Just got this from the pro-democracy organisation. I’ve seen various arch-Tory types puffing National Conservatism, and this goes some way to explaining just who’s involved in it and where it’s coming from. It’s basically nationalistic Conservatism of the Trumpian populist variety. The name rings alarm bells, because I think the National Conservatives were one of the small, Volkisch parties who ended up being swallowed by the Nazis during their rise to power. The mention of Daniel Hannan is a particular red flag. He was an MEP for Dorset and would dearly love to privatise the NHS. Pretty much like the rest of the Tories, but he was outspoken about it. As for Gove, Mogg and Cruella, definitely ‘No thanks!’. It’s the Tory hard right, who really haven’t learnt that Tufton Street theories are massively unworkable and damn near wrecked us. Quite apart from the lofty intellectualism of Darren Grimes.
As for Christian Nationalism, it’s bad politics and bad theology. Nothing does more to put people off religion and promote religious scepticism than its political imposition. After the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, religious scepticism grew, and in the various national churches throughout Europe there was a keen desire to avoid fanaticism and a return to religious bloodshed. Furthermore, to prevent continued religious fractures and conflict, theologians taught that only God can tell who is a true believer and who isn’t, and so it isn’t in the power of earthly governments or churches to say which of their flock is a true Christian or not.
You can see the same process of religious dissatisfaction occurring in the Muslim world. A Pew poll a few years ago found that the majority of Iranians are now no longer Muslim, with the largest bloc of non-Muslims atheists. I think that’s almost certainly a reaction to over forty years of the Islamic theocracy. I’ve also read that atheism is also spreading in the Arab countries. That wouldn’t surprise me, given the horrors of ISIS and similar movements. Religious belief has also declined among Americans, and I think that’s a reaction to entrance into politics of the religious right under Reagan. There are very, very good reasons for separating church and state.
‘Dear David,
For the British right wing, the “sunlit uplands” are always just over the horizon…if we would just entrust everything we hold dear to them one more time. Brexit. Johnsonism. The Truss catastrobudget. All trailed as the “one thing Britain needs to get us back on track.” Not one of them has worked.
And now they’re at it again with ‘National Conservatism’.
At first sight, National Conservatism might appear to be just the latest episode in a tired old series. But we need to keep an especially close eye on this one because it comes turbocharged with a boatload of Trump-scented dark dollars and a sharp line in Christian fundamentalism. It’s Farage-Johnson-style Brexit zealotry on steroids.
As announced in this Telegraph piece by Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Frost, the first “NatCon” event features a who’s-who of far-right gremlins. The list of speakers includes US Republican Senator J.D. Vance – who sought to overturn the 2020 US election – GB News’ on-and-off-presenter Darren Grimes, Tufton Street’s pseudo-intellectual Daniel Hannan, and, of course, Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, and Mogg himself. It’s a smorgasbord of radical libertarians, anti-woke crusaders, and straight-up election deniers.
Their website promotes Italian “neo-fascist” president Giorgia Miloni, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and a litany of books and essays promoting such delights as Christian Nationalism and the importance of male-dominated societies. Several featured titles would challenge an experienced librarian not to put them on the ‘racist literature’ shelf.
None of this is all that new, but NatCon shows that the US and UK far-right networks are now cosier than ever and readying themselves to steal power they could not win fairly at the ballot box. As Byline Timesreported yesterday, the intricate links between Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Boris Johnson are still being revealed, uncovering a well-funded and highly organised global right-wing network.
Their fundamental goal is to promote an unpopular agenda that benefits only society’s most privileged elite, using asylum seekers, minorities, college students, protestors, and anyone else who stands in their way as cannon fodder. The problem isn’t merely that they have a regressive and outdated vision for the country. It’s that they’re willing to hijack democracy in order to achieve it.
This is what we’re up against. A unified bloc of deep-pocketed and well-connected figures focussed on the goals of self-enrichment and destruction of our democratic institutions. We’ve seen in the US what can happen when these people are given the reins: a privileged minority rules with impunity, cutting their own taxes, giving hand-outs to their friends, and reopening long-settled social issues such as abortion and racial equality. We have already had enough of that agenda. We can’t allow more of it to flood in.
