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.

A Land with a People.

Click on Image

In a discussion over the events in Gaza recently I had the following exchange with a friend of mine about the fundamentals of the conflict. Note that the questioner is coming from a Christian perspective on the conflict, while I'm coming from an atheistic perspective. The primary issue is raised is the claim to the land and the specifics of the Zionist project.

Q: I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up MY land..."Does this land belong to Israel or Palestine? Well actually, according to bible scripture, God calls it His land, but the prophetic word from Joel, written 850BC is that it will in fact be divided.

 
"I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms." (Ezekiel 37:22)

 
Joshua (great name Joshua, means 'God is salvation' or 'God rescues') rightly calls this a 'miserable situation', it has a long history, Ezekiel was written sometime around 590BC, about 650 years before Israel and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the people scattered to 'the four corners of the earth'. We may ask the question was Israel returned there in 1948, fully in 1967 simply to fulfill prophecy, was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy or is there some authenticity to the prophecy. Will Jerusalem be divided? Certainly according to bible scripture it is not intended to be and if it is, will those responsible incur God's judgement?

A: Well, I don't think Jerusalem should be divided, that's merely the beginning of another problem. I take the position that is enshrined in international law: Jerusalem should be an international city, it's just too precious to belong to any state or religion. This is the same framework that would settle the conflict in a roughly 80:20 split of what used to be Palestine into Israel and Palestine. I won't comment on the scripture as I'm not a theologian, nor am I a religious man (in spite of my cool name! lol) and I think it's fair to say that the Bible is open to a lot of debate and theorisation - just look at the use of the recurring use of Gog and Magog by fundamentalists, from Reagan to Bush II, to explain foreign policy decisions.

We know from Israeli archaeology that there is considerable evidence that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for a very long time, this can be determined simply by the lack of pig bones in ancient communities. So there is a legitimate Jewish claim to live there. That's the case even if you don't buy the Bible, which most Israeli archaeologists don't by the way. There is also evidence that suggests the Palestinians are the descendents of the Jews who were living there thousands of years ago. Probably they were converted through conquest. This is all interesting, and somewhat ironic, but it doesn't provide any answer to the crisis in itself. The question of what the Zionist mission ought to be in its finer details is left completely open still. That could be part of the reason why there is opposition to peace from inside Israel, it remains unclear where the expansion should end - if 80% is too little how about 90% and so on? There are those who dream of a Greater Israel, and that will mean a perpetual war with the Arabs.

Example, should Israel be a Jewish state or a state for Jews? That's an important distinction which has never been fully clarified in Zionist circles. This matters because it relates to what kind of law there should be in Israel, as well as the demographic composition - if it's a state for Jews then it doesn't have to be a majority Jewish state for instance. By comparison, Pakistan was founded as a state for Muslims modeled on India but in the 1980s the dictatorship began to change this to the notion of Pakistan as an Islamic state (and even began to compare itself to Israel funnily enough). It impacts the internal politics of the nation-state, Pakistan has been dominated by authoritarian governments sometimes more irreligious at times. I think that Israel could've been founded in a better way than it has been, though in its foundation it was just like every other nation-state (e.g. born out of violence/theft). But we can't turn back time. The strongest claim of the Jews is perhaps based on their need for a safe haven. Again, that doesn't really deal with the details of what Israel should look like.

The important point to stress is that Israel (however defined) can exist with an independent and free Palestine as it's neighbour. To paraphrase Abba Eban, a free Palestine would pose the same threat to the existence of Israel as Luxembourg currently poses to Russia.

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".

Shame, Pride & Virtue.

We forget that Churchill was a maverick despised by many in Britain in his day and that he came to power by chance. Once Churchill took over from Chamberlain he had to contend with the faction that had sought to secure the British Empire through 'appeasement', a shallow euphemism for selling Europe to Hitler in a most cowardly manner. The Nazi plans to cleanse Europe of Jews and Slavs did not enter the imperial mind. The crowd aligned with Churchill were looking to preserve British hegemony over the East, especially the Suez Canal and India. The suggestion of a German dominated Europe posed a threat to this in the long-term. These fears later came to fruition with the Fascist invasion of Egypt, where the Italians sought to seize the Suez Canal. By then Mussolini had already seized Malta and Somaliland, the North African campaign was underway. If Mussolini had taken over Egypt then the oil trade through the Suez Canal could have been taken out of British hands entirely. That would have been a huge blow to the British empire.

