"Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white".

What's in a slogan?

Tapping into deep-running resentment has long been a tried and tested method of revanchistes everywhere. Then there are those reactionaries who go a bit further to reach for more than just resentment. This is where we'd do better to borrow a concept from Nietzsche - some would say, an indispensable concept - that of ressentiment. As Anindya Bhattacharyya blogged, the best way to understand ressentiment is in Deleuze's terms as the master's maxim is “I am good, therefore you are bad”, while the slave expresses the logic of ressentiment: “You are evil, therefore I am good.” In striking down the affirmative and active propositions of the master, the slave asserts their own power and their own position.

In white nationalist, supremacist and separatist circles - the crowd who wish they could emulate Adolf Hitler - this strategy can be found in the following slogan: "Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white." Note the implication that to be pro-white is to be racist and, of course, we can see the truth in that side of the message. Yet it seems to most that the concept of 'anti-racism' is not anti-white when in actuality this requires more of us than straightforward common-sense. We first have to deconstruct what the social category of 'white' really stands for in order to determine what the slogan really means.

The social category of 'white' has in the past removed from the outset certain groups. We know that the white nationalist claim to be 'pro-white' does not extend to European Jewry, for instance, in fact it may even exclude the Slavs and the Irish if taken far enough. Hitler's Aryan master race certainly excluded the Slavs and Roma. In a sense there is truth in this claim insofar as the identification with one's pale epidermis often leads in a certain grotesque direction. In another sense the interests of the majority of white people living in Western countries are not served at all by racism. At the most racism serves to maintain relative advantage - what we may call white privilege - at the expense of class loyalties and the development of a class consciousness.

The slogan is designed to undermine anti-racist activism and even demonise those activists and the language with which we rightly criticise bigotry and discrimination. The constant noise of white whining about the 'misuse' and 'overuse' of the term should be evidence enough that it is not anti-racism which is out-of-control. In fact, we've been living through the reactive offensive to slime the advocates of multiculturalism and demonise cultural sensitivity (under the new swearword of 'political-correctness') and tolerance. The aim is the same as the pro-white message: to further legitimise racism.

Believing in 'White Genocide'.

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

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

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

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