AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
In the wake of the devastating wild fires that reduced whole neighbourhoods of Los Angles to ash the blame game caught light. Locals blamed water shortages, cutbacks, possible arson and poor forest management for the inferno. President-elect Donal Trump, never slow to point the finger, accused local leaders of “stone cold incompetence”.
In the aftermath of disaster, it’s human nature to question why it occurred. The answer in this case was hugely down to ideal weather for wild fires, drought and local topography. And let’s not forget climate change for which we are all responsible. Where other factors contributed there’s a tendency to accuse others for errors which resulted in the loss of lives and more than 12,000 homes to date.
There’s a lot of the blame game around these days, in a world where views are becoming increasingly divisive and angry. In his latest bout of political meddling X supremo Elon Musk accused Sir Kier Starmer of being responsible for the ‘rape of Britain’ over failure to hold a national inquiry into the scandal involving grooming by gangs of young girls for sexual abuse.
You can blame anything for failure, especially it seems, in sport, like Mack Hansen, for instance, who castigated the referee in the Connaught v Leinster rugby match. Even the ball can be in the firing line given Mikel Arteta’s view when Arsenal was defeated by Newcastle recently.
But the blame game can get really nasty when claims are made against groups for wrongdoing which are without foundation. Trump is particularly fond of callouts which have no relationship to truth, like the idea that Latin American migrants are rapists or Mexican migrants are eating pet cats and dogs. This is where negative bias has set in and hostile motives are attributed to individuals or groups and where no rational thought is applied to testing the truth of the view held.
The blamer puffs up his or her own sense of importance and fuels prejudice and self-righteous anger. Negative attribution is a ploy which is used to distract attention from the blamer’s own inadequacies and relieves them of having any sense of responsibility. Rational thought and truth are disregarded.
The Church and Government were once the moral arbiters and news was controlled by the press or broadcasters. Now, anyone can go online thanks to social media and post whatever malevolent or unsubstantiated claims they want to make and link up with others on sites that endorse their untested views. The dark side of the internet and the power of malign influencers inflamed the November 2023 riots in Dublin. Following a stabbing of three children and a carer outside a city centre creche, far right activists used the incident to fuel anger against migrants.
People, including powerful individuals like Elon Musk, can say what they want without censure and where a sense of grievance might, with some justification, have been confined to the have-nots or the left behinds, like those in the Americas rust belt, grievance and blaming are widespread.
It feels as though the world is becoming an angrier more divided place, with the move towards political extremes, particularly the far-Right. There are more wars around the world than at any time since 1945 and liberal centrist leaders have been falling like ninepins, with Canada’s Justin Trudeau the most recent to go, to be replaced by rightwing premiers, with other Right and far-Right supremos, some like the AFD with Fascist roots waiting in the wings.
The policies they share are anti-migrant, protectionist, illiberal and territorially acquisitive. Look at Trump and his boasts about buying Greenland and taking over Panama. And they love playing the blame game. The danger in far-Right extremism is that leads on to intolerance, racism and the erosion of human rights and the blame game can become a trade war or a war game, for instance with Putin blaming Ukraine.
The tragic post-fire wreckage in Los Angeles neighbourhoods looks eerily like the devastation visited on Gaza by Israeli bomb strikes. Those strikes were largely funded by America where $20 million in arms were recently voted through by the outgoing administration.
Now, Americans can see at first hand what that devastation is like.
