More Eurosceptic racism from the Tories. On Wednesday, Zelo Street reported on yet another embarrassment for the Tories when Suella Braverman, the MP for Fareham and another Brexiteer, used another term from the Far Right in a speech she gave to the Bruges group. This is another section of the Tory party composed of Eurosceptic fans of Maggie Thatcher. According to Business Insider, Braverman told the assembled Thatcherite faithful that as Conservatives they were engaged in the battle against cultural Marxism, and that she was frightened of the creep of cultural Marxism coming out of the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn.
Cultural Marxism is one of the big bugbears of the Far Right, including Anders Breivik. The Groan’s Dawn Foster recognised the term, and asked her to talk a bit more about it, considering that it had been used by the Fascist mass murderer. Braverman responded by saying that she believed we were in a struggle against cultural Marxism, a movement to snuff out free speech from the Far Left’. The Sage of Crewe points out that this really means that Braverman would like to be able to say whatever she wants, without being called out for it. Which she then was.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews then criticised her for her use of a term that is used extensively by the Far Right with anti-Semitic connotations. They told a reporter in the Jewish Chronicle that the term originated with the Nazis, who called it Kulturbolschewismus, ‘cultural Bolshevism’, and used it to attack Jewish intellectual, who they accused of spreading communism and sexual permissiveness. It is now popular amongst the Alt Right and Far Right. It is associated with a conspiracy theory that sees the Frankfurt School of Jewish philosophers and sociologists as the instigators of a campaign to destroy traditional western conservatism and traditional values. It was used by Anders Breivik in his manifesto, and by the vile mass murderer in New Zealand.
Zelo Street points out that Braverman was a leading Tory MP before she resigned over May’s Brexit deal. She used an anti-Semitic term, and had to have it pointed out to her that it was anti-Semitic. She then dismissed the criticism as an attack on her freedom of speech. He makes the point that if she had been a friend of Jeremy Corbyn, the press would have had a field day. Instead they were silent all that morning. Which shows that not only does the Tory party have an anti-Semitism problem, but their friends in the Tory press don’t want the rest of us to know about it.
There are several aspects to this. First of all, everything the Board’s spokesperson said about the origins and conspiracy theory behind the term is correctly. However, the Frankfurt school, while certainly leftists, were anti-Fascists, who believed that Adolf Hitler had been assisted into power through popular culture. They were passionate supporters of traditional European culture against what they saw as the destructive, coarsening effect of low culture, like comics. Frederic Wertham, who was the leader of the anti-comics crusade in the 1950s, shared many of their attitudes. He attacked comics because he was afraid they were sexualising and corrupting American youth, leading them into crime and juvenile delinquency.
The conspiracy theory confuses them, who were actually culturally conservative, with Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was an Italian Marxist, who had been imprisoned by Mussolini. He believed that instead of the economic structure of society determining culture, as in classical Marxism, culture also helped determine and reinforce the economic structure. Thus, if you wanted to attack capitalism, you had to change the culture. It’s also been confused with post-modernism and the rise of Cultural Studies, which does attack western culture for its racism and sexism.
And like much pernicious right-wing drivel, it also seems to be partly influenced by Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher was determined to purge British universities of Communists and Trotskyites, and so passed legislation that no Marxist could get a job as a lecturer. What happened was that the Commies and Trots got round it by denying that they were Marxists. They were instead Marxians, people who were Marxist in their culture. Now I can sympathise up to a certain point with Thatcher’s intentions. It is one-sided to ban the genocidal race-haters of the Fascists and Nazis from teaching, while permitting old school Stalinists, who also supported genocide, to continue in their jobs. But not all Marxists stood for Stalinist dictatorship. In the case of the Trots, it’s the exact opposite, although I doubt that Trotsky himself would not have been a dictator if he’d succeeded Lenin as the president of the Soviet Union. In any case, Thatcher’s attempts to purge the universities of Marxism was itself an attack on freedom of speech and thought.
The attacks on cultural Marxism are also being mobilised to justify continuing attacks on left-wing, anti-racist and anti-sexist staff and organisations at universities. It’s come at a time when fake, astro-turf students’ organisations in the US have been demanding and compiling watch lists of left-wing and liberal professors with the intention of trying to get them silenced or sacked. One of those calling for this was the right-wing Canadian psychologist and lobster overlord, Jordan Peterson. At the same time US conservatives and the Trump administration have also been trying to force universities and colleges to permit controversial extreme right-wing figures like Anne Coulter and Milo Yiannopolis to speak on campus. Coulter and Yiannopolis are extremely anti-feminist, with very reactionary, racist views, although Yiannopolis has tried to divert criticism by pointing out that he’s gay and has a Black husband. There have been mass protests against both of them when they have tried to speak on college campuses. But if people like Coulter and Yiannopolis have a right to speak to students, then students also have the right to protest against them in the name of free speech.
And cultural Marxism is a good term for attacking a range of separate concerns, like feminism, anti-racism and class inequality. These are related, overlapping attitudes. The same people, who are concerned about racism, for example, are also likely to be concerned about feminism and challenging class privilege. But it may not necessarily be the case. And these issues can be pursued separately from Marxism. But one of the points Hitler made is that when addressing propaganda to the masses, you always simplify everything so that they are against a single person or cause. The trope of cultural Marxism allows the right to carry on a campaign against feminism, anti-racism and other left-wing ideas through lumping them together.
