Living In Philistia: multiculturalism

Showing posts with label multiculturalism. Show all posts

Friday, 12 May 2017

The French election: Defeating Le Pen

It’s been a while since Western liberals have been able to cheer a victory. Emmanuel Macron has given them what they needed. He has triumphed over Marine Le Pen with more than 66% of the vote behind him. After Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, the liberals feared that France would fall next as if politics were just a series of trending hashtags.

A vote for Macron was a vote for reassuring telltales. It wasn’t a vote for political substance. The man presents the same agenda as Hollande but clarified and purified. The extreme centre is back: $65 billion cuts every year, 120,000 less civil servants and corporation tax levelled to 25%. The idea that this is going to produce harmony in France is absurd. Yet that well-crafted illusion is exactly why the Macron platform has won.

Much like Obama’s team in 2008, the Macron campaign set out to create a blank slate for the popular imagination to project onto. Once this was achieved, Macron was able to unveil an austerity package and still expand outwards from his supporters in the media and the astroturfed crowds. Le Pen just provided a moral cover to his victory. And it was very apt of Obama to intervene on Macron’s side.

This is enough for the liberals who don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with Western society. So long as the European Union survives and technocrats remain in power, the system can destroy countless lives in the end of capital accumulation. The possibility of a recurring stand-off with right-wing nationalism is not something to worry about because it legitimates neoliberals like Macron in the end.

Ghosts of the Algerian War

The National Front’s success is not new. It became a permanent fixture in French political life in the 1980s. The immigration debate is dominated by the far-right and the French political centre dances to Marine Le Pen’s tune even if it doesn’t want to acknowledge it. The race problem in France has been transmuted into a Muslim problem, which has allowed the FN to monopolise identity politics in the country.

Macron may have won, but this election is the second time in 15 years that the far-right has come within shouting distance of the Elysee Palace. The last time was in 2002 when conservative President Jacques Chirac defeated Jean-Marie Le Pen with over 82.2% of the vote. The National Front leader won just 17.8% after politicians of the right and the left mobilised a ‘republican front’ against Le Pen. But the daughter is far stronger than the father.

Many American and British far-righters wonder why ‘political correctness’ and multiculturalism have not permeated Southern Catholic Europe to the same extent that they have Protestant countries like the United Kingdom and the United States. And yet the level of diversity in France is greater than it is in the UK. For starters, France has the biggest Muslim population in Europe and the colonial legacy runs deep beneath the country’s race relations.

Not least because the French settler regime was defeated, but the ‘loss’ of French Algeria in a bloody conflict with the FLN led to outbreaks of political violence on the streets of Paris and ultimately hastened the demise of the Fourth Republic. It’s almost always forgotten that Vichy thug Maurice Papon had the cops attack a pro-independence march of Algerians in October 1961, killing an estimated 200 people and throwing their lifeless bodies into the Seine.

It’s also important to note that the Fifth Republic was founded during the May 1958 crisis, in which the French political class found itself at odds with the military establishment. General de Gaulle came out of retirement to draw up a new constitution with strong executive powers, all as part of the efforts to defend the French Empire. Yet in the end, it was de Gaulle who settled with the FLN and the narrative of ‘abandonment’ was confirmed for the French settlers.

Building Hegemony

Historically, the National Front has based itself in the south of France, where you find a great deal of racial resentment from the former settlers. The hardcore of the FN are originally the former soldiers from the Algerian war, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, as well as Vichy collaborators and even monarchist elements.

As a lieutenant in the Algerian war, Le Pen has been accused of participating in torture and extrajudicial killings. Many of his early political allies were members of the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), the dissident right-wing paramilitaries who waged a terrorist campaign to sabotage the Evian Accords. This past would help establish Le Pen as a leading neo-fascist.

A plethora of far-right groups emerged in the 1960s, Le Pen set out to unite these disparate groups into a single force capable of breaking through the media and the post-war consensus. When the National Front was founded, the party was just one among many: there was the New Order (ON) and the Party of New Forces (PFN). This fragmentation prevented any one group making electoral gains.

Much like how the British National Party came out of fierce empire loyalists, the FN emerged from the ranks of colonials who lived and fought in Algeria only to return to France once the war was lost. Fascism is what happens when imperialism comes home. Where John Tyndall would fail in Britain, Le Pen has succeeded in France. The FN outlived all of its major rivals and eventually became the dominant far-right party in the country.

The long march to 2002 began in the 1980s when the FN first made its breakthrough into the mainstream. In 1984, the FN won 10 seats in the European elections and in the cantonal elections of the following year the party won 8.7% of the vote. By the presidential election of 1988, Le Pen had expanded his base to 14.4% of the vote. This was how the FN became legitimate.

