Indian Taxman Raids BBC Offices in Kolkata – Hindu Fascism on the March?

A very short text report came up on YouTube from one of the Indian English-language news channels, reporting that the Indian authorities had raided the Beeb’s offices in Kolkata, or Calcutta as I think it used to be under the Empire, for a tax ‘survey’. There were no further details, so I don’t know what this is all about, But it brought out all all the Hindu Fascists in the comments section. They were denouncing the Beeb as anti-Indian and demanding that it should be banned along with al-Jazeera. At the moment Modi’s bunch of subcontinental stormtroopers are trying to silence opposition media. Apart from the Nazi persecution of non-Hindu minorities like Muslims, Sikhs and Christians – and they were even going after the Buddhists a few months ago, like they have any kind of reputation as a violent threat to civilised society – they were also clamping down on liberal Hindu and other journalists, who believe in the Congress party’s vision of a liberal, pluralistic India where peoples of different faiths and philosophies can live in harmony. I wonder if something like that is going on here, and that the Beeb has angered the goose-steppers of the BJP by reporting on their religious fanaticism, their corruption and the harm their neoliberal policies are doing to the poor. And that the tax ‘survey’ is a trumped-up investigation designed to exert political pressure.

Does Sargon Really Think That Only Whites Can Be ‘Far Right’?

I haven’t criticised Sargon of Gasbag, otherwise known as Carl Benjamin, the man who broke UKIP, for a little while, so I’m doing so, now that the opportunity has presented itself. And it definitely has! Like Simon Webb of History Debunked, Sargon and the Lotus Eaters decided to put up a video about the Hindu-Muslim riots in Leicester. The title claimed that the ‘right’ had started it. Which the right definitely has, but not in the sense Sargon thought. East Leicester’s MP, Claudia Webbe, had tried to calm things down with a message to the people of Leicester that it was a great multicultural city where traditionally different peoples had lived peacefully together. Sargon obviously couldn’t resist sneering at that, now that the peace and harmony had been broken. But I understand from the great commenters on this blog that, whether relations between Hindus and Muslims are like now, this was certainly true in the past. But Sargon really showed his ignorance when he sneered at something else Webbe said. Webbe said that the hate and violence was caused by far-right influences from outside. To Sargon and his viewers, this meant that Webbe believed that the tension was being stirred up by White supremacists.

Except Webbe didn’t say that. She said, ‘far-right’. Various television news reports on the riots by the Indian news agencies and British broadcasters like GB News have suggested that the violence was provoked by Hindu far right extremists supporting Modi and his militant Hindu nationalism on the one hand and militant Muslim Pakistanis on the other. Modi’s BJP and its concept of Hindutva, Hindu Nationalism, is considered far right and a form of fascism. I’ve seen it mentioned in a recent textbook on fascism as an example of the mystical trend in fascism. The same textbook also included Marcus Garvey and his Negro Improvement Association because when Garvey was in New York, he and his organisation used to give each other military ranks and hold paramilitary style rallies, very much like Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, Garvey said in an interview that he taught it to those two dictators. He didn’t, but it shows a certain similarity in attitude to them.

Sargon stated in his video that Webbe is now an independent after she was thrown out of Labour party after being convicted of threatening to throw acid in the face of a love rival. It’s a disgusting crime, and a pity Webbe did this. She was a member of the Corbynite left, and the Labour party needs MPs like her who stand up for the working class against neoliberalism. Despite her crime, she’s not stupid. My guess is that Webbe knows very well that other nations and races have their own far right. And so, when she talks about the far right causing the tension and violence in Leicester, she’s talking about Hindutva nationalists and Islamists. She isn’t talking about the NF, BNP, National Action or whoever.

Sargon’s sneer about her assessment of the situation, which is entirely accurate, shows he’s not as clever as he thinks he is.

Or it could be that he knows perfectly well that Webbe did not mean White fascists, but has carried on with the smear because he knows it’ll stick with his viewers, who won’t know any better.

Which is really nasty and cynical. And worthy of a true Tory like Truss or Rees-Mogg.

Diane Abbott’s ‘Whites Like to Divide and Rule’ Comment

Discussing the ongoing riots between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester, I have said that I believe that part of the problem comes from politicians’ and anti-racist groups’ exclusive focus on White racism. This, I believe, was shown a few years ago during a Labour party gathering when an Asian man asked Diane Abbott if Labour would do more to tackle racism amongst ethnic communities. Abbott refused, stating that Whites would use it to divide and rule. Searching through YouTube for this exchange, I regret that I’ve been unable to find it. But I did discover other occasions where she stated that Whites liked to divide and rule.

She seems to have first uttered it in 2012 during a twitter exchange with another Black woman about the sentencing of the accused in the Stephen Lawrence murder. The other lady objected to statements about the Black community, as if they were all a monolithic group. Abbott replied that she understood that, but that ‘Whites like to divide and rule’. She was challenged on that statement by various Tories in parliament, who called her racist and demanded that she should resign. Andrew Neil also tackled her about it, in the company of Michael Portillo and an Asian guest, on his programme. Abbott tried to excuse it by saying that she was really talking about 19th century colonialism, but she was unable to state this precisely because of the 140-word limit on Twitter. But as Neil pointed out, did she didn’t put it in the past tense. She used the present. And she continued to repeat it. She stated that Black people need to unite, because the races with the greatest cohesion succeed while Whites like to divide and rule. And two years ago, she repeated the same statement when calling for all of Britain’s ethnic minorities to unite against White racism.