Braverman’s use of the trope of ‘cultural Marxism’ shows that she either doesn’t know what it means, or does know and is content with its anti-Semitic connotations. It also shows she doesn’t know anything about the term and its falsification of history. And by claiming that ‘cultural Marxism’ is creeping through Britain’s universities, it also amply shows that she is an enemy of real freedom of speech. Attacking ‘cultural Marxism’ is simply another strategy for trying to force students to accept right-wing indoctrination, while making sure that anything left-wing is thoroughly purged.
Braverman isn’t just using anti-Semitic terminology, she’s also showing herself an enemy of free speech, even while proclaiming that she and her Far Right wing friends are its defenders.
We got the news today that, at lunch time New Zealand time, gun men shot the worshippers at two mosques over there, killing men, women and children. There are 49 dead, and many more wounded. Two men and a woman have been arrested. One of them is an Australian White supremacist. It’s particularly shocking as I understand that, while New Zealand has its problems with violent crime same as everywhere else, it’s largely quiet and peaceful compared with some other nations. I can remember talking to an elderly gentleman in my part of south Bristol, who was preparing to leave to join relatives out there. He said he was impressed with the humanity of the place. It’s still a country where neighbours greet and talk to each other, And now sadly racist, islamophobic violence has hit that nation too.
The good fellow at Crewe, who posts the Zelo Street blog, has put up a really good piece not only condemning the violence, and putting it in the context of the other massacres caused by Fascist maniacs – Anders Breivik at Utoya, the rabid anti-Semite who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the other bigots and racists who gun down and murder Jews, Muslims and gays, including children. He also points the finger at those, whose own politics and rhetoric of hate have helped to inspire such atrocities: the right-wing press. He makes the point that this hate long ago went beyond the extreme right-wing fringe, and discusses the extreme right-wing figures, from Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopolis and the Alt Right, to Tories like Boris Johnson. All of whom will claim that their venomous hatred of Muslims and minorities had nothing to do with these outrages. And he says very strongly that none of them can escape their responsibility for these events. He writes
It is an industry that does not exist in a vacuum: as with any malignant virus, once incubated, it has to spread if it is to have any effect. And here, our free and fearless press, and even our broadcast media, should hang their heads in shame, although they will not. They have published the hate merchants, given platforms to bigots, encouraged the demonisation of minorities, all for the momentary interest of profit and ratings.
Moreover, it is not just fringe media that has spread the virus of hatred. It long ago went beyond Breitbart, InfoWars and Rush Limbaugh. Now it has been transmitted by Fox News Channel, the Murdoch Sun, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, the Express, the Spectator and others. Yet the management of those media outlets are not responsible for the end product of the hatred they enable. Nor are the figureheads of the hate movement.
So it is that Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Geert Wilders, Marine le Pen, Nigel Farage, Gerard Batten, Rod Liddle, Douglas Murray, Tony Gallagher, Paul Dacre, Trevor Kavanagh, Katie Hopkins, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Paul Joseph Watson, Peter Imanuelsen, Martin Sellner, Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, Milo Yiannopoulos, Taki Theororacopulos, Fraser Nelson, James Delingpole, Boris Johnson, and so many others will rest easy this morning, safe in the knowledge that It Wasn’t Them.
Well, I have news for this collective stain on humanity, this repellent convocation of amateur human beings, this vicious cohort of hate preachers. Don’t think any or all of you can duck responsibility for what happened in Christchurch. You cannot. This is where your ignorance, hatred and bigotry leads. This is the fruit of your ill thought out labours.
Damn you. Damn every last miserable, hate-filled, bigoted, snivelling, cowardly, intolerant, selfish, worthless, uncaring one of you. Damn you all to hell.
Okay, this is going to be a long extract, but bear with it. It all needs to be said. One of the arguments I’ve seen Libertarians use to defend their ideology of a minimal state and absolute laissez-faire free enterprise and zero state welfare, is that liberals and socialists don’t have any philosophical arguments to justify their position beyond pointing to the practical, positive effects. I’ve seen this line stated by one of the more notorious Libertarians, Vox Day. Not only is Day a supporter of the miserable and immiserating economics of vons Hayek and Mises, but he has extreme right-wing views on feminism and race. You can tell just how far right he is by the fact that he calls Donald Trump ‘the God Emperor’ and refers to Anders Breivik, the man who called 70 odd children at a Norwegian Young Socialists’ camp, a saint. He really is despicable.
In fact, the philosophers of the New Liberalism, which appeared in Britain in the 1880s, like T.H. Green, D.G. Ritchie, J.A. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse, produced philosophical defences of state interference to justify the new change in direction taken by the Liberals. These had broken with the stance of the old Radicals, who were firmly against state legislation. Instead, these philosophers argued that state interference, rather than reducing human freedom, actually enlarged it by empowering the individual. Ritchie, in the piece below, attacks the simplistic notion of the state versus personal liberty expressed by Herbert Spencer, the founder of Social Darwinism, and provides a philosophical justification for collective ownership not just in nationalization but also municipalization. In his The Principles of State Interference of 1891 he wrote
Underlying all these traditions and prejudices there is a particular metaphysical theory-a metaphysical theory which takes hold of those persons especially who are fondest of abjuring all metaphysics; and the disease is in their case the more dangerous since they do not know when they have it. The chief symptom of this metaphysical complaint is the belief in the abstract individual. The individual is thought of, at least spoken of, as if he had a meaning and significance apart from his surroundings and apart from his relations to the community of which he is a member. It may be quite true that the significance of the individual is not exhausted by his relations to any given set of surroundings; but apart from all these he is a mere abstraction-a logical ghost, a metaphysical spectre, which haunts the habitations of those who have derided metaphysics. The individual, apart from all relations to a community, is a negation. You can say nothing about him, or rather it, except that it is not any other individual. Now, along with this negative and abstract view of the individual there goes, as counterpart, the way of looking at the State as an opposing element to the individual. The individual and the State are put over against one another. Their relation is regarded as one merely of antithesis. Of course, this is a point of view which we can take, and quite rightly for certain purposes; but it is only one point of view. It expresses only a partial truth; and a partial truth, if accepted as the whole truth, is always a falsehood. Such a conception is, in any case, quite inadequate as a basis for any profitable discussion of the duties of Government.