Containment

In the 1980s, Le Pen styled himself as an anti-Communist with neoliberal economic credentials and a pan-European vision. With the end of the Cold War, the FN had to adapt to a new terrain and took on economic populism as a new electoral strategy. The party began to refocus its racism against French Muslims after the Salman Rushdie fatwa.

In the last 25 years, the FN would adopt a new strategy for building on its early gains. Shifting from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, converting from pan-Europeanism and neoliberal reform to euroscepticism and protectionism. The collapse of the Communist Party and the failures of the Socialist Party opened up the ideological space for Le Pen to create a new base.

“There are two Front Nationals: one in the north of France which is anti-religious, very socialist, quite leftist; and one in the south, which accepts the euro, which is – economically speaking – liberal and Catholic,” Alain Minc, an adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, has said. “The only thing which helps them to stick together is the prospect of winning one day.”

This is the challenge posed by Marine Le Pen today. If this coalition is to be broken, the French left has to build the alternative in northern France and reclaim working-class support and restrict the FN to its petit-bourgeois origins. That was the strength of Melenchon’s platform, which brought together the social and national with the political and economic. It might have been a winning ticket had the left not been so internally divided.

If Melenchon can’t capitalise on the gains he made in the presidential campaign and liberals sit back in complacency, the results of Macron’s austerity policies could be disastrous. Not only would Le Pen be able to grow her constituency further, but despair at the mainstream could lead to more abstentions. Le Pen got double the vote of her father, and once she reaches the 50% mark she’s in the winners’ league.

June’s parliamentary elections will be a crucial test. Unlike Macron’s En Marche!, the National Front is a real party, with far more experience getting out the vote, particularly when it comes to local elections. Given its growth in regional polling during the Hollande years, it’s not unlikely that Le Pen will eventually get what she so desperately wants. Pity the French for not doing enough to stop her.

This article was originally published by Souciant Magazine.

Thursday, 30 March 2017

Four things Brexit means for the UK

When the EU referendum came around last year, I was conflicted over the vote if I'm honest. I could see the 'Lexit' case for voting to leave: the European Union is a neoliberal project with a serious democratic deficit. I have a great deal of time for the old Bennite arguments against the common market. However, it was also clear that the balance of forces were overwhelmingly right-wing, so any withdrawal from the EU would be shaped by the Conservatives and UKIP. In the end, I decided to vote Remain out of caution.

Many months later it's clear that the rupture was coming for some time. The problem was that the left was nowhere on the EU debate. You had a split between the Lexit camp, who were typically hard left, and the Remain camp, mostly left-liberals and reformist socialists. Both positions were reactive to the terms set by the right and its dominance over the question. The referendum itself was held by David Cameron for party political reasons. It was about the internal dynamics of the Conservative Party. Not about the future of the United Kingdom.

Without a clear position, the left could either side with the liberal wing of the establishment or the right-wing reaction to it. This was not a good place to be. I could have lived with Brexit if there was a strong left-wing government in place, or a chance that the right would lose power any time soon. Only under those conditions would the British government likely maintain an open immigration policy and pursue a radical programme to restructure the UK economy for working-class interests.

So where are we left now? As expected, I've been following the situation develop since the vote last summer and I've tried to consider the social and economic impact of Brexit carefully. Here are just a few thoughts on the unfolding crisis.

1. Brexit means the end of the UK

Despite the hopes of British nationalists, Brexit may mean the United Kingdom will cease to exist in the not-too-distant future. It was already possible that the UK would begin to fall apart over the next twenty years. The realignment of Scottish politics in 2015 shows that the conditions for a second referendum were already emerging, but the withdrawal from the EU has hastened calls for an independent Scotland.

Scottish independence is now a realistic possibility in the near future. If Scotland votes for independence in 2018 or 19, Theresa May will have to resign and the Conservative government will face serious questions over its credibility. They will go down in history as the party that literally broke the country in two. At least this could put the Labour Party on course to government (presuming the Blairites don't move to dislodge Corbyn). This is just one case.

Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, the republicans have gained a majority in Stormont for the first time. Ulster unionism is in crisis over corruption at the heart of government, and Brexit has stoked fears of a hard border arising between the North and the rest of Ireland. I wouldn't say Irish reunification is an imminent prospect, though it is clear that the UK cannot take Northern Ireland for granted. Even demographically, the Catholic community are likely to tip the balance towards Irish nationalism.

As for Wales, the situation is far more stable (for now) as the Welsh nationalists have yet to develop a strong constituency for independence. Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales was very much for Brexit and the Welsh national question is not shaped in quite the same way. It's much more likely that the Welsh will remain tethered to the English, as the Scots and the Northern Irish break free. But this doesn't rule out Welsh independence in the long-term either.

