<nettime> You Want it Darker..he kills the flame

-Is this the point when Liberalism becomes a fighting creed?

Stephen King has no monopoly on evil clowns. We Brits can certainly compete with

Boris Johnson, a kind of inverted vampire clown (he shrivels when out of the

spotlight).

Buried in his mischievous 4000 word article for the conservative daily the Telegraph

was a paragraph on what he describes as -split allegiances- that made my blood run cold.

The phrase goes to the heart of the Brext debate and the re-assertion of nationalism with its

fixed and singular identies. It suggests that we must place nation (blood and belonging) above

all else. here is the offending paragraph.

- "I used to look at the Brussels bumper stickers saying -Mon patrie, c’est Europe- and think it

was a bit of a laugh, and that they would never engender a genuine Euro-patriotism, or compete

with people’s natural feelings for their own country. I have to say that I am now not so sure. I think

I was complacent. I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked on their faces and I

am troubled with the thought that people are begining to have genuinely split allegiances."-

This is a world view that denies the inevitability of multiple allegiances asking us to choose or be

labled unpatriotic. I am being asked to choose whether I am more Jewish, or European than British..

Johnson’s speaks for many in the Tory party as we witnessed at last year’s Party Conference address

by Theresa May declared that - if you think you are a citizen of the world you're a citizen of nowhere-

There is a chilling echo here of the Russian anti-Semitic campaign after World War II in which Stalinist

theatre critics created the term -rootless cosmopolitans- to describe Jewish intellectuals. It also reminds

us that the classical liberal’s position of deliberative tolerance which asserts that we must listen carefuly

to the arguments of our adversaries as a way of testing the truth of our own position puts the classical

liberal at a permanent disadvantage. There comes a time when even liberalism must become a fighting

creed.