Published 20 January 2025 in News
The Helsinki Notebooks
From Grey to Gone: The Perils of Ideological Purity By Moshumee Dewoo
The Helsinki Notebooks - Global Dispatches Against Fascism and the Far Right
The University of Helsinki - Faculty of Social Sciences - Academic Disciplines - Political History
Posted 15 January 2025
From Grey to Gone: The Perils of Ideological Purity
“Women of colour suffer wherever white men are,” a group of African American students flung out from behind the knight of ideological purity during one of my earlier lectures on African Political Thought in Cape Town, South Africa. Their words cut through the air with missionary certainty. My lungs ran out of breath. I froze. There I was, a woman of colour, commanding intellectual space in a world shared with white men – a perfect, irrefutable, living contradiction to their claim. Could they not see me? Had they erased me from the history of women of colour? The sting of exclusion was sharp, but what truly gnawed at me then, as a scholar of resistance, was the broader political implication of their claim. And so, I dove deeper into what would become a relentless pursuit to understand the knight of ideological purity – a pursuit that has largely shaped my academic journey.
The knight of ideological purity, as I came to understand, finds sanctuary at the far ends of political thought, thriving equally on the right as it does on the left (as the ultra-right and the ultra-left), despite the ostensible opposition of the two.
On the ultra-right, the knight of ideological purity champions exclusion under the guise of preserving a monolithic national ethos for the purity and therefore survival and eventual greatness of a single race, ethnicity, culture, or nation. This often leads to systemic violence and mass atrocities stemming from the binaries of “us, the pure” versus “them, the corrupting other.” The military regime of Efraín Ríos Montt illustrates this, whose vision of a pure Guatemalan identity cast indigenous Mayans as communist sympathisers – cultural, political, and ethnic contamination –, based on their involvement in grassroots movements advocating for labour rights, and resistance to government oppression (practices aligning with leftist ideologies, particularly in the context of the Cold War). The regime swiftly unleashed its brutal “Scorched Earth” campaign across the country. The result? The destruction of entire indigenous villages and death of hundreds of thousands of Mayans.
On the ultra-left, this knight manifests in the erosion of pluralistic discourse as it screams with uncompromising, revolutionary zeal for radical equality, which often mutates into authoritarian moral conformity or the dogmatic enforcement of collectivist ideals. Any deviation from the prescribed orthodoxy, even within progressive circles, is branded as betrayal of the cause or heresy, splitting the world into “us, the liberators” versus “them, the reactionary enemies of progress.” Consider the chilling example of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, whose obsession with eradicating perceived inequality in favour of an agrarian utopia led to the destruction of the very fabric of Cambodian society in the manner of the abolition of private property, outlawing of religion, emptying of urban centres, and denial of cultural diversity. Millions of urban dwellers were then displaced to the countryside, where they were subjected to gruelling labour, starvation, and disease. Intellectuals were declared enemies of the state, where the most trivial deviations from the ideal agrarian Cambodian identity, including wearing spectacles or speaking foreign languages, cast them as the “bourgeois enemies” to execute. The result? Genocide. Nearly two million lives lost.
Through years of observing the knight of ideological purity, whether on the left or on the right, I have come to the sobering realisation that, no matter how noble its banner (presenting itself as if it were a solution to the problems it claims to identify), it is no friend to those who linger in the many shades of grey, in the nuanced spaces between the ultra-right and ultra-left. For, it insists that, lest they are demonised, stoned, burnt at a stake, enslaved, gassed, invisibilised, actively silenced, left to die, exiled, ostracised, dehumanised, “cancelled,” or, if fortunate, only ridiculed, everyone should squeeze into its sterile, predefined moulds, always in binary opposition to a negative “other”: oppressed and oppressor, good and evil, ally and enemy, heroes and villains, “us” versus “them, fracturing societies toward a zero-sum world.
More insidiously, the knight of ideological purity shows to not be confined to the far ends of past political thought. It also quietly waves its banner in the mundane dynamics of contemporary societies. Consider, for instance, how those African American students went on to exclude my existence, my lived experience, from the history of women of colour… Over the years, I have compiled a long list of similar mundane instances of exclusion – some that were deeply personal, and others that were larger in scale. Recently, I added another entry to this list, inspired by my observation of the Finnish Independence Day march and the protest against it in Helsinki in December 2024. This entry reads as follows:
It is mid-afternoon, Friday, 6 December 2024. Töölöntori Square in central Helsinki is divided into two. On one side, a few thousand men, women and children have gathered, who will march toward Hietaniemi cemetery, silently, torch in hand, in celebration of independence and commemoration of fallen soldiers. The march, officially sanctioned and assured politically neutral, will nonetheless include ultra-right elements, the kind that would not want me there – Neo-Nazis. They will blend into the crowd. On the other side, a few hundred progressive activists vociferously protesting what they assure to be an assembly of Nazis. They demand an end to the Independence Day march: “No Nazis in Helsinki. No Nazis anywhere!” Soon, the sun will set, masks will go up, flares will be lit, dogs will be stationed out as part of the police’s tactical response, and, with these, tensions will escalate, as many will defy police orders to disperse. Between thirty and forty will be arrested. In this fraught tableau, all those who linger in the grey, whose perspectives or intentions lay between the ultra-right and ultra-left, will be swiftly forced out of their complex identities, into a binary framework of guilt by association or mutual (direct and indirect) demonisation. Those who participated in the Independence Day march will be condemned as fascist sympathisers for their perceived association with the far right. Similarly, even if their motives and methods were far more complex, those opposing Nazism in Helsinki will be conflated with those who clashed with the police.
Family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, police, press, politicians, and even gods will be judged without mercy.
By Monday, the social fallout will be palpable.
We read, with this new entry, that the knight of ideological purity is cultivating an environment in Finland where people are slowly being denied the luxury of complexity, where this complexity implies belonging to the right or the left without endorsing their ultra-positions, as well as embracing hybridity, independence, moderation, undecidedness, neutrality, detachment, and so on and so forth, including the capacity to question and arrive at conclusions that do not fit neatly into purist boxes. Finns will have to belong to one side or the other. They will have to choose between one extreme or another. If they do not make this choice, if they cannot make this choice, it will be made for them. They will be bullied into alignment, assured “with us or against us,” by media framing, political rhetoric, or social pressure. We will eventually see those who linger in the grey disappear. The nuanced spaces between the ultra-right and ultra-left will erode. And so, Finnish democracy, once a dynamic space for collective engagement, will turn into an empty formality. For, it is precisely within these nuanced spaces that people would have been willing to entertain diverse perspectives and engage in honest dialogue – the key to a thriving, functioning democracy.
My new entry continues:
What comes after Monday? Will Finns rise to challenge the knight of ideological purity, or will they succumb to its rigid dualities?
And what about the rest of us? What are we doing right now? Why are we letting this knight cleave us apart? Why are we unable to think beyond the binaries it imposes upon us?
(Can I think beyond these binaries…?)
Moshumee Dewoo
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