The Racist and His New Clothes.

 

In recent years Britain has become a hotbed for anti-Muslim bigotry like many of its neighbours on the Continent. It has become the primary means of mobilisation for marginal elements on the radical Right. Old canards against immigrants are being recycled and directed purposely to siphon off disenfranchised working-class and lower middle-class support for mainstream parties in this way. For instance, the BNP’s accusations that there are South Asian paedophile gangs were transformed into ‘Muslim’ paedophile gangs as if the grooming and rape of non-Muslim children has any basis in theology. It is now a staple of right-wing commentary that there are ‘Muslim’ paedophile gangs in the shadows of every city in the country. No focus on non-Muslim paedophile rings.[1] Naturally, the mainstream media has plenty of time to feed its own rape-mania and has no qualms about fanning the flames of anti-Muslim racism in doing so. No real concern for the victims of child abuse.

 

 

Given that the Muslims have become the main target of groups like the BNP the old targets have had to take a backseat. The main reason for this is that it has become more acceptable to express disdain for Islam than the West Indians who settled here in the 1950s. Likewise it has become completely unacceptable to engage in old-fashioned Judeophobia. Meanwhile bashing Muslims has become an umbrella for spreading enmity against South Asian British citizens.[2] The slur ‘Paki’ has been replaced with ‘Muslim’ in the vocabulary of every racist in the country. The EDL have attacked Sikh temples in the past and have marched under the chant ‘We love the floods! We love the floods!’ in reference to the floods which devastated Pakistan in 2010. Of course, the EDL has no qualms about exploiting the sectarian tensions on the old Indian subcontinent and soaking Sikh and even Hindu support. In that way the rabble of aging football hooligans and skinheads can claim to non-racist in its joy at the prospect of Mother Nature drowning Pakistani children.

 

 

This is the same reason the EDL has been filmed wagging Israeli flags, and making Nazi salutes. When Lee Rigby was killed the EDL was quick to jump on the scene and soon there emerged a video of the goons yelling for the ‘black bastards’ to be deported. Mostly unreported went the attempts by the EDL to make headway in electoral politics. The British Freedom Party was founded in 2011 with Paul Weston, a former UKIP blogger, as well as with an influx of ex-BNP members. In one of the speeches given by Paul Weston he said “In fact, Islam is worse than Nazism” before sounding off about the stoning of women.[3] He went on to claim that the growth of a Muslim population will lead to the breakdown of British society, pointing to the Lebanese Civil War and the collapse of Yugoslavia. In other words, Weston places the blame for the collapse of these societies on Lebanese Muslims and Bosnian Muslims.[4] That would imply Weston takes the side of the neo-Fascist groups in Lebanon and the nationalist fantasists of a ‘Greater’ Serbia.

 

 

In spite of his courageous support for the ‘lesser evil’ to Islam the new party soon evaporated. Its existence lacked the strong presence of a fart in the wind. Not content with this failure Paul Weston formed Liberty GB with much of the same herd and little deviation from the comradely affection for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.[5] The new group soon found plenty of friends in soaking up the right-wingers of the blogosphere united in their hatred of Muslims and non-whites. Soon Mr Weston was on YouTube again looking to beat the competition posed by various videos of cats flushing toilets. He had some more revealing words too. By the summer of 2013 Paul Weston was giving talks on what he described as the “racial and cultural war against the indigenous people of this country.”[6] Going on to deem this “genocide” Weston goes on to claim the cities are “inundated with the Third World”.[7] He lists the places which have been “inundated” as follows: Tower Hamlets, Bradford, Birmingham, Luton and Leicester. The plot thickens.

 

 

All the while Paul Weston is adamant that it’s not just the Muslims that are the problem. Oh no, most certainly not! The Muslims are only the ‘pawns’ in Weston’s mind, a foreign race imported to undermine and destroy white Britain.[8] The people responsible are broadly pinned as ‘liberals’, ‘hippies’, ‘multiculturalists’ and ‘Marxists’. In his more blunt moments Mr Weston claims that it’s all the Frankfurt school. From beyond the grave Jewish Marxist intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse are responsible for political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism and mass-immigration.[9] It’s all a part of a calculated plot by the Jews who deems ‘cultural Marxists’ who created critical theory to wage ‘cultural terrorism’ against Western civilisation.[10] He claims elsewhere that “the Left now control pretty much everything”.[11] Yet again the raison d'être of National Socialism resurfaces in the clever language of a ‘counter-Jihadist’.

