Again, with the racist Christmas card.

The last time I was writing about the BNP and its Christmas cards it was 2013 and Nick Griffin was still the leader. Now not only has he lost his seat in the European Parliament, he has lost his role as leader, which he held for 15 years, and has actually been expelled from the party. He's since thrown his weight behind UKIP as the leading right-wing alternative to the Westminster consensus. The BNP haven't changed tactics drastically, they are still sending out fascist Christmas cards wishing us all a 'white' Christmas. The party is still wearing Nick's old jackboots.

What does this say about the BNP? Is this the Griffin legacy? Putting it succinctly, I would say 'yes' to the latter question, and refer back to my writing from last Christmas:

Under Griffin the BNP has been active in attempting to carve out a position of right-wing populism with its own self-sustaining momentum. To this end Griffin has set out to normalise the party as a modern cultural nationalist group standing up for the little guy. The enemy is defined as a coterie of multiculturalist liberals, radical leftist infiltrators and an assortment of foreigners. In plain speaking, the Left (and, of course, the Jews) have triumphed over Western civilization and mass-immigration is their tool in destroying the 'white race'.

Of course, the party is still completely enthralled by racial nationalism, just as its precursor the National Front used to campaign to "keep Britain white". The BNP, like all fascist parties, cannot abandon 'white' people, even as it can desist from talking about African, Jewish and South Asian Britons. The commitment to defending the 'white race' is its raison d'etre, and the hatred and oppression of non-whites is the only way it can further this agenda.

Believing in 'White Genocide'.

Above I've attached a video from Liberty GB chairman Paul Weston which was produced last November and has since become a favourite among white nationalists. Here he reels out questionable statistics in order to buttress the claim that the demographic changes taking place can constitute 'genocide'. The claim that the birth of non-white children in European counties amounts to 'white genocide' has become a trope of the Far-Right. Recently, I was fortunate to stumble upon a critique of the lie of 'white genocide' at Debunking Denialism.

I've covered Liberty GB before, which was formed in huge fallout from the attempt to build a parliamentary wing for the EDL. The line used to be that the struggle is cultural and not about race. In this video Weston comes out. He states that cultural and civic nationalism, which Liberty GB claimed as it's position, will not work without (as he implies) forced repatriation. However, we should note that the 'culturism' of this organisation was always about the characterisation of Muslims as non-racial. And yet Liberty GB has never been able to shut up about the 'white race', which would mean the problem is not just cultural; in fact it defines Muslims as non-white by implication. This is all very revealing of the loaded language of culture, race, and nationalism.

The appeal to white racial consciousness is vital to fascism because it presupposes a harmonious collaboration between classes as 'white people' are a multi-class formation. In advancing race consciousness over class consciousness the objective is to hold together capitalist society in spite of its immense contradictions. All systemic failures can be pinned on 'external threats', whether it is the trade unions, the Left as a whole, or Muslim migrants. This is no secret. Paul Weston is overtly calling Liberty GB a "counter-revolutionary party". Liberty GB frames multiculturalism, gay liberation, feminism, and 'political-correctness', as flanks in a war waged by "cultural Marxists". Of course, the "cultural Marxists" were the Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt school. The same old paranoias are reasserted in new forms. All of this was fundamental to Breivik's manifesto incidentally.

Notice Weston names Lebanon, as he has also mentioned Yugoslavia, taking the side of the Christians over the Muslims. Not coincidentally the Maronite Christian factions included fascist groups, just as Serbian identity was heavily defined by an Orthodox Christian background. Liberty GB takes the side of both, as well as 'white' South Africans, and the Israeli occupation as an outpost of 'Western' civilisation. Unsurprisingly, Weston has said in the past that "Islam is worse than Nazism". So it's clear what he takes to be the necessary course of action and what he sees as the 'lesser evil'.

'Wishing You a White Christmas'.

Exhibit 1: Race Bait.

