The Torygraph ran a story yesterday claiming that over half of Hindu schoolchildren in Britain had been bullied by their Muslim classmates. This included throwing beef at them, a particular insult given the Hindu veneration for cattle. The victims were supposedly told that the insults and violence would stop if they converted to Islam. The blog’s favourite YouTube non-historian, Simon Webb, posted a video about it on his channel this morning in which he added his own peculiar viewpoint on it. He claimed that the bullying was being ignored by Guardian-reading liberals, who would have otherwise been extremely annoyed and organising protests if the bullying had been by White children against Blacks and Muslims. I’m sure he’s right there. However, he claimed that the anti-Hindu bullying was being ignored because Guardian readers had convinced themselves that Hindutva was fascism, and because India was friends with Israel. This is nonsense. Many academic historians of Fascism across the world have concluded that Hindutva, militant Hindu nationalism, is fascistic. One of the Hindu nationalist prayers appears in a collection of fascist texts because it exemplifies the mystical strain of fascism. The RSSS, a paramilitary Hindu organisation, was modelled on Mussolini’s black shirts. I’ve put up a piece about ultra-nationalist Hindu priests putting bounties on the head of dissident Indians and calling for the death of blasphemers. There have been mass rallies calling for the abandonment of India’s secular, pluralist constitution and its transformation into a Hindu state. Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are the target of militant Hindu nationalist violence, with Muslims and their mosques especially targeted. I also remember a particularly repulsive incident back in the ’90s when one local Hindu nationalist politico announced his support for Hitler against the Muslims, and used the Nazi version of the swastika. But western liberal hatred of India fascism almost certainly isn’t behind the liberal left ignoring such anti-Hindu bullying.
Playground violence between different Asian groups has been around for a long time. I heard back in the 1980s that in one of the schools in a multicultural ward of Bristol the real conflict and violence wasn’t between Black and White, but between different Asian groups. I don’t know if the violence was based on religion, ethnicity or caste. I do remember, however, that talking about it to friends there was a real opposition to any recognition that Asian racism could be as bad or worse than White racism.
Part of the problem is that the anti-racist movement arose specifically to tackle White prejudice, hostility and discrimination against Blacks and other people of colour. It therefore has immense difficulty recognising that non-Whites also have their own racial prejudices and can also be responsible for racist abuse and violence. Some of this comes from the way the right-wing press in the 1980s framed the 1980s/81 race riots and continuing racial controversies as due to Black racism. Diane Abbott has said several times that she wasn’t going to tackle racism within ethnic minority communities, because this would lead ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. The result is that racism from non-Whites is played down or ignored. One Jewish writer for the right-wing online magazine, Spiked, wrote a piece describing how she also received anti-Semitic abuse and treatment from ethnic minorities. But this wasn’t reflected in the public discussions about anti-Semitism, which only dealt with it when it came from Whites.
This exclusive focus on White racism does not represent the complex reality of racial attitudes in multicultural Britain. This is grossly unjust, and needs to change, however uncomfortable it may be to official anti-racists like Diane Abbott.
I posted a video by Owen Jones taking apart the accusation that the Nazis were socialist a few days ago. Despite his claims to be one, Hitler stood for privatisation and cuts to the welfare state as well as racism and Social Darwinism, policies that are fundamental opposed to socialism. Oswald Mosley, like Hitler, also called himself a socialist despite not believing in socialist policies. He explains why he called his ideology ‘European Socialism in his answer to ‘Question 276: What is European “Socialism”? ‘in his book, Mosley: Right or Wrong? Mosley states
‘Any man has a right to call himself a socialist if he works for motives of public service rather than far private gain. That is why we used this phrase. Because our people have certainly proved that they work selflessly for the public good, and it is this spirit which is needed for the building of a new European system. But I am not going to use it in future because it has led to misunderstanding. British people in general think that socialism means the nationalization or bureaucratic control of industry, that it means the Labour party policy which was a concept of the last century. But Union Movement has never stood for anything of this kind. In practice, it has proved a mistake to use a phrase that can be misrepresented, and that is why I ceased to use it. I now use instead the term “European Service”.
Hitler took much of his ideology from right-wing authors like Moeller van den Bruck, who considered themselves revolutionary conservatives. One of these wrote a book called ‘The Worker’. They also called for what they considered to be socialism, but they also made it clear that by this they meant an ideology that encouraged individuals to work for the good of society as a whole, but did not mean the nationalisation of industry.
As for the question whether fascism is of the left or right, Mosley answered that in reply to ‘Question 285. Do you consider yourself to be of the Right or Left in politics?’ in his wretched book.
‘Neither. If any such description could be applied to us it would rather be the “hard centre”, the opposite to the present soft core. But I never use these terms in relation to our thinking, because they mean nothing to us. Our policy cuts clean across the “right” and “left” of the old world. These expressions are nonsensical when applied to us. In thought, we are no more Conservative than we are Socialist or Liberal. Our thinking is a creation of the modern age, though it has deeper roots in the European past than that of the old parties. I do not speak of our people as “right” or “left” but given them their true name: the vital forces of Europe.’