The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the Frankfurt school are responsible for a vast array of problems has become increasingly popular and mainstream on the Right.[12] It originates in the mad ramblings of Lyndon LaRouche and in the twenty years since it has been taken up by American shock-jocks and the reactionary press in Britain.[13] It has been promulgated by many cultural conservatives as well white nationalists.[14] Naturally the BNP have moved in on this. In 2011 Nick Griffin put across his non-understanding of the Frankfurt school in a talk with Simon Darby and posted it on the Party’s YouTube channel.[15] This year the BNP appears to have gone on to hold a knuckleheaded talk on the Frankfurt school where the Jewish intellectuals were painted as belonging to an international conspiracy alongside the Freemasons, the Illuminati and Bilderberg.[16] If anything it’s good to see that the Illuminati conspiracy theory has finally been given the audience it deserves.

 

 

Not coincidentally, Anders Behring Breivik promulgated the same theory in his manifesto and considered ‘cultural Marxists’ to be “traitors” deserving of execution.[17] In that same manifesto Breivik praises the EDL as a ‘blessing’ and quoted Paul Weston’s Gates of Vienna blog posts predicting ‘a European civil war.’[18] Fortunately, the economic crisis in Britain has not been so severe as to produce the conditions necessary for a full-blown fascist resurgence as we have seen in Greece for instance. The rabbles organised by the EDL come nowhere near the ranks of Blackshirts led by Sir Oswald Mosley. It’s primarily an online phenomenon with the potential to influence psychopaths and thugs to take action. It was this that led to Breivik’s rampage and the numerous attacks on mosques and Muslims since the Rigby murder. It would seem that this could get a lot uglier before the liberals wake up to find what they have allowed to flourish and take it seriously.

 

This article was originally written for and posted at the Third Estate on September 29th 2013.

---

[1] Bard-Rosenberg, R; Daily Mail Lies: Are Asian gangs targeting white girls? (2010): http://thethirdestate.net/2010/11/daily-mail-lies-are-asian-gangs-targeting-white-girls/

[2] EDL Uncovered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6_D9J685CQ

[3] Paul Weston on Islam & Nazism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZjOd-A5HDM

[4] Ibid.

[5] ‘Communist UAF orders BBC to curb Free Speech’: http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/news-libertygb/5836-communist-uaf-orders-bbc-to-curb-free-speech?highlight=YToxOntpOjA7czo5OiJjb21tdW5pc3QiO30

[6] Paul Weston on the Woolwich killing, Islam and the State of Modern Britain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ocqyqjaVSg#t=271

[7] Ibid.

[8] Paul Weston ‘Is Britain sustainable?’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhe4nsm8rI

[9] Paul Weston on ‘How to Destroy a Country’: http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/news-libertygb/5868-how-to-destroy-a-country-part-one

[10] Ibid.

[11] Paul Weston ‘Is Britain sustainable?’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhe4nsm8rI

[12] ‘Who are Breivik’s Fellow Travellers?’: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2012/04/who-are-breivik%E2%80%99s-fellow-travellers

[13] Jay, M; Dialectical Counter-Enlightenment: the Frankfurt School as a Scapegoat for the Lunatic Fringe (Skidmore College, 2010): http://cms.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/backissues/168-169/martin-jay-frankfurt-school-as-scapegoat.cfm

[14] ‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/reframing-the-enemy?page=0,1

[15] ‘EU-Frankfurt school neo-Marxism’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMTULjwiG08

[16] ‘Frankfurt School & New World Order’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZoj2fLbYk0

[17] Seymour, R; Anders Behring Breivik and 21st Century Fascism (2012): http://www.leninology.com/2012/08/anders-behring-breivik-and-21st-century.html

[18] RT; Breeding Breiviks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwxq_ml0T0o



Condell's Chauvinism.

