Green and unpleasant land

Whatever the Green Party wishes to build in England, I assure you it won’t be Jerusalem. I’d venture a guess that a Gulag Archipelago would be closer to the mark.

Zack Polanski, the party leader, is quite transparent about this intention. In this he follows a fine tradition best exemplified by Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, who never bothered to conceal their plans to rid the world of the kind of people Lenin called ‘noxious insects’ and Hitler called ‘subhumans’.

Mr Polanski is just as forthright, deviating from his typological ancestors only semantically, not substantively. The group he wishes to exterminate is the millions of Britons whose political convictions lie to the right of his own. But do let’s allow the man to speak for himself:

“Before we go into complete utopia – which I’m totally there for – there are people, though, who would identify as Right-wing, or indeed even far-Right. 

“And no matter what humanity or community we put them in, they are set on destroying or pushing this toxicity.

“Do we think we can change their minds? Or is it a case of building a society that doesn’t include them?”

The last two questions are clearly rhetorical: Mr Polanski thinks it self-evident that it’s impossible to change Right-wingers’ minds — and hence desirable to get rid of them.

Such is the “complete utopia” he is “totally there for”, although ‘the shining ideal’ would have been more precise. A utopia, after all, is an unachievable fantasy, whereas the society Mr Polanski sees in his mind’s eye, one in which whole swaths of the population are wiped out by category, has enviable historical antecedents.

Thus what he’s talking about isn’t a utopia but a concrete plan he intends to realise should the Greens form the next government. Since Polanski genuinely believes that his bogeymen “are set on destroying” society with their “toxicity”, he has a point: it behoves a responsible leader to protect his realm from such venomous blights.

The matter of ‘what’ thus settled, the next question to ask is ‘how?’, and again Mr Polansky can follow the course so ably charted in the past by Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Hitler (and Messrs Marx and Engels before them).

Still, Polanski has his job cut out for him logistically: the numbers he has in mind are quite large. According to most polls, over 25 per cent of all British adults place themselves on the right of the political spectrum. Since Britain is blessed with just over 55 million adults, the group targeted for exclusion may number close to 14 million.

Messrs Lenin, Stalin and Hitler proved that such numbers are achievable, given the talent and application, but the task is by no means easy, especially if we consider the proportions involved. Macîas Nguema in Equatorial Guinea and Pol Pot in Cambodia did manage to murder a third of their populations, but their countries were much less populous than Britain.

Still, as Lenin put it, “There is no fortress that Bolsheviks can’t storm”. So how does Mr Polanski propose to go about the task of cleaning the British Augean Stables of conservative refuse?

Since we already know that any hope of re-educating conservatives would be forlorn, the list of available exclusion options is narrow.

First, many incorrigible villains can be forced to emigrate. Second, those who choose to ignore that option must be killed either quickly, by bullet or torture, or slowly, by hunger and neglect in what Engels called “special guarded places”, and what Lenin – and, following him, Hitler – re-named ‘concentration camps’.

To be pedantic about it, Lenin and Hitler didn’t really coin the term, nor invent the concept. It was practised by the Spanish in Cuba, the British during the Boer Wars and by the Americans during the Philippine War.

Yet Lenin, Stalin and Hitler are owed the honour of proving that ‘concentration camp’ could really be a euphemism. Their camps were there to exterminate, not just to concentrate, and this is probably what Mr Polanski has in mind.  

Lest you may think that his pronouncement was merely a rhetorical flourish uttered without serious aforethought, let me remind you that exactly the same allowances were made by the target groups in Russia and Germany.

Exterminate all educated classes? Surely not, said the Russian clergy, intelligentsia and aristocrats. Kill all Jews? It’s just a figure of speech, said German Jews and simply decent people. All of them forgot the difference between civilised leaders and cannibalistic tyrants: the former relate their utterances to conventions of decency; the latter don’t.

Evil despots, those aspiring or already in power, must be taken at their word because they are seldom bashful about their plans. If Polanski says he wants to build “a society that doesn’t include” conservatives (or, in other words, excludes them), that’s exactly what he’ll try to do given the chance.

The way the Green Party is polling at the moment suggests he may well get that chance. Even if the Greens are unlikely to win a general election outright, they may still gain a large presence in Parliament either on their own or in coalition with Labour.

Since the British electorate has on many occasions shown its tendency to self-harm, that possibility can by no means be discounted. Somehow not many people realise that the likes of Polanski aren’t misguided idealists but evil ghouls.

Decorticating their pronouncements would go a long way towards acquiring such understanding, so I beg you: open your ears and listen to wicked ideologues. They do mean what they say.

P.S. Speaking of leaders who tend to run off at the mouth, I have two questions.

First, is it ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ or ‘Trump’s Derangement Syndrome’?

Second, when Trump ends a war that then restarts, only for him to end it again, does it count as one war ended or two? The latter is better: the Donald can easily run up the score so high that the Nobel Committee will have to sit up and take notice.