It is this theory of the individual which underlies Mill’s famous book, Liberty. Mill, and all those who take up his attitude towards the State, seem to assume that all power gained by the State is so much taken from the individual, and conversely, that all power gained by the individual is gained at the expense of the state. Now this is to treat the two elements, power of the State and power (or liberty) of the individual, as if they formed the debit and credit sides of an account book; it is to make them like two heaps of a fixed number of stones, to neither of which you can add without taking from the other. It is to apply a mere quantitative conception in politics, as it that were an adequate ‘category’ in such matters. the same thing is done when society is spoken of as merely ‘an aggregate of individuals.’ The citizen of a State, the member of a society of any sort, even an artificial or temporary association, does not stand in the same relation to the Whole that one number does to a series of numbers, or that one stone does to a heap of stones. Even ordinary language shows this. We feel it to be a more adequate expression to say that the citizen is a member of the body politic, than to call him merely a unit in a political aggregate…
Life Mr. Spencer defines as adaptation of the individual to his environment; but, unless the individual manages likewise to adapt his environment to himself, the definition would be more applicable to death.
It must not be supposed that we wish to blind ourselves to the many real difficulties and objections which there are in the way of remedying and preventing evils by direct State action. If assured that the end is good, we must see that the means are sufficient and necessary, and we must be prepared to count the cost. But, admitting the real difficulties, we must not allow imaginary difficulties to block the way. In the first place, as already said, State action does not necessarily imply the direct action of the central government. Many things may be undertaken by local bodies which it would be unwise to put under the control of officials at a distance. ‘Municipalisation’ is, in many cases, a much better ‘cry’ than ‘Nationalisation’. Experiments may also be more safely tried in small than in large areas, and local bodies may profit by each other’s experience. Diffusion of power may well be combined with concentration of information. ‘Power’, says J.S. Mill, ‘may be localized, but knowledge to be most useful must be centralized.’ Secondly, there are many matters which can more easily be taken in hand than others by the State as presently constituted. Thus the means of communication and locomotion can in every civilized country be easily nationalized or municipalized, where this has not been done already. With regard to productive industries, there may appear greater difficulty. But the process now going on by which the individual capitalist more and more gives place to enormous joint-stock enterprises, worked by salaried managers, this tendency of capital to become ‘impersonal,’ is making the transition to management by government (central or local) very much more simple, and very much more necessary, than in the days of small industries, before the ‘industrial revolution’ began. The State will not so much displace individual enterprise, as substitute for the irresponsible company or ‘trust’ the responsible public corporation. Thirdly, and lastly, be it observed that the arguments used against ‘government’ action, where the government is entirely or mainly in the hands of a ruling class or caste, exercising wisely or unwisely a paternal or ‘grandmotherly’ authority-such arguments lose their force just in proportion as government becomes more and more genuinely the government of the people by the people themselves. The explicit recognition of popular sovereignty tends to abolish the antithesis between ‘the Man’ and ‘the State’. The State becomes, not ‘I’ indeed, but ‘we.’ The main reason for desiring more State action is in order to give the individual a greater chance of developing all his activities in a healthy way. The State and the individual are not sides of an antithesis between which we must choose; and it is possible, though, like all great things, difficult for a democracy to construct a strong and vigorous State, and thereby to foster a strong and vigorous individuality, not selfish nor isolated, but finding its truest welfare in the welfare of the community. Mr. Spencer takes up the formula ‘from status to contract’ as a complete philosophy of history. Is there not wanting a third and higher stage in which there shall be at once order and progress, cohesion and liberty, socialistic-but, therefore, rendering possible the highest development of all such individuality as constitutes an element in well-being? Perhaps then Radicalism is not turning back to an effete Toryism, but advancing to a further and positive form, leaving to the Tories and old Whigs and to Mr. Spencer the worn-out and cast-off credd of its own immaturity.
In Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, eds., The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes (Oxford: OUP 1956), pp. 187-90.
Libertarianism was discredited long ago, when 19th century governments first started passing legislation to clear slums and give the labouring poor proper sanitation, working hours and education. Its philosophical justification came later, but I think also effectively demolished it. The people promoting it, such as the Koch brothers in America, are big businessmen seeking to re-establish a highly exploitative order which allowed industry to profit massively at the expense of working people. It became popular through aligning itself with left-wing ideas of personal liberty that emerged in the 1960s, such as the drug culture, and in the ’90s produced the illegal rave scene. In the form of Anarcho-Capitalism, it also appealed to some of those who were attracted to anarchism, while attacking the communist elements in that philosophy. Its adherent also try to justify it by calling it Classical Liberalism.
But it’s still just the same old reactionary ideology, that should have finally gone out with end of the Nineteenth Century. I think that as more people become trapped in poverty as a result of its policies, it’ll lose whatever popularity it once had. And perhaps then we can back to proper political theories advocating state intervention to advance the real, practical liberty of working people.
Kevin Logan is a British male feminist, whose Descent of the Manosphere vlog critically discusses various members of the men’s movement and other parts of the American and British far right, and exposes them for the utterly reprehensible human beings they really are.