The YouTube anti-theist Pat Condell has come out as a sympathiser, if not a supporter, of the English Defence League. You can watch the video above and decide that for yourself. I first encountered Condell's online videos in 2007 after I googled the word 'Islam' and I immediately found 'The Trouble with Islam' video which kicked up a fuss in Berkeley and has since racked up about a million hits. That was when Pat Condell really exploded onto the internet scene. He has faced challenge and accusations of racism. I remember when his video 'Welcome to Saudi Britain' was banned from YouTube and the ban was reversed after many people uploaded the video again and again in protest. That's not the only triumph Condell has enjoyed. He has brought out a DVD with a quote from Dawkins on the front, as well as a compilation of transcripts and racked up millions of hits.

After clicking on Condell's profile I found the video 'Hello America' in which Pat railed against the Christian Right, George Bush and Tony Blair, the unforgivable wars they had started and the subsequent abuses of civil liberties. He was even critical of Israel, or rather those on "both sides" stubbornly refusing to compromise for peace - but he insisted that Jerusalem should not belong to Israel. He described the Patriot act as a charter for fascism. These points differentiated Condell from the right-wing strain of anti-Muslim sentiment, which we find on the right-wing of American, British, French and Israeli politics. It appeared as though Condell stood outside the neoconservative narrative in his insistence that Bush and Blair were 'evil evil' cunningly disguised as 'good evil'. He described the 'War on Terror' as a war on freedom, and pointed out that Osama bin Laden's activities fed into this very same poisonous narrative.

For a while Condell stuck to his guns, consistently committed to individual liberty, humanism and secularism. All the while the former comedian lacked the cuttingly posh accent and mannerisms of fellow anti-theists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He was scathing about scientology, the Saudi regime, the GOP and televangelism; but it was always clear (as with the 'New Atheists' in general) that Pat had a special place for Islam on his hit list. He has issued calls for the burka and halal meat to be banned. When talk of 'Islamization' first emerged Condell was quick to join in with the Muslim-bashing. He came out in opposition to the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque', which was actually a religious centre funded by Sharif el-Gamal - himself a realty developer who probably votes Republican. It was in 2009 that Condell came out to distinguish himself from the liberal Left, which he dubbed the multicultural appeasement lobby.

At the time Condell struck back at accusations of racism by insisting that the human species constitutes one race, but it still holds a variety of religions and cultures within that scope. He then went on to claim that we are being 'invaded' by the cultural values of a religion which is inherently fascist. It's standard for rightists to use 'culture' as a convenient synonym for 'race' in its opposition to immigration, particularly Muslim immigration. The line between criticism of Islamism, Islam and Muslims is repeatedly and deliberately blurred to this end. All the while political correctness and multiculturalism provide easy targets for people like Pat Condell. One would think that this freedom-lover might welcome new citizens to join his free society and get away from the dictatorships of West Asia. But these people aren't fit for freedom in Pat's mind. The welcome reaction on the radical Right to Condell should surprise few outside of the bubble of post-political 'New Atheism'.

Just in time for the 2010 General Election the online face of 'New Atheism' came out in favour of UKIP. It was a surprise for many of his subscribers. He was soon thundering about the Guardianista Left, repeatedly accusing the liberal newspaper of anti-Semitism and of supporting Hamas; as well as slamming the BBC for being apart of the 'progressive consensus'. It's not clear whether Condell changed, or if this is how he always felt. It's plausible that he was always a reactionary hiding behind the tenets of bourgeois liberalism. By now Pat had developed a much less enlightened line on the Palestinians and had ranted about the London riots with ferocious reactionist bile. He pinned it on a culture of welfare dependency conducive to "mental disablement" and going on to compare the rioters to vermin and parasites. He fell in line with the gutter press in calling for stripping the rioters of their benefits and arming the police with guns.

There is an obvious nexus binding together a variety of forces with anti-Muslim prejudice. It's the hatred of Islam that forms the common ground between certain clumps of nationalists, conservatives and liberals. It's a cultural chauvinism with underlying orientalist assumptions about Arab and Muslim culture. It is no coincidence that there has been a resurgence of anti-Muslim bigotry since the attacks of September 11th 2001. For the neoconservatives and other assorted hawks the attacks on the World Trade Centre provided the pretext to declaring war on Iraq. The new obsession became Muslims and their way of life, almost succeeding the traditional place of the Jews in the far-right imagination - as a force that the Left is using to destroy Christendom. Then there are the liberal guardians of tolerance and freedom, who were so unsettled by the events of 9/11 that they found themselves unable to resist taking the side of civilisation.