Those of us who believe in democracy and social progress, whatever colour rosette we favour, must come together to fight any attempt by this Nat-C movement to slide into power through some back door in the Tory Party.
This is a wake-up call if ever there was one. Let’s keep a close eye on this new movement. But let’s also work double-time to make our democracy work for ordinary people. Let’s take the dark money out of politics. Let’s reign in big tech’s disinformation industry. Let’s shine a light on the Tufton Street ghouls that freely walk the corridors of power these days. Let’s take every chance we get to defend, strengthen and renew our democracy because, of all the ways a society might have to free itself from fascism, using democracy to stop it at the front door is probably the only one that bears thinking about.
A few days ago I posted a piece about a Pakistani TV programme, which featured a panel of violently intolerant religious fanatics ranting about what they feared was a wave of unbelief and blasphemy threatening the country of the pure. Well, that’s one explanation I’ve seen for the country’s name: ‘paki’ – ‘pure’, ‘stan’ country. I’ve also seen another explanation that claimed the ‘Paki’ element is an acronym made up with the country’s various provinces. These men claimed to have seen a report by the Federal Intelligence Agency and the branch of the country’s judiciary or law enforcement tasked with protecting the Pakistani people from blasphemy, that there were 400,000 internet accounts put up by blasphemers. They then went on to complain that despite these numbers, only 119 people had been arrested and of these only 11 were executed. Later on in the programme they claimed that the blasphemous internet accounts had started with only four people, who had been arrested and executed, but the number had mushroomed. This was accompanied with histrionic demonstrations of grief and outrage. One of them wished he had died before he had seen this day. Another wondered if they shouldn’t react to this news by burning down the towns. I hope that’s just hyperbole, otherwise it’s going to kill an awful lot of people and increase any disaffection with Islam. An elderly mullah was seen crying in a corner of the studio. They also went to describe the dreadful acts the blasphemers were committing, claiming that it was all part of a conspiracy to bring down the country and that the blasphemous internet sites were using women to lure men onto them to commit these outrages. I’m not going to describe them, as they are very shocking, far more extreme than the Danish cartoons that provoked such outrage across the Islamic world when they were published.
The ex-Muslims atheists on the net believed that the stories of these blasphemous acts were genuine, and were an expression of real, bitter hatred by alienated young Pakistanis against the country’s dominant religion. But the acts they described are so grotesque, I wondered if they weren’t made up. Years ago I read an account of the furore over the Danish cartoons on one of the Islamophobic sites. After the cartoons had been published in a Danish provincial paper, the Jyllands Aftenposten or whatever it was, a group of five imams went on a tour of the Muslim world to show them to the masses. However, it seems that one of the cartoons they showed had not been published by the paper.
I’ve been told that in that part of the world there’s a culture of embroidering the truth in disputes. It was a problem for the British authorities during the Raj, as both sides would start inventing details to reinforce their side of the argument until it was impossible to tell who was actually in the right. I don’t doubt that there are internet sites in Pakistani posting blasphemous material, but I wonder if the supposed acts they contained weren’t, in actual fact, the products of the nasty, lurid imaginations of those complaining about them.
The ex-Muslims themselves wondered about how many of the 400,000 blasphemers were really non-Muslims. Islam in Pakistan is composed of different sects – Sunni, Shia, Barelvi, Deobandi and so on, some of whose doctrines are seen as blasphemy by the others. So some of what was being denounced as blasphemous by the various fanatics could simply be honestly held beliefs by pious Muslims, who themselves see them as true and respectful expressions and formulations of their religion. Some of the ex-Muslims therefore suggested that the number of real blasphemous internet accounts was therefore half the official number, 200,000. But even if 400,000 is the real figure of atheists attacking Islam on the Pakistani net, it’s a trivial number compared to the country’s population. I think Pakistan has a population of c. 250 million. Which means that the proportion of people posting this material is less than 1/500 millionth of the population. In other words, a vanishingly small number. To outsiders like myself, when put like this the issue seems hardly worth bothering with. But not to these guys, who lined up in the studio to sing a song about how they would cut the heads off the blasphemers and burn them by day and night.
