Groundhog Year III: In which I understand why groundhogs dig holes and hide in them

Another year, another depressing message…

Last year I lamented the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Not much has changed. Russia is getting absolutely nothing out of it and yet Putin is too weak to admit defeat and too stupid to change his objectives. He is a man riding on the back of a hungry tiger only to realise that the saddle he bought on wish.com is not going to hold him much longer. He is now dependent on the likes of Iran and North Korea for supplies. Only a few years ago that power relationship would have been the entirely other way round! Sooner or later, he will lose completely but that doesn’t help the people who’s lives he is ruining right now and who can’t wait for “sooner or later”.

This year couldn’t have gifted the world an even more cruel, stupid and pointless war, could it? Well, you already know the answer to that. “This is our 9/11” cried a lot of Israeli sources and they were correct, far more correct than they could possibly realise. Correct, in exactly the way that they didn’t mean. This is exactly the sort of sordid war of revenge that does infinitely more damage than the atrocity it seeks to avenge. More than another 9/11, this is a disastrous rerun of the Iraq war. Some people are loving it though. The antisemitic “Christian Zionists” have finally got what they wanted. They have complete control of an entirely corrupt Israeli government and a war that will destabilise the entire middle-east leading to… what? A final Holy War in which Jews and Muslims are both annihilated leaving the land vacant for a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem? The Rapture? The Second Coming? The end of the Earth itself? Needless to say, this is all completely insane! Just as in Ukraine, everybody loses this war. Israel loses international support, even its legitimacy, and Palestine is just obliterated, again. The guilty warlords of Hamas and Likud alike sit in their air-conditioned air-raid shelters while the innocent are shot, bombed, starved and blamed. What possible way forward is there? Israelis and Palestinians need to look at each other and see their own reflections: Abused by history, promised a land and then double-crossed by the British, cynically manipulated by their “allies”, if Israelis can not look at Palestinians and see a stateless diaspora that reproduces so much of their own historic suffering as Jews, and if they can not look at the liquidation of Gaza and see echos of the Warsaw Ghetto, then I don’t know what history is even for.

Mind you, with the way that politicians in many countries are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and just giving up on the environment completely it almost seems like nothing matters.

“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death.
JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”

― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens.

No! We must resist that impulse! That is not what Sir Terry meant! We must not give in to the boomer inside us all that says, “Yeah, but you will be dead before the sea comes to claim you.”

2024 offers us a chance of change, by which I mean not much change, but maybe something better than nothing. There will be elections in the USA and in the UK. I can’t blame you if you are not excited but we do need to take this seriously.

In the USA there will be a chance to re-elect Joe Biden, a basically decent guy who does his best and who, to be fair, is somewhat more effective than many people give him credit for. Even so, he can’t really do much against a fascism that has only dug in deeper over the last three years and does not fight fair. He will most likely be running against Trump, a treasonous career criminal who isn’t even the worst person seeking the Republican nomination. Trump, working for Putin, would burn America to the ground using the Constitution as a firelighter. The only hope for America is to sweep Republicans out of office at every level where they have the power to ban books, rig votes, disenfranchise, imprison and murder black, Latino and LGBT people, rape women and children and force them to die in childbirth. I am not optimistic. The only lesson the Republicans learned from 2020 was that they didn’t cheat hard enough. People need to be ready for much worse this time. On the plus side, demographics are changing favourably. The boomers are ageing out of the American electorate and younger voters are not as gullible as their predecessors. There is hope that the Republican vote will collapse among women as they finally realise that the Republican’s libertarian posturing does not even extend to their own wombs.

In the UK there will be a chance to…
Ugh! Don’t make me say it…
Ugh! OK.
There will be a chance to elect Kier Starmer, a man only incrementally less of a Tory than the actual Tories. Starmer is a man who’s only real skill is pandering, which he directs it at all the wrong people. He panders to Tory “concerns”. He panders to anti-LGBT “concerns”. He panders to anti-environmentalist “concerns”. He panders to an imaginary white working class voter with reactionary attitudes. He does whatever the far-right press tells him to in the hope that it will anoint him like it anointed Tony Blair. Maybe it will. It should be the corruption and the profiteering that does for the Tories but maybe it will just be racism that does for Sunak. That would be depressing. Imagine being rid of the Tories knowing that only the vilest of motivations achieved it and knowing that the racists are ready to vote Tory again as soon as they find a white leader. Nonetheless, the only hope for the UK is to sweep Tories out of office at every level, reform our vicious far-right press and rejoin the World that we so arrogantly turned our backs on with Brexit.

For a lot of us that means voting Labour, at least so long as the Labour candidate is not also a fascist. (There are many excellent Labour candidates who I would happily vote for but I’d rather see Canterbury go back to the Tories than see far-right extremist Rosie Duffield re-elected!) For others it will mean voting Lib Dem. (That will be me in Guildford.) In other parts of the UK, it may mean voting SNP, Green or PC. In Northern Ireland it means kicking out both extreme unionists and republicans.

Research your local candidates carefully. Which ones can actually win? Which ones are actually decent people? Look out for those who pander to racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, sectarianism and (particularly!) transphobia. They are not to be trusted even if they try to pander to you!

So, here’s to 2024, but only because we don’t have any other options!

Vote, and vote wisely, but remember that voting is not enough! We need to build a new society in which we are not so gullible, so easily divided and so easily exploited. Don’t let our leaders backslide on the environment just because they are old enough not to have to care whether they will be affected. Don’t let them throw the queer kids under the bus just to keep the bloodthirsty Daily Telegraph happy. Don’t be content with Tories in red rosettes.

So Merry Christmas, I guess, and a Happy New Year to everybody except Elon Musk.