Politics and Enemies

I was reading a piece on Britain's far Left when I came to this:

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them... The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

And so, of course, violence against the enemy is no problem.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner.

Did I mention that Nazi Carl Schmitt wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy? And that Curtis Yarvin writes that "there is no politics without an enemy?"

I am also around a liberal for a couple of days listening to ordinary by-the-ways about "affordable housing" and thinking to myself that, yeah, we have an affordable housing problem Because Liberals.

But the funny thing is that such people Have No Idea of the malevolence and the chaos that their Hundred Year reign has caused.

Because all problems are caused by the Other Guy, the racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell. We are the Good Guys.

Anyway, in the middle of the night I came up with two new maxims:

If you want more politics, you are really saying you want more enemies.

The more politics, the more enemies.

Am I right, or am I right? And that brings me back to Mircea Eliade:

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And that is exactly how our lefty friends think of suffering. If the homeless are homeless or there is a shortage of affordable housing, then there must be a fault. And chances are the fault is the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes.

UPDATE: Here's some more on the enemies front. Reporting on the Battle of the Bouncy Castle up in Canada, Giles Hoffman notes how the Canadian regime needed enemies.

Every conflict now is largely an information war and a public relations battle. The regime has a well-oiled propaganda machine, and they curated footage with spurious themes. For the regime, it was insufficient to have opponents; they needed enemies, which is why so much effort was expended to portray the demonstrators as dangerous ultra-nationalists and racists. 

Hey, no problem. There is no politics without an enemy.