The Alt Left State

Dear Sir: I was recently gifted with some lovely lambswool prayer shawls from the Golden Temple of Amritsar and I fell to speaking with the young Sikh devotee who spoke of the name that Sikhs give to Jesus from his travels around Tibet, and who also hearked back to the golden era of the Golden Temple in times past, opining that it was nigh time that something similar happened in the West. Do we have a word for this kind of thing?

The Golden Temple of Amritsar is the older code word for the assertion of religious and civil rights by religions when an over-dominant and oppressive state machinery has taken over a nation - nations are about people and people are individuals from individual families, and those people do have rights, human rights, civil rights, and even some religious or ecclesial rights - it is a different world from the time when the Sanskrit word for right was yos and when it meant an absolute human right independent from some spurious official state recognition of the fact. The Sikhs and priests of the Golden Temple were suppressed by the state police in the fullness of time but not without loss of nerve - the deed was done, the rights were asserted. Christians call upon their code at canon 747.

But Notate Bene - The Alt-Left State is something that has cropped up of late, with religious people of different traditions all blowing their alarm whistles or using their pepper sprays or whatever they use, to signal that the State is becoming over-weaning and dominant and depriving people of basic human and civil liberties they once enjoyed before Covid alarms rang out. It is not just the Sikhs, also the Hindus and the Moslems, and even a few Christians have been sounding this recent alarm bell. There is concerne that all the draconian powers that the State arrogated to itself during the pandemic, ostensibly to protect the British public from the Chinese Disease, might be hung onto even after the crisis passes. Certainly the paucity of opposition MPs at the recent Coronavirus Act 2021 debate in Parliament allowed all those oldish and olde worlde powers to be extended all over again just one more time. Shades of the Alamo maybe. But Alt-Left it is.

When MPs from right and left went through some solemn acts of remembrance at the House of Commons in memory and homage to Sir D who was killed, officially and ostensibly by a Moslem radical from Somalia, but whose father is himself a left wing politician out there, it seemed all was sadness and tears but also sweetness and light in Parliament again, with speeches and tributes pouring in from all sides about the parliamentarian who lost his life for the cause of democracy, but it all seems quite spurious in the cold light of sunrise the next week, since the tributes wore thinner and thinner as the service wore on, chiefly because the political Left was lauding him for what he did not represent, in sum they were using the occasion for more propaganda of the older kind, but why so, why so spurious if that is not too strong, despite all the tears? It seems the young killer wore not the garb of an Islamic militant but the uniform of the now familiar Antifa crowd, so this might well have been an Alt-Left plot to begin the killing of conservative MPs in Britain and on the western side of the old European mainland, a plot of international ramifications and ranges maybe. While the speeches seemed traditional and democratic in their range in Parliament, the directionality of the government took a decided turn toward the nanny state of the old Left, with new draconian powers in something that resembled more a Draconian Emergency Powers Act 2021 than the older sort of Medicaid Coronavirus Act 2020.

A local expert who shall remain nameless but who is very useful now that he has come over to religion who recognises the genre well, from his days campaigning for Socialism and Communism in Slow Motion, himself sees the signs of an Alt-Left Governing Council, where opposition MPs no longer become opposition MPs and both sides of the House unite on their favourite subjects, though we must be adamant about this - it is not their roles to do so, since Her Majesty's loyal opposition must put forward all that can be reasonably adduced against the directionality of the party in power so that objectivity is attained in the long run and the adversarial system of debate is given its due moment and power. Christians have been worried for some time, since they see the seeding of the newspapers with the usual anti-religious stories of the Alt Left forces coagulating around the new style Government. The Golden Temple will rise again. Christians beware of wily Greeks bearing gifts, this time round. If there is a book for this kind of era, it is an obscure one - Trojan Horse in the City of God, by Dietrich von Hildebrand.