2. Brexit is a disaster for the UK economy

As the pound continues to fall, the goods flowing into Britain will continue to rise in price and this is just after decades of wage stagnation and underemployment. Under these conditions inflation may well take a dreadful toll on working people, let alone people out of work. At the same time, the only way to generate growth would be to resort to an industrial strategy to bolster exports through state investment in the economy. This isn't going to happen. The Conservatives have spent 40 years dismantling industry and reorienting the economy towards finance.

For too long cheap labour has been a substitute for capital investment, as the British government has dropped its commitment to bolster the economy through Keynesian projects. Likewise, the Thatcher administration inflicted a historic defeat on the labour movement in the 1980s, from which organised labour has still not fully recovered. Without high levels of employment and high wages, the economy had a continuous need for demand and the only available means for this was to free up credit. This pattern looks set to continue.

The financial sector and the property market have become the core growth sectors, as services overtook manufacturing and old industry. Wealth became even more concentrated in even fewer hands than it has been historically. Yet it should be obvious that the debt bubble can't be inflated forever. Something will have to give. Another financial crisis or a property crash might do the trick. This is even with the European Union. Without the EU, Britain faces a situation where the strategy has already been ruled out by the political class.

3. Brexit is a disaster for migrants

Obviously, Brexit means that the British government will get to dictate the terms of inflows of EU migrant workers into the UK. Freedom of movement, as we know it, with the EU will change forever. The UK will still try to hold onto free movement with Ireland, possibly by introducing new mechanisms for regulating Irish migration onto the British mainland. This would be more sensible than sending British troops to the Irish border. Otherwise, the backdoor for EU nationals would be left wide open.

Many right-wing people voted leave because they wanted to close the borders. I suspect this will not happen due to simple economic factors: the UK relies on cheap labour. What is more likely is that the border controls will be adjusted to maintain a precarious workforce. The numbers may change, but not indefinitely. As the opening in the border narrows, the government would lose tax revenue from migrant labour and so would likely initiate greater austerity. Theresa May will have a new excuse for selling off the NHS, schools and pensions.

Expect more racist rhetoric. The calls for new pressures to be heaped upon migrant labour will only become more bold, and the Tories will pander to the xenophobes at every turn. VISA costs, repatriation and detention centres are just one front in this struggle. However, the aim will not be to reverse past immigration, but to shape future immigration to suit business interests. The divide and conquer strategy will continue to hammer the migrants already here and those who hope to settle here in the future. But this will help keep down British workers at the same time.

4. Brexit is a disaster for racists

Contrary to liberal hysterics, the threat of the far-right in Britain is marginal. UKIP has lost its raison d'etre, and Farage is off galavanting in the United States. The party's new leadership is incapable of seeing through the media's illusions of a white working-class thirst for fascism. As if UKIP ever had a chance of breaking through in Copeland or Stoke-on-Trent. The party's core support has always come from disaffected Tory voters, and even the former Labour voters it attracts passed through the Tories first. The real threat is that the Tory government is becoming UKIP to neutralise the threat of the party. This is far more serious than Paul Nuttall's antics.

Not that I would say the far-right is no threat at all. I suspect if Brexit doesn't pay off (which it won't) that the new far-right narrative will be that the Tory government "sold out". If immigration isn't totally restricted, the far-right will claim the EU is still violating everything we've held most often. Farage might even make a comeback with a new party. As people are hit by rising food prices and a shrinking job market, they will naturally seek out someone to blame. The usual nihilists and misanthropes will provide the scapegoats: immigrants, Muslims and the left. A populist upsurge is still a possibility in the future.

Saturday, 16 May 2015

The trouble with cultural appropriation.

In recent years, I’ve heard a lot of talk about cultural appropriation in the music industry. Not least about Miley Cyrus and the spectacle of ‘twerking’, but also Macklemore and Iggy Azalea (bog-standard targets). The charge of cultural appropriation alleges that these artists have stolen their style from black performers, and it seems clear that there is more than a hint of truth to this claim. But it shouldn’t be implied that this is just a cultural question.

The more serious cases being the fact that there is a Blues root to almost all music today. Black talent has been rinsed by the music industry for a very long time. It’s a great historical irony that the classical music of the United States, a profoundly racist society, is Jazz music – the rhythms of the oppressed – which emerged out of the Reconstruction period following the civil war. The end of this period came in the form of segregation and the rise of the Klan. As much as culture has always represented the heart of a heartless world the Jazz scene was the vivacity of a world devoid of hope.

All of this confirms the Janus-faced nature of history. So if we’re going to make a distinction it’s worth making one here: there’s the point that the music industry has rinsed Black America for a long time, and then there’s the concept of cultural appropriation and what it brings to this debate. This kind of cultural criticism is worth unpacking. The charge of cultural appropriation can only be asserted on the basis of certain presuppositions. First of all, it takes cultures as homogenous, self-enclosed, static entities; secondly, it implicitly advocates that this should be the case.

