. This could've been the start of the British Revolution had it not been for the strategic brilliance of British government intervention. That is not what Louis XVI had when the revolution rose up against him. Louis was a weak man, and as a result, lost the revolution due to those who were inspired by Enlightenment principles who became the majority by 1789. Whilst there can be debates about whether the French Revolution was a success or not, it became a blueprint for what would be further revolutions that would end in the same manner. Robespierre could have been an inspiration for the French Republic's virtues of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite' in the same way that one George Washington, who was inspired by the French Revolution, would later become. The history books say otherwise.

Maximilien Robespierre was undoubtedly a tyrant, who had abandoned revolutionary ideals for a ruthless dictatorship full of paranoia and delusion of self-grandeur. The execution of Georges Danton, his most trusted advisor, for abandoning revolutionary thoughts, would be a turning point for the new President of the National Convention. The Reign of Terror sent some 40,000 to the guillotine; he had dismantled the Catholic Church in France and replaced it with the Cult of the Supreme Being; the revolution as it had once been was in tatters. This may all sound too familiar to those who have read history and know the implications of revolutionary thought and how it can descend into chaos. Revolution isn't always counterproductive, nor will it always lead to tyranny. The American Revolution is an example of this, where the meaning of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' would extend itself (though of course, for a select few) and continue to be part of the American foundation to this day. Maximilien Robespierre was not a libertarian and never claimed to be, as far as we have found. Neither was Napoleon. Both cannot be merely described as either left or right wing. To modern contemporaries, it could be argued that Robespierre was the start of some radical left wing thought before the term had even come into existence. Robespierre had believed in deposing of the monarchy and bringing the power back to the people. Would this make Washington a left-winger too? It's hard to imagine, and it it is also difficult to quantify. Robespierre went one further, along with the Jacobins who wanted the death of the incompetent Louis (who by the time of his execution in 1793 was citizen Louis Capet), against the moderate liberals who just wanted the king removed from power. By a modern standard, Robespierre might just stand in some contemporary position within libertarian socialism, Stalinism and radical Marxism.

The parallels between what many consider to be the most ruthless form of socialism and Robespierre's Reign of Terror is that of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Soviet Union that followed. Vladimir Lenin had been used by the Germans to destabilise Russia in the hopes that a crumbling Russian front would be forced to pull out of the war. Weak and divided Tsar Nicholas II was forced out during the February Revolution, and the Provisional Government came to be. Much like Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas was essentially kept under house arrest and forced to wait for the inevitable. Lenin came back to Russia to declare that should the people follow in his revolution, there would be 'bread, peace and land', much like the 'liberte, egalite, fraternite' promised by Robespierre. Lenin believed that he could be the grandmaster of Russia's problems, reversing Kerensky's decision to keep Russia in the First World War and bringing around prosperity for the Russian peasantry. In similar vain to Robespierre's revolution, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 abandoned its core principles and descended into authoritarianism and dictatorship. Lenin's policy of collectivisation led to famines in 1921 in the Volga region and the following year in Tartarstan. Some estimated 7 million people died with cannibalism being reported. Forced collectivisation is a principle policy of socialist dogma, in the pursuit of true 'equality'. By the Russian Civil War (1917-23), Lenin had tightened his grip as a ruthless dictator, killing his opponents or taking them into exile, having the Romanov's murdered in 1918 and creating a one-party system with him in charge. Socialism cannot exist without dictatorship, and the USSR is not the only example of this: Vietnam, North Korea, Maoist China, Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia have all been testament to this. Destruction of capitalism and those who embrace it, dismantling of the free market, censoring opposition voices: this is the face of far-left ideology.

