The Global Backlash

Yesterday, Saturday 11 October, there was a pro-Palestine demonstration in Berne. 'Demonstration' is putting it mildly: 18 police officers were injured, 9 police vehicles and 57 buildings were damaged. 536 people were detained, their identities checked and then released. We shall have to wait and see if anything more happens to them.

The fact that a peace process is currently underway in Gaza seems to count for nothing: 'Free Gaza'. Nor is any respect shown, given the proximity of the second anniversary of the bestial attack on Israel on 7 October.

Plenty of hammer and sickle symbols were daubed around, so by their own hands we can conclude that the troublemakers were would-be Communists. In the flurry of revolutionary agitprop from the rioters there was also a mention of the interception of Greta's flotilla. Oh, and 'decolonisation', of course.

One of the major groups participating was Klimastreik Schweiz, 'Climate Strike Switzerland', the presence of which suggests that a broad palette of disaffected revolutionaries was there. The outward-facing political organizations usually associated with this sort of ideological grumbling, the Socialist Party and the Green Party, kept their counsel, sensing which way the wind was blowing, choosing not to support the demo openly, but neither to oppose it.

By an interesting coincidence, on Friday 10 October a three day conference in Basel entitled Gegenmoderne – Kulturkampf, 'Countermodern – Culture Battle' came to a close. Decipher that title in whatever way you can.

The conference was organized by some sociologists at the University of Basel and pulled in academic sponsorship and cash from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (politically extreme left), the Institute for Social Research (embedded in the Goethe University, renowned as the birthplace of 'Critical Theory' and all the nonsense that came with it), The Swiss National Funds and so on.

It should be no surprise that if you fill a large hall with sociologists, what transpires is incomprehensible. The event was not so much a conference, more a mutual support session for bewildered, not-so-crypto Communists trying to cope in the Age of Trump.

The conference was tasked with analysing the 'Global Backlash', the main points of which can be summarised quite succinctly: the brown shadow of fascism is spreading across the world; it's all that authoritarian Trump's fault; fascist male sexual fantasies are on the rise; it really is all Trump's fault; voters are turning to fascist ideas because they fear becoming superfluous or irrelevant. Can anyone doubt that this new authoritarianism is Trump's fault? Climate denial is increasing. Orange Man Bad.

A propos climate denial, one sociologist reported that he had interviewed workers on Swiss building sites:

His results are paradoxical: Although the workers themselves are strongly affected by climate change – for example through heat stress and weather-dependent delays – they rejected radically not only the climate movement but also the environmental protection measures that could directly improve their own situation.

Seine Ergebnisse sind paradox: Obwohl die Arbeiter selbst stark vom Klimawandel betroffen sind – etwa durch Hitzestress und wetterbedingte Verzögerungen –, lehnen sie nicht nur die Klimabewegung radikal ab, sondern auch Umweltschutzmassnahmen, die ihre eigene Situation unmittelbar verbessern könnten.

By a process of reasoning that I must say escapes me, the researcher explained this as the 'fear of uselessness' (der Angst vor Nutzlosigkeit).

The spirit of Theodor Adorno, a Frankfurt Marxist and Critical Theorist of the first chop lives on, seventy-five years after the publication of his infamous research which led to the identification of that personality type, the Authoritarian Personality. Over the years since it appeared in 1950 his work has been shown to be error-strewn bunkum written by a group of Marxist obsessives, but its main principle is alive and kicking: if a person does not agree with you, stick a psychiatric label on them, e.g. 'authoritarian personality', 'fascist', 'denier'. Even using the word 'backlash' for the current right-wing ascendancy is an act of propagandistic labelling. The technique goes back to Karl Marx himself, who labelled the downtrodden who didn't agree with him as being victims of their own 'false consciousness'.

Even Andreas Tobler, the reporter from the reliably left-wing Zürich Tages-Anzeiger had to admit to being disconcerted by the one-sidedness of the programme:

They debated in the absence of political opponents, which, in the context of the Swiss consensus-democracy felt somewhat strange, in which one discusses face-to-face with the representatives of differing political viewpoints.

Sie debattierten in Abwesenheit des politischen Gegners, was im Kontext der Schweizer Konsensdemokratie etwas fremd wirken musste, wo man sich gern leibhaftig mit den Vertretern anderer politischer Ansichten auseinandersetzt.

Herr Tobler should be praised for sitting through this drivel so we don't have to, but in this respect he misses the point: as noted above, this was not so much a conference as a support session for Eurocommunist academics.

That the riot and the conference were almost simultaneous struck me as an interesting coincidence. They both revealed to an equal degree intellectually deranged bubble-thinking, the only difference between them being that the rioters did take on their opponents face-to-face, if rather robustly. The conference concluded by agreeing that another conference on this important subject was needed.

One thing the organizers got right: Kulturkampf, 'culture battle'. Trump in the USA, Meloni in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, perhaps Milei in Argentina have shown that bringing the world back to social sanity requires action on several fronts, not just the political front – a Kulturkampf in other words.

Mao Zedong (as we now have to write his name) understood this: Send the academic parasites out to work in the fields, down the mines, in the quarries. That'll learn 'em! Not the 'Backlash' – the 'Great Leap Forward'; not Kulturkampf – the 'Cultural Revolution'!