A Free Left Blog

These days I am often reminded of a scene from the film The Godfather Part II. Al Pacino’s character Michael Corleone is in Cuba for a meeting of gang and business bosses to divide up the spoils of corrupt deals with the Batista government. Driving around the island he sees a number of Castro rebels being arrested, one of whom breaks away and kills himself and a military police captain with a grenade. In relating the episode to fellow bosses, Michael says this tells him something about the rebels, that “they can win”. The fact that the rebels were motivated enough to die for their cause showed that they could prevail over a regime that had to pay its people to fight. (One of the other business-crime bosses present by contrast dismisses them as ‘lunatics’. Shortly afterwards the Batista regime crumbles and Fidel Castro takes over.) In Downing Street yesterday, Theresa May as Prime Minister gave one of those speeches that are becoming familiar to us and also to her and t...

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Tony Blair as British Prime Minister moved quickly and effectively to establish that the Al-Qaeda suicide attackers were not being driven by Islam but a perversion of it, that Islam was a religion of peace, and that Britain, the United States and other countries were not fighting against Islam but against terrorism. Blair’s reaction seemed admirable then and still does to a large extent today. At a difficult time he reacted swiftly, showed real leadership and established himself as a genuine statesman on the world stage. The words he chose seemed right and felt right. They surely helped stop a lot of nascent anti-Muslim feeling in its tracks, both in Britain and abroad, and contributed to a remarkable atmosphere of tolerance in Britain towards Islam and Muslims following 9/11 and other Islamist attacks in Britain and elsewhere. Since leaving office, Blair has continued to preach the same line , that the ideology of ISIS or Islamic State for exam...

(Part IV on Popper and contemporary ideologies ) The avoidance and attempted suppression of contradictory arguments and evidence is a typical feature of ideologies. This tendency is also a natural feature of everyday politics of course. Practically, it is worth tolerating – though with an awareness that to tolerate something is to dislike it. However, when we are talking about matters of truth and right, and attempts to control what is said based on exclusive authority, reserved for certain groups or people, it is a different matter. This is where authoritarianism still raises its ugly head in our supposedly liberal Western societies - including from supposedly liberal people. As Karl Popper said in ‘ On the Sources of Knowledge and Of Ignorance ’ , a lecture given in 1960: “ The question of the sources of our knowledge, like so many authoritarian questions, is a genetic one. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may legitimize its...

This is the second part of a four-part essay applying the ideas of Karl Popper to the ideologies that have secured particular social power in our contemporary world . Part I preceding this introduced the context, in which Popper has been widely misappropriated by the right, and neglected by the left - wrongly, because he was liberal, and his sympathies were with the left. This second part of the essay gets into his critique of Hegelian and Marxist ideologies and explores how contemporary political Islamism is largely based on these theories. ‘Historicism’ is the term under which Karl Popper lumped all ideologies of history, from those of Plato and Aristotle through to Hegel and Marx, political communism and Nazism. For Popper, historicist social theories were those that claimed to understand the progression of history, and thereby reliably predict the future. What Marx did wrong in his view was not to make predictions that turned out to be wrong, but to claim scien...