roses and barbarism

It's all cottage charm if I narrow the camera in sufficiently. The thyme does look pretty. The larger green leaves beside it are buckwheat.
First rose of the season. Dublin Bay.
This chook has lost feathers below her throat. None of the others have and I need to research what is or might be going on.
It amazes me how the same rose plant can send out both deep green and deep red leaves at the same time.
I gave this succulent to Favourite Handyman last Christmas.
It is part of our cactus in tyres corner garden. So far, so good. Nothing else grows in this corner as it is south facing.

Slavoj Zizek has written an article in the Guardian which I think is really important. Liberalism multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face talks about the politics of fear and the creeping acceptance of racism across many spectra of society. How creepy but quite believeable is this quote?:

Robert Brasillach, the French fascist intellectual, who saw himself as a "moderate" antisemite and invented the formula of reasonable antisemitism. "We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; … We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual antisemitism is to organise a reasonable antisemitism."

Is this same attitude not at work in the way our governments are dealing with the "immigrant threat"? After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as "unreasonable" and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse "reasonably" racist protective measures or, as today's Brasillachs, some of them even Social Democrats, tell us: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and east European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organise a reasonable anti-immigrant protection."

Zizek draws on Europe and the United Kingdom for his examples, but I could think of many incidents and quotes from New Zealand society which support his argument. It is really, really worth clicking through and reading the entire article.