What It Means to Fight Oppression.

There are vital lessons to be learned from the accomplishments and failings of Nelson Mandela. Yet the mainstream media prefer to portray this great man as a kindly and benign old codger who won his battle for freedom. The assumptions behind this can be easily detected and should be excavated with a critical eye. The emphasis is always on the efforts towards reconciliation between the 'races' and not looking for 'revenge' against his former oppressors. The presupposition of biological distinctions between Africans remains intact while Mandela is to be applauded for being a 'restraint' on the barbarous hordes. Behind this lies the white racial consciousness, e.g. 'us' versus 'them'. We should resist this troubling banalisation of such an important figure. What is most admirable about Mandela is not the compromises his side made once in negotiations to dismantle the Apartheid regime.

The much lauded multiracial democracy of South Africa is actually a balancing arrangement between a state monopolised by the black vote and economic power resting in largely white hands. The mines remain privately owned and the largely black workforce is still being squeezed dry. In some ways the South African class system is now even worse than it was under Apartheid, the aspects of racial oppression which were inherent to that system remain in place in economic form. Except now the black people to rise to the business class have a vested interest in maintaining the continued subjugation of the toiling masses (most of whom are not white). The Marikana massacre in September 2012 demonstrated the disgraceful extent to which the ANC has become embroiled in the exploitation and oppression of the working-classes. The sight of white and black cops shooting the miners should be taken as the metaphor for the New South Africa.

To find the true heroism of Nelson Mandela we must examine the reasons for hysterical right-wing accusations of 'terrorism' against him. The African National Congress was dedicated to non-violent resistance for decades by this point and had exhausted every alternative to violent direct action. This was the background to the important moment when Nelson Mandela and his compatriots decided to found the Spear of the Nation and initiate the armed struggle. The targets were to be primarily governmental and symbolical, other targets included industrial and agricultural sabotage. Mandela was always eager to prevent the campaign from getting out of hand. He consistently opposed attacks on civilians and car-bombing in particular for it would degrade the movement and its cause. But he recognised that the situation in South Africa demanded more than pacifism.

In the Rivonia trial Nelson Mandela gave a virtuous defence of the cause "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." It was these words which were the reason Mandela was sent to prison for 27 years. It was these words which were the reason the US Congress refused to remove Nelson Mandela from their terrorist list until 2008. And it is precisely for these words which we should admire him in his indomitable resistance to tyranny. To call this 'terrorism' is to hold secret sympathy with the same kind of people we defeated in 1945.

If you want to know what the ANC were fighting against for decades you ought to examine the barbarism in which the Apartheid regime was by its nature embroiled. South Africa was a counter-revolutionary force in the face of national liberation movements in its neighbouring countries. In its occupation of Namibia and invasions of Angola and Mozambique, South Africa became the belligerent in a conflict which left more than 1.5 million dead. This was at the same time that the white supremacist state was carrying out assassinations, coups and atrocities which spanned the whole of Africa and beyond. The ultra-violence of the regime was completely supported by the American and British governments of the day, as well as most other European countries and Israel. The major ally of the ANC in its solidarity with the African rebels was the Castro regime of Cuba - who sent thousands of health workers, arms and troops to assist the Africans in their fight with the old colonial powers, as well as forces from South Africa and the CIA.

The reason why the mainstream media would prefer not to delve into the details of the struggle against Apartheid is that it leads to embarrassing questions about the Cold War. We might be tempted to ask why Western governments were so vehemently on the side of Afrikaner minority rule. We might also want to know why is it the Communists were intervening on the side of freedom and not the West. When it comes down to it we would have to examine the history of South Africa and ask some pointed questions. This is precisely what the compromises of the 1990s blacked out from the public discourse. In a way this isn't surprising. Common to all beginnings the traumas of the past are always to be suppressed to prevent troubling questions of the new order from being raised. If the Apartheid system was a means of managing the class antagonism built into any capitalist society (which was the case) then we should want to know if this multiracial democracy is really much different.

