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.

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[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



The Evacuation of Meaning.

 

 

You may have heard recently that the Labour Party has rediscovered itself as the revolutionary vanguard ever ready to play dictatress to the proletarians of the UK. Unfortunately the slogan won’t be ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ exactly because Ed Miliband has pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months, to protect the minimum wage, repeal the bedroom tax and to incentivise private companies to develop on the land they own. No promises to reverse course on tuition fees, certainly not on ‘free schools’, the coming sale of Royal Mail and the on-going privatisation of the NHS so ignored by most of the mainstream media. If you read The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express you will of course know this is the most radical position ever taken in the last thirty years. That is only demonstrative of just how deeply the termites have spread and how well they have dined. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson have condemned Ed Miliband’s positions for abandoning the New Labour script of triangulated means to compete for the Conservative vote and, naturally, taking the working-class vote for granted. The Blairites are totally on board for the Cameron prescription of fiscal conservatism (for the poor anyway) to restructure the welfare state and public services.

The right-wing commentariat are on the offensive to safeguard the existing order (or should that be disorder?) of bloated energy oligopolies and the particular approach Cameron has taken to pumping up a housing bubble in London. The bedroom tax has appeal because gutting the benefits system will make some in the public feel good that Nicky Welfare isn’t getting away with spending his £60 a week on lager anymore. That’s the only discussion we’re allowed about benefits. No one wants to talk about the fact that Nicky Welfare’s housing benefit doesn’t go on his drinking habits, but it does go straight into the pockets of a landlord. The housing crisis is not up for discussion anymore. The Conservatives and Lib Dems have been hard at work trying to patch up the system as it was when Gordon Brown was in the Treasury. All of them will talk the talk about the need to build more houses to stoke the chronic shortage and lift people out of dilapidated housing. There is no serious commitment to extending public money to building more social housing. Instead the government and the so-called left-wing opposition are signed up to selling off these houses thereby feeding the same processes of debt and property speculation which laid the basis for the last crash.

 

At the same time, the Labour Party has not reclaimed Clause 4 to recommit itself to the nationalisation of industries and assets. Instead Miliband waffles as the NHS is sold off bit by bit and even as the delegates vote unanimously in favour of renationalising the railways the Labour leadership looks for the door. Yet ‘Red’ Ed can’t help himself from affirming a vague commitment to an even more vague democratic socialism. It seems like just five minutes ago Ed Miliband was calling himself a “modern progressive social democrat” and affirmed a commitment to a “responsible capitalism”. It shows how far things have gone, Tony Blair knew what he had to say to get ahead back in 1983 when he described himself as a socialist influenced by Karl Marx. Keep in mind ‘Red’ Ed is the same leader looking to chuck out the troublesome unions, while he has taken the side of Boris Johnson in his support for a “use it or lose it” policy on land ownership. Even Margaret Thatcher maintained a 60p tax for nine years, but Ed is so ‘red’ for supporting the 50p rate. The truth is the spectrum has moved considerably to the Right and now the much lauded centre is hardly a bastion of moderation. At best Labour offers to hold back a bit more than the Conservatives: austerity lite, rather than austerity.

 

Meanwhile the liberal press is in just a bad shape as it agrees with the right-wing analysis for the most part. The liberals love the idea that the socialist movement and its project are long dead. To them Ed Miliband is a nuanced centre-left politician, better than Tony Blair but not as bad as Tony Benn. It’s just another variation on the Third Way paradigm of New Labour and New Democrats. There is virtually no difference in rhetoric as Miliband has been oh so very careful not to distinguish himself from the odious stench of Blairism. Nor has he set out to distance himself from the Brown mound. He doesn’t want to define himself or to be defined and yet he expects to win an election on the same old pablum. The conservative press have already laid down their script, as they had done from day one, Ed Miliband is a leftist and his failures are to be taken as failures of the Left. The liberals more or less have swallowed so much of the premise as to tie themselves to this conclusion. When it came to Syria the Labour leader was distinguished not by his success but by his failure to push through his ‘yes’ motion. It would’ve made his father proud. It might only be reasonable able to hope Miliband can produce more of these fuck ups once in office.

This article was originally written for and posted at the Third Estate on September 27th 2013.

'This book is dedicated to mankind.'

There are some novelists who can’t be avoided in the charged instability of their prose. We find this in the literature of extremes, and one such recent case is Michel Houellebecq. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace, but this has left winners and losers. Elsewhere Houellebecq calls for a ‘sexual communism’ and a ‘sexual social democracy’ where the unattractive are not excluded from the exchange centres of pleasure. The cultural revolution of the late 20^th Century did not leave us all unscathed to enter into a new sexual utopia. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh had wanted so dearly. It may be that the analysis has been prompted by the conditions demanding a response of some kind. No wonder then it has been said that Houellebecq uses the language of the Left to launch a right-wing attack on the soixante-huitards, the Hippies and New Age spirituality.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. Even as he identifies the descent into hedonism Houellebecq does not call for a return to the conventions of monogamy. He seems to prefer the idea of turning the sexual marketplace into a more democratic mechanism which everyone can enjoy. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific theory and the historical pre-conditions for modern society. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through the years reared by their grandmothers and then through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. It is a deeply tragic tale, but not one without any hint of sentimentality. In the same way that Houellebecq gives the middle finger to a whole host of liberal assumptions and beliefs he cannot get away from this plain of thought. It could’ve been an even more despairing work in some respects.