Here’s a video from ‘Bin the Labour Party’ of Abbott making her racist statement. I definitely do not endorse the channel or its sentiments, but this video is very useful for what it shows about Abbott’s racial attitudes in this regard.

While I can see the logic behind her statement, I still believe very strongly that Abbott’s exclusive focus on White racism against Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities, and those of anti-racist activists like her, have brought Britain to the current climate of racial tension today. Nothing was done about the ideologies entering Britain’s ethnic communities, such as Islamism and the Hindutva fascism of Modi’s Indian BJP and others. It didn’t suit their purpose. And the result is that gangs of Muslims and Hindu youths – not the entire communities, as the mayor of Leicester also said on GB News – are tearing each other apart on Leicester’s streets.

As an aside, one of the interviewers on GB News – I think it may have been Mike Graham – in the interview with the Mayor of Leicester claimed that half the people arrested during the riots were foreigners. No, said the good mayor, ‘they came from Birmingham’. Graham thought that some of the trouble came from Gujeratis who had entered the country through Portugal and had Portuguese passports. One of the commenters on that exchange on YouTube knew some of the Asians Graham was talking about. They were Christian Goans, who spoke Portuguese. And as Christians, they weren’t going to join either side in the fighting.

Independent Article about Anti-Muslim Racism In Britain’s Hindu Community

Today’s Indie has published an article in their ‘Voices’ section by Smriti Singh, ‘Voices: British Indians have a racism problem – we need to be honest about it’ talking about anti-Muslim prejudice in the British Hindu community. This has been generated by Modi and his Hindu-supremacist BJP, with their hatred of non-Hindu minorities and particularly Muslims. Anti-Muslim messages and images have as result been published not just for domestic Indian Hindus audiences, but also for the consumption of Hindu communities abroad, particularly in Britain. The article begins

‘I was recently sent a WhatsApp clip of a street vendor in India, dressed in a manner that suggested he was Muslim, apparently spitting into food containers. The clip was clearly doctored and shared in the name of “raising awareness”. But in fact it was intended to stir up more hatred against India’s Muslims – not just there, but among Hindus here in Britain.

I come from a family of immigrants – my parents came to the UK from India and we all experienced racism, particularly in the early days. Yet despite this, I am heartbroken by how much racism I am seeing from British Hindus today, directed at Muslims and stirred up by India’s extreme right-wing government.

Since the election of the BJP government in 2014, Hindu fundamentalism has been growing in India. Legislative changes from the top, with the judiciary and mainstream media capitulating to this agenda, are turning India from a secular country to one that puts “Hindu” first.

In 2019, the BJP passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, providing Indian citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan – but specifically excluding Muslims. Muslim girls who wear the hijab are increasingly excluded from schools. There are frequent reports of lynchings of Muslims for (allegedly) killing cows. Day-to-day life for religious minorities, particularly Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, is becoming harder.’

For further information, go to: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/voices-british-indians-have-a-racism-problem-we-need-to-be-honest-about-it/ar-AA10RZ93?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=b32ba70602624b12883808d40a7e49fd

Respect to the Indie for publishing this article, which would surely annoy Diane Abbott. I’ve said for a long time that racism in Britain is complex and not simply a case of White prejudice against and victimisation of people of colour. I’ve heard that in some schools in Bristol, the big problem of racial friction and gang fighting in the playground wasn’t between Blacks and Whites, but between various groups of Asians. But the mainstream anti-racists really don’t seem to want to recognise the complexity of situation or that it simply isn’t Whites against non-Whites. One Asian man at a Labour gathering asked Diane Abbott about doing something about racism amongst Britain’s different ethnic communities. She reply that she didn’t want anything done, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and conquer’. Which shows you how fixed and racist her own anti-racist views paradoxically are.

Far Right Hindus Swear Nazi Oaths against Muslims in India

This is a very chilling video from ‘Sultan and Khan’s Sunday Scoop’ channel over on YouTube. The two hosts, Harris Sultan and Nuriyeh Khan, are ex-Muslim atheists, who critique and attack their former religion. I’m not an atheist, and while I’m not a Muslim, this is not the kind of material I’d usually put up on my channel. I feel it’s far more important to attack the government and various political movements that I believe are wrong and dangerous, than attack other people’s religions. But Sultan and Khan are also worried about the rise of religious fanaticism and intolerance, not just in the Muslim world and Pakistan, but also in India. They have posted several videos reporting and commenting on the lynching and malicious prosecution of people for blasphemy by Muslims in Pakistan, as well as murderous rants and attacks on Muslims and Christians by Hindu mobs and rabble-rousing demagogues in India. They have also covered two incidents in which Sikhs also have lynched people for blasphemy. In this video they talk about further instances of anti-Muslim bigotry and hate spread by the Hindu far right.

The first case they comment on is the arrest of a fourth man by India’s finest for ‘Bulli Bhai’. Bulli is an insulting term for Muslims used by the Hindu fascists. Last week the Indian cops arrested a young woman for putting up the images of 100 Muslim women on the internet, announcing that they were for auction. It was deliberately done to humiliate these ladies. Now a fourth person, a man, has been arrested for it.