Of course, bringing Lenin back to Petrograd was always the downfall of Germany. Germany had faltered after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles had damaged the Fatherland. In Italy, following Britain and France's conquest, the mood wasn't much better either, seeing as Italy had made concessions to new states that had been created, losing much of its sphere of influence in the Adriatic. Italy had been victors, but ended up as losers. Benito Mussolini had been a socialist, self-exiled in Switzerland to avoid military service, and soon returned to work in a primary school. Mussolini became interested in socialist politics, but unlike his fellow socialists, Mussolini was very much for Italian intervention during the First World War, hoping that his country would lose so that a revolution could begin. He wanted to unite the Italian people's of the Adriatic, modelling himself on Nero as a great Roman emperor who could, in effect, create a new version of the Roman Empire. In addition to his hero Nero, Mussolini was surprisingly influenced by Lenin's revolution and was enamoured by how socialism could help the Italian cause and progress the country. He wanted to see Italy be just as glorious as Britain and France, who had retained their own empires following the end of the war. However, after being thrown out of the Socialist Party, Mussolini believed in a new movement that he called 'fascismo' and was going to use it to bring around socialism through nationalism. Fears of communism coming to Europe was imminent, and Mussolini had stoked the fires that would begin a new radical movement, this one not yet defined as 'far-right'.

In fact, both Mussolini and Hitler by the standards of the day were not really 'far-right'. Their hatred of socialism and communism was not unheard of amongst Europe's elites and was often seen as just righteous. Germany had been the ones who had brought around a communist revolution in Russia, hoping that it would bring chaos rather than results. Germany's defeat in 1918 saw the Kaiser abdicate, the establishment of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of what could have been civil war. Socialist revolutionaries fought against nationalist Freikorps in street warfare. Stability in Germany (or what little left of it) was toppled by hyperinflation in the 1920s. One Adolf Hitler, a former art student from Austria, had believed in German reunification over Austrian nationalism. Just like Mussolini, German peoples had to be reunited under a lebensraum of his own making. Hitler joined the German Worker's Party, which by today's standards was far right, and had tendencies as it was riddled with anti-communist and antisemitic forces. The precursor to what would later be the Nazi Party was also anti-capitalist, much like that of the socialist revolutionaries. Hitler's reimaging of economics in Germany was closer to that of the American left at the time - power to the workers, infrastructure programmes to give German jobs back to German workers and getting rid of the oligarchs who ran Germany's banks. The comparisons to that of the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin with that of Hitler's Nazi Germany have been discussed many times, from the use of secret police to absolute dictatorships, censorship and scapegoating Jews for their defeats. It is a mechanism within fascists and communists that still have implications today, and have influences on the way in which we perceive our extremes of politics.

It may come as a surprise that Donald Trump once believed that the two parties of America had once become too extreme. In 2000, he identified as conservative, but was mostly progressive on social issues and planned to run on a Reform Party ticket. His perception was that the Democrats had become too left-wing and the Republicans too right-wing. He was the middle ground candidate, until Pat Buchanan played more to the ultra-right that had started to infiltrate the Republican Party at the time. Trump had compared Buchanan to another historical figure: Attila the Hun. What the extremes of the far-left and far-right do agree on is their hatred for centrists. The centre ground in politics becomes a barrier for them to totally annihilate the other side. Looking to contemporary politics, even more so than 2000, in the era of social media, the centre ground has been a contentious one. Upon defeat in December 2019, fans of the 'beloved' Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, an ardent left-winger, had blamed centralist and soft-left voters for essentially 'giving' their vote to the Conservatives and their leader Boris Johnson. We've been hearing that anybody who had willingly given their vote to the Tories in 2019 had been allowing 'fascism' and the 'far-right' to arise in the UK. Calling Boris Johnson a fascist or remotely even right wing, considering Johnson has been one of the most pro-LGBT and pro-Jewish Prime Ministers in living memory, is an absurdity. Some conservatives even consider Johnson to be too soft on social issues. The words 'far-right', 'Nazi' and 'fascist' have become diluted in the last few years by the far-left, so much so that it has infected even liberal politics. That is not to say that fascism, the far-right and neo-Nazism are still not issues that should be confronted. What is staggering is how the Donald Trump of 2000, who had fought as a centre ground candidate, could now be in league with neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the year 2016.