The same week Pakistani television broadcast this fiasco, Muslims in Britain had been celebrating Eid with the Big Iftar, in which they shared their religious meal with their non-Muslim neighbours. The One Show also covered on Muslim, who had dedicated himself to doing good deeds during Ramadan, and had assembled a team of Muslims and non-Muslims to help him. All of which was obviously far more constructive than the Pakistani programme’s demands for mass death. As for its wretched song, I can remember when one of the great Pakistani Sufi musicians came to Britain with his band back around 1991. He performed in Bradford, I think, and the Beeb televised the concert late one evening. I watched some of it, as I was then trying to do a postgraduate degree in British Islam. What came across from the little I saw was the sheer joy of the musicians and the audience. Joy in their religion, joy in the music. No hate at all. Round about the same time there was a documentary about Islam, Living Islam, which attempted to give a positive view of the religion. When it came to Pakistani politics, the presenter admitted that yes, politically the Pakistani electorate did demand more Islam. When the politicians attempted to give it to them, however, they were much less enthusiastic. Looking back, this is a mistakenly optimistic view. But then, despite the continuing controversy over the Satanic Verses, in some ways the ’90s were far more optimistic when it came to race and religion than today. To many people, both Black and White, racism was declining as conditions for Blacks and minorities improved. Another piece of optimism that has vanished in recent years.
Some of the posts I’ve seen about it made the point that the country has bigger issues to worry about than blasphemy. The country is supposedly deteriorating economically, socially and politically. But I wonder if that wasn’t the point. It looks like a diversion, to get ordinary Pakistanis to look away from the country’s real, material problems. Just like the Conservative MP Lee Anderson wants his party to fight on the culture war issues, because Rishi Sunak’s material policies about the economy are terrible and indefensible.
Even so, the programme is still chilling for the hatred it was trying to stir up. Accusations of blasphemy have resulted in rioting, murder and assassination in Pakistan. In one particular insane case, a schoolgirl allegedly murdered her teacher. The teacher herself hadn’t actually blasphemed. The child merely dreamed that she had, and so attacked and killed her. In my previous post about this I worried that this could set off a wave of mass persecution. So were the ex-Muslims, one of whom urged people to post about this and add hashtags copying in the American embassy and British High Commission as it looked like this could lead to serious human rights violations. And there’s the additional problem that this fanaticism could easily spread over here. The rioting between Hindus and Muslims that erupted a few months ago was supposed to have been caused by radical preachers from India and Pakistan.
We really need preachers now to emphasise peace against all the bigots anywhere in the world trying to divide us with hatred.
One of the ex-Muslim atheists published a piece about another incident of bloodthirsty fanaticism from the Hindutva far right in India. I think it may be a few months old, but it still needs commenting on as it shows the real fascism now rising in Modi’s India. There was a mass conversion of Dalits – the very lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy – to Buddhism. During the ceremony they formally forswore the Hindu gods, vowing never to worship them again. The ex-Muslim atheist commented that there have been several such conversions to Buddhism or Islam by the Dalits as a way to escape the oppressive caste system. This appears to have sent the Hindu religious right into fury. There was a mass gathering of the Hindutva stormtroopers, who formally vowed to turn India into a Hindu rashtra, which I think means ‘republic’. And then three extreme right-wing Hindu priests emerged to demand the beheading of blasphemers. Two attacked one India personality in particular, calling for his death. One even put a bounty on his head. The other just called for a general execution of blasphemers.
This is chilling stuff. Hinduism has won many admirers in the west because it’s seen as a peaceful, tolerant religion. Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolence, ahimsa, and peaceful protest has justly been admired and taken up by people right across the world protesting against oppression. But Hinduism, like most other religions, has also had a militant side, and it is this aspect of the religion that seems to be growing thanks to Modi and the BJP government. The BJP has links to the RSSS, a militant nationalist group partly modelled on Mussolini’s Fascists and which carries out attacks on Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. And also Buddhists, after one Hindutva politician denounced them as a threat to Hindu India a week or so ago. Meanwhile, liberal Hindu journalists and their papers are being shut down as Modi increases state censorship. Modi and the BJP are undermining India’s constitution as a secular, pluralistic democracy to establishment a fiercely intolerant form of Hindu nationalism. It seems that across the world, bitter, intolerant nationalism is on the rise and democracy and tolerance is under threat from the bigots and fanatics.
