How much further can the IEA go in its desire to end government interference? From what I’ve just come across on YouTube, all the way to Rothbard and anarcho-capitalism. I came across a video this afternoon from IEA London in which they interview someone about this form of anarcho-individualism.
The IEA are a hard right, Thatcherite bunch who’ve been advocating extreme free market economics since the 1970s. They believe in complete privatisation, including that of the NHS and the reduction of the welfare state, if not its complete abolition. Usually people who hold this ideology call themselves Libertarians or, more recently, Classical Liberals. They’re fans of von Hayek and Milton Friedman and believe that by going back to the complete laissez-faire capitalism of the early 19th century business will become more efficient and people freer and more prosperous. Which is why Friedman used to go on trips to Chile to see how his ideas were working out under that notorious advocate for personal freedom, General Pinochet. Because people wouldn’t democratically vote for the destruction of the welfare state, and so this could only be done by a dictator. The American Libertarians also weren’t averse to collaborating with real fascists and Nazis. One issue of their wretched magazine in the ’70s contained a number of articles by them and real anti-Semites denying the Holocaust. It was part of their campaign to discredit F.D. Roosevelt and his legacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal created the American welfare state. He was also the president that brought American into World War II. World War II is regarded as a just war. In order to discredit Roosevelt and thus the American welfare state, they wanted to destroy the notion of the battle against Nazism as a noble conflict. And so the goose-steppers were given their free hand to publish their malign nonsense in their pages. Then, when Reagan was elected in 1980s, they got a president who believed what they did, and so didn’t need the Nazis anymore. That infamous episode in their history was quietly forgotten.
And now the IEA are going from minarchism – the belief in a minimal state – to outright anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism wants the abolition of the state and its replacement by corporations. This includes police and the courts. The police would be replaced by private security guards, while the courts would also operate as private corporations. This, of course, causes problems. In a society without the state to enforce justice, why would any criminal submit themselves to the judgement of private courts with no power to enforce their decisions? They argue that competition by the courts to give the fairest decisions would result in criminals submitting to the same courts in the understand that they, and the other criminals, would all receive fair and just treatment and so order would be preserved. Which is real, wishful thinking.
Ordinary, Thatcherite free-market economics don’t work. Privatisation has not increased investment in the utilities, but left them in a worse mess. The gradual erosion of the welfare state has just increased poverty, not made people more entrepreneurial and self-reliant. Nor has led to a revival of charity in quite the manner Thatcher expected, although I’d guess that she, like Jacob Reet Snob, would point to food banks as a sign of its success. Liz Truss’ and her cabinet were all true-blue followers of Tufton Street free market ideas, with very many of them members of various right-wing think tanks, including the IEA. The result was that she nearly destroyed the British economy and had to be given the heave-ho. Despite this, she still thinks she was right. A week or so ago she was giving a talk in America in which she blamed her defenestration on ‘left-wing activists’. This is the rest of the Tory party she’s talking about. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, she’s off again. Oh, don’t mock. It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’ But it seems that ordinary libertarianism isn’t enough for some in the IEA, and that some of them have an interest in privatising the state itself.
If this was ever put into practice, it would result in a dystopia straight from 90s era science fiction, like the decaying Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop but without the cyborg policeman to fight crime and bring down the corporate bad guys.
Well, it looks like Simon Webb of History Debunked has finally gone full Mosley. And you never go full Mosley. He’s put up a piece today asking, ‘what’s wrong with fascism?’ He argues that fascism is viewed negatively because it’s confusion with Nazism. But socialism has also committed horrible atrocities and run death camps. In contrast to this, he points to the Portugal of the dictator Salazar in the 1960s, which was prosperous and had kept out of the Second World War. And fascism, he explains, is neither communist nor capitalist.
No, I’m not going to put the video up here. Because he’s arguing for fascism after all. Now he’s got a point in that some political scientists and historians do make a distinction between Nazism and Fascism. Nazism is at its heart a form of biological racism and has its own origins unique to Germany, while Italian Fascism was a form of militaristic nationalism which included elements of both socialism and capitalism. However, Italian Fascism was also imperialistic, calling Italy a ‘proletarian nation’ that had been unjustly deprived of colonies by the great powers of Britain and France. It invaded Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia, as well as Tripolitania in north Africa and Ethiopia. In nearly all these countries the Fascists committed horrendous atrocities. They also developed racial policies similar, but not as harsh as the Nazis, defining Italians as Aryans as contrasted with the Jews, who were expelled from various professions. Both Nazism and Fascism supported and protected private industry, but the economy was centrally planned by the state. Germany was a complete dictatorship under Hitler, in which the Reichstag was only called once a year to sign the act stating that Germany was still in a state of emergency and so Hitler’s dictatorship could legally continue, In Italy Mussolini let the Italian parliament continue for a few years until he replaced it with a chamber of Fasces and corporations. A corporation in this case was an industrial organisation, one for each industry, that contained both management and the unions. By the 1930s there were 27 of these. They were supposed to run the various industries, but in practice they served just to rubber stamp the decisions Mussolini had already taken.
I’ve read some of the comments that have been left on the video. Some of them are rants against Tony Blair’s period in office and complaints that it was supported by a biased media. Well, one paper stood against him – the Daily Heil. And you can wonder who had the real power in Blair’s relationship with the media, as he was always worrying whether his policies would meet the approval of one Rupert Murdoch. And Blair was a Tory in all but name. Thatcher, remember, regarded him as her greatest achievement. I’ve also notice that several of the commenters can’t spell Nazism. They’ve spelled it ‘Natzim’.
Of course, it hasn’t just been the association with the Nazis that has tarnished Italian Fascism. It’s also the various brutal dictatorships that have appeared across the world that committed horrendous atrocities, like the various military dictatorships in Latin America, the most famous of which is General Pinochet’s in Chile, as well as Greece under the Colonels. You can also attack his argument by pointing out he deliberately confuses socialism with communism. Communism is a form of socialism, but it is not the definitive form. For most British Labour supporters and politicians before Blair and his stupid, Thatcherite ‘Third Way’, socialism meant democratic socialism, which supported and included parliamentary democracy, and a mixed economy. This was the type of socialism practised by the reformist socialist parties of western Europe, like the German Social Democrats. And this form of socialism was keen to support human rights and democracy to a greater or lesser extent, as shown in the various people who joined anti-apartheid and anti-racism movement and gave Khrushchev a hard time when he visited the country about the imprisonment of socialist dissidents in the USSR.
I’ve left this comment on Webb’s video. I wonder if anyone will reply.
‘Salazar is probably best viewed as a reactionary Catholic like General Franco, rather than a pure Fascist. His books apparently are pretty much about Roman Catholic dogma, rather the secular ideas which informed Italian Fascism. And Fascism wasn’t just nationalism or dictatorship. Would your readers want definitive features of fascism like a state-directed economy, even if it is done through private industry and the corporate state, in which parliament is replaced by a chamber representing industries, each corporation including management and unions, which is charged with running the economy?’