Not only is this presupposition wrong, it shouldn’t be the case either. Cultures don’t have borders and never have had borders. Nor should cultures have them. To take an example within a dominant culture: Beowulf, the oldest piece of English literature, was produced in Scandinavia. The English language is composed of many influences, famously so, from Latin, Greek, French, and even Irish; its homogeneity can only arise out of heterogeneous origins. The numerical system employed in the West is Arabic. What we might call cultural transmission can’t be avoided.

We seem to have reached a point where cultural appropriation now extends to criticism of individual conduct. This is especially ironic as the phrase was coined by George Lipsitz, who defined it as a form of strategic anti-essentialism (this was long before the momentous days of Tumblr). He warned against wanton appropriation which could be insensitive. This implies that there is a sensitive way to do so, and that has been lost to the whirlwind of social media. No one seems to have the time of day to look into the terms of debate, which obscures the issue further.

This is the crux of the matter. To suggest white guys with dreadlocks are ‘acting black’ implies a certain amount of identity essentialism (e.g. that there are social attributes belonging inherently to black and white people) which takes essence to precede existence. The contemporary Left can see this problem when it comes to transgenderism and rightly chides the radical feminists who question it. At the same time, it ought to be kept in mind that the gender roles shouldn’t be maintained as a binary in the first place and this also applies to the question at hand.

In its worst moments, the contemporary Left seems to have become preoccupied on interpersonal conduct. The response to every issue comes in the form of regulation, which seems to extend a kind of consumer ethics (in this case at least) and make it business ethics. So it’s at once moralistic, reformist and puritanical. It would be a mistake to characterise this as ‘identity politics’. It’s almost a kind of ‘lifestyle politics’ – it’s about who has the most responsible newsfeed – which is a retreat from organised politics. It belongs to the same family as ‘privilege-checking’ and ‘trigger warnings’.

As if what we need today is a new set of ethics and we can remake the world without power. This criticism shouldn’t be confused with not being a committed anti-racist. Exploitation in the music industry is a political and economic question, it’s not a moral and cultural one, we should respond accordingly without de-politicisation. When we’re talking about race we’re dealing with formations of social control and we shouldn’t forget that the scars and wounds are very deep. Ultimately, we should be looking to move beyond diversity and aim for greater hybridity and immixing – not less.

Monday, 29 December 2014

One rejoinder to another.

1: He retreats from his nostalgia accusation, saying it was aimed at something called ‘the reactionary press in general’ (whatever that may be, such a construct would have been out of date in 1965, let alone now. Does he actually *read* the papers?). It looked pretty specific to me, but I’ll always take surrendered ground when offered, and not fuss too much about the face-saving words which the retreating person sometimes feels the need to say.

Well, the Murdoch press may peddle in soft-core porn but its political agenda has been to shift the discourse rightwards on welfare, immigration and economics. It’s a different sort of reaction to the variety found on the Hitchens blog. The desire to level the welfare state and return to the social squalor of a bygone age is the agenda of many reactionaries – particularly, Thatcherites. Not that I think this is the mission of the Hitchens blog.

To be fair, I did not mention nostalgia but I did say ‘turn the clock back’ in reference to Evelyn Waugh. It was a conflation, though it’s not necessarily in regard to nostalgia. A better metaphor might be GK Chesterton’s white post and the lick of paint.

2: But this was not my ‘main problem’ with what he wrote. It was his evasion of the problem of the left, that they cannot possibly have meant to foul up our society so completely, yet will never attribute any of the disasters they have caused to their own ideas.

It’s a somewhat weak point to dismiss my article as ‘evasive’. I did argue that the Hitchens prognosis is inaccurate. I think much of the social change since the 1960s largely came out of compromises. Overall, the picture looks ambiguous from where I’m sitting: in many ways progressive, in other ways regressive.

Multiculturalism is mostly a liberal compromise to manage newly settled communities. It conveniently presupposes culture as a self-enclosing entity, the truth is that it is neither the case nor should it be the case. Hybridity and immixing is far better than regulated forms of diversity. Not only do I think monoculturalism isn’t preferable, I don’t think it’s possible. Even before non-white immigration, British culture was composed of a vast multiplicity of influences.

I don’t see the Left in the driving seat of such change for the most part. As Noel Ignatiev puts it, the momentum of neoliberalism “tends to reduce all human beings to abstract, undifferentiated, homogenous labour power”. None of the liberalising measures initiated since the 1960s threatens capital accumulation. On the contrary, this cultural revolution has been matched by Thatcher’s economic revolution. Capital can do without the old boundaries of sexuality, race, and gender, so it’s no problem to circumvent them.