A few days ago the ex-Muslim atheist YouTuber Harris Sultan put up a link to a piece in one of the English language Pakistani magazines. Harris is an Australian of Pakistani heritage and a very bitter critic of Islam. The magazine had approached him for comment about a programme on Pakistani television in which various members of the clergy and officialdom had demanded more arrests to curb a wave of ‘islamophobia’ and blasphemy that was supposedly threatening the country. The official had stated that 400,000 blasphemous comments had been posted online, and the magazine claimed that Pakistan was the 7th most islamophobic country in the world, despite its draconian laws against blasphemy. Insulting the Prophet Mohammed himself carries the death penalty, and insulting the Prophet’s companions is punishable by 10 years to life in prison. The magazine claimed that this meant that Shia Muslims are particularly vulnerable to this charge, as they reject many of the first caliphs.
A friend of mine with a stronger stomach than me told me once that there’s a piece in William S. Burrough’s The Naked Lunch where the cops get arrestomania and go around arresting anyone they can. It looks like the official demanding more arrests for blasphemy has a bad case of it. The very idea that Pakistan is massively islamophobic seems to me to be entirely false. It was set up by Jinna explicitly as an Islamic state, where Muslims could live in accordance with their faith although it remained relatively secular until the country’s dictator, General Zia in the 1970s formed an alliance with the conservative Muslim clergy. It was then that the blasphemy laws, which had been introduced by the Raj to protect all religions, became solely about Islam and increasingly severe. I also think that the Pakistani upper house is composed of Muslim clergy who check whether the legislation passed is sufficiently Islamic. It’s also one of the nations where there is the strongest support for the return of a Muslim caliphate.
Accusations of blasphemy have led to murder, mob attacks and assassination. The laws are frequently abused by people wanting to get rid of their opponents in disputes that have nothing to do with religion. They’ve also led to attacks on Christians and other religious minorities, as shown in the cases of Asia Bibi, who was accused of desecrating a Quran, and a Christian student who was murdered by his classmates because he took a sip from a glass of water he was bringing to a group of girls. There was also the case of a seven year old boy, who was being charged with blasphemy because he urinated in a madrassa, a Muslim religious school.
Historically, Islam was admired by many intellectuals in the west because it didn’t have the history of mass persecution, such as inquisitions and witch hunts, that has marred Christianity. But this official’s complaints about 400,000 blasphemous posts looks like he wanted all that to change.
Sultan’s comments was that if they wanted to deal with anti-Islamic sentiment, they should stop forcing the religion down their children’s throats and abolish the blasphemy laws. I’m not an atheist, and believe that parents have the right to bring children up in their religion. But in my experience, many atheist activists come from oppressively religious backgrounds that have turned them against religion. And when religion comes into politics, then it does seem to lose popularity through its association with controversial or oppressive legislation. I think Christianity in America has lost some of its ground because of the emergence of the religious right and their influence in the Republican Party. A Pew Poll the other year found that Iran, which the magazine article stated also has harsh laws against blasphemy comparable to Pakistan, was no longer a majority Muslim country. People were either turning to other faiths, or abandoning religion altogether. There have also been other reports about the massive, underground spread of Islam in the Arab countries. I’ve no doubt that this is a reaction to the atrocities and horrors committed by ISIS. I therefore think Sultan is absolutely right about the blasphemy laws.
Religion should be a matter of one’s own private conscience, especially as these laws seem to be used as instruments of religious persecution.
I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.
Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.
And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.
Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.
But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.
This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.
The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.
And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.
Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.
We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.
Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.
As some of the great commenters on this blog have pointed out, Simon Webb of History Debunked is a great advocate of home schooling. He makes no secret of this, and talks often about how he home schooled his daughter. He also used to run a blog called ‘Home School Heretic’. A few days ago he posted a piece about how the government was introducing legislation to make home schooling more difficult. He believes, or suggested, that this is a government attempt to enforce ideological conformity on the population by preventing parents from opting out of the official education system. He quoted part of the new legislation, which stated that it was concerned about the home schooling leading to the growth of parallel societies.