The love story between Michel and Annabelle stands as evidence of Houellebecq’s sentimentality in that he couldn’t just have them never come together in the first place. Some of the saddest pages tell of Michel and Annabelle growing up, failing to get together as teenagers and ultimately depart on the cusp of adulthood in the middle 70s. Funnily enough, Michel lost Annabelle (not that he had had her yet) to a wannabe rock-star in a communal setting and partly with the help of Bruno. Take from that what you will. Many years later, Michel bumps into Annabelle by chance and falls limply into a relationship with her. She too had been failed by the world in which she was born to. Throughout the relationship Michel remains indifferent even to her affections, only taking enjoyment in their embraces in the most intellectualised way. Even still, this was as close as it came to the two of them making a ‘go of it’ as they should have as twenty-somethings. In a fit of desperation Annabelle had bluntly asked him to procreate with her – for fear that he was going to Ireland to leave her for his research project – and characteristically the good scientist agreed with a murmur. During the sexual act Michel remains distant and envisions a cell splitting, before describing the brink of orgasm as ‘a little suicide’. Afterwards Annabelle finds not only can she not have the child but she has uterine cancer and has to have a hysterectomy. Not too many pages later Annabelle commits suicide and Michel moves on with his research in Ireland only to disappear himself. We might say Houellebecq takes love deadly seriously, just not the prospects of finding and holding onto it in a world like this one.

It was quite something to flick from page to page, but it is revealing of the French poet who is a recovering Stalinist and former agronomist. Houellebecq could have opted for another version where Michel and Annabelle briefly meet again, only for them to never follow each other up. That would have led to the same conclusion, especially as it would still be twinned with Bruno’s doomed love affair with Christiane. Bruno goes mad after Christiane is left paralysed and chooses suicide as he had stopped seeing her. That was a much less sentimental series of events. And yet Houellebecq can’t resist the temptation of Michel and Annabelle coming together; it reminds one of the most overused lines of Tennyson “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.” Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in an anhedonic and rationalist distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. Both of the siblings are heirs to unfettered freedoms. The hedonist Bruno is ensnared in a culture which he cannot extricate himself from and he wouldn’t want to if he could just get laid more. On the other hand, Michel would probably have liked to have been left alone to his scientific inquiry – which was impossible given the obligatory nature of the relations so alien to him – we shouldn’t be surprised that he may have jumped at the opportunity to finally exit this world. By the end of the book there was nothing binding him to this life, he had completed his project and heralded a biogenetic revolution to outmatch the legacy of sexual liberation in expunging its pre-conditions.

It was that legacy which Bruno found himself so entangled with. Never sated by the amount of pornography, prostitutes, masturbation, sex shows, girlfriends and orgies he could ever muster the energy to find. It brings to mind Freud’s point that satisfaction is distinctly unsatisfactory. We can’t just do it, and nor can Bruno, but not want of trying; Houellebecq seems to retain the hope in the market of sexual exchange if only it can be transformed into a more democratic space. Only then will the bulbous and desperate Bruno, with all of his emotional baggage, find a scintilla of contentment. The affair with Christiane may have been a glimpse of such a life, where Clément finds a partner willing to take the lead and indulge in his insatiable appetites in courting nude beaches in search of swingers. Retrospectively we have the incident with Adjila, an Arab student, whom Bruno finds irresistible – to the point of exposing himself to her in a lesson and subsequently being sectioned. The girl standing as the nexus between the man’s sexual voracity, his misogyny and his racial ressentiment; in later interviews Houellebecq (partly defending himself against accusations of racism) draws a distinction between Arabs and Muslims insofar as the former can be assimilated. The author is right to locate in Bruno unending lust in conjunction with an immense dissatisfaction, which lends itself to sexual jealousy and racism ultimately. The obsession with Adjila is not to be disassociated from Bruno’s loathing of a black male student in his class and interprets his behaviour as rivalling him in the capacity to regress to ‘our animal selves’. He even goes as far as penning and trying to publish a racist pamphlet and contemplates joining the Front National.

In the end Bruno gives up on the written word (unlike Houellebecq) and finds some brief fulfilment with Christiane before losing his mind. It is apt that Michel Djerzinski not only diagnoses the condition but provides a cure, not for Bruno but for the human species. The biogenetic revolution amounts to the transcendence of the human species with a new race of clones (who are free of this unceasing desire). It means the end for mankind, but the book stands as an ode to humanity written in the mid 21^st Century partly looking at Djerzinski’s follower and successor Hubczejak. It is wonderfully satirical in this sense, in that the book charts the decline of Western civilisation only to cheer it on, and even welcome the end; then present the record of cultural decay as the only homage humanity deserves. It’s in this darkly amusing way that Houellebecq intends the words “This book is dedicated to mankind.” It is an appropriate frame for the events of the sad lives of Bruno and Michel, as well as the pages on scientific theory, social and cultural issues. It may be backward-looking in some respects, as well as outright reactionary in other moments and even be an extension of Houellebecq’s bitterness over the women in his life. I would contest the claim that Houellebecq should be dismissed for these reasons. As the man himself remarked in a BBC interview “Perhaps the mistake is to think of me in actual fact…” We may do better to bear in mind that we may not be able to prefigure the long-term legacy of a writer like Houellebecq. Somewhere in Atomised Houellbecq writes “Death is a great leveller.”