I can’t accept the grammar of the question. For starters, I couldn’t really accept the presupposition of the Left’s role in this, or the claim that it is necessarily the case. Otherwise I would only be able to accept such points, either to affirm the aims or to denounce them. So I can only maintain an oppositional standpoint by giving the premise a good prod. Oh well, that’s adversarial politics for you!

3: After following the link, I still don’t think he addresses this. Perhaps he would care to. I do very much recommend that he actually finds out what I think first. There are a number of books which he may read, starting with ‘The Abolition of Britain’, which may help. But he needs to grasp that I am not a Thatcherite or any kind of economic liberal, and that I loathe the Tory Party, probably more than he does.

Maybe I’ll write a review of ‘The Abolition of Britain’, or ‘The War We Never Fought’. Right now, I’m more perplexed by what could only be a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of my views. In my first article, I clearly pointed out Hitchens takes issue with the Tory Party and Thatcher’s legacy.

I never suggested Mr. Hitchens was a Thatcherite; in fact, it speaks rather well of his writing that he’s not a market liberal. He’s not an unscrupulous phony like David Cameron. Nor does he face the problem of how to reconcile economic liberalism with social conservatism. It’s much more consistent, as I’ve already said, if you’re a traditionalist conservative, to see Thatcherism as just another problem and not a solution. This the Left has in common with Peter Hitchens.

Though I did imply that the line Hitchens takes on addiction comes across as more liberal than conservative, e.g. the view of the individual and their agency as prime. I don’t mean to suggest one has to be a determinist, but it’s evident that individuals don’t choose the circumstances under which they act. This extends as far to the culture they are born into and as deep as the genetic predispositions they inherit.

I don’t expect a reply to this post, Mr. Hitchens probably has a long list of enemies to engage with, and his patience must be wearing thin at this point. But I think the readers have enjoyed this back-and-forth.

This post was a response to a post by Peter Hitchens. Should anyone want to ask me a direct question, you can email me at: cainmosni@hotmail.co.uk

Wednesday, 9 July 2014

Notes on Anglo-Fascism.

In my most recent articles for Souciant Magazine I've been focusing on the Far-Right in the UK, it's history and it's relationship with the concept of whiteness. In the article 'Keeping Britain White' I take Powell's notorious speeches as my jumping off point. It was the perfect starting-point as the extent to which Powell tapped into the race-consciousness of white people in England cannot be exaggerated. There's a reason Powell's memory lives to this day and his political career has been eclipsed by the speeches he gave in '68. The spirit of Powell still captivates many to this day.

It was in 1968 that the Conservative politician Enoch Powell gave his notorious speech, in which he claimed that “in fifteen to twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. He invoked the language of ‘excreta’ and ‘wide-grinning picaninnies’ in relation to Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

Powell imbued this inflammatory portrayal with a classicist reference to the poet Virgil: “as I look ahead I am filled with foreboding like the Roman I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

Immediately the speech became notorious and has since remained an artefact in the collective imagination of British life. Every so often there is an eruption of racial strife and the phrase ‘Enoch was right’ is bandied about. Yet the speech had not emerged from a clear sky. In the mid-1960s, Powell had penned articles against Indian men sporting turbans and beards at work. There had been serious racial tensions in the past. The Notting Hill riots of 1958 were followed by calls for the doors to ‘coloured’ immigration to be shut. The Far-Right participated in these riots and sought to propel themselves further on the basis of racial strife.

If you look back at old newsreels from forty to fifty years ago you can see people saying things like “We want to keep Britain white”. It was a slogan for far-right organisations like the White Defence League, the National Front, and later, the BNP. In the aftermath of Powell’s speech people would march under banners and placards that displayed the same or similar messages. He had tapped into the racial consciousness of the white working-class. As a prominent right-wing politician Powell had given credence to sentiments widely held in the country. He had gone out on a limb in a bid to unseat his rival Ted Heath as leader of the Conservative Party.

I go on to go over the racial oppression of the Irish by the British in order to frame our common assumptions about race. I refer to the accounts of racist signs, such as "No coloured, or Irish", and the details of British colonial rule in Ireland. Relying on the work of Noel Ignatiev and Ted Allen I present how the Irish were not considered 'white' until the late nineteenth century. In fact, in a conversation I had with Carl Freedman, on this matter, I was told that it was only in certain parts of the US. So there was asymmetry in that regard. The Irish may have found headway on the East Coast, but not necessarily across the American continent. It is true that the KKK was partly a successor to earlier nativist movements looking to restrict the rights of Irish Catholics.

