Harriet Harman, Fidel Castro and a glass of whiskey in both their left hands
Danny Finkelstein points out ten of the unheroic things that Fidel Castro has done in his criticism of Harriet Harman for calling the bearded one ‘a hero of the left’. I am generally categorised as being on the left; if Fidel Castro is also on the left, I would think that ‘left’ has no meaning whatsoever as Castro and I have bugger all in common. The terms ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ poison our debate by making us think there is a unidimensional continuum between (say) Augusto Pinochet and Fidel Castro. There isn’t.
Harman was being particularly flippant in her common as, if ‘left’ does mean anything and Castro is a hero of it, she most certainly does not qualify as ‘left’; nor should she want to be. Sadly, because we think in these ridiculous terms, there is a cache to being left-wing; viz., middle class people wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. Equally, we see anarchists lumped together with Stalinists and socialists and social democrats and Tony Blair, while on the right we see anarchists with libertarians with neocons and palaeocons and Tories and God-King-and-Country types. Oh, and Tony Blair.
The best summary I can find is from a Mississippi state representative, one Noah Sweat, Jr, in the Missouri House in 1952:
If you mean whiskey, the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pits of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness, and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.However, if by whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow; if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into Texas treasuries untold millions of dollars each year, that provides tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, to build the finest highways, hospitals, universities, and community colleges in this nation, then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor it.
This is my position, and as always, I refuse to be compromised on matters of principle.
The use of these political shorthands shows a lack of intellectual rigour, poor semantics and an affection for ding-dong politics where you appeal to identifications that are increasingly out of touch with reality.
xD.