A note on the Woolwich murder.

 

On Facebook I posted the following points as a status after the hours of coverage of the attack in Woolwich and I stand by them today:
1. Your sympathy belongs with the victim and their family. It should go without saying that this is a horrible crime.
2. The perpetrators are not representatives of Islam, or immigration, they are murderous thugs and will go down for this. That's a good thing. We shouldn't let a pair of murderers change our society. No death penalty. No deportation. To be a civilised country means treating the worst people in a way which doesn't lower ourselves to their level.
3. Don't concede any ground to racists and/or neo-Nazis who are clambering over one another to exploit the death of another human being. The EDL have been quick to get down to Woolwich, they deserve no attention nor should we pretend they have any serious claim to comment on this crime.
4. This looks like a political act, if so then we have to talk about the real reasons for anger against Western governments from the Muslim world. A question that is much bigger . That means we have to address the wars that have waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the dictatorships that have been supported by Western governments for decades.

 

In the discussion that followed this post I was told that point 4 is in contradiction with the first points and that it constitutes a 'mitigation'. That's simply not the case as I was making a more subtle point than some can appreciate. The fourth point is the last of the points because I consider it to be the last of priorities under such extreme circumstances. It's a sorry fact about the world that there is no time for criticism of American and British foreign policy after the war in Iraq and the on-going occupation of Afghanistan. There isn't a causal link between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the murder of Lee Rigby. It's plausible that there are people who could've killed even if these events hadn't taken place. But there is a sense in which certain foreign policy decisions fed the narrative of radical Islamism. That is the narrative and set of ideas the media describe as 'ideology'.

The Politically Incorrect.

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.

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.

Liberalism with "Muscles".

 The Multicultural Dream?

In Britain the debate over multiculturalism has once again been jump-started by David Cameron, while the EDL protested against Islamism in Luton and just after the Oldham by-election was secured through flat out race-baiting on the part of Jack Straw. Notably Jack Straw was on Question Time, alongside Sayeeda Warsi, the same night as Nick Griffin and the programme quickly degenerated into a hour of narcissistic anti-fascism on the part of the establishment which gave Griffin a soap box to stand on and rail against the elites. No mention of the glass ceiling in the Lib-Lab-Con establishment which maintains it as a predominantly white, male and wealthy Parliament. It was Jack Straw who began the debate over "Britishness" and has since brought other xenophobic worries into the mainstream media. Warsi was also given a pass for her homophobia. The political class ought to ask itself why the BNP exists in the first place, for it is in part a creature of social deprivation which has been spawned by the economy and raised by a debauched political discourse.


David Cameron has called, presumably in the place of multiculturalism, for a "muscular liberalism" which does not tolerate extremism but has room for the Other. This comes from the neoconservative wing of government embodied in the presence of Michael Gove and Liam Fox. The intolerant brand of liberal values peddled by this wing is similar to the platform of the UKIP, which might be best summed up as a right-wing fruitcake of conservatives and ultra-nationalists brought together by Euroscepticism. Individual freedom is important to this kind of liberalism but with strict limits, which come in the form of bans on specific clothing in the case of UKIP. As for Cameron's "muscular liberalism", we have seen it has room for control orders in all but name which would make it no different to the supposedly "state-imposed multiculturalism" of New Labour. In this sense liberalism is being put on a pedestal as a neutral framework for all other cultures, but in order for this to work we must all be liberal and not impose our values on others.

The Conservative Party have long stood for a kind of liberalism that adheres to an idea of freedom which is tied to free-market principles. For the Tories, freedom is to be guaranteed by stripping away all constraints on the individual - but only in economic terms. So away with regulations and taxes for the sake of individual freedom. In the Thatcher years we saw the rise of unconstrained freedom in the market place along with Victorian moralising about permissive society.  We might describe this as a division between the private vices and the public benefits reaped through such vices, private meaning the market place and public meaning society as a whole. Freedom is acceptable so long as it is an economic doctrine, but in society as a whole it can be curtailed for the sake of "nationhood", "security" etc. So there are calls to "Ban the Burka" for the sake of "English values". The Tory rhetoric against multiculturalism should be understood in this context. A nationally defined leitkultur, as the Germans would say, which would constrain the multiple cultures in Britain whilst individuals are granted greater freedom in the market place.