The latest move has been to post a Christmas card bearing the BNP message through the internet to as many people as possible. Subtlety has never been a refined capacity of Britain's neo-fascists. A few years ago Nick Griffin made an appearance online telling the nativity story by a fireplace. It's all in line with Griffin's mission to take the BNP on a 'moderate line' of identity politics, complete with appeals to free-speech, democracy, culture and values. This is at the same time as the party trying to maintain its basis as a racist party, while expanding the appeal to other electoral blocs. Historically, Fascism has been a movement focused on stealing the working-class base of the Left, as well as the conservative middle-classes, and ultimately the support of the industrial bourgeoisie. To accomplish this there has to be sufficient economic chaos for the Fascists to subsume these bases of support and stomp the guts out of the Left.

Fortunately, these efforts have been thwarted by the malfeasance and incompetence of the party leadership, as well as its inability to capitalise on the gains made in 2009. All the while the party has faced a lot of opposition from dedicated anti-racists and has had to endure the same ideological crisis as the rest of Britain's political parties. The result has been a fragmentation of the far-right in Britain, with the BNP in financial disarray and new competition arising from the EDL and even new fascist parties springing up such as the BDP set up by Andrew Brons and Paul Weston's Liberty GB. The UKIP has benefited from this fragmentation in pitching itself as the leading right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. Tommy Robinson has left the EDL headless to pursue his agenda in another form. So the impetus of the far-right has shifted to pushing the Establishment to adopt much more reactionary policies. But this is not the road to a Fourth Reich.

Under Griffin the BNP has been active in attempting to carve out a position of right-wing populism with its own self-sustaining momentum. To this end Griffin has set out to normalise the party as a modern cultural nationalist group standing up for the little guy. The enemy is defined as a coterie of multiculturalist liberals, radical leftist infiltrators and an assortment of foreigners. In plain speaking, the Left (and, of course, the Jews) have triumphed over Western civilization and mass-immigration is their tool in destroying the 'white race'. The assertion of a white racial consciousness combined with a cultural notions of traditions and values. In this way the Other is distinguished in negative terms with no need to distinguish them in somatic references to 'black' or 'coloured' people. If the populist appeal is to culture then the Other can remain opaque. Yet the line is no different to the one Nick Griffin expressed in 1996 when he exclaimed at a rally: "The capitalist free-traders, the Marxists, and organised Jewry, have declared war on the White Man!"

It is enough for 'us' to be defined in order to distinguish 'them'. So the message of a 'White Christmas' with the Aryan folk imagery comes in conjunction with an anti-PC message. The target is the British Muslim population. To all detractors the BNP has a prepared response: Islam isn't a race, so it can't be racist to hate Muslims. The response to such nonsense should be clear, the Jews aren't a race either. Of course, race as a concept of 19th Century biology and anthropology has no validity today. The problem is that the somatic reference of race to pigmentation and even hair colour remains pervasive. As Richard Seymour has pointed out, the move to cultural racism over scientific (or somatic) racism on the European Right has been followed by efforts to pilfer the tactics of American conservatives in the 'culture war' against liberalism. As we can tell from looking at the BNP's more adept rivals race can remain a force as an even more slippery concept in these 'culture wars'.

The call to save Christmas from the purveyors of politically-correct Winterval comes with the message to keep Britain 'white' by keeping its culture 'white'. The assertion of racial consciousness and appeals to white resentment against multiculturalism, political-correctness, and, of course, the foreigners. It's built into the counter-revolutionary motivations of Fascism to assert race. The necessity to block all class opposition to the system creates the need for a means of binding together the classes against a common enemy. The 'white race' has to be understood as a formation of social control. It transcends class and appeals to it presuppose a collaboration of the classes: whites together against the non-whites. Racism is the mustard gas pumped into the trenches of the class war. For this reason Nick Griffin, and his fellow travelers, can't get away from the 'white race' even if they can resist talking too much about categories of 'black' and 'Asian'. The priority is to expunge the contradictions inherent to the system and wipe out its opponents (both real and imaginary).

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



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'.

War All the Time.