Violence and intimidation work for both the far-left and the far-right. The Nazis under Hitler had done this through the Sturmabteilung (SA), commonly known as the brownshirts, had intimidated voters at the 1928 election (where the Nazis took less than 3% of the vote), the 1930 election (where they gained 95 seats in the Reichstag) and in the two 1932 elections. Hitler had been the alternative against a changing country that had been brought to the brink by years of crippling debt and social change. He was an outsider against the political elites in Berlin, did not speak like a traditional politician and ran on a populist ticket. In 2015, Corbyn had his own similar techniques and his own methodology of getting himself into a position of power. This is not here to say that Jeremy Corbyn is the same as Hitler, but rather to use a contemporary figure on the left to make similarities between that of a far-right figure, so bear that in mind. Instead of the SA or the Gestapo, Corbyn had his own brand of sycophants and propaganda networks that gained a sphere of influence within the national Labour Party that made Corbyn seem like an outsider who believed he could bring change and fix the problems caused by economic hardships. Whilst not using violent tactics like the SA, pro-Corbyn social media networks such as Novara Media and Momentum used their platforms as a means to intimidate their opposition. Corbyn's right-hand man in John McDonnell had alluded to hounding members of the cabinet and intimidating them in their private lives, locking up his opponents and even marching on Buckingham Palace to instate Corbyn as Prime Minister following the 2017 General Election. Though both Hitler and Corbyn rallied against the political establishment, there was always one thing that they needed to purge first before making their moves to make their countries into the utopias they hoped they would be. It is something that plagues the dangerous nature of extremist ideologies.

The Jewish people have always been a problem for the far-right and the far-left. J.A. Hobson described Jews as a 'peculiar people' who were 'parasites' who had purposefully moved in the 1890s from Russia to Western Europe to harm the interests of the workers living in these areas. Whilst Jews, in the opinion of Hobson, could be 'parasitic' in nature, they could also be 'influencers' and 'alien' to life in European civilisation (perhaps influencing Corbyn's view that Jews could 'never understand English irony'). One might be keen to agree that Hobson sounds like a decorated propagandist for fascism, where in actual fact, Hobson himself was a socialist. The writings could almost be akin to that of Hitler himself in 'Mein Kampf' or more contemporary examples like former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke, Robert Spencer, Paul Eisen, David Irving or 'The Daily Stormer'. The far-left and the far-right see Jews as a synonym for capitalism, and a barrier from reaching the great utopia. Stalin had ran a campaign against the 'rootless cosmopolitans' in the 1948-53 campaign, purging Yiddish speaking poets, artists and playwrights in this period. The Doctors' Plot of 1951-53, which after the death of Stalin was proven to be a fabrication, much like that of the Dreyfus affair. The Soviet Union supplied ammunition for the Arab League against Israel during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. The far-left continue to support the theocracy of Iran in its war against the Jews, abandoning the 1980s CND movements in favour of creating nuclear weapons that could be dropped on Tel Aviv. We know of the Nazis and their heinous crimes against the Jewish people. We also know of the far-right and their continued war against the Jewish people, in more recent memory the massacre in Pittsburgh by Robert Bowers, a white supremacist. It is about who the perpetrator is rather than the victims, and with liberal media afraid to expose the nature of far-left crimes against Jews, the problem of extremist politics goes mostly unnoticed. In an era of social change where narratives around minority groups continually being perceived as victims, the left mostly (with assistance from the media) did not challenge the December 2019 massacre of Jews in Jersey City by black supremacists and the Monsey stabbings by a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites.

So, what is the best way to combat two ideologies that whilst trying to obliterate one another accuses those who take a stand against them both as being the real enemy, or worse being accused of being one of the other side? The beauty of horseshoe theory is seeing how the far-left and far-right are closer than one may think. The central ground is now the new revolutionary ground: to be against ideologies in Europe and America that are pulling themselves closer to these extreme positions. In Europe, we've been seeing it with the far-left in Greece following the financial crisis, the far-right in Hungary and Poland, growing populism in France and Italy. America has had its fair share of those issues in seeing the 'progressive' wing of the Democratic Party appear to battle with the creeping neo-Nazi pandering of the Republican Party. Centrists should just watch these ultra-extreme ideologies create a civil war and let themselves take each other out. No amount of recounting of Martin Niemoller's poem 'First They Came...' will be enough, considering that Niemoller was an open supporter of fascism before he changing his tune when the fascists became a problem for the churches. After all, extremism is the last refuge of idiots and loners.

References

Bernstein, Samuel (1955). French Political and Intellectual History.

Schama, Simon (1989). Citizens: A Chronicle Of The French Revolution.

Kershaw, Ian (1997). Stalinism And Nazism: Dictatorships In Comparison.

Mawdsley, Evan (2007). The Russian Civil War.