But what will chill western viewers is the footage of a mass gathering in a village somewhere in India, in which the villagers swear a Nazi style oath not to do business with, sell land to or work with Muslims. Sultan and Khan describe it themselves as Nazi, and they are absolutely correct. It is almost exactly like the Nazi oath to boycott Jewish businesses, which culminated in the smashing of Jewish storefronts in Krystallnacht. And the parallel is even closer when you see that the wretched people swearing the oath do so with right arm outstretched in what really does look like the Fascist and Nazi salute. The oath ends with them shouting ‘Hail Mother India! Hail Lord Ram’. Sultan and Khan are naturally disgusted at this. They state that while there is a problem with Muslim fanaticism, only 5 to 10 per cent of Muslims are like that. And it is up to the vast majority of ordinary Muslims, who aren’t like that, to take care of them. Most Muslims, says Sultan, are Muslim in name only. They are just ordinary people trying to put food on the table.

The Hindu far right, like the BJP and the paramilitary RSSS, are considered Fascist movements by political scientists and historians of Fascism. One modern text book on Fascism includes a BJP prayer as an example of Fascist mysticism, a phenomenon that isn’t confined to Hinduism but permeates all Fascism, Hindu, Christian or whatever. Hindu fanaticism has been a growing problem since mobs rioted, and attacked historic mosques and ordinary Muslims while the authorities turned a blind eye in the 1980s. Indeed, several leading members of the BJP have connections to far right organisations or else made very sure that the mobs responsible for the attacks were allowed to go unchecked.

Most of us have an image of Hinduism as a gentle religion, largely, I think, thanks to Mahatma Gandhi and his doctrine of ahimsa, non-violence. The Hindu far right exploit this peaceful image, denying that such bigotry and violence exists in their religion while at the same time copying it from the religions they hate and persecute. And as well as hating Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, they also hate ordinary, democratic, moderate Hindus and secular Indians as well as Gandhi himself for their ideal of India as a democratic, pluralist nation. As this video shows, these fanatics wish to turn India into a nation where Hinduism is the only permitted religion.

Sultan and Khan have greater faith in the power of modern India’s democratic, pluralist traditions. They state that this will not happen, and India will never become a world power by persecuting 200 million of its citizens. This is presumably the Muslim population in India. The persecution isn’t stopping with Muslims and other religious minorities. The fanatics are also attacking and trying to close down and arrest Indian activists and journalists opposed to this wave of intolerance.

I have said that Fascism knows no colour or religion. Violent contempt for democracy, extreme nationalism and religious or racial hatred can arise everywhere, in any race, religion or culture. And it has to be fought everywhere it appears.

I therefore wish Indian anti-fascists and liberals every success in combating this bigotry regardless of their personal religious views, just as we in the West need to combat the rising Fascism in Europe and America.

Guardian Reports Death Threats Sent to US Academic Conference on Hindu Extremism

The Groan has posted an alarming article about a campaign of online intimidation being wages by a number of Hindu nationalist organisations against an academic conference held by many of the America’s most prestigious universities about Hindu nationalism. This includes death threats to the speakers and organisers and their families, and insults and abuse against their caste and religion. The article begins

‘An academic conference in the US addressing Hindu nationalism is being targeted by rightwing Hindu groups, which have sent death threats to participants and forced several scholars to withdraw.

The conference, titled Dismantling Global Hindutva, which is co-sponsored by more than 53 universities including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers, has come under attack after several groups in India and the US accused the event of being “anti-Hindu”.

The aim of the conference, which will begin online on 10 September, is to bring together scholars to discuss Hindutva, otherwise known as Hindu nationalism, a rightwing movement that believes India should be an ethnic Hindu state, rather than a secular nation.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), led by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, has pushed forward a Hindu nationalist agenda, under which India’s 200 million Muslims have faced discrimination and attacks.

The conference organisers said that in recent weeks, “far-right fringe groups have mobilised to attack the speakers at the conference”, falsely characterising the discussion of the political ideology of Hindutva as an attack on Hinduism itself.

In a statement, the organisers described how “immense pressure has been placed upon universities by fringe groups to back out of the conference” and emphasised the “sinister implications” of this “massive disinformation campaign”.

Several of the participants have withdrawn from the conference over fears it would lead to them being banned from returning to their families in India or being arrested on their arrival into the country.

Dozens of speakers and organisers involved have had violent threats made against their family members. Meena Kandasamy, a speaker, had pictures of her children posted online with captions such as “ur son will face a painful death” as well as casteist slurs. Other academics have been forced to file police cases after receiving death threats.

More than 1m emails were sent to the presidents, provosts and officials at universities involved in the conference pressuring them to withdraw and dismiss staff who were participating, pointing to an organised campaign by groups in India and the US. At Drew University in New Jersey, more than 30,000 emails were received in just a few minutes, causing the university server to crash.

“We are deeply concerned that all of these lies, taken together, will be used to incarcerate those who speak at the conference, or worse, inflict bodily harm, up to murder, upon those associated with the conference,” read the statement by the conference’s organisers. “Due to the variety of the nature of these threats, several speakers have had to withdraw from participating in this conference over the past two to three days.”

“The level of hate has been staggering,” said Rohit Chopra, an associate professor at Santa Clara University, who is one of the conference organisers.

“Organisers and speakers have received death threats, threats of sexual violence, and threats of violence against their families. Women participants have been subjected to the vilest kind of misogynistic threats and abuse and members of religious minorities associated with the conference have been targeted with casteist and sectarian slurs in the ugliest sorts of language.”’

The article states that the conference has been attacked by right-wing Indian TV channels and discusses the particular nationalist groups behind the campaign.