My comments on how this can be did not satisfy some. As I had explained that the 'white race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as it is a socially constructed formation this was bound to be the case. It was thought I was saying that there is no biological basis or differences whatsoever. This is not so, there are genetic gaps and clusters of ancestry. However, 'race' is a far too crude a concept as by the one-drop rule the entirety of the white American population in the Southern States would have been deemed 'black'. South African Apartheid had the same trouble in defining what constitutes 'coloured', 'black', 'Indian', and 'white'. The fact that the Irish were not considered 'white' by the English (and were compared to apes by the popular press) while the Japanese were categorised as 'white' in South Africa tells us a lot about how 'race' really works.

In the next piece I wrote 'Britain Pushes Right' I looked at Britain First and tried to contextualise it within the history of the Far-Right. History reveals the extent to which we take the unoriginal for the original. The Far-Right has a very limited playbook, though we underestimate them at our peril, we have to make sure our response is proportionate to the threat we face. A great article on the Britain First rabble has been produced by Thomas G Clark. Here you can see my own take on the Golding-Dowson double-act.

At the helm we find a double-act Paul Golding and Jim Dowson. Golding leads the Christian patrols, which consists of a campaign of intimidation against the Asian British community. He was a BNP councillor from 2009 to 2011 and left amidst the infighting around Nick Griffin. Dowson is a much more mercurial figure. He ran the BNP call centre in Northern Ireland and pumped £4 million into the Party’s coffers to provide fuel for a public relations campaign. As he was in the Six Counties, Dowson found natural allies in the Ulster Loyalist movement, and has been organising Union flag protests. Before all of this, the Scottish friend of British nationalism was a Calvinist minister and a pro-life campaigner, with ties to the American Religious Right.

Never a member of the BNP, Dowson now says he would prefer to see UKIP go from strength to strength. He has been explicit that the aim of providing support to the BNP was to “push everyone over to the right” and that has resulted in the “success” of UKIP. As Britain First put up candidates for the EU elections of 2014, the group recommended to its supporters to vote for UKIP, or the English Democrats, in areas where they could not put up a candidate. The only other recommendation was to not vote British National Party. Dowson has said that he foresees a Holy War, and that he agrees with Islamists who call it jihad. He only stipulates that it’s really a crusade.

It’s not the first time that the British far right has moved to appropriate religious sensibilities. It’s not surprising, as fascism is a ‘scavenger ideology’, to quote Robert Paxton, which constitutes itself by plucking up whatever may propel it forward. After the National Front was humiliated at the ballot box in 1979, its members moved on to experiment with a kind of fascist Christian mysticism. This was led by Derek Holland, a devout Catholic, who declared himself a ‘political soldier’, advocating an austere and disciplined life committed to the purity of nationalist ideals. The drift into esotericism was no doubt furthered by the infighting which ultimately led to the Front splitting up.

The ‘crusade’ Dowson envisions has international dimensions. The Christian infused nationalism has obvious allies in those parts of the world where religion still plays a serious role as an identity-marker in political conflicts. On the Britain First Facebook page, you can find pictures which demonise Bosnian Muslims, while others celebrate the Lebanese Phalange. No doubt this is to align Britain First with Serbian ultra-nationalists and a Maronite Christian organisation founded out of admiration for Adolf Hitler. This is just what you can find out if you canvas their Facebook page with scrutiny in one’s eyes. As we have already seen this wouldn’t be the first time that the far right has forged unexpected alliances.

The article is now dangling on reddit for the usual feeding frenzy. Good luck to the mob, I say.

Monday, 26 May 2014

My First Encounter with Racism.

I must have been about five or six at the time. I was a late start at primary school as my mum had dawdled over whether or not to send me at all (she contemplated homeschooling). My first real friend came from a similar family background as I did. We were both children of unemployed family units, I came from a single-parent family, whereas he had seen his parents split early on and his mother later remarried. Neither his father nor his stepfather worked (as far as I knew), just as my mum survived on benefits and credit cards. She attended college while I was little and went on to study at university and she looked for work wherever she could. The media campaign against single-mums and their children had been under way for many years by this time.

We had a lot in common as shy sons of the under-class so maligned by middle-class journalists. Then one day we were in the playground and he turned to me and said "These Asians are going to take over". It perplexed me. I didn't know what he meant. I had never heard anything like this before, or at least I hadn't noticed it, certainly not at home. He was convinced that there were so many Asians in Britain that they were going to "take over". This was long before 'Islamization' became the new buzzword of the Far-Right. Over the next few years my friend and I played video games, collected Pokemon cards, and stuck together in tough times. Still, it bothered me when he complained that Sikhs are allowed to carry knives and other such petty concerns. He often said the Asians (when he used technical language) should've been "wiped out".

My mother was blunt when I asked her what to think about my dear friend's comments. She told me it was racism. Pure and simple. No doubt the press had a big role in shaping my friend's perceptions. His family swallowed a lot of it on face value. He was on board with the 'War on Terror' and was destraught over Kevin Bigley's death because his mother was. "We're helping them!" he said. He was signed up to all the rightward trends. When UKIP was on the rise in the early part of the last decade my friend's family took to putting up UKIP campaign materials in their front room window. It was common-sense for him that we should leave the EU before we're swamped with Poles. England was a beleagured nation in his mind, dislocated, broken, and infected with undesirables.