Now I do know people, who have home schooled their children because of concerns about the local schools in their area. Their children did really well, got their ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels and went on to university. As far as I can make out, they share the same values as the rest of mainstream British society. Back a decade and a half or so ago, there was a panic over the growth of Creationism and Intelligent Design. Various atheist and sceptics’ groups were panicking about what they saw as ‘science denialism’. A number of fundamentalist Christian groups also pushed home schooling as a way adults could avoid having their children indoctrinated with evolution and so put on the path to state mandated secularism and atheism. That furore eventually blew over. But a friend, who taught religion, told me that most Creationists were Muslims, as were, I think, most home schoolers. But all you ever heard about on the BBC and the mainstream news was about Christian Creationists. The wording of the document Webb was complaining about suggests to me that the government is really concerned about alienated Muslims taking their children out of school to give them a very conservative upbringing, but dare not say it outright. I’ve had the general impression that Christianity, because it has largely been the religion of the White majority of this country, is now a whipping boy for fears about the growth of radical religious movement in ethnic minorities. Christianity can be criticised without accusations of racism or Islamophobia, and Christians won’t, as a rule, start sending death threats.
For example, the right-wing media and vloggers have been discussing this week the criticism directed at somebody Forbes, the woman now tipped to replace Nicola Sturgeon. Forbes is a church-going Presbyterian with very traditional, social conservative views. She doesn’t approve of sex before marriage, gay marriage or the transgender ideology. And so various newspapers, including the Scum, have been denouncing her as unsuitable for the post of Scots First Minister. The same thing happened to the Lib Dems’ Tim Farron. He went to an evangelical church, which also viewed homosexuality as a sin. He was constantly asked, as no-other politico was, whether he shared their views with the implication that if he did, he shouldn’t be in politics. And the attack on religious individuals now includes gay groups, who disagree with them but maintain their right to hold such opinions. The EDIJester posted a piece this morning, which included the story that the LGB Alliance, a gay advocacy group, had been contacted by the Beeb for their comment. Their chief spokeswomen replied that they disagreed with her beliefs, but religion is a protected characteristic and she has a right to hold them. This was not what the Beeb’s producer wanted to hear. The Alliance was contacted again, and told that they would not be using them in the programme. If this is true, then the Beeb wanted to present it as debate in which Forbes would be denounced for her views by all gay groups.
The BBC has also produced very biased programmes misrepresenting religious issues before. A few years ago I picked up a book about political bias at the Beeb written by a Conservative. It was published during Blair’s government, and presented a convincing case. And one of these was a documentary about the Roman Catholic church’s abstinence-only policy towards contraception in Africa. The programme argued that this was causing Black Africans to suffer unwanted pregnancies and catch AIDS purely because of religious dogma. In fact, the abstinence-only policy, surprisingly, has been successful in cutting down on both. There is a very strong cultural hostility in African society to contraception. Nigel Barley, in his book The Innocent Anthropologist, remarks that there’s a joke that the only thing that will go through the Nigerian postal system and not be interfered with is a packed of condoms. In this environment, where contraception will be refused in any case, it makes sense to stress abstinence. But this conflicted with the received opinions of western liberals, who produced a deliberately deceptive programme.
In the case of Forbes and Farron, all that should be needed to be said is that although they personally may disapprove, they will not interfere in previous legislation. I think Forbes may have said that, but it obviously isn’t enough. But I do wonder if the same questions would be asked if she belonged to a non-Christian religion. I suspect she wouldn’t.
In the meantime, I think Webb can stop fretting. I don’t think the government is really worried about ultra-Conservative right-wingers like him. I think the real, unspoken fear is about Islam.
This might interest any readers of this blog with an interest in mysticism and history. I’ve been reading, off and on, Tony McAleavy’s The Last Witch Craze: John Aubrey, the Royal Society and the Witches (Amberley: 2022). This is about how individual members of the Royal Society, set up to advance science, and the 17th century naturalist and biographer John Aubrey, investigated cases of witchcraft scientifically as part of a project to combat the threat of atheism. They were afraid that the rise of the new mechanical philosophy denied the existence of disembodied spirits and so led to atheism. But this in turn could be challenged by properly investigated cases of witchcraft, hauntings and what would now be considered poltergeists, supported by the testimony of reliable multiple witnesses.