‘The conference has also become a particular object of ire on rightwing TV news channels in India, who have accused it of being funded by the CIA, foreign governments and George Soros, and alleged on air that the conference is designed to support the Taliban.

The groups campaigning against the conference are the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, an Indian organisation that has faced allegations of being linked to the murders of intellectuals and journalists, and US-based rightwing groups the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America.

In a statement this week, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) USA – a sister group of the RSS, an extremist nationalist organisation in India – urged all universities involved to withdraw support. They expressed “deep concern about the upcoming online event titled Dismantling Global Hindutva. We strongly condemn such events that amplify Hinduphobia, encourage Hindu hate, and incite violence against the minority Hindu population in the west.”

Hindu Janajagruti Samiti also wrote to the Indian home minister asking for action to be taken against those taking part in the event.’

According to Private Eye, the RSSS was founded in the 1920s and deliberately modelled on Mussolini’s Fascists. They have been behind a series of attacks against Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. And some of the Hindu groups in the US are very right-wing. I can remember seeing a video on one American Hindu group’s rally supporting Donald Trump and the Republicans. It was blatantly Islamophobic, consisting of a play in which Hindu dancers were attacked by menacing jihadis before the US marines came in and shot them.

This Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, is considered by political scientists to be another form of Fascism. I’ve come across books on Fascism that include passages from Hindu extremist literature as examples of the mystical side of Fascism, ‘Fascismo mystica’, as Mussolini called it.

The organisers of the conference make it very clear that they aren’t opponents of Hinduism, but of Hindu nationalism. And the domestic victims of this form of Fascism have included liberal Hindu writers, journalists and activists. People who wish India to remain faithful to Gandhi’s vision of a pluralist, multicultural country. And the ultra-nationalist Hindu fanatics despise him because of this.

Indian liberals have also complained that freedom of speech and information is under threat thanks to Modi. Peaceful protesters, including the farmers protesting against the government’s privatisation of the state machinery guaranteeing a fair price for this goods, are arrested and beaten by the police. Journos covering these protests are also arrested in attempts to stop coverage and filming.

We’re used to hearing about European and British Fascism and Nazism as well as Islamism, but it should be remembered that hatred, racism, religious intolerance and violent ethnic nationalism can be found in all cultures, nations and races.

Which is why Fascism has to be fought wherever it is found.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/death-threats-sent-to-participants-of-us-conference-on-hindu-nationalism/ar-AAPjKWd?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

Kim Leadbeater – A Vapid Candidate for a Vacuous, Manipulative Leadership

Okay, the Batley and Spen by-election has happened, and the results are. The good news is that the extreme right-wing parties, who went there hoping to clean up, have all done spectacularly badly. I saw something that said they only got two per cent of the vote, and lost their deposits. So well done to the good voters of that constituency. More problematic is the fact that the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, won, scraping through with a majority of 360 odd votes. As Mike’s pointed out in his piece about the election, this has effectively turned a Labour safe seat into a marginal. But Starmer has hailed it as a great victory, and according to one of the papers has told everyone that Leadbeater is the ‘future of Labour’.

I profoundly hope he’s wrong, but I fear that under is persecutory, opportunistic and factional leadership, he might be right.

Leadbeater was apparently parachuted into the constituency on a shortlist of precisely one. She was not even a Labour member until four months ago. She’s another Blairite Tory – I won’t say Tory lite’, as these scumbags may be more extreme in their views than the true Tories. Also according to Mike, in 2017 she was telling disabled people that there was no magic money tree for them. Despite the fact that the Tories raid the magic money tree whenever its convenient for them or their patrons, the superrich. Then there’s a whole orchard of the plants. As for her policies in this campaign, the Preston Journalist posted the video below analysing her electoral video. In it she talks about fighting local problems like litter and dog mess. This is all well and good, but as the Preston Journalist points out, it’s local authority stuff. MPs deal with bigger issues like attracting investment to the area. He also argued she made a mistake, in that, as the local council was Labour and so should have been tackling these issues, she’s attacking her own side.

I think there’s a simple reason behind her failure to articulate a set of policies: under Starmer, Labour doesn’t have any. There’s a policy review going on at the moment, but Starmer was elected promising to continue the great manifesto polices set by Jeremy Corbyn. Which he then promptly broke, ditching the policies, suspending the Labour leader and going on yet another witch hunt against his supporters. Like Blair, Starmer doesn’t really have any different policies. He’s a Tory, as are his supporters and the Blairite party bureaucracy. They have nothing to offer working people except more privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state and NHS for corporate profit. Like Blair, his whole election strategy seems to be to appeal once again to the middle class, swing voters and corporate donors, with the promise that somehow his administration will be more efficient at carrying out Tory policies than the Conservatives themselves. But as he has no real policies himself, he’s constantly flailing around trying to find an issue that he can jump on. The last one was trans rights. Before then he opportunistically took the knee to support BLM, even though he dismissed it when it broke out last year. Worse, he has shown himself entirely complacent and unwilling to confront real racism, and particularly the bullying of Black MPs and activists like Diane Abbott, in the party. Hence Black people are deserting the party in droves. So apparently, are Muslims.