The strength of the nationalist narrative is in its appeal to real grievances in the North and the Midlands. The national industries are gone, the old lifelines of working-class people have been decimated, and everywhere jobs are even more scarce. These were the blank slate years of the Nineties. Blairism was on the rise as John Major's 'Back to Basics' disappeared down a whirlpool of sleaze and hypocrisy. Thatcherism had wiped out the labour movement and fed public assets to the private sector. The most convenient way to explain away the problems of society was not to analyse its systemic contradictions (who has the time for this?) but to externalise them. The EU is running our country. The foreigners took the jobs and the benefits and even taking over our football teams.

Of course, the media has done a wonderful job of demonising asylum seekers and the benefits system and the EU. Not to mention the way they have set out to undermine the term 'racist' and its tone of condemnation. My friend insisted he wasn't 'racist', all the while insisting that the blacks all look the same, the Asians are taking over and should be exterminated, everyone who isn't 'white' should be deported and the government should stand up for the 'white' English. He later moved on to voting BNP and had little idea that the Party represents everything the British fought in Nazi Germany. He was more concerned by the losses of the England football team than by D-Day. He insisted that the people who died on the shores of Normandy did not die for him or his country. Not that he was pro-Hitler. I don't think he was aware of all the implications of what he thought.

That's ideology for you. It's not what you think, it's what you do. In the world he lives in there are only racial formations and he has to take the side of his own kind. Class is abstracted away, only ancestry and skin-colour matter. It breaks my heart that there are still working-class people who think like this. It merely enforces their predicament and closes down any possibility beyond the existing order. It keeps the working-class in its place. As Noel Ignatiev put it "We cannot say it too often: whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else."

Friday, 18 April 2014

Autocritique: Islam, Europe & Democracy.

My very first blogpost was an article on the British refusal to let Geert Wilders enter the country and to be received by Parliament where his film would then be shown. Later Mr Wilders was allowed into the country, to great controversy, given his own views of Islam as a ‘fascist ideology’. At the time I took the line that it would be much better if Lord Nazir Ahmed didn’t push for Wilders to be blocked from presenting the film. Rather Lord Ahmed should’ve challenged him and defeated Wilders in his claims about Islam, it’s not as though the film’s message is difficult to refute. He equates terrorism with the Quran pushing aside the collapse of Arab nationalism which led to the emergence of radical Islamism. Never mind the legitimate grievances of Muslims, not only the atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and Chechnya, but in former Yugoslavia as well. Nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq either.

It still seems clear that if Geert Wilders had been allowed to enter then he could have been defeated in debate. I think that would have been constructive. My stance on this particular issue is not a part of a general position on free speech. It’s not a reflection of any bias towards the reactionary Right in its bid to further marginalise Muslims in Europe. So I would maintain the position I took up to that point. But I should reassess the following claims and implications in my article: 1) Lord Ahmed has a responsibility to adequately represent British Muslims, 2) the assumption that the Muslim population of Britain is a problem community; 3) any implication that if we don't listen to Wilders we'll have fascism on our hands. It's these aspects of my article which I wish to address here.

1. As Lord Ahmed was never elected we shouldn't hold him to the responsibilities of an elected representative and, in actuality, we should be opposed to the position he holds. It's not that Lord Ahmed poses any threat to democracy, it's that the UK doesn't have much of a democracy in the first place. We're a constitutional monarchy and, principally, I would favour a secular republic with a much more democratic form of government. So we should be asking deeper questions and not presupposing a present existing democratic system. We should ask why British Muslims don't have enough representation and head from there. Ahmed could not pose as such a representative even if he wanted to. Nevertheless, I would add that Lord Ahmed welcomed Israel Shamir to Britain and he has little ground to stand on to block Wilders from coming here.

2. It is the case that British Muslims are too often put on the spot to defend their religion. The expectation is that the British Muslim community have to prove themselves as loyal citizens. Instead of a presumption of innocence and loyalty, we have a presumption of guilt and disloyalty. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't always immune to the mass hysteria which came with the 'War on Terror'. Actually the Muslims in the UK have nothing to prove. The 'clash of civilizations' thesis is a farce which was spawned by a mediocre squirrel-scholar. The facts are that the major allies of the US and the UK in the Muslim world have long included authoritarian regimes and continue to do so. The 'clash' is a convenient narrative. We claim to back democracy in Iraq while we support theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Muslims and non-Muslims alike are right to be critical of this.