The special place of British troops who fought in the Falklands in this funeral should surprise no one. It was the war that saved Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 General Election, without which the later battles over the mines, privatisation and the poll tax would've never been fought. Since the death of the 'Iron Lady' we have heard little of the truth of Thatcher's foreign policy. Only the snippets have made it through in a collage of sound bites cherry-picked and arranged by the media class as part of the Thatcher hagiography. We're reminded of the Falklands war, as it was her saviour in life, it is now her saviour in death. There has been little to no mention of the full range of Thatcherite foreign policy, only Ireland and South Africa are mentioned as negative examples of the decisions made by the Thatcher government. Little mention of Thatcher's subservience to American power, evident in her decisions to support Reagan's bombing of Libya and Bush's invasion of Panama to kidnap Noriega. No mention of Thatcher's support for violence around the world.

 

 

The Falklands was once adequately summarised by Jorge Luis Borges as a "fight between two bald men over a comb." It was hardly a noble stand for democracy against dictatorship, as the Thatcher government was supporting Pinochet at the same time. In fact the Chilean dictatorship was a major ally in the war with Argentina. It's plausible that the Thatcher government would've had little qualm with the Argentine Generals had the islands not been an issue of dispute. That can hardly be called 'principled' in any sense of the word. It was a convenient way to benefit from the nationalist fervour too often stirred by war. In his bid to displace anger over his economic policies Galtieri gave Thatcher the opportunity needed to distract from the economic crisis in Britain. The sons of the poor were sent to fight and die for even less than the islands themselves. For their victory the Thatcher government rewarded the country with a programme of privatisation and deregulation, the consequences of which we are still living with to this day.

 

A year before the Falklands war was to be waged Margaret Thatcher gave the nod to the KMS to start training and arming the Contras in Nicaragua. It was a part of Washington's policy of stamping out all opposition with death squads. The support for the Contras would later burst out into the open and expose the ugliness under the surface of America's wars for 'liberty' and 'democracy'. The only other foreign policy position that the press have praised has been Thatcher's stance on the invasion of Grenada. Supposedly the 'Iron Lady' was outraged by the operations conducted in a Commonwealth nation without consulting the British. Actually the outrage was rather timid and private, while the UK government stood in line and supported the invasion. It definitely isn't the case that the Thatcherites were making anything more than cold calculated decisions to keep in line with American foreign policy. As we will see, for the most part, Thatcher failed to differentiate herself from the American line on world affairs.

 

 

We are meant to look upon Margaret Thatcher as a strident anti-Communist who brought down the Berlin Wall with the Reaganites. Even the words the Communists tried to use against her were turned against them. The term 'Thatcherism' was originally deployed by the Communist Party of Great Britain, while 'Iron Lady' was a sobriquet of Soviet invention; it was Dennis Healey who dubbed her 'Attila the Hen'. Old Madge delighted in all of this. It was the only and best card to play of course. Unsurprisingly then 'Attila the Hen' was quick to attack the Soviet empire upon taking office in 1979. It was one of Thatcher's first acts to persuade the European Economic Community to put a stop to its shipments of food and powdered milk to the children of Vietnam. After that decision a third of all infants under five deteriorated and many were stunted. Perhaps the only journalist to document this in the West was John Pilger. He also kept an eye on Thatcher's support for the enemies of the enemy in a bid to support one dominion over another in the Cold War.

 

It was not enough that the US war in Indochina had killed maybe more than 3 million people. The children of Vietnam were guilty by virtue of being born into a Communist state that had dared to try and defy the American empire. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot it was the US - still bitter over its humiliation in Indochina - led the chorus of international condemnation. Quick to follow the Americans as ever the British were soon on the side of Pol Pot. It was a matter of supporting China's influence in the region over that of Russia. The Khmer Rouge claimed to be the legitimate government of Kampuchea, so the US and the UK supported their bid to hold onto their seat in the UN. The West withheld aid to Cambodia until the Vietnamese occupation came to an end. The argument was that the Vietnamese would not let the aid reach the Cambodian people. Meanwhile, Vietnam sent over 25,000 tonnes of food aid across the border to feed civilians.