One of the issues at the election was Kashmir. Simon Webb, the man behind the History Debunked Channel, produced a video discussing this in which he sneered at the Labour party. I’ve said many times before that Webb is a Torygraph reading Conservative, although he also said he didn’t have much time for Boris’ crew either. He’s a staunch critic of multiculturalism, and so said that it was a peculiar situation when an election in an English town could be decided by the situation in a country thousands of miles away. He also talked about pro-Palestinian demonstrations by Labour supporters in a neighbouring area, and then repeated the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s line that most Muslims are anti-Semitic. Webb is very pro-Israel, and he says he spent some time in Israel when he was younger working on a kibbutz, as many idealistic young people did way back in the 80s or so. He claimed that Muslim antagonism to Starmer’s leadership was anti-Semitic. They hate the Labour leader because his wife’s Jewish and his children are being raised in that faith. This is the first I’ve heard of it, and quite honestly I don’t care about the personal religious beliefs of himself or his family either. What matters far more is that Starmer has declared himself a firm Zionist, and continued the witch hunt against decent, anti-racist folk, including Jews and gentiles, who have fought real anti-Semitism, who have dared to make even the mildest criticism of Israel. As for Kashmir, Modi is a Hindu supremacist, whose party persecutes not just Muslims, but also Sikhs and Christians, as well as liberal Hindus concerned about his assault on democracy, plurality and interfaith tolerance. There are good reasons why people of all three of those faiths, and not just Muslims, should be sceptical about Starmer’s apparent backing of Modi. Muslims have an especially good reason to despise Starmer, because of the brutality of the Indian occupation. A month or so ago, Private Eye did a ‘Letter From Kashmir’ about it. Among other atrocities, this mentioned how Indian troopers were rounding up Muslim youths and then raping them. It’s a very good reason why people, who care about human rights, should be concerned about Starmer and his support for the Indian prime minister. But I doubt you’ll hear a word about this from Starmer.

Webb’s comments about Muslims, Kashmir and Palestine also shows the double standard behind the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. According to this, which the Board of Deputy and its allied Zionist organisation were so keen to foist on the Labour party, it is anti-Semitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to another country. In all too many cases, this is true. Central to the real, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is the belief that Jews have no love or loyalty to their host nations, and are really more loyal to rival nations. At the time of the First World War, Jewish German businessmen like Mond were suspected by the xenophobic right of being more loyal to Germany, while in later years it’s been Israel. When the fear hasn’t been that the Jews are just more loyal to each other, of course, and are actively plotting to enslave their non-Jewish compatriots.

But that example of anti-Semitism also raises problems, as there are Jewish Zionists, who made no secret that their primarily loyalty was to Israel. One of the most notorious of these was the casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who made no secret that his first loyalty was not to his home, America, but to Israel. There’s a double standard in Webb’s attitude in that I assume he would find it anti-Semitic for Jews to be accused of such conflicting loyalties, but not British Muslims.

Back to Leadbeater, it seems to me that she was selected primarily because she’s the sister of the late Jo Cox, assassinated years ago by a Nazi. She’s also a lesbian, and while this shouldn’t make any difference to whether someone’s suitable for a political career, I think support for gay rights and anti-racism are also a part of the Blairite political ideology and one of the few areas that mark the Labour party as a party of the left. It’s been pointed out that Blair was a liberal, not a socialist. He ditched the party’s Clause IV, pledging it to nationalisation, but retained the concern for tackling prejudice against minorities, which is a liberal policy. But Starmer’s complete lack of interest in retaining Black and Muslim voters shows that he’s not really interested in anti-racism either. And as the Tories also claim to support gay rights since David Cameron’s leadership, and Johnson has marked Pride week or month by decorating the front of No.10 in Pride colours, I don’t know how far support for that issue differentiates the two parties.

The mad right-winger, Alex Belfield, also couldn’t resist the opportunity to take another swipe at Diane Abbott. Abbott, apparently, congratulated Jeremy Corbyn for Leadbeater’s victory. To Belfield, this is yet another demonstration of how stupid she is. Well, I can’t say Abbott is my favourite MP, but I think she’s right. Under Corbyn, Labour’s majority in the constituency was 8,000. I think Leadbeater’s election was helped by the scandal about Hancock’s affair and subsequent resignation, but I’m sure that it was also helped by some of those, who had voted Labour under Corbyn, continuing to support the party.

Before the election, people were predicting that Labour would lose and it would spell the end of Starmer’s leadership of the party. That hasn’t happened, and it looks like he’s still going to hang on. But it’s not a stunning victory, and the Tories know it. Sargon of Gasbag and his fellow Lotus Eaters put up a video afterwards laughing at how terrible the result was. While it’s good that Labour was able to hang on to the seat after the humiliation of the previous elections, it’s still doesn’t dispel the fears of further electoral disaster.

Together, Leadbeater and Starmer decimated the Labour majority in Batley and Spen, showing how much of a busted flush Blairism is and why Starmer still needs to go as party leader. But he’s determined to hang on, and so we can expect further and worse results in the future.

Bristol South Labour Party Passes Motion of Solidarity with Indian Farmers

Bristol South CLP held its monthly meeting last Thursday, and passed a number of motions. Due to the Coronavirus, these are now held over Zoom, like many meetings up and down the country generally. A number of motions were debated and passed during the meeting, one of which was solidarity with the Indian farmers. Explaining the issues was a guest speaker, Dal Singh, from the Sikh community. According to Mr Singh, the central issue is the poverty caused by the BJP’s government’s privatisation of the state purchasing apparatus for agricultural goods. The Indian government had a state organisation that bought up the farmer’s produce, giving them a fair price. But now Modi is handing this process over to private entrepreneurs, who are paying starvation prices for the produce purchased. Singh said that as a result, the farmers are going to be in debt for the rest of their lives. The farmers affected and involved in the protests aren’t all Sikhs, but Sikhs form a majority of those affected. When asked what the attitude of the Sikh community was to it, Mr Singh seemed to indicate that they were more or less resigned to it. He called it a ‘genocide’ several times, and said that Sikhs regarded it as part of the long history of their people’s suffering going back to the horrors of the partition of India and the British occupation of the Punjab. He also described how the police and armed forces were being used by the Modi government to brutalize protesters and muzzle the press, with the arrest and beating of journalists covering the protests. As well as explaining the situation, Mr Singh also gave details of charities to which people could donate to help the affected farmers, though I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what they were.