Fascism considers itself to be a third political ideology, neither left nor right, because it accepts private industry to subordinates it to state control. Thus, when the German neo-Nazis infiltrated one of the mainstream European parties in the ’80s, it wasn’t the left-wing SDP or the conservative Christian Democrats, but the liberal Freie Demokraten.
So much for Peter Hitchens’ idea that the Nazis were left-wing socialists.
This is an excellent video in which Guardian columnist Owen Jones attacks and refutes the right-wing myth that the Nazis were socialists, because Hitler said they were. In my experience, this is one the of the favourite accusations of the loony American libertarian right, who see any kind of state intervention in industry as a terrible infringement of sacred property rights and a form of Communism, leading ultimately to death camps and gulags. In fact, as Jones states in this video, there are plenty of examples where a country’s or political party’s name is deceptive. The German Democratic Republic, for example, wasn’t democratic, and the Russian Liberal Democratic Party is far-right. It’s the same with Hitler’s claim to be a socialist. He quotes Adolf Hitler to show that Hitler’s claim to be a socialist is based on his radical redefinition of the word, and his denial that the German Social Democrats, the Communists and Marxism itself are socialist. He goes further, and shows that the Nazis were Social Darwinists, who believed that the fittest would rise to the top while inferiors should stay at the bottom, replaced the socialist emphasis on class with race, and believed in competition as against socialist cooperation. He also makes the point that right-wing, non-fascist parties have also adopted anti-capitalist policies and rhetoric when it suits them. For example, Reform have recently announced they will nationalise the public utilities. As for the red in the Nazi flag, Hitler put it in their to troll the left so they would attend his meetings.
The Nazis’ real political orientation is shown by their cooperation with right-wing parties, like the German National People’s Party, the DNVP, and with German big business. In fact, 29 heads of industry wrote to President Hindenburg calling for him to appoint Hitler as chancellor. In return, Hitler made a speech to various industrialists announcing that private enterprise could not survive democracy and required a dictatorship to protect it. The Nazis received generous funding from firms like Krupps, I.G. Farben and Porsche, who greatly benefited from the Nazi regime and the exploitation of slave labour.
In power the Nazis followed right-wing, pro-capitalist policies such as the privatisation of industry, very much against the trend of the times. They also cut back the welfare provision that had been established by the Weimar Republic, and replaced it with their private charity, the Winterhilfe. All good, Thatcherite policies. Real socialist parties were smashed, as were the trade unions, and their members placed in concentration camps. They also forced women back into their traditional domestic role, again, not a socialist policy. There was a socialist element within the Nazi in the SA, the Nazis paramilitary group, but they were purged and murdered at the request of Hitler’s backers in big business.
The Nazis did establish a rigorous system of state control during the War, but Jones views this as a response to the conditions of wartime. Britain also had a planned economy, but it would be ridiculous to say that the British government was also socialist or communist.
The video is a response to a piece Peter Hitchen’s wrote in one of the middle-market tabloids. If it’s the Heil, they’re probably hoping that people won’t remember how they backed Mosley and his not-at-all socialist BUF. I’ve found other people repeating the same accusation that the Nazis were socialists on the net. However, one of these also claims that the SPD at the time of the German council revolution of 1919 was a Marxist revolutionary party. Well, it was partly based in Marxism, but also contained a revisionist right, led by Edward Bernstein. Bernstein had noticed that capitalism was not collapsing and the working class had become more wealthy during the 19th century. He therefore recommended a reformist, evolutionary approach to socialism through democracy like the British Labour party and the Fabian Society. The party’s leader, Friedrich Ebert, was a democrat. One of the reasons Germany today is a democratic state rather than a Communist dictatorship was that Ebert got wind that the Communists in Berlin were about to declare a republic and so pre-empted them by declaring it first.
The same YouTuber also claims that the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council during the revolution were Communist. Some were, some weren’t. A report by German officialdom stated that in many areas the councils were actually very moderate. In several places local authority had collapsed completely, and it was the councils who were keeping things running and the people fed. This particular YouTuber has put up a nearly five hour long refutation of the denials that Hitler was a socialist, but considering his biases and distortions I don’t think it’s worth watching to refute it.
A few days ago I watched another video put up by Jim Boobeh, the main man behind the right-wing YouTube channel Correct, Not Political, and a fellow rightists, called O’Looney. Correct, Not Political are the bunch who believe that the World Economic Forum are at the at the heart of a global conspiracy to take over the world and make us all serfs under green communism, owning nothing, confined to 15 minute cities and eating insects for the good of the planet. Many people on the right have similar views, like Carl Benjamin and the Lotus Eaters. But I wasn’t prepared for just how paranoid Correct, Not Political was.