Aubrey himself, the author of Brief Lives, a series of potted biographies of the great men of his time, and books on the natural history and customs of his native Wiltshire and other counties, was a practising ritual magicians, though also friends with Thomas Hobbes, who denied the existence of the supernatural and was suspected of atheism. The Royal Society had no corporate opinion on witchcraft, but individual members were staunch believers, writing and publishing books about it. One of these was Robert Boyle, whose book The Sceptical Chymist, founded the modern science of chemistry. Boyle was deeply Christian, and left a legacy to fund an annual sermon preaching Christianity against atheism. But as a scientist and man of faith, he was also interested in the possibility of the existence of disembodied spirits on other worlds and stars, and the theological implications of their existence.
‘Robert Boyle thought a lot about the supernatural. Not only was he sure about the reality of angels and demons, he also speculated on the possible existence of enormous numbers of spirits of other types, ‘an inestimable multitude of Spiritual Beings , of various kinds.’ Distant planets and stars might contain alien spirits about which we know nothing. There could be spirits inhabiting ‘all the Celestial Globes (very many of which do vastly exceed ours in bulk)’. This raised, for Boyle, interesting theological questions. Angels and demons were known to be saved or damned, respectively, but in other worlds there might be spirits who were still being tested by God, just as Adam and Eve were tested in the Garden of Eden.’ (p. 69).
There’s a link, or a chain of belief here with the Swedenborgians of the 18th century, who believed that the planets were inhabited and that they could travel to them in spirit and communicate with their inhabitants during seances. I think they also believed that people also travelled to these worlds and made their homes on them after death. Some of the Spiritualist mediums believed this. And Evans-Wentz records the view of an elderly Irish mystic in his book, The Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries, that the fairies were an old race come from the stars.
And this also continues into the UFO phenomenon. I am not going to start a debate over whether all alien encounters are mystical in nature rather than encounters with real, nuts and bolts craft, whether alien spaceships or secret terrestrial aircraft. But there have been UFO encounters which do seem to be either hallucinatory or mystical in nature. One Australian woman was abducted and examined in an alien spacecraft on a deserted road one night. When she was taken back there by a member of an Ozzie UFO investigation group, she had another such experience. But she was still physically present with the investigator in his car, and no UFO was visible. Other experiencers have said that there abduction was an astral or out of body experience, rather than physical. Sceptics have suggested that UFO abduction experiences can be explained by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Some no doubt can, but others have occurred to seemingly normal individuals with no history of such a neurological illness.
I therefore wonder if Boyle was right after all, and this type of alien encounters are with disembodied alien spirits, which our brains interpret as physical alien beings in real nuts and bolts craft in order to make it comprehensible.
Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.
Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.
I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.
The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.
And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.
I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.
There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.
There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.
Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.
There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.
And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.
I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.
But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.
I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.
It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.
This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.
And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.
‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.
I found this vicious little piece of bitter satire on YouTube yesterday. It’s produced by Aamon Animations, whose brief description on the platforms states that he makes animations ranging from political memes to comic horror. Yedolf is obviously a combination Kanye West’s preferred epithet, ‘Ye’, and Hitler’s first name. West, as you’ll remember, effectively torpedoed his career and lost something like a hundred million after ranting about the Jews controlling the music industry. The dialogue in the animation appears to genuine, which is combined with computer generated caricatures of West, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro and some other right-wing American pundits that are truly grotesque. Especially when West develops snail’s horns after eating one of the molluscs.
The video includes American right-wing media hacks talking about the threat of Secular Humanists with Jewish last names – which obvious means atheist Jews, raising the old canard about banking at its top levels being run by people with Jewish last names. In other words, the old Jewish banking conspiracy. Then Ben Shapiro appears to endorse West, stating that he’s not mad and states the issues clearly. I don’t think you can call Shapiro anti-Semitic, because I think he’s Jewish. But assuming that he’s talking about West’s anti-Semitic rant, he has shown that he’s prepared to endorse a conspiracist nutter for political expediency, and in the instance throw Jews under the bus.
