Make Bradford British?

If you heard about Make Bradford British a couple of weeks ago on Twitter you might be excused for mistaking it for a racist slogan. But then you might have found a link to the Channel 4 citizenship test and discovered that if you wouldn't pass the tests immigrants go through to get into this country. This was a step-up from the pinhead documentary Proud and Prejudiced, which almost portrayed the crypto-Nazi EDL as defenders of multicultural Britain against radical Islam. The stated point of Make Bradford British was the standard concern about the lack of integration in a racially tense place like Bradford to create a model for a multicultural Britain. The line that the liberal intelligentsia was the main proponent behind multiculturalism was quickly trotted out, but in terms that the mission had failed to deliver integration outside of London. The emphasis on a set of 'common values' came out at the beginning and end of the episodes.

A pair of 'diversity experts' invite us to watch this search for an answer to the question "What does it mean to be British nowadays?" The problem with this is that it assumes there is or should be a thing called 'Britishness'. We have forgotten that Great Britain is composed of a union between the English, the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish. It is a marriage of convenience that has lasted a very long time. It was never about a nation, tradition or identity. It is almost as absurd as the French having a fit over the disappearance of the King of France. The standard spectrum on this debate runs from the view that we ought to respect 'other cultures' to the position that we need to reassert 'our values'. These are just empty signifiers and that remains so even if we are calling for a return to the values of Boudica. At best we can only tolerate the Other, which is especially easy if they fit into a neat unit which renders them 'one of us'.

Rashid and Damon were the most interesting to see 'interact', the rest was a standard mash up of fake lessons regurgitated for the camera upon command. The copper had to learn to look beyond the blackness of Desmond and the liberal bint had to find someone who won't tolerate her sinuous nonsense. Rashid and Damon are set up to share the same bedroom, but they move one bed out of the room so that the two can sleep separately from one another. It was an agreement that they both reached. Rashid was presented as a Muslim absorbed by his faith to the point of inconveniencing the team with the call to prayer. The cheap lesson in the first episode was Rashid putting aside going to his mosque to pray in order to go on an outing with the team. Whereas, Damon came out with the predictable lines about the Muslim community - the lack of integration demonstrated by women wearing headscarves etc. - that you can enjoy in our fine press. He went as far as to defend the use of the slur 'Paki' at dinner and admits that he viewed mosques as 'terrorist centres'.

Then Damon started to go to the gym with Rashid and visits the mosque in a predominantly Asian area which Damon had avoided for so long. It was warming to see these two men paint the bedroom of Damon's daughter. Even more heartening was the scene where Damon tells Rashid that it is he - the bearded Muslim - who is in fact closer to his grandparents and their 'British values' than he is. Damon has since attended the wedding of Rashid's sister. This moment went beyond the multicultural trite of liberals and the white whines of conservatives. Even though the rest of the participants regurgitated the same old platitudes and shallow ideas of what it means to live in a multicultural democracy. It may have meant to just reenforce the old narrative that there needs to be a national centre to a plurality of cultures in contemporary Britain. But it included a moment of great potential.

The American Experience.

The First Casualty of War.

 

Ricky Gervais once joked that the Second World War may have the best ending but the Vietnam war has the best sound track. He was referring to the horrendous use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese as less "entertaining" than the music of the 1960s. In doing so, whether intentionally or not, Gervais highlights the way war has been reduced to the realm of entertainment today. As we all know, since the end of the Vietnam war there have been countless efforts to immortalise the conflict on the big screen for all to see. The best of these films are often listed as Platoon, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. The Kubrick film being my personal favourite. But there are problems with the so-called anti-war films that have focused on the war which raged from the early 60s under JFK to the mid 1970s under the caretaker administration of Gerald Ford.


The problems of films like First Blood and Missing in Action are self-evident, as such films do not pretend to be anything more than a shallow display of steroid-fuelled jingoism and a mere excuse for a angry white man to go "wild". The problems of films that claim to show us the true horror of war are not often discussed in the same light. Even though the films, which take a less "positive" look at the Vietnam war, have made false depictions of the Vietnamese. One such instance being in The Deer Hunter where American POWs are forced to play Russian roulette for the pleasure of sadistic Vietcong. Thus, justifying the ruthlessness which Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken demonstrated in gunning them down to escape. It is the scars, both physical and psychological, of war that are depicted in the film. But only the scars inflicted on the minds and bodies of American soldiers.