In this video, he attacks and criticizes the American alt-right blogger and vlogger, Vox Day. Vox Day is a former newspaper columnist, an SF/Fantasy writer, and the author of a statement of the fundamental principles of the Alt Right. The Alt-Right is a diverse and often contradictory movement, and so there’s considerable disagreement amongst its members on what it actually stands. But Day’s summary of its principles have received the approval of its leading members, including Richard Spencer.
In the video Logan takes the viewer through Day’s ideas and bizarre personality, pointing out his intellectual vanity – he keeps harping on about how high an IQ he has, and how he used to be a nationally syndicated columnist for the tech pages of a paper in Minnesota. He’s also a massive fan of Donald Trump, whom he lauds, without irony, as ‘the God Emperor’, presumably like Leto Atreides, the half-sandworm ruler of the universe in the Dune sequel, God Emperor of Dune. So enamoured is he of Trump, that he also tries to excuse Trump’s comment about sexually assaulting women, trying to tell everyone that it’s ‘alpha (male) talk’, when it isn’t. It’s simply sexual assault.
He then critiques his statement of the principles of the Alt Right. These are basically that it’s a right-wing movement, which is not traditionally Conservative, Libertarian or Neo-Con, which promotes western civilization as derived from Christianity, the European nations and the Graeco-Roman heritage. It states that every nation has the right to their own homeland, free of domination by other groups and that no race is superior to another. But he also strongly rejects free trade, because that also brings with it immigration and diversity. He quotes approvingly the ’14 Words’ – ‘We must secure the existence of the White race and a future for White children’ of the Nazi, David Lane, and is also massively anti-Semitic. He states very clearly that Jews are not members of the American people, and are working against their interests. Day states he is in favour of peaceful repatriation, but shows how peaceful he really is by talking about gunning down immigrant boats and praising the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik, whom he calls a saint. He tries to defend the Alt-Right as in favour and based on science, but notes that this accompanied by a caveat – except where its conclusion have been altered by democracy – which therefore allows him and his Nazi friends to dismiss global warming and claim that Whites are intellectually superior to Blacks. The Alt-Right also claims to be ‘anti-equalitarian’, which it dismisses as being ‘unicorns and leprechauns’, and also claims to be based on history. States have to be ethnically uniform, as proximity + diversity = war. Although it also claims to be in favour of peace between nations.
Logan shows how the liberal parts of Alt Right ideology are either unviable or contradictory – for example, the statement that each nation has a right to its own homeland doesn’t account for instances where two ethnic groups also claim the same territory, like Zionist Jews and Palestinians. He also states that there are other examples. Indeed, he could have mentioned the Hungarians and Romanians, who both claim Transylvania as the historic cradles of their peoples. He also makes the point that if the Alt Right took seriously their point about each nation having the exclusive right to their own historic homelands, then this would mean that White Americans should return to Europe, as the country they’re currently inhabiting is that of the Amerindians. As would all the European colonists throughout the former British Empire, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc. The statement that no race is superior to another is a sop to the Alt Right’s battered egos to get them over the fact that so many sports are dominated by Blacks and other non-Whites. In short, the liberal aspects of Alt-Right ideology mask the real White supremacy and Nazism underneath.
As for Day’s attitude to women, he fears and hates educated women to the extent that he defended the Islamist assassin, who shot Malala Yousafzai in the head simply because she was a girl, who wanted to go to school as boys did.
To be fair, Day on his blog describes himself as a ‘cruelty artist’, and I think like Milo Yiannopolis, he’s also a troll who delights in saying the inflammatory and unspeakable simply because he enjoys shocking liberals and leftists. Or simply the majority of decent human beings. But the misogyny is still very real.
The only thing I disagree with here is Logan’s opinion that Christianity isn’t fundamental to western civilization. Logan states that it isn’t, because western civilization pre-dates Christianity, going back to Greece and Rome, and America is a secular country, while in recent centuries western Europe has also moved significantly away from Christianity. This is true. But historically Christianity has formed one of the major influences on European culture. It was through Christian writers and intellectuals that the ancient legacy of classical Greece and Rome was passed on and expanded, and which also mediated influences from other civilisations such as Islam, India and China. American secularism also has its origin in the demands made for religious toleration first articulated during the British Civil War by the Nonconformist sects. Again, there are other influences. Some of the atheist commenters on this blog have pointed to recent works arguing that the first radical democrats in Europe were influenced by Baruch Spinoza. It’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean there also wasn’t an influence from radical Christianity. See the collection of writings from the British civil war published by Penguin Classics as Divine Right and Democracy.
This is reblogged from Kevin Logan’s mirror of Ropata’s piece. This is more about the Alt Right and its denizens, I’m sorry to say. In this piece, Johnny Ropata discusses the career and ideas of Kevin McDonald, one of the leading ideologues of the Alt Right and the man dubbed by another leading figure in the movement, John Derbyshire, ‘the Karl Marx of the Alt Right’. McDonald is one of the directors of the American Freedom Party, the neo-Nazi group that publicly endorsed Donald Trump. He was also one of the speakers introduced by the Alt Right’s leader and founder, Richard Spencer, at that notorious conference in the Texas A&M University. From 1985 to 2015, McDonald taught child psychology at the University of California at Long Beach, where he kept at low profile. He did his doctoral thesis on evolutionary psychology, and group selection amongst wolves. He published a series of three books in the 1990s applying his views to Jews – A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and Its Discontents, and the Culture of Critique. In the first book, McDonald lays out his theory that humanity is composed of different groups all competing for resources. The Jews are able to dominate in this, as they have a ‘Group Evolutionary Strategy’, founded on the Talmud as a eugenics text.
