‘Far-Left’ and ‘Far-Right’ need to be replaced by ‘Far-UP’
by Gavin Ashenen:
I can understand why the Nazis burned books. One book can subvert a whole culture. Perhaps one of the most subversive books I’ve known was “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding. I must have read it when I was 14 or 15.
It tells the story of a group of schoolboys whose plane crashes onto a remote island. They survive the crash, but descend into violence and chaos and finally murder. They lose all the trappings of civilisation, inside and out, in a very short time.
This was and is a shocking book. It called the bluff of moral progress and ethical evolution. Our civility is just skin deep Golding was saying. From the moment I finished the book, I knew that Golding was right and that progressive politics was based on a misjudgement of human nature. Our ethical progress was just skin deep, and could be lost in an instant.
I keep on being haunted by images of Nazi book burning and the smashing up of Jewish shop fronts from Germany in the 1930’s. Something like a collective madness came on the people of Germany. It really seemed to erupt almost out of nowhere. How could such a civilised people, the children of Goethe and Beethoven, so swiftly become the breeding ground of Nazism, with its book burnings, thuggery and ultimately the horrifying and very Golding-like final solution?
I’m not the only one to make this connection.
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