Rees, Laurence (1999). The Nazis: A Warning From History.

Murray, Douglas. (2017). The Strange Death Of Europe.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304083421/http://www.ghi-dc.org/publications/ghipubs/bu/024/bulletin_S99.html#Westernization

On Identity

Albert Camus once said: "Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness." To me, this means that in order for us to be just as a people, we must face and identify where injustices may lie. It has become a topical word this year, in the sense of changing and exploring aspects of history that have otherwise been either ignored, or have been ultimately whitewashed for political purposes. In context, justice should come from the fact that we as people have the intellectual capacity to be able to pass judgement, and through the passing of judgement, we can for ourselves see what is justice and what is injustice. A separation of the two is not always possible. Take war for example: if a war criminal were hiding munitions inside of a hospital purposefully and crammed hundreds of innocent civilians inside of it, and the only way that a threatened area could deal with such problem was to obliterate the hospital, potentially killing the people inside, would it be right to save thousands of lives as a result? This is the Bentham principle of Utilitarianism ethics, and one that John Stuart Mill and David Hume would be proponents of in their later life. The relation to this of identity, and one's way of being able to find themselves, comes from ideas of whether or not identity is tied up with the legalities of justice.

First, I take a view of balancing what is 'good' with what is 'right'. One can seek what they assume to be justice by doing what is 'good' with not always doing what is legally 'right'. 'Rights' and 'wrongs' are ultimately formed by laws that are meant to function society and set the course of justice on its way. Now, as a libertarian, I take issue with what government can consider to be 'right' and 'wrong' when pursuing justice. In the US, for example, the death penalty is a legal means of execution, which they see as something that is 'right' in the pursuit of justice. Iran thinks the same way when it comes to executing homosexuals, but we in the West would mainly consider that to be 'wrong'. For an Iranian lawmaker, this is not the case. Instead, it is pursuing the justice that they as a society deem is correct, morally and legally. Western values may never be necessarily always 'right' or even 'good', but it is more accepting than that of many Islamic areas of the world, but that is due to a differing code of ethics that we have grown accustomed to. Seeing homosexuals getting legally married in Western nations is seen as unjustifiable in the Middle East, and the ideas of identity, justice and legality work well into this idea.

Take this as a principle with some examples of what I consider to be the moral code for justice:

Good-Right: Morally 'good' with legally 'right' - normal human behaviour. Showing displays of everyday ethics.

Good-Wrong: Morally 'good' with legally 'wrong' - freedom fighters in Nazi Germany (the White Rose).

Evil-Right: Morally 'evil' with legally 'right' - the setup for many ruthless dictatorships

Evil-Wrong: Morally 'evil' with legally 'wrong' - mass murderers, rapists, child molesters, etc.

Identity can be a complex notion, especially as it is being talked about a lot over the past decade or so. Identity and identity politics, another term that has been thrown around inconclusively the past few years, are separate issues, and both I will address. Identity is what makes human behaviour and what human beings are. In biological and moral terms, everybody has identity. And identity is not a brand new notion as it is one that has existed since the dawn of time, and once human behaviour came to develop for survival and adaptation, identity becomes important. It is what helped the strongest defeat the weakest and what helped development of technology during the early days of farming in ancient civilisations. If you worked as a farmer and controlled the supply chain that all peoples needed, and that of course being food, then you became the strongest and the most important. That was the identity that you created. Of course, identity means so much more than that now. It goes along racial and sexual lines that can mean so much more than just name, age and gender. Identity is deep rooted within societal expectations for certain people that during the past decade, we have seen a radical new idea that identity can simply be changed to suit the needs of the individual. I believe in individual liberty over social justice because individuals in a group of people act differently and have different ideas and abilities that come with biological identity. If we were to have a group of women in a room, each one would have different needs based on socio-economic status, education status, marital status, etc. Grouping people based upon one identifiable trait can lead to allegations of racism, sexism, homophobia and general bigotry.