Through divide and conquer the Afrikaner minority could maintain its hold on wealth procured through the exploitation of South Africa's copious resources as well as its working-classes. In the end it was the international campaigns to boycott and impose sanctions against the South African economy which crippled the system of divide and conquer. The ANC fought alongside the MPLA, SWAPO and Cuban troops against the counter-revolutionary forces at Cuito Cuanavale in what Nelson Mandela called "a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people." These events combined with the sight of burning townships from Table Top Mountain was no doubt enough to convince many it was over. In the late 80s the Afrikaner business class then began to meet secretly with Oliver Tambo and others in places like Zambia to establish ties and negotiate. It took the party-state a bit longer. In a couple of years Nelson Mandela would be brought to meet with FW de Klerk in the first steps to his release and the official negotiations.

No Clean Hands.

Q: How big a part did violence pay in moving ANC forward?

A: These things are always difficult to gauge, but it's worth noting that pretty much every means of non-violent struggle were exhausted over many years. In my view Nelson Mandela was justified in shifting gears in the early 60s and founding the Spear of the Nation to initiate a campaign of sabotage. That's not to say every single action was justified, and indeed Mandela didn't simply believe that the resistance was to be fought by all means available. He was an opponent of car-bombing for example, precisely because it would degrade the movement. It's also the case that Mandela was very careful to select government targets, as well as industrial and agricultural targets for sabotage. So this wasn't indiscriminate civilian bloodshed for the most part. Then we have to put the struggle in its regional context.

The decolonization of Africa was still underway when Mandela undertook the new approach, but the liberation of Spanish and Portuguese colonies was stalled until the Fascist regimes began to collapse in the late 60s and early 70s. The primary force of counter-revolution in the region was Apartheid South Africa and it quickly moved to try and prevent its neighbours from achieving independence. The CIA was heavily involved of course. South Africa occupied Namibia and intervened in Angola and Mozambique, as well as organising bombing raids, coups and death squads in a lot of other places. We're talking 1.5 million dead plus $60 billion in damage from 1980 to 1988. Cuba pledged a great deal of support for the rebels in Angola, Namibia as well as the ANC. In fact, the ANC along with the MPLA and SWAPO fought alongside one another at Cuito Cuanavale in what Nelson Mandela called "a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people."

I don't claim expert knowledge on this. My South African friends will probably have a lot to add on this. I would stress the demands of historical conditions and how quickly those demands can change. Gandhi's approach worked because the British Empire was crippled. You couldn't say that about the South African state in 1961.

Afterthoughts: Eventually the South African state was effectively crippled through the boycott campaigns and the international sanctions imposed on the country as opposition gradually became the predominant position in the world. Once the US had given up on Apartheid the South African regime had no choice but to dismantle the system of white supremacy. The next best scenario for the Afrikaner elite in South Africa was a compromise where the black masses would be given suffrage, while overwhelming economic power would remain in the hands of the white minority. The business class realised this by the late 1980s and began meeting secretly with Oliver Tambo and others in places like Zambia. It took the political class a bit longer to reach the same conclusion. Once free Nelson Mandela and the ANC negotiated away the possibility of economic justice, possibly out of fear of what the white generals might do if the ANC opts for significant social and economic reform. In this way we might understand Nelson Mandela as a transitional figure in an unfinished revolution.

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.

Apartheid, Analogy and Disanalogy.

 

"Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians." - Nelson Mandela
 

The analogy between Israel and South Africa is often drawn when it comes to the question of the occupied territories and the Palestinians. There are good reasons for making this analogy, as well as serious differences between the cases that would mean the analogy is dubious. The problem of a Palestinian state is innate to Israel in the same way that racial equality is a problem innate to South Africa. The creation of nation-states out of the processes of European colonialism comes with the brutality of expansionism and war. South Africa was a principle aggressor in Southern Africa in its role as a counter-revolutionary force it slaughtered over a million people in neighbouring states in the 1980s. By comparison, Israel has been at war almost constantly for most of its existence and it serves the US as a "cop on the beat" in the Middle East. This is well demonstrated by the worrying tensions between Israel and Iran. I don't think I will be able to settle this matter in just one article, so I'm only going to go over a few points about the comparison.

