I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.
Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.
And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.
Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.
But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.
This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.
The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.
And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.
Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.
We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.
Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.
David Rosenberg, Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s (Five Leaves Publishing 2011).
Here’s something to cleanse the palate after the discussion of fascism and the Tufton Street gangs of free trade looters. While looking for books on fascism on Google, I found this book by David Rosenberg. I’ve got a feeling he may be the same David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, who was one of the advisors to Jeremy Corbyn and is The Wrong Kind Of Jew. He’s very firmly in the tradition of the Jewish Bund, the mass Jewish socialist party of Poland and Russia. As well as opposed to capitalist exploitation, they were also anti-Zionist and wanted Jews instead to remain in their home countries to live as free people with the h same rights and privileges as their gentile fellow-countrymen. Their anthems are on YouTube, and I’ve put up a number of them here.
The blurb for the book on Amazon runs
‘During the 1930s, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts intensified their campaign against the Jewish community, particularly in London’s East End. As that campaign became more overtly antisemitic, and more physically intimidating, Jewish groups debated how to deal with the fascist threat, ultimately building their own defence organisations and forging alliances with others. The simmering tensions in East London culminated in the Battle of Cable Street, when more than 100,000 people, mainly from the local Jewish and Irish communities, prevented Mosley’s troops marching through the East End.’
Tony Greenstein, another Jewish critic of Israel, has also written a book about the fight against Mosley thugs in Brighton and the south coast. Unfortunately, despite being a self-respecting Jew who was obviously proud of his townsfolk’s resistance to the BUF, he was also smeared as an anti-Semite and thrown out by the Blairites. One of the points he makes is that the Jewish people who fought Mosley with the Irish, trade unions and Commies did so on their own initiative. The Board of Deputies told them instead to stay indoors and not fight back. Which is something to think about the next time Marina van der Zyle starts shouting that the Labour party is institutionally racist and it’s only the Board standing up for Jewish people.
This is an excellent video in which Guardian columnist Owen Jones attacks and refutes the right-wing myth that the Nazis were socialists, because Hitler said they were. In my experience, this is one the of the favourite accusations of the loony American libertarian right, who see any kind of state intervention in industry as a terrible infringement of sacred property rights and a form of Communism, leading ultimately to death camps and gulags. In fact, as Jones states in this video, there are plenty of examples where a country’s or political party’s name is deceptive. The German Democratic Republic, for example, wasn’t democratic, and the Russian Liberal Democratic Party is far-right. It’s the same with Hitler’s claim to be a socialist. He quotes Adolf Hitler to show that Hitler’s claim to be a socialist is based on his radical redefinition of the word, and his denial that the German Social Democrats, the Communists and Marxism itself are socialist. He goes further, and shows that the Nazis were Social Darwinists, who believed that the fittest would rise to the top while inferiors should stay at the bottom, replaced the socialist emphasis on class with race, and believed in competition as against socialist cooperation. He also makes the point that right-wing, non-fascist parties have also adopted anti-capitalist policies and rhetoric when it suits them. For example, Reform have recently announced they will nationalise the public utilities. As for the red in the Nazi flag, Hitler put it in their to troll the left so they would attend his meetings.
The Nazis’ real political orientation is shown by their cooperation with right-wing parties, like the German National People’s Party, the DNVP, and with German big business. In fact, 29 heads of industry wrote to President Hindenburg calling for him to appoint Hitler as chancellor. In return, Hitler made a speech to various industrialists announcing that private enterprise could not survive democracy and required a dictatorship to protect it. The Nazis received generous funding from firms like Krupps, I.G. Farben and Porsche, who greatly benefited from the Nazi regime and the exploitation of slave labour.
In power the Nazis followed right-wing, pro-capitalist policies such as the privatisation of industry, very much against the trend of the times. They also cut back the welfare provision that had been established by the Weimar Republic, and replaced it with their private charity, the Winterhilfe. All good, Thatcherite policies. Real socialist parties were smashed, as were the trade unions, and their members placed in concentration camps. They also forced women back into their traditional domestic role, again, not a socialist policy. There was a socialist element within the Nazi in the SA, the Nazis paramilitary group, but they were purged and murdered at the request of Hitler’s backers in big business.
