05/17/2004: "Eating their young"

What happens when leftists have to choose between gays and Islamic fundamentalists/Palestinians? Evidently the latter win:

(London) Members of two British gay rights groups were attacked when they attempted to participate in a demonstration for Palestinian rights.

OutRage and Queer Youth Alliance went to the protest march at Trafalgar Square to show their support for people of Palestine. But they also urged the Palestinian Authority to halt the arrest, torture and murder of homosexuals.

As soon as they arrived at the square members of the two groups were surrounded by an angry, screaming mob of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican clergymen, members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, and officials from the protest organizers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

They variously attacked the gay activists as "racists", "Zionists", "CIA and MI5 agents", "supporters of the Sharon government" and accused the gays of "dividing the Free Palestine movement".

I wish the site had video of the "screaming mob" of Islamofascists and CofE clergy side-by-side. It would serve as visual proof my contention that the political spectrum is best portrayed, not as a straight left-to-right line, but as a circle, where the extreme left and right meet and become essentially indistinguishable. In this case, it sounds like the circle became a snake, swallowing its own tail.

(Thanks to CaNN for the link.)

Replies: 2 Comments

on Monday, May 17th, Little Fly said

Athanasius, this is a fascinating incident, and I too would love to see pictures. However, I think we come to slightly different conclusions about what this incident signifies about political culture, so let me share my thoughts. While reading this post, I immediately thought of the womanist observation that an individuals’ political identity is a product not so much of his or her identification with this or that monolithic ideology (“liberal,” “conservative,” etc.) but is instead an amalgam of different personal, social, and political allegiances, some of which may appear to conflict, and some of which may lead a person to agree with another person on one issue but vehemently disagree on another. For this reason, womanist thought takes terms like “liberal” and “conservative” or “left” and “right” to have limited heuristic value, and concludes that they are insufficient for anticipating how this or that person will construct his or her political allegiances, or which side of the picket line they will end up on.

This is all a way of saying that the above incident is not proof that people we characterize as extremely left or right become essentially indistinguishable. Rather, I would conclude that these individuals’ political agreement on one issue is so strong that no monolithic ideology is sufficient to anticipate their actions, and no monolithic ideology dominates these individuals’ thinking so strongly that they cannot temporarily overlook differences on other issues to unite over one. If anything, I think the story proves that we shouldn’t spend our time trying to make monolithic ideologies make sense in the face of highly complex political situations. Rather, we should ask ourselves how it is that people who can so strongly disagree on a bevy of issues find themselves unified in a particular political situation. In fact, your quotation is clear to point out that different people were protesting the protestors for different reasons, which suggests that they are clearly distinguishable in spite of their standing next to each other.

My concern with your characterization of a spectrum that is a circle is that it may fail to account for the fact that people “closer to the center” of the spectrum/circle regularly do the exact same thing as these protestors. I am willing to unite with Phillipa in my opposition to extramarital sex. I’ll even go so far as to picket against it. But this does not mean that I have to choose between homosexuals and extramarital sex. Some might think that I am implicated in making such a decision, but this is because they are trying to understand me in terms of a monolithic ideology (“liberalism”) rather than the variety of personal, social, and political allegiances with which I associate. And, since there is no conflict between my views on homosexuality and my views on extramarital sex, I would not be in any way duplicitous for picketing behaviors I know both straights and gays participate in. Seeing these protestors in light of the complexity of their allegiances makes reference back to terms like left and right seem reductive.

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