It is never good to laugh at people who are suffering. Especially an easy target as left in Irish politics. Shoot fish in the barrel. But I’ll enjoy myself anyway. In these bleak times, you can enjoy your joy wherever you find it.
I’m not talking about Sinn Féin here, pseudo-socialists with a sinister past who are now trading populism to attract gullible and appreciative people. Nor the Labor Party or the Social Democrats. Although often sober and prone to grabbing hands, at least they both recognize the basic logic of a market economy.
I think more of the Trots and Stalins sitting to one side of the Dáil, dressing up and lecturing on the evil establishment – that is, the hardworking taxpayers living in the D-sale and paying the mortgage – of how they are vampires sucking blood of the proletariat.
As it happened, some of these people, ahem, Marxists went to schools that charged tuition and were never more disadvantaged growing up than going to see Angela’s Ashes at the cinema. The economically illiterate, their trivial political stories in the columns of Leinster House – sternly masked by RTÉ as if they had a mission far beyond their actual seats – at best should be muted.
I have heard enough to know that they do not understand Marx and that their wisdom is meager in Groucho’s favor rather than Karl. I am thinking of a loose coalition of shabby but elegantly elected political commissars who have soft support for serial killers like Uncle Joe and Chairman Mao.
For the sake of brevity, we’ll simply call them PBPs. Until last week, of course, representing People Before Profits. However, as one wag on Twitter noted, they should now be known as the Pre-Putin Principles. Tongue in cheek, but on something. Bow your heads, anti-Westernists, comrades Richard Boyd Barrett, Paul Murphy and Brid Smith.
It could also include the group of Irish MEPs, who insulted our intelligence by voting against a European Parliament resolution condemning Russian hegemony just three months ago. Please add bows for Sinn Féin’s Mick Wallace, Clare Daly, Ming Flanagan and Chris MacManus. This brain believer has clearly never read any European history, or if it does, it can’t be calculated.
So far, it’s funny. Except now, with their favorite billionaire gangster rolling tanks into Ukraine and threatening a nuclear attack, this old joke has turned sour. To add insult to injury, we’ve got the PBP and the so-called Anti-War Movement – bomb-banned hippies left over from the last millennium – preaching outside Leinster House about twin evils of NATO and the United States.
To see traumatized Ukrainians – there at the same time protesting the invasion – get beaten up by these unscrupulous stand-up comedians is infuriating. Undoubtedly the problem is where the imitators and ironies died and were buried in Lenin’s mausoleum.