I found this little snippet in today’s Independent fascinating. I’m a fan, sort-of, of Frank Herbert’s classic SF epic, Dune. This is set on Arrakis, a desert planet, whose sandworms are the only known source of the drug Spice, whose mind-expanding effects allow the mutated human navigators to guide their spacecraft across the galaxy without the use of computers. The planet’s original settlers, the Fremen, use stillsuits, technological body suits that harvest water from their sweat and body fluids to produce drinkable water, enabling them to survive for weeks even in the deep desert. And the Fremen have also established a network of cisterns to gather water as part of a project to turn their arid world green.
That type of technology and engineering, used to reclaim and channel water in desert areas, fascinates me. There are ingenious machines now that collect water from the humidity in the atmosphere, to produce drinking water. Nearly 2,000 years ago, a Greek engineer created a huge moisture-gatherer in one of the ancient Greek colonies on the Black Sea to provide the town with water despite the absence of rain or rivers. Now, according to the Independent, Peruvian engineers are renovating the ancient system of canals the Incas used to irrigate their land. The article by Samuel Webb, ‘Ancient Incan technology being used to harvest water to combat Peru’s crisis’, begins
Techniques used by servants of the Inca empire to build canals 500 years ago are being resurrected in Peru to funnel much-needed water to remote mountain communities and the city of Lima below.
Gregorio Rios, 74, oversaw the renovation of the vast network of canals above San Pedro de Casta, a town 3,000 metres above sea level in the South American country’s Huarochiri district.
The canals were built centuries ago by the Yapani ethnic group, using clay and rocks ingeniously compressed over a long period of time.
The local municipality previously used concrete to build new modern canals, but it stifled plant growth, affecting the local ecosystem, and crumbled after just 10 years.
The Yapani canals, by contrast, are more than 500 years old. New canals built with the ancient techniques could last for more than 100 years if built correctly. They are also permeable, so the water is filtered and plant roots help anchor the structure in place.
Mr Rios, whose work is supported by Warwickshire-based charity Practical Action, said: “Our ancestors built the canals with rock and clay. That knowledge is being lost and it’s in our interest to recover it.
“We have got to take control of the management of water for the crops. This is all being done thanks to the knowledge of our ancestors.”
In Chile, farmers use networks of string placed across their fields to collect moisture from the sea mists for their crops despite the lack of rainfall in that part of the country.
And over in Iran and Afghanistan, there’s an ancient system of subterranean canals, the qanats, irrigating those countries deserts and arid regions.
I find it absolutely fascinating that such ancient methods and modern technology are together being used to combat the desert and the contemporary water shortage caused by climate change.
Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race (New York: Basic Books 2013)
Thomas Sowell is himself a Black American intellectual. A former Marxist, he wrote an excellent book on Marxism which I’ve used on this blog, before crossing the floor to become a conservative. According to the blurb on the back flap, he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow for Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. That’s the same Milton Friedman, I presume, who backed General Pinochet’s Fascist regime in Chile because only a Fascist regime could introduce the free market reforms and abolition of the welfare state Friedman wanted against the wishes of the workers. The same Milton Friedman whose monetarism was considered so daft by economics lecturers in the 1970s that they simply didn’t bother discussing or refuting them. The same Friedman who caused consternation in Tory ranks in the late 1980s when he announced that his policies were a failure.
Race and IQ in the views of the Progressives
The book is a survey of official attitudes to race, intelligence and social, economic and intellectual achievement from the Progressive era around the close of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th up to the late 20th century and today. These two periods had markedly different attitudes towards race, and especially its supposed links to intelligence. During the Progressive era, senior academics, intellectuals, politicians and policy makers followed the social Darwinist dogmas of their day and believed that race defined intelligence. They believe in a racial hierarchy of peoples, with Nordic Whites at the top, southern Europeans below them, Black Africans below them and right at the bottom aboriginal Australians. This led to brutal, callous and genocidal attitudes towards race. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, declared that ‘we should not be sentimental about the gradual extinction of inferior races’. They were particularly worried about the decline in superior Nordic immigrants from Europe and mass immigration from the supposedly inferior peoples from southern Europe. Hence they were keen to impose legislation limiting the arrival of the latter. They were also afraid that intellectual inferior Whites from the lower orders would also outbreed their more intelligent social superiors, and so imposed legislation providing for their sterilisation and isolation. These men weren’t cranks. They included leading academics from America’s best universities, and politicians like American presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Most of the examples Sowell gives were on the political left. They believed in conservation, state intervention, publicly owned utilities and strong trade unions. He does, however, mention that over here in Britain eugenics’ supporters included Ernest Beveridge, H.G. Wells and Conservatives like Winston Churchill.
The American authorities thus initiated a programme of IQ testing, the results of which do appear to show that they were right about the average IQ of certain racial groups at the time. But many of the groups whose IQ scores were low have gone on to achieve considerable social and economic success. Blacks had an average IQ of 85, but other immigrant groups like Greeks, various Slavic peoples also had IQs in the low 80s, while Spanish immigrants had an average IQ, on these tests, of 77. These low-scoring peoples also included eastern European Jews, which is astonishing given the massive uplift of the Jewish community and their prominence in academia. As for the Chinese, who believers in the Bell Curve consider are superior to Whites in intelligence, they were found to have an IQ of 98. Interestingly, Blacks from the northern US scored higher on IQ tests than southern Whites. This racist ideology had a direct effect on Black employability. Under Wilson, various state departments, such as the post office, began to sack their Black workers. But not all of those who believed in the link between race and IQ were monsters. One psychologist stated that he took 3 sessions with a child before administering the test. He believed the children he saw were more intelligent than the tests showed. he therefore spent time getting them used to him. In the first three sessions he let them play, drawing on the blackboard, making things with clay. It was at the fourth session he administered the test. Using this technique, the children’s test scores went up by 8 points. This psychiatrist still believed that this was a small amount, but it is roughly half of the 15 per cent average difference between Black and White IQs. The link between IQ and race was later discredited when another psychiatrist issued damning criticisms against it, one of which was that the tests were not often not administered in a language the subjects, often immigrants, understood. The same psychiatrist also did not believe that Blacks were incapable of being educated, but thought that they could achieve much more given better teaching methods.
General Rise in IQ
He also notes that IQs generally are rising, and that no-one really knows the true range of the Black IQ, or even that of the human race as a whole. The reason why average IQs have always remained at 100 is that they’ve been periodically renormed to keep 100 as the average level. If they weren’t, and psychiatrists continued using the same standards, then the average Black IQ would 104. As for the range of Black intelligence, he cites the example of a nine year old girl, who by one set of tests had an IQ of 140, and 200 by another set. Unfortunately, his scepticism towards racial differences in IQ does not extend to the Bell Curve, whose authors and work he defends. He notes that they state in the book that there isn’t enough evidence to decide one way or another if IQ is affected by race.
But IQ alone does not explain why some groups outperform others, even when their intelligence is exactly the same. For example, Chinese with an IQ of 100 perform at the same level in jobs, education and so on, as Whites with IQs of 120 or so.