That they’re a bunch of far right conspiracy theorists is obvious, as shown by their videos of them protesting gay rights marches, drag queen story hour, trades union and environmental protests, pro-refugee demonstrations, and events held by socialists and ‘commies’. How right wing they are is also demonstrated by the video they show introducing their live streams, which are old footage of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts marching about. They also don’t like the Freemasons and there’s more than a touch of anti-Semitism there, as I think they’re also into the stupid myths of the Jewish banking conspiracy. But they’re also worried about a military invasion by the Channel migrants. Yup, these are not poor unfortunates fleeing war and persecution in their homelands, but undercover UN soldiers. Now, many members of the anti-immigrant right have said that most of the Channel migrants are military age men, and are suspicious of them because they don’t include similar numbers of women and children. Which is what you would expect to see if people were fleeing war and persecution, or at least what the sceptical peeps of the right would. But there was an interview with one Channel migrant a little while ago who said that he, and many others were running away from conscription, and hoped to bring their women and families over later when they had settled. I also think that many of the military age men are actually young blokes hoping to find work and greater opportunities in the West. The impression I’ve had reading various bit and pieces of information on the current state of the Middle East and talking to more knowledgeable friends is that there’s a real problem with large scale unemployment in many of the Arab countries. A little while ago there was a piece in one of the news blogs that the economic situation in Egypt had deteriorated to the point where many families could no longer afford basic staples. There was a similar situation among Sunni Muslims in Syria, where they were very firmly at the bottom of the social pile and faced with grinding poverty, less educated and with poorer prospects than the Shi’a, Alawi and Christian Syrians. Hence their support for radical Islamist movements and the rebellion against Assad. But Correct, Not Political really do believe that we’re being literally invaded.
Boobeh and O’Looney spoke about how they’d heard from a number of people that the Channel migrants were really undercover UN soldiers. One man had sent a drone off to spy on them, and had seen them being trained by the Black Watch. They were here, ready to take over the country. The two also speculated about the outbreak of a nuclear war, and stated that the elite would be all right as they would be safe in their luxury nuclear bunkers 2- 3 miles underground. That was certainly true of the Soviet elite. After the Fall of Communism it was revealed that a whole city, complete with shops, had been built underground for the Communist rulers in the event of a nuclear war. I dare say that something similar may have been secretly built in the west. One of the TV travel shows, in which a celeb goes round a part of the world talking about the interesting bits, showed the world’s most expensive nuclear bunker. I think it was built by a businessman in Nevada, and was so luxurious it even had a swimming pool. I don’t know if other big businessmen built themselves similar bunkers, but as during the Cold War ordinary Americans were told to build fall-out shelters in their yards it really, really wouldn’t surprise me.
Going back to the weird idea of the migrants as UN troopers, it looks like a mutant British version of some of the rumours that were going around America’s paranoid fringe in the ’90s. This held that the Soviet Union had not in fact collapsed, but had a staged a careful ruse. There were supposed to be secret Soviet military bases on the Canadian and Mexican borders, from which Russian tanks would roll into America once the invasion started. Here the Red Army has been replaced by the Channel migrants and the United Nations, who are the centre of similar fears on the American right. It’s all part of the plan to set up the evil, satanic one-world communist government. The current paranoia about the World Economic Forum is part of that, and indeed Boobeh himself put it into context by mentioning the other groups that have also been seen as part of the global conspiracy, like the Trilateral Commission.
The extent of this section of the far right’s alienation from mainstream society was shown by Boobeh and O’Looney talking about how they’d like to set up parallel societies, complete with a separate healthcare system, independent of the mainstream. Well, the anarchists and other left-wing radicals they despise have also felt the same way, and tried to something like it, but have been unsuccessful. They, or at least Boobeh, also were against voting, because all the parties were compromised, but neither did they want to start a violent revolution. Which was reassuring. Mosley’s their hero, but they don’t want to follow him down the road of trying to attempt a Fascist seizure of power along the lines of Mussolini and Hitler.
I don’t know how many of them there are in Correct, Not Political. Probably not many, as even at their height the extreme right-wing groups in this country were numerically small. The BNP claimed to have 2,000 members, but researchers have suggested that they only had about 200 core members. Most of the others left after about a year, probably because although they were against non-White immigration, they didn’t have any interest in Fascist ideology. But I suspect that there are many other groups and individuals, like Godfrey Bloom, who shared their fears about the WEF and the UN.
As for the notion that the Black Watch were training the migrants, it seems to me that they may have been sent to guard them. Some of them came over with guns, as reported a few months ago. But if any kind of training was going on, I wonder if it could be because these are western-allied soldiers, who were disguised as civilians, perhaps to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took over. Or perhaps as part of some undercover global security operation which uses the migrant networks. Of course, this is just speculation and it may well be rubbish, and no training of any kind is going on. But I wonder.
There may be a genuine conspiracy here, which has nothing to do with the UN, WEF or Masonic Jewish bankers.
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.
