Summer Visit And Politics

Summer Visit And Politics

Natalie and family ame to visit this summer as usual and I think enjoyed their holiday doing nothing very much but swimming and, Andy, cycling. I was pleased that the front of the house was in full bloomwhen they arrivedand we sat for a while on the bench in front as they arrived too early to go directly into the gite. He photos below are of the front of the house and their visit. 

They took back with them the two old figures sitting on a bench (i told Eilidh they were her mum and dad when they will be my age) and the spinning wheel which I had bought at the Telethon auction. I bought the spinning wheel because I thought it a beautiful piece of wooden machinery. But I thought that, rather than here it belongs in Scotland where there is a tradition of spinning wool, especially in the islands.

Politics

I’m still struggling to understand French politics, which seem much more complicated than their British counterparts. The sheer number of political parties is in itself daunting. For me at this time the political imperative is to ensure that the far right does not gain majority power. I feel that the wealth imbalance in the developed world, let alone the less developed countries, threatens something akin to feudalism if the far right gains power. And wider war in Europe becomes a stronger possibility.

To gain power far right parties exploit stupidity which, as Bonhoeffer has pointed out, is the hardest obstacle to counter. However it means that there is a depth of stupidity in their power base that will be shunned by a majority using at least some ntellect so the only intelligent people who will be attracted to them are those who seek power at any price, the Goebels of the world. I have found comfort in the idea that power and wealth alone don’t imply any coherent set of domestic policies and I have always presumed that, given some small measure of power, far right party representatives will openly display their inadequacies and thus won’t gain more power. A strong focus on nationalism gets you only so far.

This would seem to be the case in Britain and the USA at the moment. But can I be sure that this will always hold true ?

At base my contention is that far right parties cannot succeed in a democracy, they will be shown to be inadequate and that to succeed they need a dictatorship. I think that whether this is true or not depends on the level of stupidity (and irrationality and prejudice) present in a society. A colleague of mine once said that we plumb the depths of oceans and space but the depths of human stupidity have never been plumbed.