Instead the US government piled on the pressure for the World Food Programme to send $12 million in food to the Khmer Rouge sitting across the Thai border under UN protection. As Pilger has noted, the US had been secretly funding Pol Pot in exile since January 1980. The extent of this support - $85m from 1980 to 1986 - was later revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Major government would admit in 1991 that the UK had provided the Khmer Rouge with SAS training from 1983. It was in a 1988 interview for Blue Peter of all settings that the 'Iron Lady' clarified her view of the Khmer Rouge "Pol Pot could not go back... but some of the Khmer Rouge of course are very different I think there are probably two parts to the Khmer Rouge there are those who supported Pol Pot and then there is a much much more reasonable grouping within that title 'Khmer Rouge'..." This should not shock the cold-eyed realists of the world.



In the bid to support China mattered more than justice - which was not on the balance sheet of priorities. The deaths of 1.2 million people under Pol Pot were a price worth paying for extending China's reach and rolling back Russian influence. In the surrounding region the Thatcherites were a force of continuity and pledged support for Suharto in Indonesia. This support went as far as arming Suharto's troops to butcher the people of East Timor. The deals were overseen by minister Alan Clark, who had no concern for the consequences of his actions. Again, the justification for America's support for Suharto was to hold-off Communism. Sukarno was too left-ish and had to go, the CIA made sure of that in 1965 with the coup that installed Suharto for the next 33 years. The deaths of 200,000 people in East Timor didn't matter, neither did the deaths of more than a million people in Indonesia itself. It mattered not to Mr Reagan as little as it did to Mrs Thatcher.

 

This was a policy not contained nor unique to East Asia. It was the Thatcher government which violated Britain's neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war and began to sell as many arms as possible to Saddam in 1981. The American government had yet to remove Iraq from the terrorist list at that time. Once Iraq had been taken off the list (and replaced with Cuba) the Reagan administration threw total support behind Saddam. Before the Reaganites could fully align themselves with Hussein in 1982, Thatcher was sending Christmas cards to not just Saddam Hussein but Colonel Gaddafi. Together the Reaganites and the Thatcherites won over Saddam to the American side of the Cold War. That was before the standing of both Saddam and Gaddafi changed. Over 20 years later, as Jonathan Schwarz noted, the Iron Lady penned this line for an article "Saddam must go... It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD."

 

We're living with the legacy of Thatcherism abroad and not just at home, it is very much alive and kicking. It's not just that we live with privately owned electric companies and a crippled labour movement. It was Thatcher's foreign policy which stands as the extension of the prescription of austerity, privatisation and deregulation. Financialisation and wars of aggression are not as far from one another as it may appear. Both were just as short-sighted as one another. It was the Thatcher-Reagan support for Iraq in its development of weapons of mass-destruction in the 1980s the Iranians reacted by re-opening the nuclear facilities that had been closed with the era of the Shah. We know how this ended for Iraq and we should be alarmed by the ongoing aggression demonstrated by the US and the UK towards Iran. It could all too easily escalate into a full-blown war and we know whose side we shall be on. And for that we may thank the departed.

Breivik's Living Space.

The trial and conviction, a conclusion foregone long ago, of Anders Behring Breivik has, of course, drawn the attention of the world media. Breivik has been given the maximum sentence of 21 years for the bombing of a government building before a shooting spree on Utøya island. This act of lone-wolf terrorism left 77 people dead and 319 people injured. He has to serve a minimum of 10 years before he can appeal, but this is unlikely. It's more likely that Breivik will remain inside for the rest of his life with a review every 5 years after the initial 21 year period. This seems especially likely given that Breivik fully intends to continue "the war" from his prison cell. It's obvious from what "the war" is meant to be when he writes "We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe." The car-bombing and subsequent spree targeted the liberal political class in Norway was just the beginning of a battle that fits into a fascist millenarianism in his thinking.

As The Guardian has observed it was an open trial in an open society, the social democratic principles of Norway have endured this assault. The Norwegians have rightly seen to it that the liberal foundations of their society will not be compromised for this monster. This was an impressive display given the appalling actrocities that took place. There are plenty of people who want to execute Breivik, but that would be to do his work for him. Breivik has much more in common with the Islamists than he likes to admit. The suicide-bombers of al-Qaeda want to destroy this world out of love for another world, just as Breivik wants to reconstruct a European Christendom the Jihadists want to establish a Caliphate. Effectively Breivik wants to destroy the liberal societies of Europe in order to deal with the threat, as he sees it, of Islam. The failure of many Western countries since 9/11 has been to abandon the liberal democratic commitment to civil liberties and human rights. Instead, we have seen the kidnapping and torture of 'terror suspects' time and time again.