Culture and Historic Environment as the Determining Factors in Ethnic Skills and Performance
Sowell believes that the performance of ethnic groups depends on the environment in which these groups historically lived and their traditional culture. These create skills which have allowed minority groups the world over to achieve prominence in business and academia, such as the Germans in Latvia and Bohemia, the Jews in eastern Europe, and the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia. These groups have often prospered despite immense persecution, like the Jews. For example, Italian immigrants to the US and Australia were dirt poor. But they always repaid their debts, hence a separate bank was set up in California, the Bank of Italy, was set up to cater to them. This bank eventually became the Bank of Italy. At the same time there was a marked disparity between the achievements of Jewish and Italian kids at school. The two groups lived in the same areas and attended the same schools. But Jews did much better than Italians. Why? Sowell puts this down to different cultural attitudes towards education. Even the poorest Jews had a respect for learning, while there was a hostility to it in the Italian south, from which many of the latter migrants came. When there Italian government introduced compulsory schooling, there were riots, and attacks on teachers and schools. He takes issue with some of these groups now being described as ‘privileged’. A survey of different races in Toronto declared that the Japanese were the most privileged people in the city. But the Japanese owe their success to their own efforts, not privilege. They were also subjected to restrictive legislation and were interned during the Second World War for far longer in Canada than in the US. He is also highly sceptical that racism accounts for the poor performance of American Blacks. While they’re often the last to be hired, and the first to be fired, the next in line for sacking are Whites. Asians are the last to go, and perform better generally than Whites, even in White owned companies. But this is not mentioned in discussions about race, as it would cast doubt about the poor performance of Blacks being solely due to White racial prejudice.
White Racism as the Cause for Black Marginalisation
And it’s White racial prejudice which is the dominant explanation for Blacks lagging behind Whites and the rest of society today. This began with Gunnar Murdal’s 1944 book, An American Dilemma, which claimed that this was due to ‘confused and contradictory’ attitudes among Whites. But Sowell considers this an insufficient explanation, as American Blacks made their greatest progress, both professionally, economically and educationally, during the period before the Civil Rights Act, when racism and overt discrimination was far more acute. He also describes how White racial attitudes changed over time. For example, from 1840 to 1890 some areas were remarkably racially tolerant. In these cities, Whites and Blacks lived in the same areas. As time went on, Blacks not only exercised their right to vote, but also were elected themselves in areas where the majority of voters were White. There were no zoning regulations and the communities weren’t segregated. Sowell believes this was because the Black communities that had moved north in this period had become acculturated and had the same values and standards of behaviour as their White neighbours. This changed with mass Black migration from the south. Sowell draws on observers to the south, like Alexis de Toqueville, Frederick Olmsted and others, to argue that there is a common southern culture, shared by Blacks and Whites, and ultimately coming from the British immigrants that settled those areas. This culture rejects education in favour of aggressive masculinity., The new Black migrants had none of cultural values of the previous Black arrivals,. Crime rates shot up, dismaying the traditional Black citizens as well as Whites. As a result, these communities introduced zoning laws segregating the two colours.
As time went on, the Progressives called themselves liberals, and the explanation for Black underachievement and poverty changed from intelligence to White racism. The solution for these ills, as proposed by the intellectuals, is multiculturalism. Blacks are to be given greater access to academic places through preferential treatment that allows them to get into universities with lower grades than White applicants. At the same time, the features of Black culture that are holding the Black community back are either excused or simply denied as well as the racist attacks by Black gangs on Whites and Asians. Multiculturalism, according to Sowell, is not only not working, it is actually positively harmful.
Affirmative Action Holding Blacks Back Educationally
The book argues that, contrary to the claims made by some educationalists, there doesn’t need to be a ‘critical mass’ of Blacks in a class to get the bright Black students to do better. What works instead is when bright blacks are put in with Whites at the same intellectual level. As for university admissions, much harm is being done through mismatching Black applicants with the wrong colleges. Elite American universities are giving places to Black students, who without such preferential placements would have gone instead to second tier universities. These students find it difficult to keep up, and drop out. The second tier universities, denied a pool of applicants from these aspiring Blacks, offer places instead to Blacks, who would have gone to third tier institutions. And these two drop out, all the way down the line. This is a controversial assertion, and has been argued against, though the professors doing so have not made their research available to scrutiny by others. The book instead to the academic results achieved by the University of California when they dropped giving such preferential placements. There were drops in admissions at the some campuses, but of the Blacks who attended, more passed with better grades. He also argues from the example of Amhurst College that teaching Black history and insisting on Black culture also isn’t necessary for Blacks to get ahead. Amhurst was a Black only college that sent a small but significant number of students on to Stanford. Alumni from the college have said that they were taught Black history as it affect America, like slavery and abolition. But beyond that, it wasn’t taught and there was no interest in it. They said they knew about as much about Africa as they knew about Finland.
He also criticises such academic preferential programmes on the grounds that they don’t work for the poor who really need them. Instead the places offered go to members of the upper classes of the groups targeted. In America, that means the children of lawyers and businessmen. And it’s the same with the Indian version of affirmative action.
The Decline of Black Communities Following the ‘White Racism’ Explanation
Sowell also gets angry about how multiculturalism has led to the decline of life in Black communities. Anything done by Whites for Blacks is immediately suspected of being for some sinister, racist purpose. When a subsidized housing project was built in Harlem in the 1960s, writer James Baldwin declared that it showed how much Whites hated Blacks. That was why people were urinating in the lifts, smashing anything they could, and fornicating in the playground. Sowell argues that there was never a time when this would have been acceptable, and it didn’t occur before the ’60s and White racism became the explanation for everything. He cites the memoirs of other former residents of Harlem, who say that when they lived there, none of this vandalism and loutish behaviour occurred. He cites Theodore Dalrymple, one of the columnists in the Spectator, who declared that the same destructiveness is found among lower class Whites in Britain. They can’t blame racism, so it must come from a common attitude of resentment fostered by the post-60s intelligentsia.
He also argues that most Blacks were against the race riots of the 60s, citing polling data. One of the polls showed that 58 per cent of Blacks thought the riots were harmful for them. But the rioting was excused by the media, which claimed that the anger that fuelled it was quite rightly felt by all Blacks. Sowell is concerned and angry at the way Black culture is being dragged down to the lowest common denominator of rioters, criminals and vandals. He suggests that Black underperformance in schools comes from a resentment of intelligent, academically able Blacks by other students, who will attempt to stop them from achieving. And the same attitude, according to Dalrymple, exists among White Brits. From my own experiences at school forty years ago, I think Sowell has a point. There is a resentment among some Blacks and some Whites, not all, against anybody, who seems to be doing better than them, and they will bully them. For Sowell, this clearly harms the Black community when middle class Blacks feel compelled to emulate the poor behaviour of their less-achieving classmates.
Multiculturalism Preventing Blacks from Acquiring Social Skills Leading to Achievement
This attitude prevents Black Americans from acquiring the same civic qualities and skills that other groups have in their progress upward through society. For example, German Jews were highly acculturated, compared to more recent immigrants from eastern Europe. They took it upon themselves to educate and uplift them. As a result, eastern European Jews from Romania and elsewhere were told to learn English, speak without vulgarity ‘and learn the uses of soap’. Two Black newspapers in one of America’s northern cities advised Black arrivals not to dump their rubbish in the yard or the passage by their houses, watch their language, and not to talk too loudly on the tramcars. In other words, to act couth. Sowell doesn’t mention it, but similar attitudes were impressed on the British working class during the 19th and early 20th century as part of the culture of working class respectability.