I spent some time Saturday evening watching a couple of videos posted by the far right YouTube outfit, Correct, Not Political. One was of their man Jim walking around the demonstrators and supporters at Drag Queen Story Time in Colchester asking them awkward, ‘Socratic’ questions. The other was an interview between Jim and another fixture of the British far right, Godfrey Bloom. Both were weirdly interesting, but only for the light they cast on these two men’s conspiracist views. I’ve already written about how Correct, Not Political has the classic paranoid idea that the Masons are behind a massive conspiracy. His interview with Bloom, and the comments he made talking to some of the people in Colchester confirmed it. It also revealed him to be a mad anti-vaxxer who thinks they’re putting something in it to kill people as part of the WEF’s goal to reduce the human population on the planet.
The drag queen reading to the kids in Colchester was Edward Wilcox, who performs under the name ‘Ann Nemic’ or something similar. Talking to various members of the crowd, Jim said that ‘Nemic’ had been vaccinated twice, and given blood 92 times. He didn’t want to say too much, as he didn’t want his channel to be banned, but didn’t this tell you something. Er, yes. It demonstrates that he was like everyone else and did as the government and medical authorities advised. He got vaccinated to protect himself. As for giving blood 92 times, one of the women at the demonstration pointed out that it made him a good person and that surely you want people to give blood? His stage name also shows that he has a sense of humour: Ann Nemic/ anaemic. It doesn’t say anything more than that, unless you’re so paranoid you think he was actively trying to spread whatever it is in the vaccine which you think is a poison by donating his contaminated blood. Sadly, I think Jim really is that bonkers.
Looking at the crowd, he declared, ‘There isn’t half a lot of sodomy going on here!’ This was probably because they were quite a few gay people and people waving pride flags, not because gay men were having sex in the street. He then went round warning people that drag queen story hour was a plot to indoctrinate kids with gender ideology and abuse from paedophiles. Here he has a point. James Lindsay has read out a paper co-written by a drag queen and queer activist, which states that the purpose of these shows is to queer the children’s minds and upset gender norms. And yes, the founder of Queer Theory, Judith Butler, did support paedophilia and the breaking down of barriers between adult and child. But this doesn’t mean that every drag queen, library or school which stages these sessions holds such views or is even aware of their existence. They may just be doing it because they genuinely feel it is spreading tolerance towards gay and trans people whilst encouraging children to read. No more than that.
Walking around the demonstration was a bald bloke, who looked a bit like the Matt Lucas character George Daws, selling copies of the Socialist Worker. So Jim immediately called him a Communist, asked whether he was trying to get people to sign up for Communism, and then asked people to tell him if there was a country in which Communism had ever succeeded. Well, technically the man was a Trotskyite, which is a slightly different form of Marxism. And I actually agree with him in that there hasn’t been a country where Communism has been successful. China has been doing very well of late, but that’s also thanks to a capitalist component in its economy. But from where Britain stands at the moment, capitalism isn’t working very well either. Far from improving people’s living standards, they’re being lowered. However, the right haven’t given up the refrain that this generation has it far better than anyone else at any time in history, and capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than socialism has. The first part of that statement is utterly wrong, and the second needs serious qualifications.
The drag show, Jim said, was all about promoting equality. But this was equality under communism, where everyone didn’t have life equally good, but equally bad, except for those at the top. Again, this seems to come from critiques of the woke ideology from James Lindsay and the EDIJester. It’s certainly present in those ideologies, though its equity – equality of outcome – rather than equality of opportunity. There were a couple of examples of this in the American education system a month or so ago. One teacher, in the interest of equality, gave all her students an ‘A’. Another one just gave the average award to a series of excellent students, who actually deserved much higher marks to take them into one of the prestigious American universities to study science. This was eventually revealed after an inquiry and possibly legal action. I have yet to hear of a case like this in this country, however.
Jim also got shirty with the Trotskyite because the man called him a Fascist and a Nazi. Jim told him that was libel, to which the fellow rightly pointed out that it was slander, as he’d know if he’d actually had any knowledge of the law. As Jim has prefaced several of his livestreams with old footage of Oswald Mosley and the BUF, and that Mosley changed his benighted organisation’s name to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’, it could be said that what the man said was fair comment.
When someone asked who was behind this plot to corrupt Britain’s kids, Jim replied that, again he didn’t want to say too much, but it was the Freemasons, citing a couple of 19th century authors, who, he said, were themselves 33rd degree members of the brotherhood. I’ve forgotten just who they were, but their names rang a bell among the sources cited by those convinced of such a conspiracy. Finally, after bothering the good burghers of Colchester for about an hour, and nearly being assaulted by some particularly angry LGBTQ+ rights demonstrators, he went off in search of something to drink. Going through the town’s back streets, he complained about the number of ‘weirdos’ there were and that it was all coffee houses. Quite what he has against coffee houses I don’t know. Perhaps he was afraid that if he went inside, left-wing intellectuals would all jump on him like the characters in Fraser all those years ago.