 

It's scary just how the views Breivik holds of Muslims in particular are so widespread and mainstream. He repeatedly cites mainstream conservative sources such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes and Melanie Phillips as well as liberals like Sam Harris. It's not just Fox News, it's the BBC as well as liberal rags and even leftist outlets such as CounterPunch. It's also clear that Breivik's views are not alien to the particularly reactionary elements in the media in Britain. He railed against multiculturalism, mass-immigration and political correctness, these are the favourite targets of cultural conservatives and nationalists alike. It's no coincidence that the massacre was met, in some quarters, with the sentiment that this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the multicultural experiment. The rightist Melanie Phillips made it clear that she won't go back on any criticism of multiculturalism, Islamic extremism and immigration because of Breivik's killing spree. In short, the real battle is outside of the courtroom and Breivik's prison cell.

We have to stand by and build on the liberal ideals of Europe. Multiculturalism is certainly a flawed doctrine, but it is worth defending from these kinds of attacks. The only true friends of the Muslim community, at this time, will be the secularists keen to preserve Europe's atheist legacy with its religious freedoms and pluralism. It's clear why the Breiviks of this world see a 'cultural communism' lurking behind liberal multiculturalism. Leftists may criticise liberal promises of equality as a veneer over deeper forms of inequality, but it has to be acknowledged that the universality of human rights and freedoms was first advocated in liberal thought. It set the ground with the rights and freedoms limited to rich white men, but then the field of bourgeois individualism could be expanded to include women and so on. The egalitarian struggle has to be fought with liberalism as a starting-point. It's this that the likes of Breivik wants to destroy and that's exactly why we must defend it.

Punk Russia.

 

With Pussy Riot in the news we may read into the origins of this punk band and look to Voina. It seems somehow significant that this movement to shock cultural conservatism out of Russian society. The fall of the Berlin Wall affected a lot of people in a number of ways. Before the fall there was an entire underground scene of avant-garde art, music and literature, the work was defined by its opposition to the Soviet socialism as well as American capitalism. There has to be a new side to take, beyond left and right. It wasn’t just the emergence of democratic institutions, but the birth of a set of political options that were stunted in utero. We’ll get back to this later. Russia actually has a long history of avant-garde art and we should not mistake Pussy Riot for a deviancy of the post-Communist federation. As the Kremlin prefers to frame the Church as an anti-Stalinist institution it conveniently forgets the importance of the avant-garde in Russian history. Not just in the origins of the Soviet Union, but in the escapism from Brezhnevian repression.

By the early 1930s Stalin had solidified his position with the help of his appointed bureaucrats, the New Economic Policy could be abandoned in order to pursue the brutal collectivization of agriculture. It was at this time that Stalin heralded a new era in Russian art and architecture, it would be known as socialist realism. In the early years of the Revolution the aesthetic of Bolshevism became constructivism and, to a lesser extent, futurism. The Soviet artists were organised into Prolekult, at its peak the organisation had over 84,000 members active in studios and factory groups. The revolutionary avant-garde went back to the earlier uprisings against the Tsar in 1905 when they emerged as left-wing Bolsheviks and became enthralled with the idea of inspiring mass-revolts through art. After the long anticipated 1917 Revolution the avant-garde exploded in its activities even though it was never all that popular with the Orthodox Marxists in the ranks of Leninism.

This was not unique to Russia it has to be said as the surrealists climbed into bed with socialists to the extent that Leon Trotsky contributed to Breton's Surrealist Manifestos. In fact, Andre Breton once summed up the simplest surrealist act as "going into the street, revolver in hand, and firing at random into the crowd for as long as one can". Breton was keen to shape the surrealist movement to fit his own tastes, which carried the symptom of scorn for the novel (with a few exceptions). He also had no interest in music whatsoever. He went onto ostracise Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille and Salvador Dalí from the group for a variety of reasons. Dalí is a notable exception, to this pattern of artistic radicalism, in his violent passivity at the rise of Franco in the 1930s. This was while Picasso conveyed the horrifying emergence of Fascist Spain over the corpses of a great number of leftists in his own painting. Naturally a mutual disdain burned between Picasso and Dalí.