Again, there’s a similar example from Britain. In the 1980s or 1990s, according to the Independent, the head of education in one of the northern towns had lost her job following accusations of racism by the Pakistani community. She’d been concerned at the way they took their children out of schools to send to Pakistan for three months at a time. This was damaging their educations. But the Pakistani community denounced her as racist, and had her sacked. It was over a decade before the council realised she was right and had the courage to reverse the policy.
Multiculturalism Creating Anti-White Racism and Violence
And then there’s the racial animosity produced by multiculturalism and its attitude that all Black America’s problems are due to White racism. This has led to racist mob attacks by Blacks against Whites and Asians, but they aren’t reported. In one, where a gang of Blacks attacked a White girl and 10 others, the cops when they arrived weren’t interested in taking down their statements or particulars, but told them simply to go home. As for a girl left bleeding from a punch, they laughed at her and joked ‘White girl bleed a lot’, which became the title of a book arguing that there was more violence by Blacks against Whites than the reverse. When these attacks occur, the race of the attackers is never identified. They are just unspecified ‘youths’. And if the details are given, then racism as a motive is both denied and justified. After a White woman was gangraped in Central Park by Blacks, a New York Times hack declared that racism wasn’t a cause, but it was part of their motivation as resentment against their treatment by White society. At the same time, a White academic has redefined racism so that it depends on power and privilege, as a way of denying Blacks can be racist.
Something very much like this has happened in Britain. Back at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, Whites were briefly the ethnic group suffering most racist assaults. And it was noted that the number of racist murders of Whites was nearly at the same level as the White racist murder of Blacks. And then there were the Asian grooming gangs, were allowed to get away with their predations for 20 years because the police and authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. And there have been the same accusations of the media cover-up of racist assaults and murders of Whites.
Another White academic felt that it was only right that young Whites should be denied places under academic preference schemes, considering how he had benefited from White privilege. Sowell states that he was therefore punishing someone younger, who had nothing to do with it, for something he himself had done. He makes the point that these decision are not about abstract people, but affect real individuals.
Slavery
He also discusses slavery, which is now held to be simply a case of Whites enslaving Blacks. But it has existed all over the world, from the days of the Roman Empire onwards. Before the arrival of Europeans, Africans enslaved other Africans, and there were more slaves in India than in the whole of the USA, and slavery was also extensive in China and southeast Asia. White Europeans were also enslaved by the Barbary pirates. Before the technology existed to transport slaves en masse, most civilisations enslaved people of their own race. As for racist lynchings, fewer Blacks were lynched in American history than Armenians were killed by Turks, or Ibo tribesmen by Nigerians in one year.
The Racism Industry and Its Assault on Business
He is also critical of what he terms the race industry and particularly the American equivalent of the Equal Opportunities Commission/ Equalities and Human Rights Commission. This prosecutes companies for not employing the correct number of ethnic employees according to demographic statistics, leading to long, expensive cases costing millions of dollars which drag out over the years from court to court. And this is despite no individual actually claiming they were subjected to racism by that corporation. Few companies can afford this process, and so they settle out of court. While this technically means that no offence has been made, it is taken by the department as an admission of guilt and a victory for them.
And what also infuriates Sowell is that none of the intellectuals, who ever pushed these policies, whether it is the racism and genetic determinism of the Progressive era or contemporary multiculturalism, ever has to take the consequences of their views. But academics, news people, politicians and educators will pay the price if they speak out against these orthodoxies. But intellectuals, meanwhile, promote these views with impunity, seeing themselves as the anointed on the side of the angels.
Sowell’s Right-Wing Bias
The book has a clear conservative bias. It’s no accident that Sowell marks out the Progressives as the promoters of social Darwinism, despite the same views being held by the right. Big businessmen during the Silver Age of the 19th century used social Darwinist arguments to oppose welfare and safety at work legislation. It was no use passing these laws, they argued, because the poor would never really benefit and would instead become a burden on society while outbreeding their brighter, more successful social superiors. But American conservatives are now using past racism to discredit anything left-wing. Previous generations of left-wingers were supposedly racist, so you shouldn’t back their policies today. It’s pure guilt by association. He likewise blames the expansion of the welfare state for the decline of the Black family, and argues that Black employment fell as a result of minimum wage laws passed in the 1930s. The motive of some of those arguing for them was that they were needed to prevent Chinese workers undercutting Whites. But this did happen, and resulted in race riots against the Chinese in 1909 in Britain. Then a number of companies sacked their White workers and replaced them with Chinese, causing the riots and racist attacks on Chinese people. After this, the firms sacked the Chinese workers and rehired the Whites. As for minimum wage laws today, these are desperately needed whether the workers are White, Black, Brown, Yellow or whatever. Without them the mass poverty we’re already seeing thanks to neoliberalism and the war in Ukraine will become particularly acute.
Decline of Marriage Not Due to Welfare State
I also disagree with his statement that the decline of marriage and the two-parent family among Black Americans is due to the welfare state or its expansion. I’m sure he’s right that this occurred in America about the same time as LBJ passed the welfare legislation of the late 60s, but as Sowell himself says, correlation is not causation. In Britain the marriage rate declined as a result of the sexual revolution of the 60s, but only really got going in the 1970s,, several decades after the introduction of the welfare state by Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1948. The decline of marriage as an institution might have been aided by the socially liberal legislation passed by Roy Jenkins in the 1960s, which made divorce much easier, but I think it has far more to do with a changing attitude towards sexual morality than greater welfare provision. At least over here in Britain.
Racial Tensions Increasing
But I do think he has a point about multiculturalism and the way it is leading to greater racial tensions. At one point in the book he states that in the 30s, 40s and 50s Whites would go into Harlem for entertainment and parties. This rings true, if only because this was the heyday of some of the great Jazz musicians and their orchestras – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Howlin’ Wolf, Duke Ellington. Yeah, I know, some of these were really in New Orleans, while Howling Wolf was in Chicago. At the end of a good evening’s fun, people were even able to sleep in Central Park unmolested. I believe that as well, as I’ve read interviews with various writers – I think one of them was veteran journalist of UFOs and the weird John Keel – who have done so.
And I do believe that attributing all of Black America’s problems to racism is making the situation worse. Note here that Sowell doesn’t deny racism existed or exists now. He just doesn’t believe that it’s the ultimate cause of Black America’s dire situation, not when other groups have suffered the same persecution, started out with the same low IQ scores, but have managed to rise and prosper like Jews, Asians and the Chinese. And here the book becomes a warning. Throughout history the resentment of the success of one ethnic group by the others, from the Czechs’ resentment of the Sudetenland Germans, to the Chinese in southeast Asia and Malaya, the Indians and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and the Jews in eastern Europe, has resulted in terrible official persecution and ethnic cleansing. Here he could have added the White farmers in Zimbabwe, attacked, beaten and murdered by Robert Mugabe’s thugs. These tensions have been exacerbated by versions of affirmative action. This suggestion also contains another veiled criticism of socialism, as the resentments he criticise also apply to those at the bottom of society against those at the top, and he is very much against redistributive economics. But redistributive economics through a strong welfare state in Britain has meant that there hasn’t been the level of grinding poverty that there is in the US, where the living standards of some parts are worse than some developing countries. This may be one of the reasons why the crime rate here in Britain and Europe has traditionally been lower than the US. People traditionally haven’t been as desperate. Quite apart from the fact that if social tensions in America and Britain have got worse, it’s because of an increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, so that ordinary Americans and Brits don’t feel that the system is rewarding them as it should for their hard work.
