We used to live in a society where you could enjoy the sight of white actors "blacked up" and take in the verbal diarrhea of a meat-head like Bernard Manning. The jokes of the day were at the expense of ethnic minorities, the disabled, gays and women. These were the days before political correctness, which as Stewart Lee says, has been little more than a clumsily institutionalised form of politeness. Today we are a lot more civilised than we were once and political correctness has been conducive to that process. There could never be a political campaign with the slogan "If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Liberal or Labour." Unfortunately, we're in a period of transition in this sense and every so often we have to listen to some idiot like David Starkey about how Enoch Powell was right. There is plenty of ink for criticism of political correctness just as there is for multiculturalism, let alone of immigrants and asylum seekers. But there is an irony here.
The Right routinely attacks political correctness out of a dedication to freedom, which the Left apparently lacks. In this view political correctness is nothing less than an assault on free-speech combined with mollycoddling of the undeserving. You can't fly the English flag because it might offend nor can you shout the n-word - it's political correctness gone mad! And yet we find that the Right has sort new ways to safeguard its agenda with political correctness. The English Defence League has set up divisions of gay, Asian and Jewish members, which it will refer back to as evidence of its modern pluralist stance on race. You'll hear plenty of talk about multi-racialism as opposed to multiculturalism. Sameness with a centre, rather than sameness without one. This fails to notice that there is only one race, a suspicious mistake. The EDL goes as far as to arrange LGBT protests, quietly, and wave Israeli flags at their demonstrations. The organisation is predominantly white but it is open to minorities that can be brought together by a hatred of Muslims.
The supposed devotion to the defence of free-speech on the radical Right conveniently destroys the distinction between private space and public sphere. This is easy to do in a society where we lack a real public sphere today. We lack any meaningful political engagement beyond voting every few years and maybe our involvement in unions at work. So we look to circumvent the blockages to the smooth-running of our busy lives. There is no real time nor need for politeness in a society where the strong are meant to rise and the weak fall. The aims of the radical Right are permissive in that they want to do away with political correctness in order to free us from being polite to our co-workers. Well, it's probably to the archetypal foreigner we've never met that we would reserve our true rudeness to be fair. There are plenty of polite racists in Britain, we should have no illusions about that. And this is the brutal irony, the only means for the radical Right to succeed, in its regeneration of British nationhood, are politically correct.
The supposed devotion to the defence of free-speech on the radical Right conveniently destroys the distinction between private space and public sphere. This is easy to do in a society where we lack a real public sphere today. We lack any meaningful political engagement beyond voting every few years and maybe our involvement in unions at work. So we look to circumvent the blockages to the smooth-running of our busy lives. There is no real time nor need for politeness in a society where the strong are meant to rise and the weak fall. The aims of the radical Right are permissive in that they want to do away with political correctness in order to free us from being polite to our co-workers. Well, it's probably to the archetypal foreigner we've never met that we would reserve our true rudeness to be fair. There are plenty of polite racists in Britain, we should have no illusions about that. And this is the brutal irony, the only means for the radical Right to succeed, in its regeneration of British nationhood, are politically correct.
Now there is the British Freedom Party with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as its Deputy Leader under the much more respectable Paul Weston as Leader. It was founded with the aspiration of being a part of the International Freedom Alliance with Geert Wilders as its head. The Party seeks to protect freedom and democracy from Muslims and the European Union. It was formed as it broke away from the BNP, the group had given up on ethno-nationalism and decided that multi-racialism is here to stay. The real battleground is cultural. The leadership is ex-UKIP and EDL, the body of the organisation is ex-BNP. The gloss is modern and much more sophisticated than the BNP, the Party borrows its logo from the Obama campaign. You can spot black and Asian models in the photos on their website. And yet British Freedom pledges to create a US-style First Amendment to safeguard free-speech, no doubt with the PC brigadiers on the hit-list. Its opposition to immigration is specified as non-Western, e.g. strictly Muslim.
This push towards modernisation came with Nick Griffin in his bid to transform the British National Party into a party of new nationalism. Griffin was keen for the party to shift focus onto Islam with the advantage being that Islam is not a race and then it becomes a matter of culture. The EDL is a major outgrowth of this approach, which has taken on a life of its own. The EDL and the BNP have discovered animal rights when it became a convenient way to call for the banning of halal meat. The grounds being that the animal is subject to barbaric suffering in the method of slaughter, as it isn't stunned before it is killed. The gutter press has joined them in their bid to ban halal and kosher meat, just to make sure they can't be accused of Islamophobia. Of course, what a lot of people don't know is that around 90% of halal meat in Britain is slaughtered with the use of the stun. This level of politics has taken on a sadistic form in France where Bloc Identaire set up soup kitchens where only pork is served in order to exclude Muslims and Jews.
Rest assured that British Freedom is tiny, but it has a pact with the EDL, the BNP has imploded and it seems this new group has better funding. This is another instance where the ultra-political fervour of the radical Right converges with the anti-political purism of libertarianism. It taps into the work ethic and moral outlook of the working-class while it displaces the class struggle as a fight between natives and foreigners. The state as just a mantlepiece of failed experiments, which we would do better to strip down rather than empower it any further. Taxation is just a robbery, a redistribution from the hard-working to the work-shy. This mindset divides the poor between deserving and undeserving, but can always finds fault with the claim of a deserving poor. The European continent is a sinister harbinger of everything from multiculturalism to soft-on-crime justice. This is a freedom-loving nationalism for today's world, deliberately churned out to feed the masses who are desperate for a Hitler without the swastika.
This push towards modernisation came with Nick Griffin in his bid to transform the British National Party into a party of new nationalism. Griffin was keen for the party to shift focus onto Islam with the advantage being that Islam is not a race and then it becomes a matter of culture. The EDL is a major outgrowth of this approach, which has taken on a life of its own. The EDL and the BNP have discovered animal rights when it became a convenient way to call for the banning of halal meat. The grounds being that the animal is subject to barbaric suffering in the method of slaughter, as it isn't stunned before it is killed. The gutter press has joined them in their bid to ban halal and kosher meat, just to make sure they can't be accused of Islamophobia. Of course, what a lot of people don't know is that around 90% of halal meat in Britain is slaughtered with the use of the stun. This level of politics has taken on a sadistic form in France where Bloc Identaire set up soup kitchens where only pork is served in order to exclude Muslims and Jews.
Rest assured that British Freedom is tiny, but it has a pact with the EDL, the BNP has imploded and it seems this new group has better funding. This is another instance where the ultra-political fervour of the radical Right converges with the anti-political purism of libertarianism. It taps into the work ethic and moral outlook of the working-class while it displaces the class struggle as a fight between natives and foreigners. The state as just a mantlepiece of failed experiments, which we would do better to strip down rather than empower it any further. Taxation is just a robbery, a redistribution from the hard-working to the work-shy. This mindset divides the poor between deserving and undeserving, but can always finds fault with the claim of a deserving poor. The European continent is a sinister harbinger of everything from multiculturalism to soft-on-crime justice. This is a freedom-loving nationalism for today's world, deliberately churned out to feed the masses who are desperate for a Hitler without the swastika.
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Hello. And Bye.
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