His conspiracist views became much clearer in his conversation with Godfrey Bloom. Bloom announced himself has having been an investment banker for 40 years and at one time a member of the defence council or something like that. He was thus well-placed to know that capitalism was about to collapse. Actually, there’s a Marxist economics professor on YouTube, Richard Wolf, who has being saying exactly the same thing. And if it hadn’t been for Brown in 2008, I’m sure it would have collapsed. The two then shared their views on the World Economic Forum wishing to depopulate the planet, set up Green Communism and make us all eat bugs. The WEF has captured all our institutions, including the monarchy. Prince Philip also believed there were too many people on the planet. Well, the late Duke of Edinburgh was the head of the World Wide Fund for Nature, so his views are hardly a surprise. The WEF are Malthusians, which means that they believe that population always outstrips the supply of available food, as suggested by the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus and his followers believed that when this happened, starvation and war would inevitably result. In order to prevent this, they recommended birth control and were active promoting contraception. As did the Duke, who on one of his official visits to some tribe showed the men how to put on a condom using a spear. However, the WEF were going much further and planning to wipe out a sizable chunk of humanity using a manufactured disease or its vaccine. Those who survived would be under the WEF’s new communist order.
This made me wonder if Jim knew about the wretched views of the late zookeeper John Aspinall, best known for his big cats killing and mauling people. Aspinall also believed that there were too many people around. He said the British population should be only eight million. However, he definitely wasn’t a communist of any description. He declared that what the country needed was a ‘counterrevolution, Francoist in spirit.’ So his green views were closer to Hitler’s than the WEF. And almost certainly pretty close to Jim’s and Bloom’s.
Correct, Not Political’s Jim therefore seems to have read or watched much material about the woke ideology, especially Queer Theory, and mixed this up with old conspiracy theories about the masons. I also think there might be a touch of anti-Catholicism in their as well. When he was voicing his objections to drag queens reading to children as getting them used to nonces, one woman asked him about Roman Catholic priests abusing children. He didn’t agree with that, either, but said he didn’t agree with established religions as ‘they’re from Satan’. But some of the other things he has said, and they’re nothing I can put a precise finger on, suggests that he might have the same conspiracist views about the Catholic church, which is supposed to be doing the work of the antichrist, as some as the bigoted Protestant writers of the 19th century.
Correct, Not Political aren’t physically violent, and while Jim’s sneers about socialism are irritating, he personally has an affable manner. I can’t say that they present a physical danger, unlike National Action or the BNP, for example. What is dangerous is the mad anti-vaxxer views and the deranged paranoia about the WEF, which he also shares with the Lotus Eaters, Alex Jones and any number of others on the right. And these views are a danger to democratic politics, if only because the undermine proper democratic views in favour of suspicion and paranoia.
WatchMojo is a YouTube channel that specialises in lists of the most (insert adjective) of whatever subject they’re covering. This is usually popular culture, like films, TV programmes and comics. But in this video from their British offshoot they delve into the very murky world of British tabloid and red top newspapers to discuss the six worst of them. And so, imagine if you will, this run down of the very worst of British journalism accompanied by the old style Top of the Pops theme as that sadly missed programme went down the music charts.
Coming last at No. 6 is the Daily Star for its coverage of weird paranormal stories like black-eyed ghost children, their libelling of the Liverpool fans at the Hillsborough disaster and getting sued by the McCanns for its malign take on the disappearance of their daughter. They also blamed video games for Raoul Moat’s shooting spree, despite the entire lack of evidence showing that video games are responsible for real world violence, and for making up an interview with Duane ‘the Rock’ Johnson.
Coming in at no. 5, pop-pickers, is the Mirror, showing that it’s also left-wing papers that can have appalling low journalistic standards. This is there because of its owner, Robert Maxwell, raiding his employees’ pension funds, and Piers Morgan publishing fake photographs of alleged atrocities by British troops in Iraq. This part of the video shows some of the other headlines from the paper, such as its ‘Achtung! Surrender’ to the Germans at the 1996 World Cup as other illustrations of its lack of taste and anything resembling decent attitudes.
At No. 4 in this chart of journalistic infamy is the Daily Mail, as illustrated by its article ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ praising Mosley’s BUF and its owner, Lord Rothermere’s trip to Germany and praise of the Nazi regime. The video also states that it’s been suggested that the paper’s pro-appeasement stance convinced Hitler that Britain would not retaliate if he invaded Poland, thus causing World War II. More recently the paper has also been sued for libel or inaccurate reporting by celebs such as Melania Trump, Alan Sugar and Elton John. The video also shows some of its racist headlines opposing the decolonisation of mathematics and opposition to non-White immigration.
The Daily Express is at No. 3, again because of such low points as being sued by the McCanns, scaremongering stories about the world being wiped out by aliens or killer asteroids, and its weird fixation on conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and her death, often at the expense of more current and important stories. In 2010 its editor said that he was appalled by some of the stories it ran, and was going to reign in its islamophobia.