Critical Race Theory as an Explanation for the Failure of Affirmative Action Programmes
Sowell states that these affirmative actions programmes were, in many cases, only supposed to be temporary. But they have always been renewed. We’ve had positive discrimination in Britain for forty years now, ever since riots of 1981/2. These were also supposed to be only temporary. I think the intention was that after Blacks gained proper demographic representation proportional to the White majority, the situation would become self-sustaining. The programmes could be discontinued because Blacks would no longer need such official help. But this hasn’t happened. Blacks still lag behind, and have been particularly hard hit by austerity and the banking crisis.
I think this is one reason why the radical left is pushing Critical Race Theory and White privilege, even though some of this is obvious nonsense. CRT holds that the level of racism is the same today as 100 years ago. It’s just better hidden. But I doubt that very, very much. At the same time, all Whites are racist and benefit from the privilege of having White skin. But this is also not true, as shown by the White vagrants you can see on the streets and the very fact that many of the BLM protesters were White. There is institutional racism, but I don’t think it can be held to be the source of all the Black community’s problems. And I do fear that the belief that White racism is responsible for Black poverty and marginalisation is just increasing racial tensions. CRT and White privilege seem to me to be a desperate attempt to explain why previous anti-racism policies haven’t worked, and making even more dubious claims. Sowell states that the supporters of multiculturalism never give any supporting evidence for their views, and are never asked for any. It’s just assumed they’re right. The Black Tory MP, Kemi Badenoch, has today been reported as stating that the concentration on race is resulting in greater segregation. She may well have a point.
Perhaps now’s the time that multiculturalism and its accusations of racism as the cause of Black poverty and marginalisation should be questioned.
Here’s another piece of socialist music I really had to put up. It’s Quilapayun – Venceremos on the Commieball channel on YouTube. The images accompanying the song simply show the late, democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in the CIA-backed coup that ushered in the bloody reign of Maggie’s friend General Pinochet.
‘Veneremos’ is Spanish for ‘We shall prevail’, and the song is about how the Chilean people – peasants, soldiers, miners, women, students, employees, workers’ will prevail over fascism and sow a new land, ending with pledges to ‘fulfil’. It’s a stirring tune with overtones of Andean indigenous melodies on the panpipes. The American right and the secret state regarded Allende as a threat not only because he was a Marxist, but because he was a democratically elected Marxist. His election showed that Marxism could be genuinely popular and not imposed by force or gerrymandering, as with the Bolshevik coup that inaugurated Communist rule in Russia and the way Stalin rigged the elections and political systems in eastern Europe to foist Communist regimes on its peoples. Allende’s election threatened the image of Marxism as a threat to democracy, and so Allende had to go.
The blurb for the song on the YouTube mentions Allende’s overthrow in Pinochet’s coup that outlawed all political parties, but especially the socialist and communist ones, and gives the Spanish lyrics.
This is a response to a video posted up today on YouTube by Simon Webb of History Debunked. I’ve posted up a number of his videos because I think he does have a point when it comes to some of the bad history, if not plain myths and fabrications that are being retailed as sound, authoritative Black History. I’ve been criticised for some of this by some of great commenters on this channel, who take issue with some of his views and believe he had an agenda. And they’re right. Webb is a right-wing, Telegraph-reading Tory, some of whose views are deeply suspect if not actually abhorrent. He believes in the ‘Bell Curve’ nonsense that says that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites, who are in turn inferior to Asians. Interestingly, the American Conservative Thomas Sowell, who is no supporter of affirmative action programmes, consigns that one to the bin in a video about the myths surround Black education. This states that the fall in Black scholastic achievement has been so sudden that even the writer of the Bell Curve said it could not be explained by genetic factors. He also put up a video stating he didn’t want a wave of eastern European refugees coming to this country, and has posted pieces about the deportation of immigrants and defending Enoch Powell. Today he posted a video discussing Milton Friedman’s pronouncement that you couldn’t have unlimited immigration and a welfare state.
Yeah, that Milton Friedman. The Chicago economist who believed in absolute free markets and wanted to privatise everything and end the welfare state. The man who supported General Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, because the Fascist butcher was a follower of his wretched economic doctrines. The man who supported Fascist coups, because the masses were so much in favour of the welfare state that they would never vote into power politicians who would destroy them. The Milton Friedman who cursed the world with Monetarism before that spectacularly showed itself to be a colossal failure in the late 1980s-early ’90s. I see absolutely no reason why any sensible or decent person should take Friedman and his views at all seriously.
Webb seems to believe that the welfare state is under pressure because of continued mass immigration. This brings to this country waves of the global poor, who must be fed, clothed and housed with the resources of the welfare state. But people cannot afford to pay the additional taxes required to fund this, hence the welfare state and the NHS are under considerable pressure and near collapse.
Now he’s right in that very many immigrants to this country are extremely poor, especially those from outside Europe. Hence the demands for specific policies and welfare expenditure for Blacks and ethnic minorities. But his video seems to assume that extra-European immigrants really come here to sponge off the welfare state. That’s certainly the impression you get from the Tory propaganda regurgitated by the right-wing press. But is it true?
I honestly don’t think so. In fact the reality may be the complete opposite. I don’t believe that all of the immigrants arriving here are simply refugees seeking asylum. But I don’t think they’re here to sponge off the welfare state either. I think many come here seeking better opportunities and jobs. Years ago I tried doing a postgraduate degree on Islam in Britain. I had to give it up, but not before I’d done some reading about Islam, history and immigration. One of the books I bought was a series of potted biographies of people from the Middle East from the early 19th century to the present day, their lives illustrating the wider history, conflicts and issues affecting the region and its peoples. One of these was of a Moroccan immigrant to the Netherlands. This man had immigrated to Europe simply looking for work. There wasn’t any available in his native country. The immensely profitable fig groves were all owned by wealthy and powerful landowners, who kept outsiders out. There were also little jobs in manufacturing, as Moroccans preferred to buy foreign goods from countries like Italy. And so it was left to him and others like him to come to Europe searching work. He was scathing about European attempts to limit immigration, as when he had first arrived in the 1970s employers, such as the one he worked for in Germany, were so desperate for labour that they gave out the necessary forms there and then.
I’ve also read that it’s immigrant labour which also contributes disproportionately to the tax burden. They tend to work in poorly paid jobs that we wouldn’t normally take, and don’t take as much time off or rely so much on the welfare state, contrary to what the Tories allege. But claiming that they do serves the purpose of whipping up hatred against them and allowing the Tories a pretext for cutting welfare benefits. Because you don’t want all that money spent on foreign scroungers. But as Tony Benn said, how the government treats immigrants shows how it would also like to treat native Brits. And this has been born out by the expansion of food banks. These were set up after Tony Blair stopped illegal immigrants from being eligible for state benefits. Then the Tories under Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith decided that they would be whizzo for keeping native Brits from starvation – just – if they took their benefits away through sanctions and increased legislation designed to restrict eligibility. Because the poor are also scroungers, at least to the editors of papers like the Meil, Depress and Torygraph.