This is why social justice is an oxymoron and why identity politics is a disaster for society. Social justice could be perceived as morally 'good' by those who propose it, because it looks like one cares for a large group of people without thinking of the consequences of actions. We've seen this with the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter - identity politics being used to assume that all women should be believed regarding their sexual assault allegations and the assumption that all black people are underprivileged and at risk of being killed by police officers. Identity politics isn't even a left vs right issue. For the far-right, the alt-right and white supremacists, identity politics is at the heart of their campaigning too. Just like Black Lives Matter, white supremacists such as the KKK, neo-Nazis and the Proud Boys use white identity to seek dominance over minorities and assume that all minorities are treated better than whites in the eyes of the government and will use tactics to intimidate their opposition. Flip the races and you have the foundations of black supremacists such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement. Getting into arguments about horseshoe theory, something that I am an advocate for, can be saved for another time, but it is interesting that in the pursuit of social justice for these particular groups, how close the comparisons can be.

Identity politics is also a dangerous path to tread down. It is deep rooted within society in the pursuit of social justice to create a society that can be 'good-right' at all times, though it is not intellectually feasible and ends up actually being morally corrupt. It is something that the left likes to play into, to create a utopia where the 'deplorables' from society can be purged to allow those who need to be 'liberated' to flourish. In the battle between equality and equity, the two terms can often be muddled in order to further confusion and seek to make the argument sound 'good-right'. I will take my personal identity to put into a sense of what identity politics has done to make the argument easier to follow. Following the recent George Floyd protests, social media was flooded with misinformation from Silicon Valley to highlight the problems of what is perceived as an 'unequal' society. Whilst this fed into mainstream media, the misinformation that was purposefully transmitted through social media to create divisions within society. In the pursuit of social justice, left-wing Black Lives Matter protestors created social media posts such as #JewishPrivilege to purposefully attack Jewish people and make themselves look like the victims of some aggrandised conspiracy that Jewish people were suppressing black voices and people. It was then latched onto by white supremacists using social media to push their own agendas. Both very different ideologies using their own sense of identity politics to be prejudiced against another race of people. Accusations of who has 'privilege' or not is also not quantifiable as most who pursue social justice normally take this view based upon one particular trait, or one might see this as one particular identity. Seeing a white man and thinking that he has inherit privilege based on one identifiable trait is intellectually inept, but is one that is gaining mainstream attention and acceptance. Likewise, seeing a black woman and thinking that she has no privilege is also intellectually inept.

We've heard a lot about what 'white privilege' means by people who claim to be intellectuals without actually using statistics or quantifiable reasoning. 'White privilege' is normally defined as being white and therefore, in the eyes of those in charge of our justice system, must be prioritised over minorities. Minorities are treated differently and their is a sense of injustice against them. When we look at crime rates in certain areas of the country, mostly in urban areas, young, black men are more likely to commit violent acts, but are also more likely to be the victims of violent crimes. It is a problem not of group or social justice, but that of individual circumstances, liberty and responsibility. It is not due to open discrimination from government or society as a whole. You would therefore think that as a society, in the eyes of those who promote social justice, that an unjust society would be one that favours whites over minorities, or those who identify as BAME. So, what kind of society allows it? Ours does, and in a very subtle way. In a UCAS end of cycle report from 2015, it was discovered that white working-class men were the most discriminated against when it came down to those wanting to go into tertiary education. 9% of white working-class boys went to university compared to over 30% of black working-class girls. 24% of white middle-class boys entered further education in the same year too. Is this down to some sort of discrimination? The answer is that there is some empirical evidence to suggest this, but it can also come down to individual liberty too. In the pursuit of social justice, we have seen white boys in particular be off-rolled more frequently than those from ethnic minority backgrounds. There are more incentives and opportunities than ever for BAME students to go to university, which is a very positive thing for our society, but has come at the expense of white working-class boys missing out. This is the danger of 'equality' and what it can lead to.

So, what can we learn from this? Privilege is not synonymous with one particular trait or identity as it can be found in many differing individuals in so called 'underprivileged' groups. There are some white people who are more successful than black people and there are some black people more successful than white people. Individuals who like to push the agenda that there is inherit 'white privilege' within people are unlikely to show statistics, nor are they able to conclusively prove that such privilege exists without using anecdotal evidence. They also like to backtrack and often say 'this does not mean that white people do not suffer hardships', but in the case of the education system in the UK, there is evidence that there is discrimination often against white boys of all socio-economic backgrounds that means that they are less likely to succeed in further education. If it were the case that white people are more privileged than other minorities, then why is it that Asian people are higher earners than their white counterparts? A 2019 government finding by the Department of Work and Pensions found that 42% of Indian families take home more than £1000 a week, compared to 26% for White British. This still isn't a case for privilege by racial identity, though. It is an indication of individual privilege by choices made. Good choice and decision making leads to better privileges. Economic privilege is more important as this is done by an individual basis, rather than through social justice of seeing every person within the group as being monolithic in some way. Nobody on the left would dare suggest that there is inherit bias in the system towards Asians.