Before this there was still a significant chunk of the British ruling-class that hoped to secure the Empire through a deal with Hitler. The Halifax faction of 'appeasement' junkies were pushing the government for a deal when the Germans pushed the British back towards Dunkirk. The terms of such a deal would've been a humiliation for Churchill and he was determined to fight on. So Churchill called a meeting at which he faced down his opponents with a speech in which he stated "I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground." Notions of 'virtue' and 'honour' can barely encapsulate the moral weight of the stand Churchill took. The emotive language Churchill used had some members of the cabinet looking away in embarrassment. These same mesmeric tones of heroic rhetoric would inspire the masses during the Battle of Britain.

By the time we invaded Italy in 1943 it was part of the same aim of trying to reinstate British hegemony in the Mediterranean. The Italian resistance had effectively liberated the country, then the Allies came in to destroy hit two birds with one stone: namely destroy what was left of Fascism and to destroy the Italian resistance because it was left-wing. The Partisans in Greece and Yugoslavia experienced the same attitude from the Allies. Churchill had refused to open up a second front in France and left the real fighting for the Russians. It wasn't until 1944 that Churchill pledged with Roosevelt and Stalin to open a second front on the Continent. This wasn't the only instance that Churchill had allowed imperial interests to take priority over the war effort. Around 3 million Indians fought on the side of the Allies, but Churchill refused to grant India independence and was determined to hold onto India. As Russians and Germans were slaughtering each other in Stalingrad there were British troops killing demonstrators in India.

In the 1930s the popular desire for peace converged with the imperial interests of the British ruling-class, the outcome was 'appeasement' for a long time. The British ruling-class were looking for a way to preserve the empire, specifically the power held over the Middle East and India. There was the view that the British empire could be maintained with a Nazi dominated Europe. Hitler called our bluff when he invaded Poland and foresaw an easy victory against the French, with a settlement drawn up with the British promising not to touch the empire. The important pre-condition of this was the decision to sell Czechoslovakia to Hitler and allow Poland to become a German satellite, which had been made by 1938. The British and the French reluctantly struck at Germany after the invasion of Poland and only went as far as to evacuate Polish soldiers. By then the section of the elite aligned with Churchill came to the view that the Third Reich would inevitably threaten the empire as it would expand into the Balkans.

At that time Churchill was not easily budged when it came to matters of anti-Communist pragmatism and had gone as far as to express sympathies with Fascism along those lines. As late as 1937 Churchill said in the House of Commons "I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism." He was not alone in his view in 1935 that "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." Of course, this isn't to situate Churchill amongst the Germanophilic prime-mover of 'appeasement' known as the Cliveden Set. He was an opponent of 'appeasement' when the rot of Hitlerian sympathies had spread to the Royal Family. But it does demonstrate just how compromised the British ruling-class were. It isn't a pleasant thought just how easy it would have been to set up a Nazi puppet government in Whitehall after a successful German invasion.

This is partly what made Churchill so impressive when he came to view Hitler as a monster with an insatiable "lust for blood and plunder". Perhaps this was best demonstrated when he reacted to Operation Barbarossa with the words "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." In retrospect we can see that Churchill was right about the need to destroy Fascism and wrong that the British Empire could be maintained in this way. But it was probable by then that the Empire would collapse given the inevitability of war with Hitler. There could be no peace with National Socialism as the gang of psychopaths who took power in 1933 were met with enthusiasm from German industrialists. Expansion offered the prospect of new resources to be extracted, such as the goal of Poland and the oil of Romania. It was a last-ditch attempt at a time of enormous crisis to reinvigorate German capitalism.

Umberto Eco on Eternal Fascism.

In the essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco outlines a list of features that are typical of what he calls Eternal Fascism, it is a force which remains in plainclothes today and won't necessarily come out sporting a Swastika for us to spot easily. It could easily take a far more innocent guise. The world is too complex for history to repeat itself and we have to uncover Eternal Fascism for all to see wherever it may hide. He stresses that the features cannot be organised into a single coherent system and there are contradictions between the different features. Eco also notes that the features are typical of other kinds of authoritarianism. Even one of these features is enough for a fascism to coagulate around it, so we find the reason that there are various differences between the Fascist movements which have come and gone. There are differences between the neo-fascist groups of today and the Fascist movements of the 1930s, the English Defence League is not the same as the British Union of Fascists though it shares certain features.

Umberto Eco rightly refers us to the words of FDR in 1938: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." It should be noted that the democratic system was never betrayed in the US, as the liberal critics of George Bush accuse him of the destruction of the Constitution. There is some truth to the claims of a debasement of old-fashioned liberal principles of freedom and rights. But the political system in the US was designed not to be democratic, nor to be autocratic, rather it was constituted as a polyarchy. This is what Alexander Hamilton called "moderate government" as the Golden Mean between dictatorship and democracy. To be more exact, the political parties can take turns running the state in the favour of the particular interests in which they are ensnared. It was James Madison who held that the government "ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." The stagnation of American politics combined with economic turmoil leaves the population angry, fearful and confused - this is ripe territory for Blackshirts!