Let's look at Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Vietnam war, which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's novella takes place in the Congo Free State, a private-colony of the Belgian King Leopold II, and the characters are working for a trading company which brutally exploits African workers. Apocalypse Now takes place in war-ravaged Vietnam and Cambodia, the main characters are soldiers. It is Cambodians who replace the Africans as the brutalised people, but also as "primitive savages" who worship Kurtz as a God. In Apocalypse Now Kurtz recalls a humanitarian trip to inoculate children for polio in a Vietnamese village, the Vietcong went into the village and then hacked off the arms of the inoculated children. Kurtz wept at the sight of the pile of little arms, before learning to admire the will of the Vietcong to commit such atrocities. Kurtz says "If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly."

The emphasis on the American experience of the war is a characteristic that practically all films on the Vietnam war share. The Vietnamese experience is severely neglected, even though it was 6 million Indochinese who died during the war. Not only is the war depicted from the side of the aggressor, it is the subjective experience of the war by soldiers carrying out the invasion which is the focus of such films. The objective violence of war, which is inherent to war regardless of the existence of any particular person, which becomes subjective violence in war films. Subjective violence in the sense of violence as impacting directly on individuals, violence which is partly dependent on the existence of an individual. Take Platoon the mass-killings and fraggings that take place is all part of Charlie Sheen losing his innocence, which is the "first casualty of war" according to the film's tag line.

Far from actually taking a moral position on the war these films actually obfuscate the important issues of the war. Instead opting to focus in on the perpetrator's traumatic experience, which enables the ethical and political background of the conflict to be suppressed. Why was the US in Vietnam? This question goes unanswered in most, if not all, American war movies. The fact that it was the events at Pearl Harbour that drove the Europeans out of South-East Asia and by the early 1950s colonial powers were struggling to maintain power.  Around this time the US government supported the French in their bid to regain dominance over Indochina. This attempt failed and the US ended up backing a nationalist regime in the South of Vietnam as the North was taken over by communists. In the 60s, the US moved to destroy all currents of independence in Vietnam - whether communist or nationalist - to prevent a "domino effect" across South-East Asia. 

In We Were Soldiers, which was dedicated not just to the Americans who fought at Ia Drang but also the Vietnamese who died there, the fall of French colonialism in the region is depicted in the opening scene. The problem in the ambush of French soldiers by Vietnamese rebels is that it is the Vietnamese who remain faceless aggressors and the French who are the victims of the assault. This goes as far as portraying a Vietnamese man literally stabbing a French officer in the back with a bayonet. It is the French who are overwhelmed, disarmed and executed mercilessly. This scene is supposed to explain how the Vietnam war "began", but it takes one battle out of context. The battle of Ia Drang was one of the last in the First Indochina war, which spanned 8 years and ultimately brought an end to over 60 years of French colonialism in the region.

It is as if the American film industry is obsessed with Vietnam in particular because it is commonly perceived as such a loss for the US and a pointless waste of American life. Not because it was fundamentally wrong and immoral, but because almost 60,000 Americans died in a senseless war. Never mind the 6 million people slaughtered all over South-East Asia, not just from Vietnam but Laos and Cambodia as well. It could also be argued that the US succeeded in its goals in Indochina, most currents of independence were eradicated and these countries were reduced to satellites of China. In that sense, the Vietnam war was no loss for the US and the thousands of Americans who died in the war did die for a cause - an immoral cause. The Americans were not the victims of this war, the people of Indochina were. Thus, a film about the Vietnamese experience of war is well over due.

Relativism Knocks...

... Absolutism Answered.

In the West there is often commentary on issues of multiculturalism, tolerance and political-correctness, especially in relation to "Western values" - which Gandhi deemed to be a "good idea". But these debates have developed in reaction to controversies, like the Danish Cartoons of Mohammed, which are part of the wider problems of relativism. The problem of relativism, in all of it's variants, is that there appears to be no rational way to adjudicate conflict as that would constitute absolutism. This is why the cartoons of Mohammed was such a difficult issue. Iconography has been an accepted part of Christianity for centuries, but iconography of God or the Prophet is not acceptable within Islam because it is feared it may lead to idolatry. To the relativist, both perspectives are equal, right and wrong change according to the culture, no culture is absolute. In that sense, freedom of speech cannot be promoted as a universal value, without reverting to a vulgar relativism, but neither can the perspective of Muslims on iconography.