'Check your privilege' is a term that can be thrown around ad nauseum without seeing people as individuals and understanding that identity is more than just skin colour or genitalia. It is used by those often referred to as 'Social Justice Warriors' (SJWs), a term of ridicule by those who are generally against ideas of social justice and progressive values. It is the same SJWs that use identity as a means to change the agenda, change definitions and pervert the concept of freedom of speech whilst simultaneously demanding that legislation be passed through that supports their worldview. The other view of this is that identity politics can be used as a way to absolve one from criticism based on traits of biological identity. That is to say, BAME politicians, for example, can use their identity to deflect from their own misdemeanours and their white knight saviours will defend them to the hilt. SJWs will often say that this means that white people who criticise BAME politicians are 'afraid' of them, rather than seeing criticism for criticism's sake. This is not the same as open racism, which is morally reprehensible. What racism can do is shut down debate, and uses identity politics to defend those who make incomprehensible statements or make awful decisions. Recently, former First Lady Michelle Obama stated that she and her husband were held to a 'higher standard' based on their race compared to former Presidents and First Ladies. The example used immediately uses the standard of identity politics to absolve criticism based upon race, which is especially dangerous considering the power position that Mrs Obama has. Simply, nobody is absolved from criticism based on race, gender or sexual orientation. Identity politics becomes the new censorship, and creates a new liberal bigotry that imposes a new morality that is just as oppressive and authoritarian as the last. Having people arrested for social media posts in the name of 'social justice' is counterproductive to solving, combating and challenging racism, sexism and homophobia as it only emboldens those who use it for their own gain. Likewise, accusing people of certain races, genders and sexual orientations of being bigoted with no evidence also hurts further causes in combating the aforementioned prejudices.

I am an individualist, in the sense that it is impossible to see society as a collective, which some libertarians may identify as, but does not work in the sense of knowing what is 'good' and what is 'right'. Individual liberty is more important than social groups, and identity of the individual should be taken into consideration when dealing with issues of justice. Prevailing justice, whether it be for a man, woman, black, white, gay, straight - should be done on an individual basis, rather than the use of identity politics to demean another group. Individual liberty has always been the way since the days of the Enlightenment, and cannot be lost to progressivism and social justice.

References

http://archive.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04/17/high_achieving_asian_americans_are_being_shut_out_of_top_schools/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0038-4941.2004.00284

https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1311735249651597313/photo/1

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/household-income/latest

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/516885-michelle-obama-we-couldve-never-gotten-away-with-what-the-trump

Okay, Joe's in. Now what?

This is not the way I hoped to start things. Normally, introductory blogs allow one to connect to their writer and get a feel for what they are like. Perhaps this will do some of that, but I'm not holding my breath when it comes down to that. You get an understanding for a writer and make your judgements based upon that. Let me introduce who I am first. I am Kristoff Sorrenson, given the nickname 'Kit' by an English friend of mine who was an English major at Oxford when I attended there. I am also Jewish by birth, and I have kept my faith since the day I recited my first Shiva during my Great-Oma's commemoration, on the fifty-ninth anniversary of her murder. I never truly understood faith and identity until I was a little older and appreciated until I was older. The reason why I bring this up in a discussion about the (shall we say) unbelievable events of this week will come into fruition, and why I offer some advice to the President-elect ahead of his inauguration on the 20th of January next year.