First comes the cult of tradition. Traditionalism long precedes fascism, it was typical of counter-revolutionary Catholicism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and it first emerged in the Hellenistic era in reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. The revelation had long been concealed in forgotten languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Celtic runes and beyond to Asia. We can only persist in the interpretation of the obscure messages. The primeval truth could be procured from these ancient messages, each with a sliver of wisdom, and help compose a new culture. It would be a syncretistic culture in the sense of a combination of different forms of belief and practice, which would require a tolerance of internal contradictions. This is where the combination of Paganism, Christianity and race myths come together in Fascist states. It's also the reason that Fascism seeks to posit itself as the Third Position between capitalism and socialism.

So there can be no advancement of knowledge as truth has already been spelled out once and for all. Umberto Eco takes the example of Saint Augustine, not a proto-fascist at all, but points out that it would be symptomatic of Eternal Fascism to combine Augustine with Stonehenge. From a Marxist perspective we may note the importance of traditionalism to Fascism as superstructural to the economic conditions which fostered the regimes of the 1930s. As Terry Eagleton argues, Fascism is a last-ditch attempt on the part of monopoly capitalism to abolish the contradictions which have become intolerable. The traditionalist feature may imply a rejection of modernism, but the Fascists did not regard technology as a negation of tradition. Rather the Fascists were focused on the construction of an alternative modernity beyond the class struggle with a narrative of blood and soil. The Third Reich was proud of its industrial achievements, though the praise for modernism was only the surface of an ideology based on blood and soil. The emphasis is really on the master race, the sublimity of death and self-abnegation.

Umberto Eco notes that the Fascist finds action as beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection because thinking is a form of emasculation. Action is placed above thought. To be more precise it is reaction rather than action. One of the principle differences between a socialist and a Fascist is that the former acts whereas the latter can only react. This is where the propensity for political violence comes from, it takes the reactive form and often seeks to justify itself along such lines. The violent reaction is always justifiable to defend and secure the fatherland. This is the logic which remains in the background of the kind of 'protests' that the former football hooligans of the English Defence League hold. Originally the EDL were the violent wing of the British National Party and it remains in line with the tradition of fascist groups since the British Union of Fascists took to the streets and raised havoc. It is out of this irrationalism that culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with academics, critical attitudes and intellectualism in general.

So the entire educational system underwent a Nazification in the Third Reich, with the employment of major academics such as Martin Heidegger to purge Jewish teachers and implement the desired curriculum. This suspicion of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Eternal Fascism. Hermann Goering was fond of a phrase borrowed from Hanns Johst "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun" as well as expressions such as "degenerate intellectuals", "eggheads", "effete snobs" and the description of universities as "nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in an attack on the rampant decadence of modern culture and charge the liberal intelligentsia with the betrayal of traditional values. The point of Fascist propaganda was to tap into the irrational drives of the masses and utilise them against particular groups. The propaganda techniques to do so were picked up from the American public relations industry, which was based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud as applied by his nephew Eddie Bernays.

To make distinctions is a sign of modernism and to give into the current of depravity which began with the Enlightenment. The rejection of the modern world was dressed up as a kind of anti-capitalism, but it is the Enlightenment which is the source of decay in the modern world and Eternal Fascism rejects it on such ground. The Nazi slogan "Think with your blood!" comes to mind. The scientific community praises disagreement as a way to further pursue greater knowledge, but the disagreements we may have are treasonous for Fascists because it is a sign of diversity. We should remember the nationalist emphasis on unity and purity which opposes such liberal pluralism as a subversive or destructive influence on the nation. Thus the strange fixation on Pagan rituals, leader worship and Nordic blood myths. The rejection of the Enlightenment in Fascism is what distinguishes it from Stalinism. By contrast, Stalinism considers itself a part of the Enlightenment tradition comes in the form of the show trials held as part of the purges. The suggestion of shows trials for Jews in the Third Reich is unimaginable because there isn't even a semblance of a just society in Fascism.

Eternal Fascism seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the fear of difference and of the Other. The subversive influence of an alien race or culture becomes the principle target of Fascism. The point is to stamp out the forces which have undermined the nation and unity in society. It is racist by definition. The Nazi schoolbooks founded an impoverished vocabulary as well as an elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments of critical thought and inquiry which could undermine the regime. Even boardgames and children's books were produced to further anti-Semitic attitudes among the population. George Orwell invented Newspeak in 1984 as the official language of English Socialism. The elements of Eternal Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. Newspeak can even take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show today. With the shock jocks of the Right we find that the words 'socialism' and 'National Socialism' have been emptied out so that Obama can be called a socialist and a Nazi. The meaning of words are intentionally blurred and we see the same thing in Fascism.