No. 2, the late, unlamented News of the Screws. This was always controversial, but lasted 150 years, even claiming at one time to be the world’s best newspaper. That was until it was brought down by the phone-tapping scandal, whose victims not only included celebrities, royalty like Princes William and Harry, but also murder victims and dead soldiers. It was forced to fold after all its advertisers deserted it.
But the top slot in this catalogue of filth and sleaze merchants is the Scum. This rag’s viciously low reporting has made it notorious around the world, but what foreign viewers may not know is that it’s particularly hated in Britain for its smearing of the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, like its fellow tabloid the Depress. Instead of the Liverpool fans being responsible for the carnage, it was found that the police were responsible for the 96 deaths. This anti-Liverpool venom is the reason it’s still banned in the city, despite the paper having made some half-hearted apologies afterwards. It also claimed the Birmingham 6, a group of Irish men wrongly imprisoned for an IRA terrorist atrocity, were guilty. On top of this it was also sued for libel by Wayne Rooney. But what makes it especially hated is its staunch support of Margaret Thatcher, the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline for the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War, and its claim that it was responsible for Thatcher’s electoral victories with its headline ‘It was the Scum Wot won it’.
Of course this list leaves out some other instances of tabloid wrongdoing. The Scum has had any number of complaints for racism upheld by the former Press Complaints Commission, including one in which it compared Arabs to pigs. Piers Morgan has also been involved in the phone hacking scandal, though it’s possible the video mentions this and I’ve just forgotten it did. And I’d say the worst British tabloid was the Sport in its various editions for its mixture of sleaze, stories about freaks and daft stories following the Weekly World News style of journalism, like its claim that there was a B52 bomber on the Moon. The Sport was set up by David ‘the Slug’ Sullivan, according to Private Eye, a pornographer with convictions for running girls. But the paper has a low circulation compared to the others here, and so is far less influential.
As for the Scum coming first as Britain’s worst tabloid, I agree entirely, although I doubt this is an accolade the Scum would want to boast about on its front page. But when it comes to malign, biased reporting and racism, it is indeed the Scum wot wins it.
Okay, I just found a brief video on YouTube, posted eight days ago, on Nick Buckley’s channel. Buckley’s a former police officer and campaigner against knife crime, who’s appeared a couple of times on the Lotus Eater’s channel. I wasn’t surprised then, when he posted this video interviewing Richard Tice about Reform’s ‘Eight Principles’. In the video, however, he only talks about four of them. These are largely about protecting British democratic rights against the threat of the state and unelected organisations and quangos. According to Tice, Brits are aware that they’re born free and have inalienable rights unlike in the EU. Thus, Brits are able to whatever they like unless prohibited, while in the EU they can only do whatever the EU tells them to.
The irony about this is that the idea that humans are born free comes from a continental philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau has been condemned as one of the founders of totalitarianism. One Conservative American group made Rousseau’s The Social Contract one of the most evil books of all time alongside Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin included him among his Six Enemies of Freedom and the Lotus Eaters have also put out videos attacking him. But Rousseau’s book begins with the words, ‘Man was born free yet everywhere he is chains.’ The idea that you should be free to do whatever you want unless the law says otherwise, I think comes from John Locke a century before, and is the foundation of modern liberal ideas of freedom. However, other European philosophers also had views similar to Locke’s, that the state should be limited to the role of a night watchman, in the sense say that it should protect its citizens’ lives and property, but otherwise not interfere. This is the view expressed by the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt in his Grenzen Der Wirksamkeit der Staat – ‘Limits of the Effectiveness of the State’. I don’t know what the underlying philosophy of government of the European Union is. I suspect there isn’t one beyond harmonising various trade and other regulations between member states and allowing for the movement of labour and capital. The original intention was to create a united trading bloc to preserve western European economic independence from America or communist eastern Europe. The Eurosceptic right has frequently ranted about the EU being some kind of totalitarian state with comparisons to Nazi Germany and communism, but I’ve seen no evidence to support it. And rather than limiting freedom, I think the EU believes it is actively creating and nurturing freedom in its member states. Such as when it condemns Poland and Hungary for their legislation banning homosexuality and gay rights.
Now let’s go through the principles as explained by Tice and Buckley in the video.
The state is our servant not our master.
I don’t believe any believer in liberal democracy, whether of the left or right, would challenge this. The only people who would are either Fascists, following Mussolini’s pronouncements that the individual is nothing before the state, followers of Hegel’s dictum that ‘the state is the divine idea as it exists on Earth. We must therefore worship the state’ and supporters of Soviet Communism before Gorby’s brief reforms. However, in the context of Reform, a party of the right, it seems to me that this is yet another bland statement intended to justify further privatisation and the expansion of the power of private industry and the destruction of the welfare state against working people, the poor, the unemployed and disabled.