I had absolutely no problem supporting the motion. Socialists are internationalists, as the Style Council song reminds us, and we have to stand in solidarity with working people around the world. ‘Workingmen of all countries, unite!’ as Marx and Engels said in their little Manifesto. I am very pleased that others agreed, and that the motion was passed.

Someone at the meeting commented that the Indian farmers were yet more victims of Neoliberalism. Absolutely. Around the world, working people are being pushed further and further into poverty as wages are slashed, hours increased, rights at work taken away, industries privatised and deregulated. The book Falling Off the Edge, which is a critical examination of this process, the poverty it’s causing, and the violence and terrorism that it engenders as a backlash, describes very clearly how its affecting the average Indian worker. And this poverty is the creation of Modi’s BJP Hindufascist government.

Hindufascist? Yes, absolutely. The BJP is a nationalist organisation, which actively persecutes non-Hindus like Christians, Sikhs and Muslims. One of Modi’s fellow BJP politicos was the governor of a province, which took absolutely no action when pogroms broke out against the Muslim population back in the 1990s. The BJP also have connections to the RSSS, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary outfit modelled on Mussolini’s Fascists. Not only has the BJP followed the standard Neoliberal policies of privatisation, deregulation and low wages, they’ve also been trying to abolish the affirmative action programmes intended to improve the conditions of the Dalits, the former ‘Untouchables’. Debt slavery was one of the forms of exploitation and servitude that afflicted many Indians, and Mr Singh’s comment that Modi’s privatisation will mean that farmers will not be able to get out of debt certainly makes you wonder if the scumbag is actively trying to bring it back.

It’s not only non-Hindus and the lower castes Modi is persecuting. The BJP, or at least parts of it, have a real, bitter hatred of Gandhi and his influence on Hinduism, because he preached tolerance and the inclusion of the Muslims rather than turning India into a Hindu state. The party also actively persecutes liberal Indian journalists and writers. Tony Greenstein, the long term campaigner against Zionism, racism and Fascism, has also rightly criticised Labour party leader Keir Starmer for supporting Modi. Yes, I know – India is now a global powerhouse. Yes, it’s a vital trade partner with this country. But the country’s prosperity should not come through the exploitation of its working people. Just like ours shouldn’t. But this seems lost on Starmer and the rest of the Blairites.

I am very glad, however, that my local Labour party has made this gesture of support for the Indian farmers, and hope this will give them strength in their struggle with a Fascistic, exploitative government.

History Debunked Refutes the Myth that James I was Black

More from the whackier end of racial politics. History Debunked has put up a number of videos refuting various assertions and myths promoted as Black history. One of his videos attacked the claim, seen in the Netflix interracial historical romance, Bridgerton, that Queen Caroline was Black. This has arisen from the fact that one of her ancestors was a 13th Spanish Moorish prince. But that was five hundred years before her birth, and so any biological trace of her non-White ancestry would have disappeared way back in her lineage. Apart from which, the Spanish Moors were Berbers and Arabs from North Africa. They were darker than Europeans – the term ‘blue-blooded’ for the aristocracy comes from the Christian Spanish nobility. Under their idea of limpieza de sangre, ‘blood purity’, the racial ideology that distinguished them from the Moors, their skin was supposed to be so pale that you could see the veins in the wrist. But the Moors were nevertheless lighter-skinned than the darker peoples south of the Sahara, in what the Arabs called Bilad as-Sudan and the Berbers Akal Nguiwen, ‘The Land of the Blacks’. Which I think shows that the Arabs and Berbers, dark as they were compared to Europeans, very clearly didn’t think of themselves as Black.

In this video Simon Webb debunks a similar myth, that James I of England/ VI of Scotland, was Black. This ahistorical idea apparently began with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a Black Jewish sect who believe that one of the lost tribes of Israel went to sub-Saharan Africa. Webb mentions that a group of them settled in Israel in the Negev. He uses this to try to refute the demand that Israel should open its borders by stating that Israel had taken in people of a number of different racial groups. They are now, for example, taking in people from India. It’s true that Israel has taken in refugees from Africa, but many of the groups they’ve accepted were Jews. In the 1970s they mounted a rescue operation to transport the Falashas, the Black Jews of Ethiopia, away from their oppression in that country to safety in Israel. My guess is that the Indians they’re accepting are also Jewish. There’s an indigenous Jewish community in India, the Bene Israel, and it sounds like some of them may be migrating. There is, however, considerable racism amongst White Israelis. Abby Martin covered this in some of her reports for The Empire Files on TeleSur, in which she interviewed Black Israelis about the abuse, including physical assault, they’d experience. Gentile African refugees, although present, are resented by many Israelis as ‘infiltrators’, the term they also use for Palestinians trying to return to the ancestral lands from which they were evicted during the Nakba, the term they use for foundation of Israel and their massacre and ethnic cleansing in 1947.

