Negligible
degrees of
separation

Conservatives and fundamentalists: Hell's coalition
Harold Hark
25 October 2002

The human race is being forced once again to live through a period of fear and helplessness thanks to the conservatives, reactionaries, authoritarians, totalitarians, and fundamentalists who currently rule, or are attempting to rule, the world. Humanity's party poopers are evident in plague proportions, and they want us all to revert to their joyless, monochrome idea of a mindless, conformist paradise. Western conservatives want a consumer paradise; Islamic fundamentalists yearn for the Dark Ages.

The images vary from region to region:

A Dick and Jane version of the Bible used to promote a boys-own, John Wayne foreign policy to be implemented by a boy emperor and his deranged sidekicks;

A white picket fence defended by a force field of white superiority symbolising the neutered somnambulism of a leadership psychologically arrested in the 1950s;

A stolen land to be cleared of the race despised by the God of the occupiers who, according to ancient hearsay, pronounced them Chosen;

A misogynist, misanthropic worldwide gang of atavistic haters who long for the Sari Club of heaven, where they can finally attain the Western delights they deprive themselves of in this life.

Whichever God these cultural troglodytes have chosen to represent their conservative evil, the goal is to apply a tourniquet to the spirit of mankind.

In power, they demonise difference and share a lust for censorship. They curtail civil liberties in the national interest, thrilled by the power of life and death they hold over anyone who dissents. They remove education from the masses because it leads to free thinking. They promote hatred of others, racial or economic or religious. They regard women with fear. They cherish death, both of the body and the soul.

Islamic fundamentalists want to return us to the good old days when the wheel hadn't yet perverted the course of stasis. In the meantime, they will happily use modern technology to accomplish their aims, at least until they can destroy it too.

Western conservatives belong on this continuum, though they have been shoved, kicking and screaming, into the modern world. Nevertheless, they still share with the primevals a deep seated longing to close everything down, to stop the future, to live comfortably in a Pleasantville where nothing ever changes and old Doris Day ballads soothe their secret love of hate.

Conservatism, wherever it rears its nay-saying head, is the breeding ground of negativity, the true enemy of the human race.

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