2. Lend us your power and we’ll give you back your freedom.
This could be said by just about any political party, even those which were real enemies of freedom. Hitler, in one of his rants at Nuremberg, declared ‘Everything I am, I am through you. Everything you are, you are through me’. The Nazi party anthem, the Horst Wessel song, also has lines about German freedom. Hitler also talked about preserving freedom through separating the different spheres of party and state and preserving private industry, though in practice under the Nazi regime the party and state apparatus were intermeshed and private industry ruthlessly subordinated to the state. Mussolini also made speeches about how the freedom of the individual wasn’t limited under fascism, except in certain ways, all of which was equally rubbish.
3. People are free.
This means, as he explains, that people naturally hold certain rights and liberties that should always be protected and defended. These include freedom of speech, religion and conscience. This does not mean that certain types of speech have no consequences. I interpret this as meaning that he feels that people can say what they want, but people are also free to express outrage and take action against others for offensive or dangerous speech that is not otherwise banned by law. Tice goes on to say that in practice, while people believe in this principle, they negotiate to give up a certain amount of this freedom with the state.
I think here he means particularly the legislation on hate speech, which in his view prevents proper criticism of certain protected groups in order to combat racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and so on. He has a point, as opponents of gay rights, who have made their opposition very clear in speeches, often quoting the Biblical prohibition against it, have been arrested. In Scotland Maria Miller, a gender critical woman, was arrested for hate speech simply for putting up stickers with the slogan ‘Scots Women Won’t Wheesht’, meaning that they wouldn’t be silent, in her campaign against the proposed gender recognition legislation north of the border. In my opinion, arresting someone for saying that goes beyond a concern about stirring up hatred against trans people into active attempts to police thoughts and opinions about trans rights.
But there are good reasons behind the legislation banning hate speech. In the case of racism, it’s to prevent Nazi groups stirring up hatred against vulnerable minorities like the Jews, people of colour and gays, all of whom have been or are targets of abuse and physical assault.
4. National Sovereignty
This means protecting British traditions, institutions and culture from enemies both external and internal. The external foes include the EU. The internal threats to British tradition and democracy are unelected pressure groups and organisations. These include big tech and companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook. This is a fair point. These organisations can and do censor material posted on their platforms. The right have been complaining about their posts disappearing or the algorithms governing their availability in searches being altered so that they become invisible, but the same censorship is also inflicted on the left. If Tice and his crew get the chance, I’ve no doubt they’ll demand greater freedom of speech for their supporters while maintaining or even strengthening the censorship against their opponents on the left.
Other threats, unsurprisingly, are the European Union, while among the unelected organisations wielding power he puts the environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the gay rights organisation Stonewall. Tice states that a few years ago Greenpeace published their manifesto for Yorkshire, which was a diatribe against the car, and therefore, in his view, an attack on the automobile industry in west Yorkshire. One of the accusations the extreme right is throwing at environmental groups is that they wish to ban cars and private transport as part of their plan to establish Green Communism. He also includes Stonewall and the massive influence it wields, although no-one has elected it. There is a problem with Stonewall in that the advice it has been giving to companies, the government and the civil service has been wrong. They deliberately gave a wrongful interpretation of the legislation covering trans issues which was very much what they wanted it to say, not what the law actually did. As a result, a number of groups cut their connections to the organisation.
But unelected groups like Greenpeace, Stonewall and so on acquire their power through possessing, or being perceived to express, expertise and competence in particular issues. In the case of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, it’s the environment. Amnesty International is respected because of its thorough investigation and documentation of human rights abuses, even though governments may pay no attention to its findings. Stonewall is taken notice of because it speaks, or claims to speak, for Britain’s gays and articulates their concerns and recommendations to combat prejudice.
Even in the 19th century governments had to pay attention to popular protest organisations, such as the massive abolitionist campaign against slavery, the Anti-Corn Law League set up by Cobden and Bright to have the corn laws repealed so that the price of grain would fall and working people able to feed themselves. There was also the anti-war protests against the Crimean War led by John Bright and others. There are problems with unelected groups exercising power beyond their competence or suitability, but modern governments have always had to deal with organised groups. Tice’s singling out of the environmental groups and Stonewall seems to me to be as much to do with a hatred of their views – the Brexiteers are full-scale behind the right of private industry to trash this country’s green and pleasant land – than with their supposed power outside of the formal sphere of elections. I doubt that Reform would ever go as far if they were in power, but it reminds me more than a little bit of Mussolini’s statement that there should be ‘nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’, and similar bans on private quasi-political organisations in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
But what you’ll also notice is that these principles tell you absolutely nothing about how Reform as a party intends to act on them, except by reading the lines. What does Reform intend to do about the health service? Not said. I suspect, in fact, that as a party of the right they’ll want to privatise even more of it. What about the welfare state and the scandal of millions of people using food banks? No answers there, either. I suspect, however, that in practice you’d get more mantras of encouraging people to be independent, find work and so on, coupled with rants about welfare scroungers. What about industry? Again, the reality is almost certainly that they want more deregulation. Well, we’ve had four decades of Thatcherite privatisation and deregulation, and the result is the mass poverty and failing economy we’re now experiencing. Industry should be acting for the good of society and its employees and not just shareholders and senior management. This means limiting economic freedom, but as the Liberal journalist J.A. Hobson said, in order for the mass of people to be free you need to limit the freedom of the rich. Which is obviously toxic to the Conservatives and other parties of the right.