In the 1970s the Tory alternative to the post-war settlement could be summarised as a restoration of national competitiveness through liberal economic reform, defence of British sovereignty in Europe; maintenance of national identity and the national state through a rigid public order. The Atlantic alliance with America was justified as a way of maintaining the standing of Britain in the world, though the alliance is certainly contradictory as the position is supposedly nationalistic whilst also a liberal hack for the Washington Consensus. Instead of providing a welfare state the Party would provide a nationhood for the masses. This is the tradition of which David Cameron is a representative and that would put his beliefs at odds with the consistently illiberal conservatism of Phillip Blond, the origins of the "Big Society" idea. As that vision adheres to a view of Britain as an organic society, in which socio-economic change ought to be slow for the sake of cohesion, held together by community and cooperation as opposed to the state or the market. Cameron has opted for a "muscular liberalism" as an alternative to multiculturalism because it doesn't exclude the economics of dispossession.

Relativism versus Chauvinism.

The right-wing commentariat have been cheering on Cameron for his critique of "state-sponsored multiculturalism". Multiculturalism, like political correctness, has been abandoned the established Left formerly known as the Labour Party and now it is openly attacked by one and all. The hard Right defining the rules of the game and positing the Left as a spectral source of a "cultural Marxism" determined to erode our freedoms. Now we hear David Cameron talking of "British values" as he invokes the failures of multiculturalism. This is nothing unusual and we have heard the same from the Blairites about tackling "militant Islam". The debate over "Britishness" and the veil are symptomatic of this type of discourse. The reactionary press have an agenda and there's plenty of room to pander to it in Cameron's hollow pragmatism. New Labour pandered to the 'little Eichmanns' in a similarly shameless display of opportunism and a deep contempt for the public.


It is no coincidence that the most dedicated exponents of US-led globalisation, from the Blairites to UKIP, have also been critical of multiculturalism along chauvinist lines, which might be summed up as a covert form of racism, positions itself as the working-mans' voice against the Establishment. It is a liberal elite posited as the engineers of multiculturalism out of a destructive experiment with cultural relativism. This elite of "do-gooders", often conjured up by the chauvinists, as the enemy of the working-man is an invention of the right-wing media. Supposedly there is an elite who want to see Shariah courts in Britain and halal meat in the supermarket, when in actuality the elites of this country are deeply critical of multiculturalism. The Conservatives and New Labour have both criticised multiculturalism over the years. Immigration has always gone on, there have been openings but always with enormous opposition along racist lines. There was even opposition to letting Jews come to Britain as the Nazis came to power, our reason was that Jews are too "left-wing". After the Jews and the Irish it was black people from the West Indies and then it was Asians.

It was only last year that the conservative German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Man-Woman of Hamburg, declared that multiculturalism had "utterly failed". Months before the Rat Man banned the veil in France in a disgraceful display of poujadism and went on to expell the Roma from the country. Even before that a state of emergency was established in Italy in 2008, partly to defend the country from illegal immigration as well as sexual deviancy and organised crime. Before that a spate of racist attacks against the Roma in Northern Ireland shocked the public. These are not the cure to a state-sanctioned disease, multiculturalism was never been implemented as an official state doctrine in Britain and in a sense we have merely flirted with a particular kind of multiculturalism in Europe. In Eastern Europe we can see the Roma are still waiting for equal standards of education and remain the subject of frequent abuse. The liberals condemn this as racism, and rightly so, whilst the nationalists reflexively play the freedom card.


In the postmodern nationalism of today there is a "You may!" quality which presents itself as permissive in the sense of "You may use the n-word because they use it!" Freedom of speech and expression become umbrellas for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Meanwhile the liberals who actually defend multiculturalism are found "guilty" of trampling on such freedoms for the sake of "anti-British" agenda. The origins of this permissiveness can be seen clearly in history as the "Know Nothing" movement of the US campaigned against Catholic immigration, particularly from Ireland, on the grounds that it could undermine American democracy and lead to the rise of a Catholic state run by the Pope. This nativist movement called for severe limits on immigration from Catholic countries and restrictions on languages other than English. This is not so far away from what the EDL are doing to "defend" the country from Islamisation. Though the EDL, like the Tea Party and UKIP, are all effectively hacks for neoliberalism and globalisation led by the US through war. All under the guise of defending the values and sovereignty of Britain.