As for problems funding the NHS and the welfare state, these exist not because of asylum seekers, but because the Tories have massively cut expenditure in order to give massive tax cuts to the rich. While shifting the tax burden to the poor. And in the case of the NHS, it’s also being done to prepare for its privatisation. It has zip to do with the burden of caring for extra people through immigration.
I think there are problems with mass immigration, not least that of separate, parallel communities. But I don’t believe that people are coming to this country because of the welfare state.
If they are not coming here seeking refuge and sanctuary from persecution, it seems to me that they are coming here to work. Anything else is just right-wing propaganda.
Oh ho! This is very amusing. The Tory party has always positioned itself, at least since the 19th century, as the party of Britishness. If you listen to its supporters and propaganda, it’s the party of the British constitution and the union, protecting our ancient liberties and defending our great nation from plots and attacks by evil foreigners. Historically this largely meant the French, but today means the EU and Scots Nationalists. Under Maggie Thatcher this nationalism became particularly shrill. The 1987 Tory election broadcast showed Spitfires zooming about the sky while an excited voice told us that ‘We were born free. It’s our fundamental right’ and ended with ‘It’s great, to be great again!’ Political theorists who’ve read, or at least heard of Rousseau could correct the first statement. At the beginning of his book, The Social Contract, which became one of the founding texts of the French Revolution, Rousseau said: ‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’ Which is probably not something Thatcher wanted said about her government. As for being ‘great again’, this was the period when Thatcher was selling our state industries off to foreign investors, destroying trade unions, cutting unemployment and other welfare benefits and trying to find ways to get people to take out private medical insurance instead of relying on the NHS. She would have liked to have privatised that, but was prevented by a massive cabinet rebellion. At the same time she was using her ‘strong state’ against striking miners and anyone else she thought was an evil Commie subversive while at the same time propping up truly evil Fascist dictators abroad. Like the brute General Pinochet, responsible for the murder and torture of 30,000 people in his native Chile. The country’s present grinding poverty and crumbling infrastructure are all a result of her policies. The identification of the Conservative party with Britishness was so loud and crass that, reviewing the election broadcast on Radio 4’s The News Quiz, the late, much-missed humourist Alan Coren referred to the planes as ‘the Royal Conservative Airforce’. I also remember one of the Observer’s columnists referring to the Tories as ‘the patriotic party’.
But now aspersions have been cast on the Britishness of the Tories’ leader and current head of the country, Boris Johnson. Simon Webb of the History Debunked YouTube channel put up a piece yesterday asking ‘How British Is Boris Johnson?’ This speculated that Johnson carries on the way does because, quite simply, he isn’t really British. He was born in New York, and is of mixed Turkish and American ancestry. He is also part Jewish, which is one reason why I’m not going to put the video up here. One of the elements of the genuine anti-Semitic conspiracies is the allegation that Jews aren’t really patriotic citizens because of their international connections and foreign ancestry and relatives. They have frequently been accused of being ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ with no real connection or loyalty to the gentile peoples among which they settle. It’s a poisonous allegation that has resulted in the murder of countless innocents and encouraged the formation and growth of Fascist organisations and parties like the Nazis. The vast majority of British Jews are as British as everyone else. And before the Second World War, the vast majority of Jews wished to remain in the countries of their birth, to be accepted as patriotic fellow citizens by their gentile countrymen. It’s why the leaders of the British Jewish community during the First World War actually opposed the Balfour Declaration. They did not want the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine nor anywhere else, as it could lead to the accusation that their loyalties were divided. And they weren’t. They were, and wanted to be seen as, patriotic Brits.
But there is a kind of irony in Boris Johnson, a pukka old Etonian, and true-blue Tory being accused of not being British enough.
And I think Webb has a point, though not in the sense he means. At the heart of the right-wing ranting and suspicion about the ‘globalists’, supposedly plotting to create an evil, Satanic one-world Communist state, there’s an element of truth. Regardless of their nationality or ancestry, it appears to me that the global superrich really are forming a separate international class whose loyalty is primarily to themselves and not to the people below them, even if these people are of the same nationality. You can see that in the way the Tory grandees and those like them move their capital around the world, investing in countries on the other side of the world while making pay and conditions worse over here and cutting benefits. As far as I know, Jacob Rees-Mogg is thoroughly British in his ancestry. He also projects a caricatured, right-wing image of Britishness very much like his nickname of ‘Lord Snooty’. He also backed Brexit, which was supposed to be another patriotic gesture in which Britain took back her sovereignty.
In fact Brexit has wreaked massive harm to our economy, disastrously cutting British firms off from continental markets and suppliers. The deals we’ve made, or are trying to make, with the Americans, Australians and New Zealanders are to our disadvantage, whatever the Tory mouthpieces say to the contrary. And the response of Rees-Mogg and the superrich like him amply demonstrate where their loyalties lie. Even before Brexit, Mogg had invested in companies in the far east. And when he was urging everyone to vote to leave the EU, he was moving his own financial interests to Eire. This was to pick up on all the EU business he would otherwise have lost if they’d remained centred in Britain. Which is, to me, another example of Tory hypocrisy.
Back in the 19th century Disraeli declared in his books Coningsby and Sybil that Britain was divided into two nations, the rich and poor, who had no knowledge or connection with each other, and demanded that this should be remedied. They’ve been talking about ‘One Nation’ Toryism every since. This is done by leaders like John Major, Michael Howard, David Cameron and so on, and is supposed to show that they are from that branch of the party that still has some paternalistic regard for those below them. The same people talk, or used to talk, about ‘caring Conservativism’. This is all the while doing what Tories always do – cut benefits, wages, and employment conditions and make it easier to sack people. All while manipulating the stats to persuade people that this is actually working and that they’re somehow better off.
Tony Benn in one of his books said something about the British ruling class regarding the lower orders as indeed like a foreign nation. Thinking about the Britannia Unchained mob, he had a point. This was the book written by a group of Tory MPs, including the smirking insult to decency, Priti Patel, that said that for Britain to compete in the global market, British workers must endure the same terrible conditions and wages as those elsewhere in the world, like India. A similar view was put forward by a former Lib Dem MP for Taunton Deane in Somerset. I’ve forgotten who he was, but I do remember his appearance on the local news. Introducing him, the interviewer stated that he came from a family of colonial administrators and governors. This strongly suggests to me that, deep down, he regarded British people of all colours in the same way his family had regarded the Africans and other indigenous peoples they governed.
And going back back to the 1920s, George Bernard Shaw attacked the Tory claim that they and the rich represented Britain and her interests in his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism by pointing out that the rich spent much of their time and money abroad, and preferred to invest in firms in the colonies using cheap indigenous labour. And this still remains absolutely true. One of the problems with Britain’s banking system is that its investment banks are geared to putting money into commonwealth rather than domestic industries.