Ropata also believes that Jews see Whites as more of an enemy than Muslims, because Muslims are less intelligent and more easily dominated. He considers that Jews are motivated by a bitter hostility towards White, Christian civilisation, based on their own history of persecution, from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans through to the expulsions from Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. In Separation and Its Discontents, McDonald considered anti-Semitism to be rational strategy against Jewish domination, and saw the anti-Semitic campaigns of the Spanish Inquisition and Nazi Germany very much along these lines. In the Culture of Critique, McDonald examines Jewish involvement in western 20th century cultural movements, and concludes that they are actively trying to destroy White, Christian society in order to create an order more favourable to them.
Ropata here states that ‘this is straight-up bullsh*t’ without any hard data, and directs his viewers to a detailed critique of McDonald’s rubbish by JHate at bit.ly/2ktaauD. He has done little to understand or contextualise Jewish beliefs and practices, and his work is not accepted by scholars. He is simply a crank, and the only people, who take him seriously are other Nazis.
Among his other daft, poisonous ideas, he’s claimed on the David Duke Show on the radio that pornography is the Jews’ revenge for Christian persecution. he has also said that Jews want to set up Soviet-type gulags in the West for White Christians, when these become a minority in America. He bases this on his perception of Jewish involvement in the Russian Revolution and Nazi regime. Ropata says about this ‘This is what projection sounds like.’ After Anders Breivik horrific murder of 77 children at a Young Socialist summer camp in Norway, he wrote on his blog praising the butcher for being a great thinker with good practical ideas on strategy. Ropata also points out that McDonald is dangerous as he has forged a connection between the anti-Semitism of the early 20th century and that of the contemporary Nazi right. In this part of the video, he shows a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda movie denouncing Jews, even assimilated Jews, of enemies of western civilisation provoking discontent and protest. He also plays a section from ‘The Daily Shoah’, a modern neo-Nazi podcast, whose hosts rant on about Jewish control of the media and how they were responsible for Stalin’s gulags. This ends with the host citing McDonald’s Culture of Critique as a source for further information. He also shows a clip of Richard Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party stating that the ideals of White nationalism did not die in the bunker with Adolf Hitler, but are rising amongst ‘free peoples’ today, and that the Jews are waging a war against western civilisation. Heimbach also was shown pushing around a Black woman at a Trump rally. He regularly speaks at rallies of the American Freedom Party. Another regular speaker at these is the Holocaust denier Mark Weber, of the International Historical Review. He notes that these groups have become emboldened since the election of Donald Trump.
Morris Dees with James Corcoran (London: HarperCollins 1996).
A few minutes ago this evening I put up a post about an article on Hatewatch, a site by the Southern Poverty Law Centre that monitors extreme right-wing terrorism in the US, about the contacts between British Nazis, such as Thomas Mair, accused of the murder of Jo Cox, other extreme rightists, like Anders Breivik, and the National Alliance, the main Nazi organisation in the US. Twenty years ago, Morris Dees, the chief trial counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, wrote this book about the emergence of the militia movement in the US. These are right-wing paramilitary organisations, which came out of the survivalist movement in the 1980s. Their immediate impetus was the FBI’s killing of the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a right-wing extremist during an attack on his home at Ruby Ridge. The militias included fringe Christian groups, such as Christian identity and the neo-Nazi compounds and organisations at Hayden Lakes. It was the nexus that published the Turner Diaries, written by William Pierce, a Fascist fantasy about a White supremacist rebellion against a future America dominated by ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government – Jews and Blacks. This was the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma.
These were and are armed groups that believed that America was run by a secret Jewish government intent on enslaving gentiles and determined to destroy the White race through racial interbreeding with Blacks. Flicking through the book again, I found a photo of Col. ‘Bo’ Gritz. Gritz claimed to be the real person on which Rambo was based, and for years supposedly toured Vietnam looking for missing American soldiers still kept in prison camps after the War. Apart from his paramilitary activities, Gritz also had some very strange metaphysical views. He turns up in one of the pieces by Adam Palfrey, collected in Cult Rapture and Apocalypse Culture, in which he is interviewed after a meeting with a little old lady, who was one of the New Age channellers, who appeared in the ’80s and ’90s. Most Channellers seemed to have been essentially decent types, offering fairly banal warnings about the importance of love, peace, spiritual values and the need to save the planet from a various cast of interplanetary aliens and Ascended Masters. Unfortunately, the interstellar authority this one channelled was Hathon. He was a 9 1/2 foot tall reptilian from the Pleiades and a Nazi, who told people that there really was an international Jewish conspiracy and UFOs were a Nazi secret weapon. It’s the kind of stuff Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke describes in his book on modern Neo-Nazi pagan cults, The Black Sun.
At the time, there was a real fear that the Militias would try to organise some kind of coup, or at least begin a wave of extreme right-wing terror. Those fears largely haven’t materialised. One demented woman, who claimed to be a militia commander, tried to organise the Militias to form a mass march on Washington, but this never got off the ground as most of them suspected her of being a federal agent provocateur. And not all of them were racist. The commander of one of the Militias was Black, and there was a Jewish Militia, whose members believed that Jews should arm themselves against the possibility of a renewed Holocaust. Nevertheless, extreme rightwing terrorism is still very much a threat in America. In contradiction to the impression you get from the media, there’s more terrorism by White Supremacist and Neo-Nazis in America than from the Islamists. This is part of the milieu that’s produced the extreme right-wing radio hosts, who tell their listeners that America is in the hands of an atheist/ Communist/ Nazi/ Muslim conspiracy to kill good patriotic Christian Americans. The type of people, who blithely state over the airwaves that Obama is going to kill more people than Pol Pot. They’re part of the same milieu that has produced the Nazi supporters of Donald Trump, and that may be their most lasting and pernicious legacy to American politics.