The network of roadblocks and checkpoints which regulate the daily lives of Palestinians has been compared to the Apartheid rule of South Africa. Though it is worthy of condemnation even if we dismiss the comparison as a disanalogy. After all it's a system which has left pregnant women to give birth in the street only for their newborn babies to die in the heat, all in the name of Israel's national security. There is even a segregated highway system, roads on which only Jews are allowed to travel. This highway system was established on the pretext of counter-terrorism.  Actually this has nothing to do with counter-terrorism. Instead it is a part of the maintenance of the occupation of the West Bank, where the Israeli government supports (directly and indirectly) the settlements which hold 60% of the land. To this end the Israeli government are busily constructed a wall of annexation in and around the West Bank to snatch the major concentrations of resources and water from the Palestinians. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. But the West Bank wall is longer than the Berlin Wall.

It's clear that the Israeli government is not too comfortable with the prospect of a Palestinian state. The continued encroachment into and domination of Palestinian territory has the potential to reduce the possibility of a free Palestine to a Bantustan at best. This isn't an accident of history. As Noam Chomsky would remind us Moshe Dayan's recommendation to his colleagues shortly after the 1967 conquests was that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories "You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads". This is not the last of the ugly words spewed over Palestinian territory. Almost 30 years later the Director of Communications and Policy Planning David Bar-Illan who said in 1996 that "the Palestinians can have a state if they want, or they can call it fried chicken". And that's when the Israeli establishment talks peace. The establishment is aware of the situation on the ground, the need for a two-state settlement. It's just that there is no reason for the Israeli government to seek out peace.

It would seem that the Israeli elite are for a peaceful solution, whereas the more economically deprived and zealous Israeli citizens - particularly Mizrahi Jews and refuseniks - are much more hawkish. The ruling-class have been busily eroding the civic institutions and welfare state of Israel in recent decades. The neoliberalisation that the Israeli economy has undergone is another point of fair comparison with South Africa. Israel was once a quasi-socialist state with a significantly slim gap between the rich and the poor. Today it is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This is what comes with expanding a state by force and creating a country out of thin air. The apparent abnormality of Israel by world's standards today is exactly what makes it normal in historical standards. The very same process of aggressive expansionism was carried out in North America to a much more genocidal degree. And the founding of the American Republic provoked a desperate resistance from the likes of Geronimo.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq." - Benjamin Netanyahu

There are good reasons to suspect that the Israeli ruling class is well aware of the consequences of their actions. In an interview with Gideon Levi Prime Minister Ehud Barak said "If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage." By the way, everyone should know that Nelson Mandela was officially listed as a 'terrorist' in the US until about 2009. This isn't to say that by analogy Hamas are the Palestinian version of the ANC. Sadly the picture is much more complicated than that. The concept of 'terrorism' really designates the use of violence to achieve goals of a political, religious or ideological nature. That would certainly include all of modern warfare. So it could be that the notion of 'terror' lacks any weight in terms of moral condemnation. When the US shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, it's an accident and not an act of terror. So it might be better to talk about specific forms of violence. For instance, in his years as 'terrorist' leader Nelson Mandela argued against car-bombing as a tactic. This wasn't a rejection of violence, rather it was about scale.

Christopher Hitchens observed the similarity of the theological justifications of Apartheid in the dogma of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Church adhered to a variety of Calvinism that enshrined a strict separation of white and black in holy design. Its presupposition was racial inequality, for the white man shares the bodily form of Christ. The ravings at the pulpit spewed forth its own blood myth of a Boer Exodus and in what Hitchens describes as an "Afrikaner permutation of Zionism" awarded the whites exclusive rights in a promised land. It should be no surprise that the National Party had an appalling record for anti-Semitism and took the side of Hitlerism in the Second World War. The end result was a pariah state where the rights of non-whites were nonexistent, in fact the people were confined to open prisons with boundaries defined by pigmentation. The state exercised its monopoly on violence to maintain this system for as long as it could. But the justifications were not simply theological.