We are One!

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not so much a name for a country as indicative of an expired compromise. There is no such thing as a "British nation", the tribes of the United Kingdom are English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. So we should know what to think of the talk of "Britishness" and we should not be surprised we have no idea what it means to be "British". We know that "Britishness" is the sense of nationhood and culture shared by all. But the best we can do to define British identity is to make a risible list of football teams, brands of tea and take note of widespread binge-drinking. The words "Britishness" and "anti-British", or even "anti-English", are in the "blut und boden" lexicon of totalitarianism. Only in states like the Soviet Union were such concepts, e.g. anti-Soviet, used to stifle debate and clamp down on dissent. Only demagogues with a quasi-fascist agenda speak in such terms to divide and conquer the white working-class by pitting it against the minorities, who are in the same boat as white working-people. 

The real danger of multiculturalism is that it is a "benign" form of apartheid in itself. The official ideological justification of apartheid in South Africa was that it was necessary to put the African tribes into bantustans in order to prevent them from being "drowned" in the white civilisation. Of course the racism of the regime was barely concealed by the "official reason" for this separation of the African tribes, Indians and "coloureds" from the white Afrikaner. This is the logical conclusion of multiculturalism in it's liberal form, it is hegemonic as liberalism is itself and it clouds a whole array of inequality and prejudice. So the claims by nationalists that multiculturalism is racist to white people are utterly absurd. For the liberal defenders of multiculturalism the Other should be included, but only so long as the Otherness is strictly non-invasive and can be easily contained into a community. Note that the cultural chauvinists make a similar point, that the immigrants who integrate into our society are not the problem and it is just radical Islamism which is the "problem".

It is not that the EDL only targets Islam in it's most reactionary and violent manifestation, it is simply the old school rejection of the Other on the behalf of Western values. This is the reason that the EDL oppose Islam, which they constantly remind us is not racial, but actually only target Asian Muslims and chant things like "We love the floods!" in reference to the recent floods in Pakistan. The likes of Stephen Lennon, Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage latch onto the failure of the Left to adequately condemn homophobia and misogyny in the Muslim community to strengthen a reactionary platform. In the Netherlands nationalists have tapped into the anger of the gay community against homophobia among Muslims. In defence of freedom, women's rights and gay rights etc. the EDL calls for bans on veils, halal meat and mosques all the while chanting "We've fucked all of Allah's wives!" While it is true that homophobia is prevalent within the Muslim community, the EDL are not giving the answers and the Left must step in to take the side of the victim. 

For the alternative to cultural relativism, as manifested in multicultural rhetoric, which is actively opposed to racist populism we should turn to the recent events in Egypt. We have seen mass protests across the Middle East and the fall of Mubarak in Egypt where hundreds of thousands poured into Tahrir Square. Not only was the movement secular and democratic, it was grass-roots based and called for social justice. The most sublime moment of the protests in Tahrir Square were when Muslims and Coptic Christians were brought together in prayer and chanted "We are one!" In a common struggle against tyranny the oppressed came together regardless of religious and ethnic "divisions" to fight together. The "muscular" liberality offered by Cameron would have been insufficent, as would the liberal variety of multiculturalism. A common project is what is needed to bring us together, it ought to be constructed along the lines of universalism and militant egalitarianism. Of which the liberals and the fascists are both ideological enemies.

Angry White Men of the World, Unite!

 

The English Defence League has taken a time out from the campaign of race-baiting against less than 2 million Muslims in Britain, but particularly targeting Asian Muslims, to react to the student demonstrations in their own special way. The leader of the movement is Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who goes by the name of "Tommy Robinson", who attacked the students in a speech this week. The former BNP member and football hooligan accused the students of "living off their dad's fucking bank cards" and not knowing what it means to be working-class. During the speech Mr Yaxley-Lennon issued a threat "The next time the students want to protest in our capital, the English Defence League will be there." This is a part of the EDL new approach of ruining left-wing meetings and denouncing trade unions as "communist", the movement is now engaged in the kind of red-baiting that still goes on across the pond.