But back to the Black Hebrew Israelites and James I. The Black Hebrew Israelites believe that the Spanish Moors were Black, and that they went from Spain to colonise Ireland and Scotland. Which must be news to most Scots and Irish. Mary, Queen of Scots was mixed race, but Lord Darnley, James’ father, was fully Black and so was James. The English, however, were determined to erase any trace of this Black ancestry, and so embarked on a deliberately policy of intermarrying with the Black Scots and Irish in order to make them White, at the same time destroying all the contrary evidence that they were Black. Although this myth began with the Black Hebrew Israelites it has spread out from them into the wider Black community. To support his description of this bizarre myth, Webb on the YouTube page for the video has link to an article in the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Patriot, which proudly promotes this claim.

Was King James I of England black? – YouTube

The belief that the Spanish Moors were Black has formed the basis for an anti-White racist view of history. A few years ago the American left-wing magazine, Counterpunch, carried on its online edition a piece by a Black historian, Garikai Chengu. This claimed that the Moors were ‘obviously Black’, and their colonisation of Spain brought science and reason to a Europe then gripped by ignorance and superstition. There’s some basis for this in that the revival of science in the West began when Christian scholars acquired Arab and Islamic scientific texts from places such as Islamic Spain and Sicily after that was conquered by the Normans. However, it’s grotesquely exaggerated and is really just a piece of racial supremacist propaganda, albeit one by Blacks rather than Whites. I think it’s fair to see such Afrocentric views of history as a form of Fascism, including this myth that the Irish and Scots were also really Black. Some historians have no trouble describing certain Black political movements as forms of Fascism. One recent book by an academic historian not only includes the classic Fascist movements of German Nazism, Italian Fascism and various other White, European far right movements, but also Marcus Garvey’s Negro Improvement Association and the Nation of Islam, as well as Narendra Modi’s BJP in India. The inclusion of Marcus Garvey and his organisation may well offend many Black activists. Garvey is one of the pioneers of Black liberation. A month or so ago there was a Black celebrity writing in the pages of the Radio Times recommending that children should be taught about him in school. I really know very little about Garvey, but the claim that he was Fascistic rings true. When I was working as a volunteer in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol one of the jobs I was given was unpacking some of boxes of material given to the Museum by private individuals and institutions. One of these included a document by Garvey’s organisation. I didn’t do more than glance at it, but it appeared to be describing some kind of military parade or armed wing. This included women’s units and mechanised and mounted forces of various kinds. I don’t know if Garvey and his followers were ever able to set up such a paramilitary force or whether it was all a fantasy. But one of the features of Fascism is its militarism. The Nazis and Italian Fascists, not to mention the various other Fascist movements, all started out as paramilitary organisations complete with uniforms and arms.

Alongside the entirely reasonable demands for social and economic improvement and renewed action to combat White racism, the Black Lives Matter movement has also brought out and articulated strains of overt anti-White racism. One example of this was the attempt by Sasha Johnson, of the Oxford branch of the organisation, to set up her own paramilitary Black army in Brixton to protect Blacks from the cops, and her tweet that the White man wouldn’t be Blacks’ equal, but their slave. Which got her banned from the social media platform. I think there is a real need to start studying and publishing material specifically on Black racism and Fascism. At the moment, there appears to be very little, if any, books specifically published on it. If you search for ‘Black racism’ on Google, what comes up is articles and books on the attacks on affirmative action programmes by right-wing Whites. Way back in the ’90s and early parts of this century there was a book published on Black anti-White violence in America. This might be White Girl Bleed A Lot, which is a similar book. However, I’m not sure how academically respectable the latter is, as I think its author may have joined the extreme right. I can see many people on the left resisting any attempt to categorise and study various Black Fascist movements from the belief that, as Blacks have been oppressed in the West, and are still disadvantaged, it is unfair to characterise such movement as they arose in response to White racism and persecution.

But this does not change the nature of these movements and the racism and racist history they promote. Whatever their connections to the broader Black liberation movement, they’re still racist and Fascist themselves, and should be viewed as such. Fascism everywhere needs to be fought, regarded of race.

Hindu Nationalist Persecution of Christians in India under Modi’s Government

One of the ladies at our church gave a talk on Wednesday about the growing persecution of Christians in India by Hindu extremists, aided and abetted by President Narendra Modi and his squalid Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. This is an important issue for a number of reasons, and needs to be discussed. It’s naturally important to Christians concerned with the persecution members of their faith face in many other countries, but there are other reasons why it is important. It contradicts the view being pushed by the islamophobic right, that Christians are only, or primarily persecuted by Muslims. This is being particularly promoted by the neocons and Christian Zionists, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, who, it seems, are using it to work up support for Israel and for further western imperialist wars in the Middle East. Although the article was written for Christians, the laws criminalising Christian conversion and the mob violence they face are also part of a general persecution directed at other non-Hindu religious minorities, such as Muslims and Sikhs. Discussing the resistible rise of the BJP two decades or so ago, Private Eye’s ‘Letter from India’ described how the BJP was connected to the militant RSSS, a militant Indian nationalist organisation which was partly modeled on Mussolini’s Fascists, and which was responsible for attacks on Muslims, Sikhs and Christians.