The leading figures were either absorbed into socialist realism, died off or found themselves marginalised in later life. The avant-garde would only re-emerge in the 1970s and 80s as a negative opposition to state-socialism and liberal capitalism. This time it offered little in positive vision, only a mockery of what had been for so long. At best the artists reverted to the politics of anarchy, forever leftwards. The underground scene thrived in Leningrad and Moscow. There the youth (including the spawn of prominent bureaucrats and commissars) turned to cultural activities – especially music – to capture and mock the absurdity of the USSR. Politics had precious little to offer for the children of Brezhnev, it was not a means to reorganise society. The youth reached out to American Punk because only change seemed possible outside the political realm. It was a way of retreating from any engagement with the corrupt politics of the state that had no place for them to participate in the first place.

For the poet Eduard Limonov the new music scene embodied everything good about Russian maximalism – the tendency to take things to the extreme. The collision of bland bureaucracy and vapid optimism in Russia under Gorbachev could only be met with a militant anti-establishment fervour. Perhaps at some level this was an attempt to recapture the Russian tradition of nihilism. The hero of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was Bazarov, an idealistic young radical, a devotee of universal freedom destined for tragedy. The novel reflected the Russian nihilism of the late 19^th Century. This was when nihilism was of a generational rejection of the old traditional and cultural whole. It was better to profess a faith in ‘nothing’ than to buy into the conventions of traditional religion. The nihilists looked for a better understanding of this world as the future hope rather than living for the promise of salvation in the afterlife.

When the poet Eduard Limonov returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union he was appalled by the imposition of Western-style capitalism through ‘shock therapy’. It was a disaster and Limonov was convinced that the liberal societies of the West were no better than the old totalitarian model that had collapsed. Capitalism was just more sophisticated in its oppression. He decided to take drastic action and formed a new political party to take back Russian society from the rapacious forces of globalisation. Limonov set out to develop a new kind of politic out of the avant-garde scene that he had come out of it. He set out to take ideas and tendencies from within avant-garde art and music to redefine his oppositional politics. The aim would be to establish an alternative that would break through the bourgeois illusions of Western democracy to show the masses that the elites were greedily eviscerating Russia to feast on the entrails. 

It would be the National Bolshevik Party. It became the embodiment of the resurgent nationalism – through which the masses could be harnessed as a force – that has sought to quash the Russian process of modernisation since the 1990s. During the bombardment of Sarajevo, Limonov was present in solidarity with his Slavic brethren and there he was with Radovan Karadžić and was filmed taking a turn firing into the streets below them with a rifle. In the meantime, the drink-sodden Yeltsin and the gang of free-marketeers around him practically destroyed Russia only to give way for the rise of Putin. Some of the musicians from the Russian Punk even scene joined the National Bolshevik Party where they would aestheticise the political. As Walter Benjamin would remind us, with great wisdom, behind every Fascism you can find a failed revolution. The disillusionment that had carved out a comforting oppositional aesthetics to the Commissars found no way to define itself after the collapse of really existing socialism.


Once it was the Punk movement of New York City that had offered escapism to the Russian youth, only for it to boil over into a neo-fascism with Limonov's leap from a radical poet in exile to a full-blown reactionary. He had arrived in 1974 just in time to see the Punk scene kick-off in New York. Limonov became close to the likes of Richard Hell, Patti Smith and the Ramones. Limonov took the Punk vision fused it with the pervasive disillusionment of Soviet society. Now Pussy Riot blends Punk with a feminist politic in the post-Soviet Russia where the Kremlin seeks its authority in religiosity and jingoism. It still smacks of the comfortable resistance of artists in the 1970s and 80s. The anarchic form and subversion of any traditional standards without necessarily any positive vision to take the place of the dysfunctional institutions of really existing democracy in Russia. Nevertheless, it is clear that Pussy Riot embodies a valuable tendency in Russian music and art that should not be suppressed as it was under the Stalinists.