And then there’s the interview between West and Jones. West goes really anti-Semitic in this one, declaring that Hitler had his good points when Jones tells him he sounds like the Nazi leader. West really, really needs to do some proper reading about Hitler and the Third Reich, and not crap that comes from White Supremacists and Black anti-Semites like the Nation of Islam. I really do wonder if he’d say that if he knew that among the groups the Nazis persecuted were the mixed-race children of Black American squaddies and White German women when the country was occupied by the Allies after the First World War. They organised a programme of sterilisation against them. As a self-respecting man of colour I would hope that this would help disabuse him of the notion that there was anything positive about Nazism.
West’s opinions were too much for Jones, who splutters that his channel believes in freedom of speech, but nevertheless what West has said is unacceptable. Or words to that effect. And when Jones declares that West has gone too far, the man who has absolutely no regard for any kind of libel he can throw at his opponents, then several red lines have clearly been crossed.
I was unaware just how noxious West’s comments were. The impression I got was that he said little more than that the Jews controlled the music industry, but kept Blacks down – vile stuff, but unfortunately held by a number of Black artists who have similarly sabotaged their careers uttering this nonsense. I wasn’t prepared for how really unpleasant it was. I don’t like cancel culture, but if this is right, West deserves to be well and truly cancelled.
But one of the most revealing aspects is that there were too many American conservatives prepared to support him, even though parts of the Republican party are claiming to be the true friends of the Jews and staunch supporters of Israel.
This needs watching. Despite the allegations against the left, anti-Semitism is still present on the right.
Yesterday, Simon Sideways, a self-proclaimed ‘White activist’, put up a piece on his YouTube channel asking people what they will do when the Muslims finally take over and start forcing people to convert. It was once again the Eurabia myth, that Muslim birth rates are far more than White Europeans, and so in a few decades they will become the majority religion on the continent and take it over. It’s nonsense, although Muslim populations are set to expand and this could cause problems if the alienation and turn of some Muslims to radical theologies continues. He illustrated his prediction by stating that Muslims had established sharia police in Germany, who were forcing both Muslims and non-Muslims to attend the mosques.
I checked this story by Googling it, and it appears to be several years old. From what I’ve uncovered, it appears that a group of seven radical Muslims led by a German convert, Sven Laue, set up an Islamic sharia patrol in Wuppertal in Bavaria in 2014 or 2016. The German police arrested them and charged them under the Basic Law. This is article in the German constitution that forbids anti-democratic organisation and political parties. It’s a product of the denazification after World War II and has been used against neo-Nazi organisations like the National Democrat Party. The German Communist party evaded a ban by dissolving themselves and then holding a special congress at which it was declared that they recognised that society would have to go through a period of democracy. This is standard Marxist dogma, in which society goes through a stage of bourgeois democracy in which the remains of feudalism are cleared away before the workers take over and establish socialism. The seven were acquitted, but there was some kind of appeal, and in 2019 they were convicted and sent down.
The German authorities are as concerned as our political class about the growth of parallel societies. In the 1980s the German trade union confederation accused the Turkish sections of practising separatism while claiming to integrate with ethnic Germans. A few years ago the mayor of one of the German cities with a large Turkish population wrote a book describing their alienation and anti-social behaviour, sometimes violent, towards ethnic German. This was somewhat surprising, as he was a member of the SPD, the German socialist party, who I think expelled him soon after. It hasn’t, however, been only in Germany that vigilante sharia police have appeared. A group of fanatics at Anjem Chaudhury’s mosque in London set one up and posted their exploits on YouTube, before the police pounced on them.
As for forced conversion, Islamic laws forbids the forcible conversion of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and/or Hindus, although massacres have occurred throughout history. This law was obeyed by the Ottomans in the Balkans. In the 7th century one of the sultans wanted to convert the indigenous Christian population by armed force, only to be told by the majlis, the assembly of Muslim clergy, that it was not permitted. Such toleration does not extend to pagans and atheists, who may be forced to convert to Islam on pain of death.
Sideways seems to have seen or read a garbled, very dated version of the story about the German sharia patrols, probably from an extreme right-wing source. There are problems with the growth of parallel Islamic societies in Britain, France, Germany and no doubt elsewhere, but the Muslims aren’t set to take over Europe and what attempts there have been to set up sharia police are minuscule – there were only seven members of Laue’s wretched outfit – and have not been tolerated by the authorities.
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