To sum up, what Reform seems to be doing with these principles is to try to position themselves as defenders of traditional British liberties against the threat of the evil EU and pesky Green and gay groups. But this hides an illiberal ideology that views such groups as somehow subversive, would probably remove the obstacles against real, dangerous expressions of racial and other prejudice, and which would promote the interests of private industry against ordinary Brits.
We can’t afford to be taken in by sweet words hiding their true intentions.
I put up a piece a few days ago about the great German radical artist John Heartfield, who used photographs to create stunning pictures. Heartfield’s best known for his political works celebrating Communism and savagely denouncing war and the Prussian aristocracy that promoted it, and especially Hitler and the Nazis. But he also worked for publishers producing book covers. This is his cover for Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, about poor Jews living on the Lower East Side of New York. The decades from the late 19th century saw mass Jewish migration from eastern Europe to the west and America. Many of them were dirt poor, and poorly educated, living in low-quality, massively overcrowded tenements. It’s from this milieu that many of the great founders of the American comics industry, like the mighty Jack Kirby. Kirby came from the kind of neighbourhood where men wanted to be mechanics rather than artists, and ran with the street gangs before breaking with them to enter comics. This is the background to Will Eisner’s acclaimed graphic novel, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Tales. I’m putting this up here also to make the point that Jewishness isn’t synonymous with wealth and power, whatever the Blairites in the Labour party may think. You may remember that a few years ago one right-wing female Labour MP claimed that socialism was anti-Semitic because it attacked capitalism. Hitler wouldn’t have agreed that ‘Marxist’ socialism was anti-Semitic, because he believed it was created and dominated by Jews. But he would certainly have wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment that capitalism is Jewish. Other people realised the anti-Semitic nature of what she’d said, even though she obviously didn’t mean it as such, and called her out for it. In the meantime this is a striking piece of art illustrating a piece of American social history.
I was talking on another comments thread about ornithopters with Brian Burden, one of the many great commenters on this blog. Ornithopters are flying machines that work by flapping their wings like a bird or an insect, unlike helicopters or fixed wing aircraft, which use either propeller or jet engines. Some of the very first attempts at powered, heavier than air flight were ornithopters, whose inventors obviously sought inspiration from nature. As human-carrying aircraft, they haven’t been successful. They work as small models, and the early scale models the pioneering aviation inventors and engineers created did actually work, as have more recent model ornithopters and robots modelled on birds and insects. However there were severe problems scaling them up to work with humans. This did not prevent a series of pioneering inventors and aviators trying. One of those was E.P. Frost, who created a series of ornithopters over a decade from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The piccie below shows his 1903 ornithopter, powered by a three horsepower petrol engine and with wings covered in feathers. Another inventor was the French aviator, Passat, who constructed an ornithopter with four flapping wings, covered with fabric rather than feathers, and powered by a 4.5 horsepower motorcycle engine. When it was being tried out in 1912 on Wimbledon Common, it flew for about four hundred feet at a speed of under 15 mph before crashing into a tree. This did not deter Passat, who carried on his experiments into this form of aircraft despite ridicule and the success of fixed wing aircraft.
One of the other aviation pioneers interested in developing this type of aircraft was another Frenchman, Louis Riel, who went on to design the Riout 102T plane, which at one point seemed to be a successful aircraft if further improvements had been made. I found this video about it on Ed Nash’s Military Matters channel on YouTube. This notes the similarity between the four-winged design of the Riout plane and the multi-winged ornithopters of the recent Dune film. This suggests that Frank Herbert, Dune’s author, might have been inspired by Riel’s aircraft. Riel had experimented with a two-winged ornithopter before the First World War before moving on to other projects. He retained his interest in ornithopters, however, and 1937 created the Riout 102T Alerion, which had four, fabric covered planes. Wind tunnel tests were originally promising, until an increase in engine power in one test destroyed the plane’s four wings. Riel had plans to improve and strengthen the wings, but by this time it was 1938. Hitler had annexed Austria and was moving into the Sudetenland, and France needed all its available aircraft to protect itself against German invasion. The project was therefore cancelled.
Brian wondered if computer design and control could result in a practical, human level ornithopter. I think it’s possible, especially as today’s aviation engineers are exploring the instabilities in flight that allow birds to fly so well in creating high performance aircraft, that would need a degree of computer control in flight. One of the issues looks to my like the stresses on the wings caused by flapping, but it may be that this could be solved using the more resilient and durable materials available to modern engineers, which the early pioneers didn’t have. Riel’s plane is not entirely forgotten. Its remains, minus the wings and covering, are in one of the French aviation museums. Perhaps one day they’ll inspire a new generation of engineers to experiment with similar aircraft.
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