AN INTERVIEW With GEORGE MONBIOT
George Monbiot may have been wrong about Syria, and also the White Helmets, but he does remain a genuine socialist, in my opinion.
What really opened my mind up about conspiracy theories was when I was debating with the climate change deniers on twitter, and I saw how their minds work, but to my alarm I began to wonder about many of my own precious beliefs, as I could see similar psychological patterns within myself. We all have them where we can get a belief and get entrench by it. So, you have to be vigilante about this, but not close your mind completely, as there are some real conspiracies out there.
Anyway, this is a superb article, but George Monbiot may have closed his mind a bit too much too on some topics too.
It's interesting how the radical right, which is controlled by very rich people, talk like anti establishment lefties at times, when they say they are anti elite, even though they are the elite. My theory is that the ruling class had become predominantly socially liberal, so now many conservatives felt they could not support the state anymore. Conservative are normally more authoritarian and so tend to support the establishment.
Like the radical right, the left completely distrust the establishment, and so many of them now are so entrenched by this that they are unable to look at each situation independently and weigh it up, so now some of them have fallen for vaccine scepticism and also oppose mandates. If you go into hospital because you are very ill you don't want staff there who could give you covid (by the way, nearly all doctors have have been vaccinated) and the same for care homes for the elderly, but some on the left oppose all mandates. Some even hold climate change denial views.
Tweet
Beaumont hospital reveals that 8 medical staff, 49 nursing staff & 57 administrators have not been vaccinated. Earlier this year it had the highest number of Covid cases of any hospital in Dublin. There is also "strong antivax movement in the hospital"
The Internet means we can get caught in our own little groups and echo chambers.
One of the statements that gets to me is, "there is no left and right anymore, only us against the elite", but two thirds of the over 55's in England vote Tory and they haven't gone away.
Amid a disorienting explosion of crises and social shifts, there are worrying signs that some parts of the Left are becoming more susceptible to conspiracist ways of thinking. It’s a symptom of social atomization in the neoliberal era — but we don’t have to accept it as inevitable.
Author and activist George Monbiot, however, finds something singularly dark and sinister about our present moment. In a recent column for the Guardian, he writes with urgency about the extreme right’s appropriation of countercultural idioms and revolutionary language in the age of QAnon and COVID. In a wide-ranging conversation, Jacobin’s Luke Savage sat down with Monbiot to discuss the issues raised in his latest piece, the corrosion of community in the neoliberal era, and the desperate need for a new narrative of solidarity and common good in an age of resurgent fascism and ecological collapse.
Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/conspiracy-theories-qanon-covid-left-anarchism-counterculture-extreme-right-restoration-stories-bridging-communities