The most typical feature of Fascism is the appeal to a frustrated middle-class, which had suffered through the crises of capitalism and intense feelings of political humiliation as in the Weimar Republic. The threat of working-class movements such as trade unions and leftist organisations is also a source of agitation in this instance. The possibility of revolution becomes genuine and the capitalist class begins to get desperate. Eco holds that once the proletarians are petty bourgeois and the lumpenproletariat are marginalised totally from politics then fascism will find its audience in a new majority. The audience have to be humiliated in socio-economic terms as well as political terms, it could be a war but not necessarily. The wealth and force of the enemy is defined in such terms. The Fascist is convinced of his ability to overwhelm the enemy through harsh measures, violence is never out of the question. A continuous shift in rhetorical focus maintains that the enemy is at once too strong and too weak. The inability to evaluate the force of the enemy clouds the capacity of Fascism to win wars.

To people who have been deprived of a social identity, Eternal Fascism offers a clear privilege that we were born in this great country. This is where nationalism comes into the picture, which we might be described as palingenetic (as Eco does not recognise) in that Fascist Italy was the reincarnated second Roman Empire and the Third Reich was the First and Second Reich realised as an alternate modernity. The idea of a rebirth is common, it feeds into a self-pitying and disordered view of the imperial past of the European powers. The nation can only define itself through the exclusion of the Other and the same can be said of the national identity. The Fascist mind is obsessed with an international plot which is taking place and must be stopped for the good of the nation. The people have to feel besieged and under attack in order to flock around identity-markers such as religion and nationality. The plot has to appeal to race hate, the most base instincts of hatred and it relies on the gullible cynicism of the individual to buy into a conspiracy theory in the first place. The plot must be insidious and almost invisible, which is why Jews are perfect given that they are inside and outside at the same time.

Permanent warfare is an inevitably given the nature of Fascism. Life is lived for struggle, pacifism is treason. The consequence of this is an Armageddon complex as enemies have to be defeated, so there must be a last battle or final stand to make and then the movement will have total control of the world. This implies an era of peace and unity afterwards, which stands in contradiction to this doctrine and no Fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this problem. This doctrine of perpetual war fits in with the popular elitism of Fascism, as it is fundamentally aristocratic and militaristic to the extent of holding contempt for the weak. Each citizen belongs to the best people in the world, but the members of the Party are the best of the citizens and each citizen should join the Party. There can be no patricians without plebeians. The leader knows that the position he holds was stolen and not given to him through the democratic process (though there are exceptions, Hitler being the most infamous), it was the weakness of the masses which allowed him to seize power - this applies even to cases where the Fascists came to power via the ballot box.

The masses need a ruler in this conception, so the view of people differs greatly from the liberal view of human beings as having rights and freedoms - and by extension the political impact of the citizenry in quantitative terms. So the individual often falls in line with the community, as we see with so-called 'safe seats'. Of course, Eternal Fascism rejects the claim of individuals to such rights and the People are a monolithic entity which expresses the common will. No doubt the liberal protection of individuals and minorities from the whims of the majority feeds into fascistic conspiracy theories. No large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Fascist leader becomes their interpreter. As marginalised from the political process, individuals no longer act as citizens but take on the role of the People as a theatrical fiction. Umberto Eco foresees that the future internet version of this populism may take the emotional response of a selected group of individuals as the accepted Voice of the People. The masses are manipulated under Fascism, not disdained as they are in conservative thought.

Out of a qualitative populism, Fascism takes a stand against the "rotten" Parliamentary model and the governments which have been formed as a result of them. There are hints of Eternal Fascism in the doubts raised by politicians of the Parliament's legitimacy, that the government does not represent the Voice of the People as Umberto Eco puts it. Richard Seymour notes that for the Fascist the political system is vulnerable to viruses. So the problem is not capitalism as such but super-capitalism, as Mussolini noted, which should be contrasted with the heroic capitalism of the 19th Century. Of course, heroic capitalism became super-capitalism eventually as it grew decadent. The explanation for the inherent contradictions and destructive capacities of capitalism can be displaced onto a cabal of some kind. It could be the Jews, the Freemasons, the Communists or even a bit of all three as in most cases. This is a very similar logic to the claim that there is a liberal elite which has poisoned American society.