The EDL seems to adhere to a vicious brand of evolutionary economics, whereby the strong rise and the weak fall, which is a departure from the traditional third-way economics of distributism. This is in line with the "permissive" aspects of post-modern nationalism, which is why they will claim to be defenders of freedom of speech against political-correctness. The kind of individualism the EDL favours is no doubt subordinate to nationhood. It may be a defence of free-speech but it's really about defending "English values", as if freedom was exclusively British. This extreme economic shift began with the BNP supporting the cuts and putting forward proposal of £200 billion in public spending cuts over a year, which would have decimated the welfare state and devastated the working-class. Though as this new strategy has accelerated the decline of the Party, the BNP have resorted to a vague list of cuts it advocates.

Not only would it appear that the EDL are now running with the stance that the BNP abandoned, but the growth of the League is now partly the cause of the decline of the BNP. The electoralist approach of Nick Griffin is perceived as a failure on the far-right and the EDL is a regression to the street level thuggery. As the EDL were originally just another force to collude with, the League have seized onto the "common cause" of stamping out the British Muslim community. From this there is a kind of unity among neo-Nazis and angry white men in general, but now the EDL is seeking to harden it's right-wing base in it's opposition to student demonstrations and trade unions. At the same time, the EDL has sought to allign itself with the Islamophobic wing of the Tea Party. The new line of the League on cuts might strengthen the link to the Tea Party and the American chickenhawks  who have been on board for taking on Islamism for a long time.

In Fascist ideology the class struggle is typically displaced, the EDL are no different in this sense. The idea of an English working-class is posited against an exploitative left-wing elite who have capitulated to radical Islamists. Notice that neo-fascists have yet to replace European Jewry as a scapegoat which appeals to the upper-classes just as much as it does to the working-classes. To the rich the Jew was a communist and to the poor the Jew was a banker, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis externalised the tension between classes onto a "common enemy" and we all know what happened thereafter. Instead the EDL have to stick to the same line as the BNP have been, that "Islamization" is being imposed as part of a conspiracy between a left-wing media and a liberal elite.


The "intellectual" leadership of the EDL is most certainly National Socialist in character, just as the leadership of the BNP has been since it's emergence in 1982, complete with the same old genocidal intentions. The foot soldiers are typically the standard football thug with just enough brain cells to hate everything foreign. But the base of the BNP and the EDL are not consciously fascist, which is the reason for the carefully maintained veneer of railing against a culture and not a race. Cultural chauvinism is something picked up from the New Right, which focuses on the incompatibility of the culture of a "race" and thereby targets the minority indirectly. Just as old-fashioned racism is making a return, race-related harassment and violence has increased in recent times from 13,000 in 1997 to 53,000 in 2005. 35,000 of which consistuted assault. Now we can see Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Hill defend the use of slurs such as "Paki" and "nigger".


The base of the EDL is no different than any other far-right group, it consists mostly of working-class men who have been dispossessed over the last 30 years and have legitimate grievances. The working-class has been neglected and it's grievances have been ignored by the establishment. Unemployment and stagnant wages being a serious concern. The line of the reactionary press is that the markets are efficient and produce enough jobs for all people. From this view the only explanation for unemployment is that the jobless are lazy scum or that their jobs have been "stolen" by foreigners. It's assumed that the system is perfect and has only been disrupted by "meddlesome entities" (e.g. foreigners and scroungers). When actually the case is that the markets are inefficient and don't provide jobs for all. Enter the EDL, who take advantage of a source of untapped rage and acknowledge the grievances by offering ways of restoring order - e.g. cutting off all benefits and putting a stop to Muslim immigration.

The malicious defence of authority and the erosion of welfare liberalism for the sake of "social order" is partly about solidifying a ultra-rightist base, it appeals to the bourgeois sectors of society. Equally it is about the long-term future of the EDL, whether or not it is intended to be. The end of the welfare state does have the potential to enlarge and intensify support for far-right groups, as would a double-dip recession. As it would ensure the kind of conditions that produce and sustain groups like the EDL, e.g. high unemployment, stagnant wages and greater inequality. Though it is possible that this manoeuvre will drive away working-class support for the League, as opposition to the cuts could increase rapidly as demonstrated by the student protests. Hopefully the EDL will find itself outnumbered by going down this route.