The Nazis did establish a rigorous system of state control during the War, but Jones views this as a response to the conditions of wartime. Britain also had a planned economy, but it would be ridiculous to say that the British government was also socialist or communist.
The video is a response to a piece Peter Hitchen’s wrote in one of the middle-market tabloids. If it’s the Heil, they’re probably hoping that people won’t remember how they backed Mosley and his not-at-all socialist BUF. I’ve found other people repeating the same accusation that the Nazis were socialists on the net. However, one of these also claims that the SPD at the time of the German council revolution of 1919 was a Marxist revolutionary party. Well, it was partly based in Marxism, but also contained a revisionist right, led by Edward Bernstein. Bernstein had noticed that capitalism was not collapsing and the working class had become more wealthy during the 19th century. He therefore recommended a reformist, evolutionary approach to socialism through democracy like the British Labour party and the Fabian Society. The party’s leader, Friedrich Ebert, was a democrat. One of the reasons Germany today is a democratic state rather than a Communist dictatorship was that Ebert got wind that the Communists in Berlin were about to declare a republic and so pre-empted them by declaring it first.
The same YouTuber also claims that the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council during the revolution were Communist. Some were, some weren’t. A report by German officialdom stated that in many areas the councils were actually very moderate. In several places local authority had collapsed completely, and it was the councils who were keeping things running and the people fed. This particular YouTuber has put up a nearly five hour long refutation of the denials that Hitler was a socialist, but considering his biases and distortions I don’t think it’s worth watching to refute it.
One of Mosley’s policies for the British Union of Fascists was to turn the House of Lords into an industrial chamber. This would be like Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Fasces and Corporations in which representatives of management and the trade unions for particular industries would sit to manage the economy. It’s an interesting idea, and the Germans had experimented with a similar chamber in 1919. When Mosley was attempting his political return after the War, he was still considering having people elected according to industry rather than geographical location, and included his thoughts on it in his book Mosley-Right or Wrong (London: Lion Books 1961):
‘Question 152: Do you advocate an occupational franchise?
Answer: I think it is the best method, but it is not essential to our system. So long as government has sufficient power of action in its defined sphere to carry out the mandate of the electors during its period of office, the essential is there. Government elected by the people will be able to do what the people want done, and they can sack it by their votes at the next election if it does not do the job to their satisfaction.
But as parliament still plays a very important part in our systems, it is preferable that it should be elected in a modern instead of an obsolete way. I mean by this that in early days of the geographical franchise, when the main industry was agriculture, men exercised the very limited franchise of those days in the area where they both lived and worked. Residential and industrial interests were really identical. But now a man’s occupation may be completely separated from his residence. Certainly his interests in these two spheres are no longer identical, and most men and women are more interested in their occupation than where they happen to live.
In their occupation they are well informed concerning its problems and the people engaged in it. They are more likely to select the best people to represent them.
Further, the resulting parliament will be a serious one, more likely to approach problems in the spirit of the search for truth, rather than the frivolous mood of party warfare. That is why I prefer and occupational franchise, but it is not essential to the success of our system. People may prefer not immediately to change so many of the traditional methods.’ (p. 151).
I’d very much like working people and their industries to be represented in parliament, especially as it is now dominated by representatives of industry. When Cameron was in power 77 % of MPs were company directors and senior executives. But the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations didn’t actually do anything except cheer Mussolini and rubber stamp his polices.
As well as laying out Mosley’s policies for post-War Britain and Europe, much of the book is an attempt to justify his conduct before the War as head of the BUF. He attempts to present himself as a democratic politician and definitely not a raging anti-Semite. The BUF wasn’t responsible for violence, and in power Mosley will respect all the traditional liberties like free elections and Habeas Corpus. He also attempts to redefine various Fascist doctrines. For example, he declares that the leadership principle just means that the person in charge of a particular policy, task or ministry should be held absolutely personally responsible for it, and that the buck shouldn’t be passed among members of various committees. It’s a good attitude, especially as we’ve seen officials responsible for catastrophic failures try to shrug off their responsibility for it. But that’s not what the leadership principle means. It looks like a version of Hitler’s Fuehrerprinzep, or ‘leader principle’. Simply put, this meant that the head of an organisation was its leader, and his staff or employees had an absolute duty to obey him, such as the relationship between a factory manager and his workers.