Everyone is taught to be a hero in a strict sense, as the exceptional being which becomes the norm in Fascist ideology. The cult of heroism is joined at the hip with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was "Viva la Muerte!" which means "Long Live Death!" This motto may have been borrowed from the Iron Guard in Romania led by Corneliu Codreanu who considered Hitler "soft" when it came to the Jews. The view of death maintained by the Fascist is in contrast to the standard views of death, that it is to be faced with dignity and it leads to a better place etc. The Fascist hero craves a heroic death, to the point of impatience, because it is the best reward for having led a heroic life. In this impatience then the Fascist will send other people to die in droves. As a consequence of the impracticality and difficulty of ceaseless war and a heroism based on death the Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

The cult of the masculine leader and the heroic death retreats to the bedroom. This is the origin of chauvinist machismo complete with misogyny, as well as intolerance of sexual habits which do not fit into a certain set of standards (from chastity to homosexuality). Mussolini famously said "War is to man what maternity is to woman." Ultimately, even sex is a difficult game to play - the Fuhrer was a masochist in the bedroom who left behind a string of relationships which ended in suicide - and so the Fascist tends to games with weapons as Eco notes "doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise." Plato maintains that the tyrant lives the life of dreams, where there is no conceivable 'crime' that we can commit and we can follow our desires to their end without consequence. The tyrant becomes what he was in his dreams, eating forbidden fruit and killing at a whim. Nothing is off the table, from incest to mass-murder. Dreams become reality for the tyrant. Perhaps these words were prescient of the indulgences of Fascist dictators.

David Starkey, Black Culture & the Riots.

Wiggers with Attitude?

In the aftermath of the riots David Starkey decided it was wise to bring up Enoch Powell and argue that a specific point made in the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was "absolutely right". He was keen to reassure the audience that Powell was wrong in that it was not "inter-communal violence" and that it is cultural rather than racial. It would be generous to David Starkey to designate him as a cultural chauvinist, which is perfectly consistent with the monarchism and nationalism to which he subscribes. David Starkey is a provocateur in the tradition of an insolent dinner guest crowing just to offend and shock. In this instance the bespectacled historian was at dinner with an Oxbridge liberal, a leftist and a crime novelist. The outrage was over comments such as "The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham." As if that were not bad enough Starkey went on to claim the problem is that "the whites have become black" and that the black politician David Lammy sounds "white" when you close your eyes.

At first he pinned the riots as an "extension of commercialism" and the exuberant consumerism of British society, though he is intelligent enough to understand that the consumer boom was born out of the implosion of social democracy and the emergence of Thatcherism in it's wake. Therefore to manage the contradiction between rapacious individualism and the moral opposition to senseless violence Starkey wheels in racially charged rhetoric which will scandalise the liberal intelligentsia and split the commentariat down the middle. At which point the working-classes can make a cameo appearance in the guise of the angry crowd yelling "Enoch was right!" It is now highly unlikely that there will be any debate over the issues behind the riots as the media discusses whether or not David Starkey is a racist. Notice David Starkey asks of Owen Jones "You glorify Rap?" and then backs off as Dreda Say Mitchell points out that the rappers only reflect the materialism of the world. Brian Cox was right to call Starkey "utterly corrupt" last year.

It could have been a conscious effort to further derail the political discourse away from any meaningful discussion of inequality and police brutality. It could just be a simple case of racism masquerading as cultural conservatism. Time will tell if David Starkey distances himself in the future from such remarks. The insinuation of a respectable historian that this is somehow related to an imported "black culture" of crime is just false. In the halcyon days of vanilla Britain, at the finest hour of our country, back in 1940 juvenile crime accounted for 48% of all arrests and there were over 4,500 cases of looting from then until 1941. There were even cases of firemen looting burned-out shops, teenagers stripped the clothes off of corpses to sell and some even cut-off the fingers of the dead to get at their rings. These could not have just been the "wiggers" who had watched too much MTV and absorbed an awful lot of 50 Cent's anger before going out to spit it out into society. As a result of this level of bullshiting we're unlikely to see any real solutions in Britain, just a right-ward shift that will lead us down the road to more riots in the future.

Cultural Blackness?

Originally the issue of race was raised on Newsnight before Starkey crawled out from his hole, it was Gavin Esler who wondered if the riots had anything to do with "black culture" or even MTV. We should bare in mind the relations of base and superstructure when we're talking about culture in this way, that the superstructure is generated by the base in order to justify and defend itself. Simultaneously the superstructure has the potential to undermine the base in spite of the interdependent relations between them. Take Rap music, usually it defends the status quo in it's portrayal of a anti-political and anti-intellectual form of underground capitalism in which collective organisations (e.g. gangs) can still function meaningfully. It at once embodies society's institutional corruption and it's opposite with an emphasis on a warped set of codes and rituals. The misogyny and homophobia found rampant in the music videos and lyrics is born out of a thoroughly impotent masculinity.