Apartheid justified itself further as a separation which protected African culture from being drowned in white civilisation. Earlier in the 20th Century Jan Smuts formulated a holistic philosophy to justify British colonialism. This holism took the world to be composed of wholes, each together constitute a grand system while each can sustain and stabilise themselves. The stability of the system was guaranteed by the arrangement of wholes, provided each whole remained in the right place the system could be maintained. Every whole is made up of small wholes which are evolving and will inevitably come together to form larger wholes until finally becoming part of a single unified whole. This was the beginning of what would become Apartheid. South Africa further justified its brutal methods of repression in its claim to be an outpost of freedom fighting against Communism. Although Israel does not have the same kind of racial mythology as South Africa, its government often claims that the country is an outpost against radical Islamism.

No wonder then Israel and South Africa entered into a pariah's pact in 1975 to trade in weapons of mass-destruction. The end of Apartheid might actually signal how the occupation might end and Palestine might actually be established as an independent state. It was almost inevitable that the Apartheid system would undermine the future possibility of survival of the state. So the Afrikaner business elite began meeting with the ANC in neighbouring countries in the late 1980s. By then a campaign of sanctions and boycotting had done its damage on South Africa's economy and body politic. Around this time the Priests had a 'revelation' regarding racial equality. The fate of the regime was settled before the National Party goons even knew it. South Africa had been significantly isolated in the international community by that point. It was when the US started to withdraw its support for Apartheid that the Botha government started to cave. But this came after decades of struggle in spite of extreme violence and rejectionism.

The Ugliness of the Beautiful Game.

The cult of football is alive as ever, especially in Britain where the English pride themselves as the inventors of the beautiful game. It is unclear, at least to me, what is so beautiful about the sight of over twenty millionaires chasing a bladder around a field. Chomsky would remind us of the role sports play in training us to be submissive to authority as well as the tides of irrational jingoism. This shouldn't be taken lightly as it was George Orwell who noted "The nationalist does not only not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." The rampant flag-waving and patriotic chanting emanates from the delusion that the England team embodies the spirit of the nation. Indeed many are left intoxicated by the ecstasy of these non-events. The power of the mass event should not be understated. It's forgotten that the concerts and music festivals we enjoy today come from the same model of the mass rally which Hitler used in the 1930s.

Peter Hitchens has compared it to Pagan cults, and for good reason, but we shouldn't take football as a Pagan exploit entirely as it is essentially prolefeed. And the aristocratic fans of Paganism are too often forgotten. It used to be that Christianity was for the poor while the ruling-class remained largely Pagan until the 19th Century in Britain. The aristocratic radical Nietzsche wanted to undo Christian values in order to return to the life-affirming polytheism of Ancient Greece. If anything football is not elitist even if it is particularist rather than universalist, it is open to all and for all. And it is the particularism of football - the preference for us over them - that holds a great link with Paganism. The loyalty to the team matters most, it can get you beaten up in some places. The worship of heroes, special clothing, the celebration of "seasons" and singing are all symptomatic; another particularist deed is racism. It isn't a coincidence that the neo-völkisch movements of Scandinavia are Pagan and call for white supremacy and a return to Odin worship in the same breathe.

The emergence of football hooliganism is not a coincidence, the fact that these hooligan elements are typically racists and right-wing extremists is also not a coincidence. The primary base of recruitment into the EDL were these thugs, the ex-BNP leadership itself comes out of hooliganism. This isn't to say that the sport of football is inherently fascistic. For 20 years Kick It Out has campaigned against racism in British football now, which is something that Eastern Europe and a lot of other places lack. But it is the case that there are a great many people who were whinging that the England manager Fabio Capello at the time was not English. There is plenty of talk about the high presence of foreign players in our teams. There is undeniably an element of nationalism that has been harnessed as part of the base of support for football teams. The shirt you were aligns you with a specific team in the same way that the flag links you with a nation, the glory of which reflects back on you.