I am also certainly not blaming all Hindus for the actions of the BJP, or trying to attack Hinduism generally. Hinduism is a religion with a bewildering number of deities and sects, and thus has an impressive reputation for pluralism and tolerance. The extremists encouraged by the BJP also target moderate, liberal or secular Hindus because of their support of Gandhi and Nehru’s vision of India as a religiously tolerant, secular nation in which people of different faiths could live together in harmony and peace. The Hindu extremists not only reject this, they also passionately and vehemently despised its founder. A week or so ago one of the columnists in the I published a piece about how shocked they were when they first met a Hindu, who hated Gandhi. The Hindu extreme right despise and vilify Gandhi because they wanted India to be a Hindu state, and believed he had done too much to appease the Muslims.

I am also very much aware that Christian has also been spread through imperialism and military force, and has persecuted non-Christians. I don’t approve of or justify this. Religious persecution is wrong, no matter which religion is doing it.

Christianity in India is very ancient. Before Europeans arrived, there was already an indigenous Indian, Syriac Christian church. The Mar Thoma Christian church of Kerala believe that Christianity was brought to India in 50 or 52 AD by the apostle Thomas, who was martyred in Chennai in 72 AD. In 883 AD Sighelm, an ambassador to Kerala from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, visited his shrine to present thank offering from King Alfred. Another apostle, Nathanael (Bartholomew) also visited India in the first century, who brought with him a copy of Matthew’s Gospel in Hebrew. Documentary evidence suggests that Christianity had reached India by the early third century AD. By 225 there was a bishop in Baith Lapat, now Shahabad in Northern India, caring for the souls of a Christian community that had been converted by missionaries from Persia and what is now Iraq. The following century, Bishop John the Persian signed the Nicene Creed, which had been drawn up as the formal statement of the Christian faith “on behalf of (the churches) in the whole of Persia, and in the great India.”

The Indian Christian population is 65 million., and comprises about 2% of the population of India, 80% of whom are Hindus. In 2016 there were 348 incidents of persecution in India recorded by the Evangelical Fellowship of India. In 2017 this increased to 736, of which 351 were violent. Many incidents probably haven’t been recorded, and so the true number is probably higher.

The BJP has also passed a series of laws, ostensibly against forced conversion, as part of their campaign against Christianity. These forbid the use of force, fraud or allurement in conversion. I’m very much aware of the term ‘rice Christianity’, dating from the 19th century. This came from the supposed tactics of some missionaries, who promised the starving a bowl of rice if they converted. The use of such inducements to get people to convert is clearly immoral. But the laws brought in against them allow Christians to be falsely accused of these tactics. In September 2017 the Jharkhand state government passed a freedom of religion law, which punishes those guilty of using ‘coercion’ to convert Hindus with three years in prison. Anyone, who wishes to change their faith, has to obtain prior permission from a magistrate. Christians have been subjected to violence and arrest, and churches disrupted because of accusations that they are breaking these laws. But the BJP is determined to roll them out nationally. The opposition party has also moved rightward to compete with the BJP, and there is fears that this will also lead to greater intolerance of religious minorities.

The tactics used against Christians not only include social exclusion, but also assault and attacks and sabotage of church buildings and private homes. They are also subject to boycotts, and a campaign, “Ghar Wapsi” (homecoming) to force Indian Christians to renounce their faith. Two years ago, in January 2017, a 50 year-old Christian convert, Bartu Urawn, and his wife were immersed in a pond by a mob for 17 hours by a mob from their village in order to force them to recant their faith. Urawn refused, dying afterwards from his ordeal. The police, however, recorded his death as ‘natural causes’. Rural Christians are especially vulnerable, and all too often the police arrest the victims instead of the perps.

Many Christians are also Dalits, formerly the untouchables, the lowest-rung of the Hindu caste system, and are considered impure and polluting by the higher castes. There is a quota system to give them access to education and employment, but these quotas don’t apply to Christians or Muslims. They’ve also suffered attacks on their homes, churches, and water sources.

See ‘Courageous faith: India’s pressured christians’ in barnabasaid, March/April 2019, pp. 6-7.

I am also very much aware that the Christian right in several American states is trying to pass ‘freedom of religion’ laws with the same intention as the Hindu extremists in the above article: to exclude religious and secular minorities from political involvement. It hasn’t quite reached the level of the Hindu extremists as described in the above article, but the intolerance of parts of the American Christian right is similar in intensity.

The BJP is, if not Fascist, then certainly fascistic in its extreme nationalism. Indeed, a prayer used by one of the BJP’s allies or constituent organisations is included in an academic textbook on Fascism to illustrate Fascism’s mystical component. The BJP is part of the growth of religious and ethnic intolerance throughout the world. And as the book, Falling Off The Edge shows, a major cause of this tension and conflict is neoliberalism. The doctrine of absolute free trade without any form of government interference means that conditions for ordinary working people across the globe, whether in the developed West or the developing world, has got worse. And as conditions of grinding poverty have increased, so people have turned on minorities as scapegoats for their rage and desperation.

It’s what’s behind the growth of fascism in working class White communities in Britain. And I’ve no doubt it’s also behind the growth of Hindu extremism in India, all encouraged and promoted by Modi. It’s one of the classic tactics of the wealthy elite everywhere to divert opposition away from themselves by claiming that mainstream society is perfect. It’s only ethnic or religious minorities, who are behind all societies problems. Minorities like Jews, Muslims, Christians, Blacks, Asians or gays, depending on the society.

But one thing is absolutely certain: Fascism and intolerance has to be fought everywhere, along with the neoliberal economics that force people into poverty, despair and racism or religious extremism, whatever the colour or creed of the persecutors or their victims.