It is not coincidental that Rap music becomes incredibly popular and influential in the late 1980s onwards at the peak of Reaganism. Look at the socio-economic situation for young black men in particular, especially in the US where there was a brief opening for black people in the 70s as civil rights were gained through harsh struggle. But with the financialisation of the economy millions of African-Americans became part of a superfluous population. The black economy of drugs provides an alternative to the business system which has excluded black people for decades. Not only is it an alternative to financial capitalism, where the wasps of Harvard still thrive, it provides a welfare system that has been completely destroyed in the US. It is also an expression of rage against the police for the murder and persecution of black people, NWA captured the anger bubbling beneath the surface just before the battering of Rodney King sparked the LA riots in 1992. Ultimately, mainstream rappers are only looking to establish a black aristocracy which stands as a reflection of the white elites.

Rap music is not the source of riots and crime, rather it is linked to it through economic circumstances. The riots were not a coherent and organised expression of political dissent. It was mass-rage against the police along with elements of the same consumerism we have all indulged in. Where does this anger come from? In 1997 and 1998 there were around 8,000 stop-and-searches, by 2008 to 2009 that had risen to 150,000. The use of Section 60 between 2005 and 2010 has increased by 300%, originally Section 60 was introduced to combat football hooliganism; over the same time period the stop-and-searches of black people increased by 650%. From 1998 to 2010 over 330 people have died mysteriously in police custody, surprisingly 75% of the people who died were white and not so surprisingly 90% were male aged between 25 and 44. Let alone the level of unemployment and economic stagnation in this country which has plagued the poor for years. The decisions undertaken by the rioters were not justified, but the grievances are legitimate and real.

Self-Hating and Israel Threatening?

 

The anti-Semitism of Zionists.

In the disgraceful history of anti-Semitism there is an irony that the Jews have traditionally been depicted as both upper-class and lower-class, overly intellectual and too earthly, lazy and workaholic. For the Third Reich the Jew represented both the decadence of liberal capitalism and the Bolshevik spirit of socialism, the Fascists offered an alternative modernity devoid of class struggle and affirmed through a rebirth of the nation. For the Nazi conversion to Christianity is out of the question as the "guilt" of the Jews does not need to be proved, the "guilt" resides in the biological constitution of Jewishness. The source of the damnation was not theological but racial. The Jew first appeared as the enemy as the dark ages came to a close in Europe with the role of money in the rapid development of market exchange. The anti-Semitic depiction came in the form of parasites who disrupt the social fabric of society. Later, the wandering Jew came about just as capitalism began to emerge and as society was transformed it began to display the features that were attributed to Jewry.

The form of anti-Semitism prevalent today can be summarised in the words of Croat nationalist rockstar Marko Perkovic "I have nothing against [the Jews] and I did nothing to them. I know that Jesus Christ also did nothing against them, but still they hanged him on the cross."  Then there is the more recent development of Zionist anti-Semitism, which Žižek has pointed to, as the establishment of the Jewish state came so did the emergence of Jews who resist identification with the Jewish state. These are the Jews who insist on the "public use of reason" over the "private" domain offered by the nation-state being constructed in the Middle East. A standard case would be Noam Chomsky who stands against the self-designation of Israel as the state of the Jewish people on the grounds that it is based on the exclusion and oppression of the Palestinians. Chomsky was a Zionist Youth Leader and lived in a kibbutz in Israel for 5 years before leaving out of disgust with the ideological atmosphere of ultra-nationalism and even Stalinist sympathies expressed by some on the Left in those days.

A classic case of Zionist anti-Semitism can be found at www.masada2000.org where a list of over 7,000 S.H.I.T. (Self-Hating Israel-Threating) Jews can be viewed. The names listed often include detailed descriptions and unflattering photos of the person, along with an email address provided to enable hate mail. It has a lot in common with Red Watch and looks just like a Nazi list of decadent Jewish freaks. You will no doubt find Chomsky and Finkelstein on the list. The Jew who does not identify with the state of Israel is reconstructed along anti-Semitic lines as we can read in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik. The latter drew a distinction between "loyal" and "disloyal" Jews which is presupposed by a fundamental rejection of the Jewish contribution to European identity, which is a radical universalism. In Breivik's terms the "disloyal" Jew is a liberal opposed to nationalism and Zionist, for him these Jews are complicit in the multicultural experiment and the rise of cultural Marxism.

The Vilification Industry.

It is this reconstruction of the Jewish critics of Israel along anti-Semitic lines is how the anti-Semites of the Christian Right can support Israel. There's a great deal of projection involved clearly, notice that the Christianists will attack the media and the elites as left-wing whenever criticism of Israel is given public space. The conspiracy theory of Jews ruling the world is ripped from it's context to explain away negative reports of Israel as the plot of a ultra-leftist cabal in media. At the same time, the Christian Right support Israeli expansion out of a perverse attempt to bring about the Rapture which will herald the end for the Jews and the Muslims. Generally, the logic of anti-Semitism remains prevalent in Western civilisation as particular characteristics are still considered "Jewish". We find these features are sometimes morphed to the point that the greedy Shylock becomes the entrepreneurial spirit of Alan Sugar. Apparently, this is a compliment and not a racist insinuation!

