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We Must Move Forward… Not Backwards, Not to The Side, Not Forwards, But Always Whirling, Whirling, Whirling Towards Freedom!

The vacuum after Sharon – which apparently ‘will not soon, if ever, be filled’ (5) – is more than an empty chair in the Cabinet office missing a leader. It is a vacuum of vision and values and of any idea about what Israel stands for today; it represents an uncertainty about how Israel should […]

The vacuum after Sharon – which apparently ‘will not soon, if ever, be filled’ (5) – is more than an empty chair in the Cabinet office missing a leader. It is a vacuum of vision and values and of any idea about what Israel stands for today; it represents an uncertainty about how Israel should be led and where it should be led to. This was captured in the name of Sharon’s new party Kadima, which means ‘Forward’. Forward to what? And why? It was as meaningless as that New Labour slogan, ‘Forwards, not back’. Since the 1980s, Israel has been rocked by a series of crisis periods. Following the end of the Cold War in particular, when Israel was robbed of its key role as a Western-supported block on Soviet influence, Israeli leaders have struggled to find a contemporary mission for Zionism. Sharon’s stroke has brought to the surface this sense of self-doubt. ~Brendan O’Neill, spiked-online.com

This seems to be a perennial problem for people who believe that nations and states exist to fulfill ideological purposes: at some point, too few people in the nation or too few citizens in the state believe in the official or semi-official ideological purpose to which they are supposed to be dedicated and for which they are supposed to be willing to sacrifice all the natural affinities and goods in life, including life itself. The welfare of the commonwealth alone no longer seems meaningful or important enough to command allegiance or loyalty, even though this is the one political good that is most naturally and commonly desired. Instead, the commonwealth must be bled dry to serve still some other goal or ideal. Yet something as simple as the mortality of one man can puncture this illusion with a sobering dose of reality, as Sharon’s own volte face on Gaza had already started to do: a state founded on irredentism and old-fashioned romantic socialism and nationalism has been forced to come to terms with the demystification of its raison d’etre and the mortality of one of its preeminent figures. To the extent that democratic politics does actually make a party or party leader a symbol of the nation, the terrible health of such a party leader calls forth all sorts of reflections on the terrible health of the polity. Inasmuch as modern democracy inculcates a servile mentality and encourages people to leave government to the proper experts and managers, it is little wonder that, as Mr. O’Neill says, Israelis and Palestinians feel disenfranchised and not in control: the focus on Sharon’s person is a testimony to the tendency in democracy, even one as notoriously fractious and divided as Israel’s parliamentary system, towards autocracy, which helps explain the obsession with the health of the ruler. But regardless of its purported loss of vision or direction, Israel is dying demographically and will be, unless trends change, subsumed in an Arab tide. That is Israel’s real crisis, and one that will not be resolved no matter who wins the election in March.

Via Antiwar.

In contrast, the passing of Jefferson and Adams on the same day in 1826 did mark the end of an era, but it induced no sense of crisis or gloom because their republic had not existed in a semi-permanent state of conflict and violence for all that time and the nation did not possess the mentality of an armed camp that relied on the leadership of its commanders. The Republic was growing daily and adding new states every few years, not ceding territories and failing to replace its own population. In the early Republic the loss of one political leader, no matter how significant he had been in the life of the nation and no matter the time or manner of his passing, was ultimately neither here nor there, as republicanism eschewed the sort of informal personality cults that people unconsciously create around political figures in democratic states. Indeed, in America it was only in the years after Lincoln’s assassination that the sort of tawdry worship of this most unworthy man began, and it was only after this cult had been developed and elaborated that it was possible for Americans to idolise Presidents as embodiments of the nation.

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