Identities and Loyalties

The closest thing to an absolute truth is that anyone who could believe in any such thing represents a 'social problem'...at best.

Truth is always incomplete. That follows from the basic situation we find ourselves in. But if it is porous, unfinished, wishy-washy and so on, it is still Truth.

 

Let's look at a subset of the issue: peoples. 

 

Englishness is an actual thing, but what is it made of? There's a rough and ready geo-biological truth of it and a cultural truth, plus an awful lot of silly mythology, as any nation can attest, most of all our immediate neighbours, but the thing in itself surely cannot be dismissed outright as a noxious lie.

 

One of the greatest and most violent tormentors ever of the Jewish people was the Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada, a convert from Judaism to Catholicism.

 

Today, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who was once recorded observing that “they say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true!” is himself descended from a rabbinical family, self-professed Hebrews as recently as the 19th century. 

 

This should not be very surprising. A significant proportion of the card-carrying Jihadist loons in that region will inevitably be descended from the patchwork of 'indigenous' peoples who lived there long before the overwhelming Arab-Islamic conquest, now having gone full Stockholm Syndrome. (It will be interesting to see how much of the external narrative Bullshit associated with the Middle East conflict can survive the current extension into Lebanon, with its more obviously sophisticated history.) 

 

Anyway, the point here ought to be that there is a Truth behind identities and loyalties, which we need to respect, even if we can easily locate the intersections with fiction. 

 

Compromise often looks like a clumsy fudge, but sometimes it really is the Truth.