Then there is the special case of the vilification of Norman Finkelstein orchestrated by Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein had slammed the work of Alan Dershowitz on Israel and so Dershowitz went after him. The aim was not to refute Finkelstein's argument, it was to blast him out of the water, ruin his career and muddy the discourse to the extent that there can be no step forward. Dershowitz opted to go after Finkelstein's mother, who is a survivor of Auschwitz and he actually had the nerve to claim that she survived because she was a collaborator with the Nazi regime. It has been described by Chomsky as a "jihad" to try and prevent Norman Finkelstein from being appointed to tenure at DePaul University, a Catholic university, which is vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism that Dershowitz certainly has no qualms about making. The use of anti-Semitism as a label to vilify critics is cynically used to shoot out the opposition to the moral degeneracy of the Israeli government.


The consistent line of Alan Dershowitz is that all of the criticism of Israel comes from anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. This is nothing unique on his part, these same claims are often made to undermine the critics of Israel. The double-think here is that if you're opposed to mass-murder then you're a Nazi of course. It is clear that the facts of Palestinian suffering evoke outrage from normal human beings and not from people with a warped view of the world. The fact that (as of June 4th 2011) 124 Israeli children killed by Palestinians and 1,463 Palestinian children killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000 should move a normal human being. The same goes for the Israeli reaction to the deaths of three Israeli citizens as a result of around 2,000 rockets being fired into Israel, the reaction being that which had left over 1,400 Palestinians dead and thousands more injured. Of course, 10 more Israeli soldiers were killed in the mean time and the slaughter was called to a stop just before Barack Obama was inaugurated as President to avoid any embarrassment for the US.

Immodest Proposals?

At the time of the establishment of the Jewish state Hannah Arendt was one of the vocal critics of the particular statist formula that the leadership of the Zionist movement embarked upon. For Arendt the worst model for the Jews to emulate is the racial nation-state because that model had produced the horrors of Nazi Germany. To secure a future free of conflict it seemed imperative to Arendt that the Palestinians and Jews had to have equal rights and recognition as citizens based on justice. Instead of an Israel based on race carved out of the Arab world by force, Arendt proposed an independent state for Jews and Palestinians as part of the British Commonwealth of Nations that would ensure both ethnic groups got a fair deal. A Jewish homeland was a solution to the perpetual "rootless" status of the Jews and a federation amongst the Arabs and Jews in Palestine would be vital for the survival of a Jewish homeland. This was the alternative to the violence that has been used to carve a Jewish state out of a predominantly Arab region.


The concerns Hannah Arendt had about the future character of a Jewish state that had to live in agitation with its Arab neighbours were somewhat prescient. She foresaw that the Jews would have to live surrounded entirely by a hostile Arab population and secluded inside ever-threatened borders. The state would become inward looking to the extent that all other interests are marginalised by "self-defence". We have seen that the social programmes and welfare measures taken in other states have been reduced in Israel in order to raise military spending. The external threats would overwhelm social experiments, which we have seen as the most radical Kibbutzim were suppressed, whilst the military would take the centreplace of political theory and economic development. Israel was once an almost socialistic society for many years, but it is now in a state of immense inequality in which 18 families control 60% of corporate equity. Israel is second only to the US in terms of inequality.


Noam Chomsky has commented that the ideas which were considered Zionist before the establishment of the state of Israel would be considered anti-Zionist today for it is anti-statist. When Noam Chomsky was a Zionist Youth Leader he was for Arab and Jewish working-class cooperation to construct a bi-national socialist Palestine. The establishment of the state of Israel was a day of mourning for Chomsky and his pals. We can see the break between the kind of Zionism that Chomsky was involved in and the trajectory of Israel. In the country inequality has exploded as the military-industrial complex and high-tech industry (which are interconnected) have taken precedent over the welfare state. The wealth generated through financial services, chemical fertiliser and diamonds is concentrated in very few hands. Arendt went as far as to claim that the Jews of Palestine would change character to such a degree that they would no longer represent world Jewry as a whole. We find this is the case as the Israeli government differs greatly in policy to the liberal values of American Jews.

Immigrants, the Easy Target.