So, I'm currently at home, like most of you. It's November, the day after the announcement that Joe Biden has been elected President of the United States. I have been refreshing Twitter and the news channels constantly for the past few days in between my research, waiting for the moment when either the Democrat or the incumbent Donald Trump would be announced as the victor. On the eve of the election, my fiancée made the bold prediction that Biden would edge it, predicting that he would not win the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio, but would flip Pennsylvania, Florida and even North Carolina. It was hard to argue against what she was saying, but I went one further and before going to bed, I had made the audacious prediction of believing that it could end in a 269-269 stalemate. That is to say, Trump would retain Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, but lose Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. So far, we were nearly correct. Biden yesterday picked up the key state of Pennsylvania, thus giving him the necessary 270 electoral college votes to make him president. What has followed has been ugly from both Democrats and Republicans alike. President Trump throwing his toys out of the pram and Democrat sweetheart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez planning to make lists of people 'complicit' in Trump's administration, fanning fears that this could also extend to the electorate. It is amazing however, that in the less than twenty-four hours since Biden assumed the victor of the election that racism, sexism and COVID itself have miraculously disappeared overnight! Even Van Jones, a man notorious for saying that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a 'whitelash' against a 'changing country' could not help but burst into tears at the thought of another old, white, senile, perverted and (I'm going to say it) racist man becoming President, albeit this time tears of joy because this old, white, senile, perverted and racist old man happened to be a Democrat.

So, why bring up my identity at all about an election happening thousands of miles away? I didn't get a vote, so why should I get a say in anything? This is all true. I was in Connecticut four years ago, for a year of study. I had arrived in the September, moved into my dorms and found myself completely alone. I rarely interacted with the American students. I was 'foreign' to them, but the wrong type of foreign. Even my fellow American Jewish students thought that there was something wrong with me. You'd expect the next thing for me to say is that these were Trump fans who had taken on board his message of anti-immigration and light white supremacy. The opposite couldn't be more true. Most of these students were campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I never declared that I was a Trump fan, and I was not. The problem was, it transpired, was that I was not pro-Hillary. On the day of the election that year, once it became clear that Clinton was losing, I heard something from one of her supporters in the middle of the Yale University grounds that I never thought I would hear. It was a young, Muslim woman peddling an agenda that the 'Zionists' had been behind Mrs Clinton's defeat, with one young Muslim man going one further, suggesting that it had been a 'Jewish conspiracy' against the Obama administration and they had 'rigged the electoral college' to ensure a Trump victory. None of this went challenged, I hasten to add. I'm not hear to make some clickbait story about how I bravely came to the front, challenged their bigotry and then everybody cheered, because that would be idiotic and false. I was more stunned that this open bigotry was being accepted. In the months that came, those who had backed establishment Clinton became part of the 'resistance', radicalised by professors who had not expected a Trump victory, donning black masks and taking out riot gear. In November, they had backed a woman who was in bed with big pharma, and now they were reading Marx and Engels. The University had also started to tighten its control on what was acceptable speech, censoring, gagging and shaming people like myself who questioned the unfounded ideas of Critical Race Theory and challenged identity politics that were starting to become more ridiculous by the day.

Of course, we had it in the UK too following the unexpected Brexit result of 2016, something Mr Biden has been vocal in his bitter hatred of in the past, along with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Biden is a globalist: someone who believes that America's interests should be in the expansion of its sphere into the lives of other countries. He had been vital in the US invasion of Libya, backed intervention in Kosovo in 1999, supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...but Joe Biden has a weapon that he could use in a way that President Trump could not. He had cable media that could back him. It's the same problem that Johnson does not have, and it is one that I implore that he does not use. You see, Joe Biden is favourable amongst media elites, not only because he is a liberal, but because he is a deep state stooge. Trump could not been bought by the big media companies, and for that I applaud him, though he is an character of immoral values. Biden has consistently done what the media wants him to do: start wars so that they can get viewership; support the Black Lives Matter movement so that a race war can begin. It's all for views, and whilst Trump gave the media what they wanted in lots of ways, because he was able to expose cable news networks for what they were, he was Undesirable Number One. The win in 2016 meant that the coverage of the presidency was under the kybosh since day one, and anything the president did had to be analysed. Don't get me wrong, Trump has done awful things, from not dealing with COVID earlier, to his own business affairs interfering with the Oval Office and failing consistently to denounce white supremacy. Trump may have isolated what were America's 'allies' in the EU, but he strengthened those in the Middle East to Israel, brought around talks between Kosovo and Serbia and brought together talks between North and South Korea. An administration that had been setting itself on fire had moments of extinguishing its own flames. With internal conflicts between Trump, Sean Spicer, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Anthony Scaramucci, etc. the White House never seemed so divided, and soon it would fall. Trump became the first President to remind the press that they cannot always get to him, but they reminded him that he was not above the law.