At a fundamental level, Boris Johnson and the rest of the Tory elite really don’t have any connection to the Brits below them. It’s not because of their ancestry. In my view, they’re the same whether they’re completely British by descent. It’s because they are part, and see themselves as part of an international industrial and political class, who move their businesses and investments from one country to another without concern for how this affects their fellow countrymen. All the while trying to deceive the rest of us by yelling about their Britishness and British values.
Johnson and the Tories aren’t British patriots, except at the crude level of repeating nationalist slogan and anti-immigrant attitudes. Ordinary Brits are foreigners to them, like the low-waged workers in other countries they also seek to exploit.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French film director and comics creator. He was responsible for a number of very bizarre Surrealist films, such as Holy Mountain, one of which features a battle between the Incas and invading conquistadors as enacted by frogs in period costumes. In the 1970s he tried to make a film version of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune, which would have starred Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, his son, Brontis, as Paul Atreides, and Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha. Concept art was by H.R. Giger, Salvador Dali, Chris Foss and legendary French comics artist, Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud. Dali would also have played the Emperor of the Universe. However, the great Surrealist stipulated that he would only act for half an hour. So Jodorowsky planned to make a robotic Dali to play the Emperor for the rest of the film. The film was, however, abandoned when the producers stopped funding due to mounting costs. Jodorowsky and Moebius weren’t dismayed, and used the material they had already produced for the film as the basis for their comic book, The Incal. Although it was never made, Jodorowsky’s Dune has influenced a number of later SF movies and a film version of The Incal is now underway.
In this video, hosts Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg look through Panic Fables, produced when Jodorowsky was living in Mexico. Jodorowsky had been teaching mime at university, but was now blacklisted. He could no longer teach or make films. He therefore turned his creative talents into comics. Panic Fables describe themselves as teaching initiatory wisdom. This doesn’t surprise me, as I go the impression that Jodorowsky has a very strong interest in esoteric mysticism. However, this doesn’t impress one of the Kayfabers. He’s from Pittsburgh, and so when someone talks about mystic knowledge, it seems to him to be all about separating the rich from their money. The pair are nevertheless impressed by Jodorowsky’s creativity, commenting on his drawing style and unique use of colour in the strips. They also wonder what American influences may have reached Jodorowsky from north of the border, as it was published at the same time the first underground comics were beginning in America, and both Jodorowsky’s work and the undergrounds mark a radical departure from contemporary comics.
Panic Fables are obscure much less well-known than Jodorowsky’s films or his comics with Moebius, The Incal and then The Metabarons. But the video about them give an insight into his considerable creativity during this period, when the Mexican authorities were trying to close him down.
That’s the only way I think Tzipi Hotovely can fairly be described. She’s the Israeli ambassador who was hurried off the campus at LSE by the cops and her security guards as protestors against the genocidal brutality of the Israeli state made their feelings extremely clear. Needless to say, the government and the Blairite Labour leadership have metaphorically clutched their pearl in horror at what a terrible deed has been done to her. The protests have been condemned by Priti Patel and Starmerite rentagob Lisa Nandy. Mike has put up a couple of pieces about the incident, pointing out that Hotovely was never in any danger because of the police protection she enjoyed. And today he’s posted another article quoting a number of well-informed Twitterers and commenters, including Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada; the Groaniad journo Owen Jones, Natalie Strecker; Another Angry Voice and a Palestinian gent, Omar Ghraeib, which showed exactly how deeply unpleasant her extreme Israeli nationalist views are.
The Nakba, the forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians to create the nascent Israeli state in 1948 is well-documented. Historians have uncovered that it was achieved through massacres of thousands of Palestinians. People were gunned down hiding in mosques for sanctuary. A group of women tried to appease the Israeli troops through bringing them baskets of rice. They were shot in the stomach. All documented fact, covered in histories of the reality of the creation of Israeli on videos available on the internet. I think a few of them were put up by Abi Martin of The Empire Files on Tele-Sur. But Hotovely has declared this all ‘a lie’. This is, to me, as deplorable as the Nazis and anti-Semites peddling their lies that the Holocaust never happened, or the Turkish state covering up the Armenian genocide. But it’s also not just the Nadba she denies. She claims there’s no Palestinian people – a common trope of the Israeli state and its supporters over here. It started with Gold Meir and the Zionist pioneers claiming that the Palestinians were really recent settlers from Syria and other Arab nations because the landlords were absentees in those countries. It comes from the old Zionist slogan ‘A people without a land for a land without a people’ – except the land already had a people. Hence all the lies that the Palestinians don’t really exist, which I’ve seen repeated on extreme right-wing American and Canadian websites.
As an Israeli far-right nationalist, she wants Arab villages razed to be replaced by Jewish settlements. In May she was one of the main speakers at a Zionist demonstration in support of the Israeli embassy. During which the demonstrators showed just what kind of disgusting human beings they were by chanting in favour of burning down Palestinian villages and supporting Rabbi Mei Kahane, the founder of Kach. This is a group so extreme that even the Israelis call it a terrorist organisation. She so right-wing that she’s even called for Israel to invade Jordan and Syria. This is bonkers, but it would be supported by Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which would also like Israel to invade and annexe parts of Egypt and Iraq. Technically I think Syria is still at war with Israel due to the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights. A madman or -woman calling for real, renewed armed war is obviously a threat to peace in the Middle East. Which, incidentally she’s never given her explanation of how it can be achieved. A war-hungry maniac like her should not be let anywhere near power or international relations.
But let’s be fair, it’s not just Palestinians she hates. She also despises Jews, who protest against the Israeli state’s atrocities. In one of her wretched tweets she sneered at German Jewish critics, claiming in very anti-Semitic language that they were only doing it for the money. ‘Oy vey my German Euros!’, she tweeted. The mad right-wing Zionists trying to shut down any criticism of Israel do so by screeching that any critical remark must be an anti-Semitic trope. But this is a real one: that of the money-grubbing Jew. And right-wing Zionists also accuse their critics of being ‘offensive’! Well, I can only imagine how offensive her remarks must be to Jewish Germans, because the myth that Jews are materialistic, greedy and exploitative was at the heart of Nazi Jew-hatred and persecution. I’m also at a loss to know quite where she thinks these ‘German Euros’ that she claims were somehow being paid to her country’s Jewish German critics come from. They aren’t going to come from the German state, which supports Israel, nor its people, who are generally very friendly and well-disposed towards Jews. Germany is so welcoming towards Jews that many Israelis go there for their holidays. Nazism is banned under the Basic Law and Mutti Merkel’s government tried over and over to show that Germany was now a pluralist, anti-racist society that welcomed ethnic minorities. I dare say that there are individual Nazis ensconced in parts of the German state. But the German state as a whole is very, very definitely not going to give any kind of support to real anti-Semites.
The German-Jewish critics of Israel seem to me to be determinedly anti-racist generally. There’s a video on the web somewhere of the awesome Jackie Walker speaking at one of their meetings, and being given a warm welcome. This was after she was expelled from the Labour party on a trumped-up charge of anti-Semitism. She’s been subject to a torrent of horrendous abuse ever since, some of it viciously racist. She’s Black, and so her racist attackers have claimed she can’t be Jewish. There’s a vicious anti-Black racism in Israel. Abi Martin made a documentary a few years ago about the abuse and physical assaults made against Black Israelis. This included a maniac stabbing a baby in the head. The German Jews, who welcomed Walker and gave her a platform are far better people than Israel’s White supremacist defenders.