The race relations of football have been on blunt display recently. Hodgson thought it appropriate to leave Rio Ferdinand out of the Euro 2012 Squad for "footballing reasons" and include John Terry. Even though it was John Terry who called Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt" and will soon be in court for doing so. Kick It Out might condemn Hodgson's handling of Rio Ferdinand. There was the time when Ron Atkinson described a player as a "lazy thick nigger" with Jimmy Hill coming to his defense on the grounds that the comment is just harmless fun in the football culture. We don't like to remember the days when fans lobbed bananas at black footballers. Today in Poland the fans can be seen waving banners with such slogans as "Death to Hook Noses!" For many it matters that England is finally managed by an Englishman. No doubt some will think that the English team will finally be victorious after 46 years, even though we didn't actually win in 1966 - an unacceptable fact to be uttered in the pubs of our weary little island.

Roy Hodgson played for Berea Park FC as part of a white-only league in the years before Apartheid was brought down in South Africa. Of course, Hodgson has since "come out" as an admirer of Nelson Mendela in the years since the end of Apartheid. He states that he played in South Africa for footballing reasons rather than political reasons. This isn't inconsistent as the sport is an institution of continuity around which the masses can huddle while the establishment remains largely the same. It is a part of society's wallpaper, an investment for the business class and a source of national pride for the masses. The managerial function in society to regulate the passions of the masses. The need for an identity marker to derive a higher meaning had to be sated to dull the rages of class instinct. It is no coincidence that the counter-revolution has come to Egypt around the same time that there was an explosion of ultra-violence at a football match. Similarly as social democracy began to be torn apart in Britain in the 1970s and 80s there was a great wave of football violence.

As Terry Eagleton observes "If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football." The game provides mediocre forms of solidarity for the masses who gather around particular teams. This can't be said for high culture, the prolefeed excludes no one in its particularity. The teamwork can be seen as selfless for the most part, though this is undermined by the celebration of the obscene wealth accumulated by the likes of David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo. The sport combines intimacy with Otherness in celebrity form, the hero we worship is just like us really and so we could be him one day. The game may have a place carved out for "experts" but it transforms its viewers into experts too. This is why my understanding of the subject is limited to the political and the theoretical. Eagleton goes on to add "Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy".

Holism, White Whines & Multiculturalism.

 The White Whine.

In 1968 Enoch Powell delivered the notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech in which he speculated that "in 15 to 20 years time the black man would have the whip hand over the white man." The speech is often invoked by the radical Right as prophetic of the "failures" of multiculturalism, with it's liberal ideas of tolerance, diversity and equality. So whenever there is a suicide-bombing we are reminded that "Enoch was right" supposedly. Enoch Powell was the first to remind us he was right in 1981 when he saw the riots of Brixton and Toxteth. Coincidentally these riots were the result of the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, which Powell had supported and actually promoted for years. So the calls for voluntary repatriation from Powell provided a cover for the consequences of monetarism, when mass-privatisation and deregulation lead to the devastation of the working-classes there is a need for a scapegoat. For Powell it was clear that the scapegoat had to be black.

Today it is typical to hear about the "multicultural experiment" that began in the 1960s or vaguely after WW2 with a massive influx of immigrants from the West Indies and later India. Actually the tradition of the British Empire was to allow all people loyal to the British monarchy into the country and it was only when the Attlee administration introduced the Nationality Act that this practice became formal. Enoch Powell believed that his speech might put Ted Heath on the spot, a situation from which he might then capitalise on. If the Conservatives failed to defeat Labour in 1970 Powell could have challenged Heath's leadership and then lead the Party on a populist ticket against Wilson in '74. Instead, Ted Heath marginalised Powell and won the General Election. Ted Heath pushed through the Immigration act of 1971, which restricted immigration even further than the Commonwealth Immigrants act of 1962 - which had restricted immigration to people who had been allocated work vouchers - and immigration was almost put to a complete stop.

It is often forgot that Enoch Powell was a monetarist and a proponent of small government, which has made him influential amongst Thatcherites. So he was no fan of Europe, budget deficits and immigration, but Powell was a fan of the privatisation of public services. Powell was born into the lower middle-class, he joined the army and aspired to become the Viceroy of India without serving on the battlefield. After Indian independence Powell drew up a plan to reconquer India. Powell was also a classicist and served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in Northern Africa in the Second World War, it was not a heroic service though it was marked by an amusing incident in which he burned his moustache when trying to get a fire going. Though Powell did think he was the right kind of man to rule over millions of black people. He hated Neville Chamberlain for selling Britain out, not for appeasing Hitler specifically, and was always deeply troubled by the decline of Britain as an imperial power. In a nutshell, the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was a white whine and nothing more.