Thomas Mair, the suspect for the murder of the Labour politician Jo Cox, was a long-time members of the extreme Right, who had ordered about $600 worth of books on how to build home-made guns and ammunition from National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the National Alliance, the main American neo-Nazi organisation.
Michelle, one of the many great contributors to this blog, sent me this link to an article on Hatewatch, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Centre that documents the activities of right-wing extremists: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/06/21/thomas-mair-brexit-and-us-uk-neo-nazi-connection. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has been around for decades. In the 1990s its leader, Maurice Dees, published a book on the threat of the Militias, independent, private armies of right-wing survivalists, bitterly alienated from the federal government, entitled Gathering Storm. The above article by Heidi Beirich, their intelligence director, describes the links to the National Alliance and other American Nazi organisations not just of Thomas Mair, but also Zack Davies, who carried out a brutal attack on a Sikh doctor in Mold in North Wales; Mark Cotterill, a former BNP member, who recruits for the National Alliance in Britain through his Heritage and Destiny website, Andrew Lovie, a former member of UKIP, and BNP stormtrooper, who has posted on the neo-Nazi website, Stormfront, in America. Among merchandising Lovie ordered from the National Alliance was a video game, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’, where the player goes around shooting Blacks and Jews. As grotesque and incredible as this sounds, it is all too plausible. When I was at College thirty years ago, the German Republican Party had got into the news and very hot water because of a computer game they launched, in which the player took the part of a the commandant of a concentration camp and had to prevent Jews, gays and leftists escaping. The article also describes the activities of two Brexit advocates, Andrew Tait and Matthew Tait, and Arthur Kemp. Andrew Tait ran a pro-Brexit website, ‘Vote Leave Take Control’, while Matthew Tait was a former BNP activist, who has spoken several times at conferences by American Renaissance, a racist outfit on the other side of the Pond. Tait also has his own website, Western Spring, in which he posted a pro-Brexit piece arguing that the EU was a Communist organisation to destroy the White race. Kemp’s a racist South African, who was a former officer of the BNP, and was at one time the media director of the National Alliance. Kemp also has a racist website, the New Observer Online, in which he calls immigrants ‘invaders’ and ‘rapefugees’.
Other Nazi assassins elsewhere in Europe also have contacts with American Nazi organisations. These include Anders Breivik, who was a member of Stormfront, Peter Mangs, another National Alliance member, who killed three people in Sweden, and Maxime Brunerie, a French Fascist, who tried to kill the-then president, Jacques Chirac. David Copeland, the infamous Nazi, who killed a number of people in a bombing campaign in London targeting gays, Blacks and Asians, was partly inspired by the Turner Diaries, a work of fiction describing a future extreme-right coup in America, sold by the National Alliance. And then there’s Frank S., a German skinhead, who stabbed Henriette Reker, a mayoral candidate for Cologne. He also was active online. The current Chairman of the National Alliance, Will Williams, is also living on welfare due to psychological problems, and has a history of victimising women. He celebrated the death of Jo Cox, stating that she had placed a target on her back.
Politically, the membership of extreme right-wing organisations in Britain is very low, but they are extremely violent, and as this article shows, several of the most vicious have transatlantic contacts. And there is a real danger that this violence will be spread and encouraged by Brexit. As one of my brother’s foreign friends has found, the amount of racism has increased and become very personal.
Mike over at Vox Political has a further piece on the aftermath of the shocking massacre of the staff of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. In his article Charlie Hebdo update: French mosque attacked, Mike reports that three blank grenade were thrown at a Paris mosque, and shots were fired at nearby kebab stand. He says of this apparent reprisal against innocents, who had nothing to do with the attack, that
This is, of course, exactly what the terrorists wanted. Terrorists always want to set people against each other, for the wrong reasons. The vast majority of Muslims are likely to have been as horrified at the terror attack as everyone else – but what are they supposed to think, now that innocent Muslims are being attacked by idiots?
Here’s the real voice of Islam, in the words of Vox Political commenter ‘Nightentity’ yesterday: “Those that believe these so-called Imams are ignorant of their faith and will believe anything they hear that makes them seem intelligent and all knowing to the other ignorant [people].
“Terrorism is not Islamic, you don’t cause suffering to the aged, the weak and the innocent, you don’t hide behind masks and scarves, you stand like a man and fight a man’s battle. These terrorists are cowards and weaklings for they hide behind a faith that does not condone what they do.
“These terrorists are only out for power and control, they are not true Muslims in any sense of the word.” [Bolding mine]
This is entirely correct. One of the aims of terrorist organisations, from the Russian revolutionaries through to the IRA, is to provoke further reprisals and attacks against the people they claim to be defending by the authorities, in order to create further disaffection and radicalisation. I don’t believe for it was an accident that the savage attacks on Charlie Hebdo were carried out when they were. Germany this week has been torn by demonstration and counterdemonstration by and against Pegida, an anti-Islamic organisation. Pegida’s name is an acronym for ‘Patriotische Europaer Gegen der Islamisierung des Abendlands’, or ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’. And last week, in France itself, a Right-wing television host, Zammour, was finally sacked. Zammour seems to have been an extreme Right-wing bigot of the same stripe as Glen Beck, the American nutter, who declared that the young victims of Breivik’s massacre in Norway all deserved it because they were anti-Semitic Nazis. No, really, he did. Zammour was thrown out because he declared that France’s five million Muslims should all be deported. This ran chills down the spines of genuinely patriotic French people, as it recalled the deportation of the Jews to their extermination in the Nazi death camps under the Occupation.