And just to show us what the state Hotovely so enthusiastically represents is actually like, Omar Ghraeib have tweeted about the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian boy by an Israeli soldier, and Agent Rachel Swindon has also tweeted about the Israeli army’s destruction of water pipes serving four Palestinian villages. This is quite common, and is a method of squeezing the Palestinians in an attempt to force them off their land. Israeli soldiers also throw chemicals into Palestinian wells to make the water undrinkable. And the tweeters also rightly point out that the UN has condemned Israel as practicing apartheid.
Nandy was yelling that the demonstration was terrible attack on free speech. Which also shows what a revolting hypocrite Nandy is. As Daniel Finn points out, Nandy will not breathe a word in defence of the Palestinians. Her commitment to anti-Palestinian racism is ‘quite extraordinary’.
Of course, Patel and Nandy have also screamed that the demonstration was ‘anti-Semitic’. No. Definitely no! Many of Israel’s most ardent critics are themselves decent, Torah-observant and secular Jews. They’re severely normal, self-respecting people, who aren’t ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘self-hating’ or any of the other wretched, vile smears that have been thrown at them. Some of them are Haredi Jews, who believe they are to remain in galut – exile – until the coming of the Messiah, as commanded in the Hebrew Bible and Torah. Others do so because they believe Israel violates the fundamental principles of the liberal Judaism they were raised in. You know, the type of Judaism that takes as its watchword ‘Jews should always be for the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And many are socialists following the ideas of the pre-War Bund, the Jewish socialist party that wanted Jews to stay in their ancestral homelands, fighting to be accepted as equals and friends by their gentile compatriots. Over here the British Jewish community before the First World War held exactly the same attitude. They wanted to be seen as patriotic Brits and Englishmen and women, not foreigners. The British Jewish establishment actually condemned the Balfour Declaration because they were afraid it would make gentile Brits see them as foreigners. It would create anti-Semitism. Philip Gould has posted a tweet from a Jewish group over here critical of Israel, Na’amod: British Jews Against Occupation. Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert of Judaism, but I think it’s clear from their Hebrew name that they aren’t self-haters and anti-Semites. Natalie Strecker has also posted a tweet showing that, in contrast to Israeli nationalist propaganda, it is far-rightists like Hotovely who are unrepresentative of the Jewish community: “Imagine being so racist that you think a white supremacist who believes Palestinians should be subject to genocide represents Jews!!!” This was in response to someone called Caolan, who claimed that the protests were all anti-Semitic.
Way back in the early part of this century, Blair got into terrible trouble when he arrested the Chilean Fascist dictator, General Pinochet. Pinochet was responsible for horrific torture and massacres, which included the murder of a Spanish lad. Spain had put out an extradition for his arrest. Pinochet had arrived in Britain and was visiting his old friend, Maggie Thatcher. Blair pounced and had him arrested for crimes against humanity pending extradition to Spain. Thatcher and the right screeched in protest because, well, Thatcher and a large section of the Tory party support right-wing Fascist thugs like Pinochet, and he had given us aid during the Falkland’s conflict. It was all horribly bungled, as Pinochet should have been officially told first that he was not welcome over here. Blair’s regime was also guilty of human rights violations because of its grubby illegal invasion of Iraq. But in this instance it was trying to act in accordance with international law and humanity.
Hotovely is not the head of her state, but Israel is still guilty of many of the crimes for which Pinochet’s regime is abominated and reviled. I think it can be fairly said that rather than being defended and protected, the British state should be demanding her withdrawal because her racism is so much opposed to genuine, liberal British values.
In my opinion, she’s a Fascist of the same stripe as Pinochet, who should be facing tough questions from the International Court of Human Rights. But the British establishment just loves foreign Fascists if they’re on our side. And so we could expect nothing but smears and condemnation of the LSE protestersby Patel and Nandy.
Here’s another piece of fascinating SF news from Quinn’s Ideas on YouTube. Apparently the New Zealand director, Taika Waititi is adapting Alejandro Jodorowsky’s SF comic/ graphic novel, The Incal. Jodorowsky’s a Chilean-French surrealist film maker and comics writer, among whose bizarre cinematics works is The Holy Mountain. I can’t remember if it’s that film or one of his others that contains a battle between Conquistadors and Incas played by frogs in period costumes. Jodorowsky tried to make a version of Dune in the early ’70s. This would have starred his son, Brontis, as Paul Atreides, Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha. The concept artists included Salvador Dali, H.R. Giger and Chris Foss. The film was never due to the producers pulling the funding as costs escalated. However, as Quinn explains, Jodorowsky used some of the material and ideas he had developed for the movie and, with French comics maestro Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, turned it into The Incal.
There are three books in the series, Before the Incal, The Incal and Final Incal.The Incal was the first published with art by Moebius, who did not draw the other three books although the art is still good. Jodorowsky’s Dune, although never made, nevertheless inspired a series of other movies including Star Wars and Luc Besson’s The FifthElement. The books follow the adventures of John De Fool, whose name is quite intentional and who is a fool figure while simultaneously being the most important person in the universe. The book’s are about his quest to obtain the Incal of the title, the most valuable object in the universe. Quinn wonders if the character of Fry from Futurama may also have been inspired by him. Futurama’s artwork is similar and Fry is also a fool. Quinn states that The Incal is very strange and not for everyone. In addition to it, Jodorowsky also created the Metabarons comics, which contains rather more of his Dune material. Quinn states that he knows Waititi best from his comedy films. One of these was the vampire comedy, What We Do In The Shadows. He therefore wonders how he’ll get on with the more serious material in The Incal, although this also has elements of comedy. Quinn also makes the point that it’s a great time for SF film and television, with Dune in the cinemas, Asimov’s Foundation on Apple TV and the news that Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is also being adapted.
This is interesting news, though I do wonder just how similar The Incal and the Metabarons are to Frank Herbert’s novel. I suspect that while they were inspired by Dune they’re actually very different. From what I understand of Jodorowsky movie, it would have been significantly different from Herbert’s book. And while I hope that this goes ahead, I also wonder how successful the film will be amongst anglophone audiences. Moebius and The Incal are well-known amongst comics fandom. BBC 4 screened a documentary about the great French comics artist a few years ago and I remember how, way back in the 1990s, his international cache was so strong, Marvel persuaded him to draw the Silver Surfer strip for them. However there is the problem of whether audiences outside France will be familiar enough with the comics to want to see the film. The film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was based on the long-running French SF strip, Valerian. This was a flop, and it has been suggested that one of the reasons it did was that international audiences simply weren’t familiar enough with the French strip to be interested. I’m not sure how true that is, as I think the film should still have been able to draw in audiences on its own merits even if most people didn’t know about the source comic. The Incal, however, might be in a better position in this regard as I think more SF fans across the world have heard about Jodorowsky and Moebius. Jodoroswky is involved with the film in any case, and so it should be very interesting to see how Waititi translates it to the big screen.
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