In a world without being able to make moral judgements to bring such conflicts to an end leaves us in a limbo of cultural stagnation and moral segregation. At it's most extreme and terrifying, this would mean in one part of town drugs and prostitution are legal while in another religious law is enforced and discrimination against gays is common. The atomistic view of the human species, underpinning relativism, that we are made up of different societies and cultures in which certain practices and belief systems have resulted from the conditions in such places. This does not take into account the fact that human beings have always moved around, integration is possible and has occured in the past. Sadly it would appear that liberal intolerance has emerged to fill this void in the place of a real solution to the problem of relativism. To judge terrorists according to the standards of Western values, though this is even more paradoxical and misguided, it is expressed throughout society.

Even on the internet phenomenon that is YouTube relativism has become a subject, by proxy issues, of debates over related political and religious issues. The political community of YouTube are a varied bunch, ranging from socialists to libertarians, and share characteristics with radio-show hosts in the US. The videos are typically monologues delving into certain issues, occasionally these monologues are responses to rebuttals by other users. Just as in the US radio-show hosts often attack one another, Michael Savage has attacked Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck in the past. In regards to the problems of relativism, the coverage of related issues - such as whether or not the burka should be banned - on YouTube ranges from arguments that focus on the subjugation of women and verge on racism to those that shoot down all criticism as racist and a sign of the decadence of the West.

The internet is a great medium through which "cults" can be generated, just as radio and television, that are centred around charismatic personalities and entertaining shows etc. One such personality is Pat Condell, the face of New Atheism on YouTube, who endorsed UKIP in the General Election of 2010. Pat Condell was a comedian in the 1980s and has now made a come-back on YouTube over the last couple of years. UKIP is the leading Eurosceptic party in Britain today, it consists mostly of reactionary liberals and nationalists. Just like right-wing radio-show hosts in the US, Condell rants about the Labour Party and the hypocrisy of a liberal elite destroying Britain with multiculturalism and political-correctness. Mostly these videos are monologues, consisting of witty polemics, and are largely one-way in the sense that there is no interaction between the personality and the viewer, other than through emails and other videos.

Pat Condell stands for freedom, equal rights and secularism as part of his own liberal outlook - adding a dose of hippie anti-war rhetoric. He not only assumes rational and autonomous behaviour from others, he demands it of them and in doing so elevates such liberal ideals to an absolutist level. Thus, even multiculturalism and political-correctness are an obstacle to the "Good Life" Condell advocates. This clashes with the contemporary forms of liberalism which emphasise a neutral state over a pluralistic society based on relativistic assumptions about culture and morality. It could be argued that the liberal intolerance emerging today is a return to the days when liberals like JS Mill had a clear idea of how people should be living - a flourishing life free of constraint from absurd religious traditions and the masses.

These demands go largely unheard as society and the world are far more complex than a consensual arrangement upheld by free individuals, as liberals would have us believe. In a sense, the controversial way that Condell refers to Islamism as "Islam" is really derived from an overly simplistic understanding of complex religious and cultural entities. All of the Abrahamic religions are complex in that they are not just religious groups, made up of many sects, but are sometimes connected with cultural and ethnic identities - as well as political thought. The homogenous and static "Islam" that Condell describes is partly a figment of his imagination, the Qu'ran should not be thought of as the sole origin of Islamic extremism, given the extent to which the political turmoil of the Middle East has contributed to the rise of the phenomenon.

It is as if there is a kind of confrontation between the rational mind and the indifferent universe - similar to 'the Absurd', as Albert Camus wrote of it - taking place in the emergence of liberal intolerance. The ideals may be espoused, by the likes of Pat Condell and Christopher Hitchens, as a solution to the problems of relativism - how to judge religious extremism etc. But these ideals, of various liberties and rights, are commonly understood today as permissive and as a consequence the world remains indifferent. Promoting freedom of speech as a value for it's own sake seems quite strange as many would argue that free-speech is the protection of values, but is not a value in itself. Because people express their views because of some underlying reason or cause, not for the sake of expressing them freely. This is the point that liberals, like Condell, are missing.


If liberalism works best when everyone is a liberal, then liberalism is no more absolute than Christianity as it can then be written off as relative in the same manner. It could be that tolerance and pluralism should be ensured, while the ability to make moral judgements that transcend cultural boundaries is maintained and not taken to an authoritarian extreme. Multiculturalism does not go far enough in furthering tolerant pluralism, as it gives us pluralism but in practice we merely ignore the differences between us - as opposed to celebrating those differences. A benign form of ethnocentrism may be appropriate, as Rorty proposed. This view accepts that values differ from culture to culture, adding that we cannot help but favour the values we have been conditioned with. We cannot help but judge other cultures in accordance with such morals, though we should not repress others and should only promote our culture in the way we would recommend a book to a friend.