Back to 2008, when I was younger and more naïve, I had been bought in by the then-Senator Obama's message of 'Hope' and 'Change' coming to America. Being 18 and living in Denmark meant that I was obviously not eligible to vote, but if I had the opportunity, I would have voted for the Senator from Illinois and his running mate from Delaware. Like many Obama voters, seeing a changing country does not always make a good country, and with an era of radical liberal change, the word 'identity' became more of a badge of free pass rather than one of honour. Like many people (Democrats and Republicans alike), I had been shocked by the wave of unarmed black men being killed unlawfully by police, even before the death of George Floyd earlier this year. It birthed a new, radical movement under the term Black Lives Matter, which sought initially to end racial injustice, but instead became a moniker for black supremacy and separatism, antisemitism and racism. It said that being black was a disadvantage and that white people needed to pay for their sins because of their genetic makeup. With leaders cuddling up to racists like Louis Farrakhan and the change of the Democratic Party to the left, moderate Democrats changed to Donald Trump, a candidate who strongly believed in an America First policy, attacking the globalists and loving his country, something that horrified both the media and the new-left Democrats. Sure, Trump didn't cover himself in glory by calling illegal immigrants from Mexico 'rapists' or in a 2005 interview boasting that he could 'grab women by the pussy', and that would generate ire and anger from most of the American public. However, in the era of #MeToo, when we were expected to naturally believe the testaments of women who had been sexually assaulted or raped, why was it that Tara Reade's allegations against Biden suddenly revoked? What is the difference between Reade and Blaise Ford in her allegations against Kavanaugh? It's not the act that they're against - it's who they accuse that matters. Seeing the decline in traditional values, the dismantling of the family unit and political correct cancel culture infect society helped for the rise of Donald Trump, a man who said he could put everything right. Biden now has to act on the decline of decency, moral integrity and establishing order in American society if he is to succeed.

My honest prediction is that Biden may last two years. His declining mental state and his own skeletons in his closet may come back to haunt him. After all, Trump was impeached for calling out something that Biden and his son Hunter had done, rather than acting in his own right. Biden's own record on racial issues, including help the completion of the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Bill that saw mass incarceration of black men, and trying to whitewash claims that 'poor kids are just as smart as white kids' and black voters who planned to vote for Trump 'ain't black' by having an African-American woman run as his Vice Presidential nominee, will not fool anybody for long. Biden and Obama had also helped extend the Patriot Act and oversaw the DSA and the FBI spy on the American public, be part of an administration that bombed seven countries using drone strikes and sell private data through the Affordable Care Act should also come under scrutiny. If Biden wants to maintain support, even from moderate Republicans, he will need to go back to values that Trump ignored during his time in office: defence of liberty, freedom of the press/speech, tolerance of religious values, restoring American patriotism rather than nationalism, and bringing decency back to the White House.

As a libertarian, I was apprehensive during this election. Of course, as someone who is an outsider looking in, I had no say in the running of the United States. I wish not to do either, but there is this sense of American entitlement that will further isolate the rest of the world that Biden should be aware of. Obama believed that he was untouchable, just like his successor, and that was in part true because he had liberal media supporting him and helping sway the mood of the American public, who are glued to cable television. Obama could get away with so much that Trump could not because of this, as did Hillary Clinton and now Joe Biden. For libertarians, seeing two authoritarians battle for the Oval Office is not something that we want to be a part of. The cable networks not allowing Jo Jorgenson speak is clear to their own agenda, that it can only be Republican or Democrat. Democrats accuse third party voters of allowing 'fascists' to get in, and Republicans have accused third party voters of allowing Biden to get in. Truth being, both Democrats and Republicans have let down the American public for generations now, but much like in the UK where we need to get over Conservatives and Labour all the time, it is time that Americans change their attitude away from Democrats and Republicans, otherwise they will end up with the same cosy, inbred liberal politics that have meant that until this vital election, millions do not turn up to vote in person or cast a ballot (that unless they were dead in certain swing states!) Bottom line is if that you vote the same, expect the same.