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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Shamima Begum is back in the news with news that the European Court of Human Rights are questioning the UK Home Office's decision to remove her citizenship on the basis that she may have been "groomed" and "trafficked" into joining ISIS.

In a document published by the ECHR earlier this month, it states that Ms Begum is challenging the decision to revoke her British citizenship under Article 4 of the European Convention of Human Rights - prohibition of slavery and forced labour.

The four questions posed by judges in Strasbourg to the Home Office, include: "Did the Secretary of State have a positive obligation, by virtue of Article 4 of the Convention, to consider whether the applicant had been a victim of trafficking, and whether any duties or obligations to her flowed from that fact, before deciding to deprive her of her citizenship?"

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said Ms Begum "chose to go and support the violent Islamist extremists".

He added: "She has no place in the UK and our own Supreme Court found that depriving her of citizenship was lawful.

"It is deeply concerning the European Court of Human Rights is now looking at using the ECHR to make the UK take her back."

If the UK is manoeuvered into allowing Begum to return at the the behest of the European courts it will be political suicide for the government, an open goal for the far right, but what gets me is how it will foreseeably be consequently counterproductive for the very demographics that human rights activists seek to defend! It will pour fuel on reactionary sentiment and division. I think that the functional part of Labour understand this, and will be working hard to make sure it doesn't happen, but I worry that the activist section of the back benches will work against them, ignorant (wilfully?) of the prospect of ushering in a Reform government on a swelling tide of rightist sentiment. It's like a moral puritanism that denies the political reality of trade-offs. Sure, there might be a hard right UK government, but it won't be their fault - they stood against it!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed? I'm not aware of this having ever worked out, but 'well grounded in history' is not a criticism that can be levied at anti-capitalists(which is well established among the activist portion of the labour party) anyways. It seems like 'intentionally leading to a far right government' is a thing which theory would expect lefty activists to occasionally do, and Keir probably doesn't have the party discipline to stop it.

isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed?

This is basically the thesis of Lenin's book What is to be done.

I can also think of a historical example where in a band of revolutionary socialists embedded within a wider workers movement were able to execute Lenin's plan to great effect. Unfortunately for Lenin and his movement, the socialist affinity for back-stabbing reared it's ugly head and the wider left has spent the intervening decades desperately trying to convince both themselves and everyone else that the evil mustache man was never a true leftist to begin with.

All sides have their accelerationists who imagine that just x% more of what they hate will shock the masses out of their false consciousness. What that strategy ignores is that the polity can remain unfavourable longer than you can remain politically relevant.

To "accelerate the contradictions" (or in other popular phrasing "heighten the contradictions" or "sharpen the contradictions") seems to be a Leninist idea originally. And to be fair, Lenin did get the total revolution he wanted rather than the more incremental improvements that occurred (and that leave extremists fuming) elsewhere.

There seems to be a continuous spectrum of these ideas in Marxist (and probably wider leftist) thought, though. The idea that you can bring about The Revolution faster by making things worse shades into the idea that you just shouldn't try to delay The Revolution by trying to make things incrementally better, and both are similar to but distinct from the idea that you can't do much either way because prophecy psychohistory dialectical materialism proves that The Revolution will come when it's destined to regardless.

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