The attacks on Charlie Hebdo were timed to coincide with this period of stress and potential conflict over Islam in Europe. I don’t think it is any other than an attempt to provoke further violence and civil war between Muslim and Non-Muslim.
Much of the anti-Western Islamic polemic is against Western racism, portraying White Europeans and Westerners as viciously racist, and contrasting this with the supposedly non-racist nature of Islam. It’s clearly aimed at disenfranchised non-White Muslims, who may themselves have been victims of racism. I reject its view of the West and western society. The attack on Charlie Hebdo, and the further threats of attacks and atrocities in the West by al-Qaeda and Isis, are designed to make White westerners behave according to the Islamist stereotype of them as racist bigots. That way, the Islamists can spuriously claim to have shown the true, racist nature of Western society and gather further support.
It’s obvious from this that, whatever we do, we should not let them. Non-Muslim and Muslim should stand together now to prevent further hatred and violence.
Mike’s article also has some of the visual tributes from fellow cartoonists to the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo. Uderzo, who with Goscinny is the writer and creator of the world’s favourite ancient Gaul, shows Asterix and Obelix bowing in dignified respect. The two other cartoons, by Steve Bell and Lew Stringer, are a direct comment on the stupidity and cowardice of the attackers themselves.
I reblogged earlier today Mike’s piece on Farage’s grilling by LBC radio’s James O’Brien, in which he was asked some uncomfortable questions about racism and homophobia within the party, and Farage’s own comments about feeling uncomfortable in a railway carriage in which the was the person speaking English. He was also asked another awkward question about the party’s association with the parties of extreme Right, despite UKIP itself boasting of being a non-racist, non-sectarian party, which refuses to admit members of the BNP. Mike wrote
There was an implication that Farage, who has banned former members of the BNP from joining UKIP in an effort to protect the party from adverse publicity, has himself associated with the far-right organisation; and a question over the far-right parties with which UKIP sits in the European Parliament. Farage said UKIP would not sit with people who didn’t have a reasonable point of view but O’Brien flagged up a member of the group who had said the ideas of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, Islamophobe, Anti-Semite and anti-feminist, were “in defence of Western civilisation”.
Farage’s paper-thin defence was that the European political discourse was very different to the UK, (again) an admission that his party had encountered problems with “one or two members”, and a reference to problems in other parties (the Conservatives, on this occasion)
O’Brien leapt on this: “Your defence so far is that you’re no different from any other political party and yet your unique selling point … is that you are different.”
One of Mike’s commenters, HStorm, pointed out the hypocrisy in Farage’s attitude:
‘Farage’s paper-thin defence was that the European political discourse was very different to the UK, (again) an admission that his party had encountered problems with “one or two members”, and a reference to problems in other parties (the Conservatives, on this occasion)’
I find it amusing that an anti-European separatist, who is uncomfortable sitting on a train on which people dare to speak in other languages, should pontificate in the name of how political discourse is carried out in other parts of Europe. Surely if he prefers the notion that freedom-of-speech-equals-no-consequences-for-irresponsible-speech then he should live in precisely those countries that, he says, practise that manner of discourse. And yet he wants the UK to distance itself from them?
Why do so few people spot this enormous paradox in his position?
Farage’s comments about political discourse being different in other parts of Europe, thus allowing his party to join the same bloc as extreme Nationalist parties like the Danish People’s Party and the True Finns is also wrong and weak. It’s true to say that many of the other European countries don’t have the same culture of political correctness that there is in Britain. A Danish friend of mine told me that in Scandinavia non-Whites are regarded with a suspicion and hostility that he felt didn’t exist to the same extent in Britain. The Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown ten years ago described in her column the personal hostility she encountered as an Asian when she and her family went on holiday in France. I’ve also heard from others how the shops in some areas, like the south of France, will refuse to serve Arabs. Having said that, Alibhai-Brown has also written about how she and her family were treated well with no hint of racism when they went on another holiday across La Manche. And in the 1980s there was a national anti-racist movement amongst the young, when White youths showed solidarity with the Arab compatriots under a slogan, which translated as ‘Don’t Touch My Buddy’. This was initially directed against nightclubs, which refused to admit Arabs.
Yet even in those countries, where it has been alleged that racism is more widespread than in Britain, the extreme Right is still very definitely not respectable. The Financial Times also described in one of its columns how the Germans also don’t share the Anglo-American culture of political correctness. Nevertheless, there are naturally very strong laws in Germany against Nazism. At least one Neo-Nazi party, the NPD, was banned for a time in the 1970s under the Basic Law as an anti-democratic force for an article it published in its newspaper celebrating Hitler’s birthday. One of the more amusing ways Germans have taken to express their very strong hatred of the new, extreme Right is through mass demonstrations taking the mick out of them. Paul Merton covered one of these in his travel programme a few years ago journeying through the land of Kant, Goethe, and Wagner.
This is the anti-apple movement, the members of which were shown gathering outside one of the Neo-Nazi parties’ HQs in Berlin. There the protestors held up placards showing apples with the ‘banned’ symbol stamped across them, and shouted slogans about deporting apples, like ‘Sudfruchte Raus!’ – ‘Southern Fruits Out!’. The protest was organised by the politics professor at the University, who was very definitely no kind of Nazi. I found out later that the head of one of the Neo-Nazi organisations named had the element, ‘Apfel’, ‘apple’, and I have the impression that foreign immigrants of African ancestry are referred to as ‘southerners’. Hence the slogans about southern fruit. It’s a way of parodying the Neo-Nazis own racism and xenophobia, while turning into a very pointed attack on their Fuhrer.
