The hard right and the killing of empathy

Earlier this year there was a serious nuclear incident at Faslane naval base on the Clyde, where the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines are based. Nuclear incidents are graded on a scale of seriousness, from category D to category A, with category A being the most serious. Category A represents an “actual or high potential for radioactive release to the environment” in breach of safety limits. This classification covers a multitude of sins, from a release of radioactive material almost happening due to accident or negligence, but not actually occurring because a leak was contained before any radioactive material escaped into the environment, into all the way up to the release of a significant, considerable, and potentially dangerous amount of radioactive material into the environment.

A Category A nuclear incident occurred at Faslane sometime between January 1 and April 22 this year. However we do not know how serious the incident was, whether any radioactive material was released into the environment or not, nor any details about the nature of the incident. The Scottish Government has sought to find out the nature of the radioactive leak, the clean-up operation, and the potential health effects on local residents but the Labour government has refused to release any details.

As previously reported in this blog and elsewhere, the Ministry of Defence has a long-standing tradition of having a cavalier attitude to safety in its nuclear facilities and then making strenuous efforts to keep its negligence a secret from the public, a practice which is ultimately counter-productive as all it does is to breed widespread suspicion and distrust in communities close to the MoD’s nuclear installations, which only boosts public opposition to their presence. If the MoD spent the same amount of effort on preventing the leak of radioactive material as it did on preventing the leak of information about its negligence, perhaps it wouldn’t have a problem to cover up in the first place.

Meanwhile, while we are on the topic of a release of toxic material into the environment, there’s been another Murdo. Someone really ought to take Tory MSP Murdo Fraser’s phone away from him for his own good. He has such a habit of incontinently offering his risible hot takes on social media that the phrase “There’s been a Murdo” is now inextricably associated with him and defines what we are contractually obliged to call his political career.

Murdo’s latest is to attempt to link the SNP to this week’s murder of far right American influencer Charlie Kirk. After John Swinney said: “The murder of Charlie Kirk is another dreadful example of violence in our politics.We live and thrive by the democratic strength of respecting the views of others. There can never be a place for violence. My sympathy to his wife and family.” Fraser retorted: “You were deputy to a first minister [Nicola Sturgeon] who said ‘I detest the Tories’. Just yesterday you called [Scottish Tory MSP] Craig Hoy ‘disgusting’ and ‘despicable’ for raising constituents’ concerns over asylum hotels.

“There’s a link between othering and demonising opponents and events in the US. Do better.”

This comes from a man whose party and supporters have a long history of othering and demonising the SNP, supporters of independence in general, as well as migrants, benefits claimants, the disabled, the poor, and trade unionists. Look in the mirror, Murdo.

The right, particularly the far right which Kirk represented, is defined by its demonisation and othering.

Kirk had a long history of espousing morally questionable views in the supposed name of Christianity – a form of Christianity alien to the precepts of the Gospels. I’m not a believer myself but I don’t think that when Jesus said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” there was an additional verse saying – “Unless they’re a migrant.” Kirk’s openly racist views are well documented. He said civil rights hero Dr Martin Luther King was “awful… not a good person.” He also called the Civil Rights Movement “a huge mistake.” His views on abortion went beyond the bounds of reason or human decency. He once said that if his ten year old daughter became pregnant as a result of rape then she should be forced to carry the baby to term. He also insisted: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage.”

The English word empathy was coined in 1909 in order to provide a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which is attested as far back as the 18th century in the writings of the Prussian philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Of course, something exists even long before there’s a name for it. The dwarf planet Pluto has existed for billions of years, even if there has only been a name for it since it was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Jesus’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself is a commandment to practise empathy, 2000 years ago.

Long before the New Age movement was a thing, the German-Jewish and American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” That is where we are now in 2025. The barbarians are not at the gates, they are in our mobile phones.

The hard right is seeking to destroy empathy. The far right’s tactics of demonisation and dehumanisation can only work when we cannot be allowed to feel empathy for the victims of their hatred. We cannot be permitted to feel empathy for trans people or migrants. Kirk sought to deny the validity of empathy, a sentiment also shared by Elon Musk. To deny empathy is to deny humanity. I have empathy for the wife and children of Charlie Kirk because I know what bereavement feels like. I have empathy for Charlie Kirk in his final minutes, because I understand the terror of fearing you are about to die.

Charlie Kirk was a deeply unpleasant individual with some deeply unpleasant views but that of course does not justify or condone his murder. There is no excuse or murdering an individual because of his views, and of course his murder should be condemned, that should go without saying but it’s a sign of how febrile things have become these days that it has to be spelled out. Since his murder, the media has apparently set out to sanctify Kirk, presenting him as a mainstream Christian and a mainstream Conservative, a modern martyr. Kirk’s views were not mainstream and if we allow them to become normalised, we are in deep trouble as a society. “Vile people don’t deserve to be killed, but they don’t deserve to be praised, either,” is apparently a concept that is too complex for much of the American and British media to wrap its head around.

Empathy is in short supply in British politics, but there is still hope of keeping its flame alive in Scotland. Scots are not better human beings than anyone else of course, but Scottish politics, based as it is in the deep rooted Scottish cultural tradition of communitarianism and the deeply empathetic belief that we’re aw Jock Tamson’s bairns, perhaps has better bulwarks to resist the selfish and atomising cynicism upon which the far right feeds.

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