In the midst of the phone-hacking scandal and the Eurozone debt crisis, the disgraceful changes made to the law regarding migrant domestic workers which have the potential to enable a rise in human trafficking and effective slavery. Damian Green has moved to repeal some of the safeguards which are supposed to protect domestic migrant workers from exploitation of this depraved kind. The reforms will have little impact on net migration, though it does have the potential to make render workers "illegal" and may even increase the threat of violence to domestic workers from overseas. It is possible for migrant domestic workers to work, move on to new jobs, support themselves, remain visible in the United Kingdom and pay into the pot through taxes. So where is the outrage when the rights of such people are undermined? There isn't a word about this in the press, certainly not in the right-wing press where the usual line is spewed regularly.

Damian Green is looking to abolish the route for overseas domestic workers in private households, perhaps imposing a restriction of leave to 6 months as a 'visitor' only and 12 months where accompanying a Tier 1 or Tier 2 migrant. Of course there will be no possibility of extension, no right to change employer, no ability to sponsor or find work for dependents and no right to settlement under such proposals. Note that these protections are vital for migrant workers, as well as insufficient as the right to change employer has yet to be extended to servants employed by foreign diplomats (which is where a great deal of abuse is committed with immunity). If the government can't do away with the route then it will seek to strengthen the pre-entry requirements in order to "minimise the possibility of abusive or exploitative employer/employee relationships". The government wants to stop granting settlement to servants in diplomatic households, keep in mind that the servants abused in such households are particularly difficult to protect as it is.


There has been talk of a 6-12 month non-renewable visa, though the proposal was ultimately rejected because of the implications for the safety of domestic workers. The proposed visa would have enabled forced labour as it would have transferred greater power to employers, including the most unscrupulous, over isolated and dependent workers. The power to denounce the worker to the immigration authorities deprives such workers of bargaining power. Of course, if the workers flee there is always homelessness and no doubt the status of 'illegal' to fall into. Should it be that a person who wants better conditions at work is criminalised in this way? It is hardly the case that people who escape trafficking or exploitation will be able to go through the courts for justice or even just compensation. There are already huge problems with the protections in place for the victims of trafficking, the emphasis is on immigration status and criminal justice in many cases.

No doubt the hairs on the back of your white neck will have stood up as you've read about these proposals, perhaps you're thinking that we can't just let everyone in our country will be swamped! The UK Border Agency will come out with statistics to tell you that the grants of settlement to migrant domestic workers have risen by 34% from 2009 to 2010, the fact that is just 795 people in 2009 is conveniently left out. Instead the number 15,000 visas issued to domestic workers in 2010 is wheeled out, even though 94% of domestic workers will return home again with their employer and do not stay to renew their visa. The effect on net migration of domestic workers is actually miniscule as in 2009 domestic workers accounted for about 0.5% of the total grants of settlement. There is no chance that these proposals will guarantee work for British and EU workers. The reliance on flawed protections is only costly to the tax-payer and potentially harmful to the people who have to survive under them.

You will have heard that we have had "uncontrolled mass immigration" into Britain for at least a decade, some claim that we have had an uninterrupted influx of foreigners into this country since 1948. 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 Clement Attlee introduced the Nationality act that this practice became formal. There were constant attempts to restrict immigration throughout the 1950s, all of which were opposed by Enoch Powell who went on to give the infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968. Before that there was the Commonwealth Immigrants act of 1962, which restricted immigration to people who had been allocated work vouchers. The Conservatives beat Labour in 1970 and Ted Heath took over from Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. In 1971 Ted Heath passed the Immigration act that brought immigration almost to a complete halt for a number of years. 


There no mention of the facts, that we have controlled spurts of immigration and have done for a very long time. It is often complained that there should not be anyone in this country who doesn't speak English, even David Cameron made this point in a speech on immigration as he slashed spending on English lessons. There is also little room in the debate to even acknowledge the deaths of people like Jimmy Mubenga, who was "restrained" to death on an airplane as he was being deported back to Angola. There is a general ignorance of the way asylum seekers are detained and can be deported, the dominant misconception is that the foreigners are pampered. There is little coverage of G4S, which rakes in over £600 million from the government for running four prisons, three immigration removal centres as well as 675 court and police cells, but the good people who work for G4S still find time to "restrain" people to death.

It is not often admitted that there were and has been a constant wave of anti-immigrant fervour against any attempts to open up the country to immigration for decades. The result is a spurt of immigration there and a backlash here which closes up the system once more, until it has to be opened up again in order to solve problems with the supply of labour and the impending pensions crisis. In general the tone of debate over immigration in Britain is always at the brink of the hysterical outbursts about the contradictions of multicultural tolerance and the "madness" of political correctness. We find ourselves split between the racists who aren't happy with any immigration at all and the liberal do-gooders who have doomed our country. The important facts are lost whilst the media wheels out numbers to rile up the fears of people who have been disenfranchised and have legitimate grievances. Clearly something has to give in order for us to even discuss these issues, let alone do anything about them.