On a regular basis we still hear the white whinging today about immigration, even as we are entering a pensions crisis which may be avoided through immigration. The presupposition of such whinging is that the liberal doctrine of multiculturalism has been imposed by the state through mass-immigration for decades which has undermined British values and led to division in society. Immigration has not been left to flow without a stop for decades, it has been opened up and closed before being opened up a little bit and closed once more. The class divisions in British society are far bigger than 'cultural' divisions created by immigration. As for British values, there were never any to begin with and that is because there has never been a British nation. The notion of multiculturalism has never been a consistent part of policy. But it has merely been talked about an awful lot whilst partially initiated only as far as the tendency of the market is towards pluralism and relativism.

A Community of Communities.

The liberal conception of multiculturalism is insufficient, putting aside cultural relativism as it's disturbing manifestation in South Africa is too often overlooked. Officially apartheid was initiated to separate the multitude of tribes and ethnic groups into Bantustans in order to prevent such groups from "drowning" in white culture. The racist hegemonic nature of multiculturalism was not obfuscated in South Africa, rather it was taken to its most logical conclusion and the African National Congress were labelled "terrorists" by the regime. The cynical liberal wisdom was supplanted with white nationalism and we can see this in Holism as propagated by Jan Smuts. Holism held that the world is composed of wholes, each of which constitute a grand system that can sustain and stabilise itself. The stability of the system was guaranteed by the arrangement of wholes, provided each whole remained in the right place the system could be maintained. Every whole is made up of small wholes which are evolving and will inevitably come together to form larger wholes until finally becoming part of a single unified whole.

At the time Holism provided a justification for British imperialism and racial segregation. The Empire was the self-organised system; the wholes were the lands colonised along the way. To guarantee the order of such a system it was imperative that the wholes be kept in place. The essence of Smuts' argument was that the blacks have to be kept in their place otherwise the natural order will be disturbed beyond repair, from whence the idea of the Bantustan comes. The liberal vision of multiculturalism offers us a conception of society as a community of communities, each with a distinct identity and set of moral values which is appropriate to that community. Then we find ourselves witnesses to the condemnation of homosexuality in one community and the election of politicians by another community to defend gay rights. In the Netherlands we have seen the gay community rally behind the nationalists against the Muslim community in this way.


Typically there is no mention of the white community in all of this, but that is not because multiculturalism is racist to white people as the reactionaries claim. The notable similarities between liberal multiculturalism and Apartheid proves such a claim absurd. The presupposition of multiculturalism is that the white community is hegemonic, it is the dominant community into which all other communities can be meshed neatly. In multiculturalism it is the neutral framework which protects each culture so that it can thrive in its appropriate way. The Harm Principle is invoked as a way of setting limits to such 'thriving', but even the limits of the Harm Principle are not clear enough and we find ourselves demanding the average Muslim to become a white middle-class liberal. Because liberalism works best when everyone is a fucking liberal! The forces of the market lean towards pluralism, but these same forces require a reaction against such pluralism in order to defend the market as Enoch Powell demonstrated.

There is a genuine need for a common project which is universal in nature, international in scope and radically egalitarian all at once. In Tahrir Square there was a common struggle against Mubarak which united Muslims and Christians. There have also been instances in which Muslim women in traditional dress and lesbian Jews have been brought together in protest against the Israeli government. These are just glimpses of what is possible at a societal level of solidarity. The liberal form of multiculturalism offers a decaffeinated Other, a Muslim community without a Muslim community. The nationalists drive this to it's logical conclusion and call for bans on the veil, halal meat and so on in defence of freedom. To put it bluntly the dichotomy of the debate is shaped by the contradictions of the economic system and the way fascists respond to such contradictions from a managerial perspective. We need to make radical changes if we want to construct the universalist alternative to multiculturalism and fascism.