3. There is no likelihood of a Fourth Reich popping up in the next few years. Nor was there such a possibility in 2009 when I was writing of the need to ward-off the BNP threat. There is a long-term threat of neo-fascist groups which we have to deal with. Geert Wilders is a manageable threat – just another political whore – as containable a toxin as Nigel Farage (until quite recently). The opposition to his arrival only served to strengthen his Janus-faced persona as a defender of freedom and advocate of banning scripture. He defends individual freedom, except when you want to migrate (if you're a Muslim), if you want to wear a veil, if you want to read the Quran, and so on. The threat we face is twin-headed, humanitarian liberalism and cultural nationalism converge. Wilders is not a fascist, he actually comes from the market liberal tradition; yet he is increasingly aligned with proto-fascists and has now climbed into bed with Marine Le Pen.

The battleground is not just a marginal one which we can block off easily. It is a matter of challenging and undermining the status quo, where we find even progressive liberals effectively take the side of nationalists and reactionaries. The very people we would expect to guard the liberal flame of human rights and civil liberties are no longer trustworthy. Just as the social democrats of most European states have now become the enemies of what is left of social democracy. The difference is that this isn't a matter of preservation (as there was never much there in the first place).

Sunday, 6 April 2014

Europe's problem with Muslims.

Now Marine Le Pen has stated that there should be no 'special treatment' for Muslims (and by extension Jews) with school meals. Either they eat pork, or they starve. This isn't to be understood as in isolation. As some of you may have read the Danish have banned halal and kosher slaughter on the grounds of animal rights. Of course, this is just another event in a long procession of bans in Europe. The French government banned the veil in public places, the Swiss government banned minarets, then there was the Cologne ruling against circumcision in 2012, and the 2013 ban on halal and kosher slaughter in Poland. This is at the same time as we've seen calls for the Qur'an to be banned from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He has found common cause with other self-described 'counter-jihadists' such as Le Pen. We've had a recurring debate about whether Islam is compatible with 'Western' culture. Britain routinely has a debate over whether or not to ban the veil, with similar debates on halal meat and circumcision taking place with less frequency.

We should ask ourselves some stark questions about all of this. No Muslim country has invaded or occupied a 'Western' or European state in recent decades. To the contrary, the UK and the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and occupied leaving more than a million people dead. The vast majority killed have been civilians and no doubt most of them have been Muslims. The French were totally on board with the NATO intervention in Libya which left thousands dead, just as they also wanted to bomb Syria as US allies Turkey and Israel had already done. This is at the same time that the governments of the US and Western Europe continue to support dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim world. So the idea that there is a 'clash of civilisations' is somewhat absurd, mainly because it's rightists who want such a war. As for European Muslims, here's an excerpt from Yehouda Shenhav:

I would like to go back for a minute to what was known in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as the "Jewish problem," and to the debates of Jewish emancipation. The debates were originally stirred by a Prussian government effort to extend an identical status to all Jews under its rule; in 1841, it released a draft law concerned with the need for maintaining "the wondrous essence" of the Jews without "intervening with the Christian state." Bruno Bauer wrote that, in a state where Christianity was the official religion, Jews could not be truly emancipated. Religious freedom necessitates the privatization of religion and eschewing it away from the public sphere, but Judaism, being a religion of (public) law rather than of faith, cannot be reduced into a "private religion."

Just as Judaism is a public religion Islam can be understood in these terms as well and liberal societies cannot easily integrate such religious groups into atomised chambers of individual rights and freedoms. The pre-Enlightenment communitarian values of Judaeo-Islamic culture reach beyond the limits of individualism, as such an identity and tradition cannot easily be relegated to a private space. This is where multiculturalism entered as a liberal option of opening up a space for newly settled cultures within the liberal framework. But this has been a beleaguered idea since it first appeared. This is how we are to understand the calls to ban the veil, minarets, and so on. It's no coincidence that the anti-Muslim racism of today can easily overlap with anti-Semitism. This is what bans on circumcision and halal slaughter demonstrate so well. The European fascist parties now have a new means of reinstating old anti-Jewish measures as a programme for defending 'our culture' from imaginary Muslim hordes.

Over the last decade we've witnessed the legitimation of anti-Muslim hatred across Europe in various forms. The actions Breivik undertook can only be understood with this background. The Far-Right used to claim Communism was the Jewish plot to destroy European nationhood, now they claim the Left (and the Jews, no doubt!) are working to flood Europe with Muslims and impose Islamic law in order to destroy 'Western' civilisation. This was the essence of Breivik's ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, and 'political-correctness', are a "cultural Marxist" affront to European nations and their traditional culture. I've covered the growth of this theory among neo-fascists before. It should concern all of us, especially as anti-Muslim hatred is increasingly normalised by the very same liberal intelligentsia who are meant to be the custodians of liberal democratic values.

Sunday, 29 September 2013

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.