Put simply, the growing popularity on the continent of parties like the True Finns, the Danish People’s Party, or the Front National in France doesn’t make them any more respectable in their countries, let alone over here. As an ostensibly anti-racist party, UKIP certainly is under no obligation to sit with them or form blocs with them in the European parliament.
Tory MEP Daniel Hannan – claims BNP are Socialist, while wanting to privatise the NHS.
I’ve blogged before on the Tory claim that Fascism, Nazism and, in Britain, the BNP, are forms of Socialism. There is indeed a perfectly respectable academic debate about how revolutionary the various European Fascist movements were. Mussolini started out as an extreme Left-wing Socialist, who broke with the Italian Socialist party in his demands that Italy should enter the First World War. He then moved increasingly and opportunistically to join the Italian Right, and in the red scare following the invasion of the factories by radical Italian workers promoted Fascism was a force, which would defend private property and the middle class against the threat of socialist revolution. The Nazi party in Germany also contained several Socialist demands in its 1926 political programme, such as profit-sharing and the confiscation of excessive profits from the War. These were also ignored, with the exception of a half-hearted attempt by Hitler to nationalise the department stores, when the Nazis finally came to power. Again, this was partly achieved through Hitler appealing to the middle classes, offering to defend them from Socialism and the organised working class on the way hand, and big business on the other.
The allegation that Fascism is a form of Socialism re-emerged a few years ago with the Republicans in America at about the same time Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism was published. It’s an attempt to smear Socialism or an kind of progressive politics, which can be linked to socialism, like welfare provision or greater state regulation of the economy through a simple process of guilt by association and by suggesting some kind of equivalence. The argument is roughly that if Fascism is a form of Socialism, so, therefore, Socialism is also a threat to freedom and human life, like Fascism. Good American citizens should therefore reject Socialism, or anything that looks even remotely like it, such as Obamacare, and should vote for small-state Republicans instead. The most extreme example of this attitude was the extreme Right-wing American TV presenter, Glenn Beck. After Anders Breivik committed his horrific massacre of the children attending a summer camp run by the Norwegian Socialist party’s youth organisation, Beck went on to describe them as like the Hitler Youth in Germany. The reason for this vile accusation was that the Norwegian Socialists had criticised Israel for its policies towards the Palestinians. Beck saw this as demonstrating that the Socialists were anti-Semites, and therefore exactly like the Nazi party.
Over here the accusation that Fascism is a form of Socialism has been repeatedly made by the Tory MEP for Dorset and Telegraph columnist, Daniel Hannan. Guy Debord’s Cat has produced a detailed refutation of one of one of his columns making this argument, which I’ve also reblogged. As far as I’ve been able to make out so far, the accusation was first made in the context of modern Tory politics by the Libertarian wing of the Conservative party in 1977. The group Aims of Industry published an attack by Stephen Ayres with the title The National Front is a Socialist Front. Ayres was an activist for NAFF, the National Association For Freedom, which later became the Freedom Association. The National Front rejected the accusation, and in return criticised the NAFF in the pages of its journal, Spearhead, for ‘simply echoing the voice of the new Toryism by emphasising the freedoms and rights that the individual should possess vis-à-vis the state but is afraid to mention the duties that the individual should hold towards the State and Nation.’ (See Larry O’Hara, ‘Notes from the Underground: British Fascism 1974-92, Part 1, 1974-83’, in Lobster 23: 15-20 (16, n. 30, 19). lobster’s editor, Robin Ramsay, has suggested that Thatcherism was based on Libertarianism, rather than the authoritarian Fascism of the BNP/ NF Right, as it seemed at the time. This seems to be true. Thatcher was strongly influenced by von Hayek and the monetarism of the Chicago School. As this has now become the dominant ideology within British Conservatism and the Republicans in America, so the Libertarian accusation that Fascism is somehow a form of Socialism continues to be made.
In fact, Libertarians also have a history of backing extremely Right-wing, illiberal movements. Guy Debord’s Cat has pointed out that von Hayek himself served in the government of the Austro-Fascist, Vollmar Dollfuss. Dollfuss banned the Austrian Socialist party from the fear that they were organising a Revolution, and established a Corporate state like that of Mussolini’s Italy following the theories of Othmar Spann. Fascist Austria was more tolerant than Nazi Germany. A range of political opinions were permitted with the exception of Socialism. Nevertheless, it was still a Fascist state. After the War, von Hayek went to Chile to view the operation of the monetarist policies put in place by General Pinochet’s military dictatorship. And Libertarianism elsewhere also had a history of supporting murderous extreme Right-wing dictatorships. I distinctly remember the accusation that one of the Central American dictatorships and its death squads was also supported by the Freedom Association.
While Fascism did contain left-wing elements, in practice it allied itself with the Right as the defender of property and private industry. The accusation that it, and its British forms, the NF and now the BNP, is really a form of Socialism, was rejected by the NF itself, and comes from the Libertarians, who have themselves supported brutal Right-wing dictatorships. The claim has been made to present the Tory party as the only authentic party representing and defending freedom. As has been shown recently by the authoritarian stance of successive Conservative administrations, including Maggie Thatcher and her policy of the strong state, this simply isn’t the case. Moreover, it supports the economic freedoms of industry against the welfare of the working and lower middle class majority, leaving them exploited by their social and political superiors. They support freedom, but only for a very narrow, select, and extremely wealthy few. For everyone else, it’s wage slavery.
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