Related Links:
Albert Camus - The Absurd
Vote Small, Think Big
Richard Rorty's Ethnocentrism

Islam, Europe & Democracy.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and an elected Parliamentarian, he is a member of the Party for Freedom and is probably best known for his merciless criticism of Islam. Wilders considers himself to be a libertarian and has named Margaret Thatcher as his greatest political role model. He is opposed to cultural relativism and has referred to Islamic culture as a retarded culture in the past. Wilders produced a short film, which depicts Islam as a fascist ideology, he called the film Fitna and he released the film in 2008. In his own words Fitna is "a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamization and a push for Leitkultur".

Fitna is an Arabic word, which is difficult to translate, and is considered to be an all-encompassing word referring to schism, secession, upheaval and anarchy all at once. Leitkultur is a German concept and can be translated as "guiding culture" or "mainstream culture". The culture Wilders is referring to consists of the values and traditions of Judeo-Christianity, Humanism and Liberalism. In 2009, Geert Wilders was invited to Britain by the House of Lords for a viewing of his film Fitna and a debate on social inclusion.

Lord Nazir Ahmed is a member of the House of Lords and is the first Muslim life time peer of the United Kingdom. Most of his political activities relate to the British Muslim community, as well as the International Islamic community. In the past, he has openly criticised the British government for it's over aggressive Foreign Policy and the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

Lord Ahmed was appalled by the decision to give Salman Rushdie a knighthood and stated that "It's hypocrisy by Tony Blair who two weeks ago was talking about building bridges to mainstream Muslims, and then he's honouring a man who has insulted the British public and been divisive in community relations." He went on to say in regards to Rushdie "This man not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people who were killed around the world. Forgiving and forgetting is one thing, but honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of, because of what he did, I think is going a bit too far."

Lord Ahmed was sent with Baroness Warsi to Sudan in 2007, to meet with President Omar al-Bashir, to secure the relase of Gillian Gibbons. Their meeting was successful in securing a pardon for Gibbons, a school teacher who had been arrested for blasphemy after naming a teddy bear Muhammad. In 2009, when Geert Wilders was due to make his appearance in the House of Lords, Lord Ahmed threatened to lay siege to the House of Lords, with a force of 10,000 Muslims, if anti-Islamist Dutch MP Geert Wilders was allowed to speak at the House. Lord Ahmed later denied the allegation, whilst Wilders was denied entry to the United Kingdom and has been banned from entering in the future.

Silencing Wilders simply because he holds anti-Islamic views is counter-productive, in regards to furthering integration between the Muslims and non-Muslims of Great Britain, and will probably generate more Islamophobia in the long term future. Fascist Nick Griffin and his racist thugs will no doubt latch onto Lord Ahmed's behaviour for propaganda. Their argument that Islam is incompatible with democracy and therefore has no place in British society, will win over even more people. Well, Britain is technically not a democracy it is a polyarchy. A polyarchy is a system in which the ruling elite of a nation is divided into two or three factions - which have some differences but fundamentally adhere to the same ideology - whilst the rest of society is kept ignorant, fragmented and distracted. In elections the ignorant and distracted masses are given a choice between two or three people who basically have the same policies. So, even if Islam is incompatible with democracy, that is irrelevant because Britain is no democracy. Lord Ahmed may have intended to defend his religion from criticism, but the methods he used to accomplish his end ultimately tarnished Islam as much as the Sudanese teddy bear controversy and the controversy over Muhammad cartoons have done.

Do you really want these people running the United Kingdom?

Banning Wilders and his Fitna from Britain - in an attempt to pacify a man, who was not elected, who is meant to represent British Muslims, and he is threatening violence - implies that the film has a formidable argument; that British Muslims are incapable of peacefully defending Islam. This is utterly insulting to British Muslims and it annoys me that no one is angered by actions like this. Actions that perpetuate the myth that Muslims are intolerant and violent bigots. If we continue to feed this delusion, we in turn feed the propaganda machine of fascist groups like the BNP, we've already got a member of the BNP sitting on the London Assembly like a turd on grass. But how many turds will we let land on our grass before we take a stand and say "No more"?