As for Mosley respecting democracy, I don’t believe a word of it.
Mosley is completely unrepentant of the actions and policies of the BUF. He considered them justified at the time, and says so in his book. If Mosley had seized power, Britain would have become another wretched Fascist dictatorship in which the individual would have no rights, political parties and genuine working class trade unions would be smashed and illegal. Opposition politicians would be attacked and incarcerated and Jewish Brits would either be expelled or exterminated. I’ve no doubt that he would have collaborated with Hitler in the Holocaust. After Hitler became the international star of Fascism, eclipsing Mussolini, Mosley changed the name of his gang of thugs to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. His Fascist Quarterly, set up as a rival to Gollancz’s Left Book Club, contained pieces by leading Nazis as well as other Fascists.
While I like the idea of an industrial parliament, Fascism itself is a murderous tyranny which has to be fought everywhere.
More overt fascism from the channel that has begun its livestreams with footage of Oswald Mosley and his stormtroopers goose-stepping about. This afternoon they put up a meme supposedly showing that present mass migration to the west is all due to the Kalergi plan as part of a UN-backed ‘Great Replacement’, financed by the Rothschilds, the Baruchs and the Warburgs. In other words, it’s just a new wrinkle on the old conspiracy theory about the UN one-world dictatorship plotted by Jewish bankers. Lobster put up a review of a book on Richard Von Kalergi a few years ago, and I put up a post about it. Kalergi did believe that countries should include different ethnic groups, but for quite different reasons from those attributed to him by the paranoids. He was writing after the First World War, and believed that countries would be less likely to go to war on each other if their opponents contained members of their people. It’s about preserving peace in Europe, not replacing its people. As for his connection to the EU, I think he was just one of a number of political thinkers at about that time who were trying to create a pan-European state in order to protect international peace, and I don’t think he had much success or influence on the EU architects. If you want to find the ultimate roots of the EU, it’s possible that it’s derived from Kant’s On Perpetual Peace, in which he argued that the world should be organised into a federation of states. This was back in the 18th century, long before mass migration from outside Europe.
The meme also states that the UN calls this migration ‘the Great Replacement’. I’m sceptical about this, as I understood the term was invented in 2012 by a far-right Frenchman. In any case, ‘the Great Replacement’ is just another version of the old Fascist myth that the Jews are encouraging Black and Asian immigration to destroy the White race. I’m quite prepared to believe that the UN has declared criticism of its migration laws hate speech out of concern for the refugees subject to racist attacks.
As well as this fascist nonsense, their lead man also says in the comments that he hates David Bowie and Mick Jagger because they were Satanists. I don’t know about Jagger, but there was a vogue for the occult among some rockers at one time, including Bowie. There’s supposed to be a lot of occult material in his last album, Black Star. But I’m not sure if you could call him a Satanist. The late 19th-early 20th century occult society, the Golden Dawn, was mostly composed of High Church Anglicans, who were very definitely not Satanists, with the exception of the vehemently anti-Christian Alistair Crowley.
I’m not going to put it up, because I really don’t want to spread fascism even if its only by showing the kind of stuff that the fascists are posting. So, you’ll just have to settle for a description of it. Earlier today the Mosleyites of Correct, Not Political put up a meme showing a muscular bloke holding up the sun and a slogan stating that people would notice if all the institutions helping immigrants had people running them with names like Xjang and other vaguely Chinese-y names. It all looks obscure, until you read the comments. These applauded it, and the way it showed that ‘the tribe’, by which they mean Jews, are responsible for mass immigration. Of course, the Jews have nothing to do with it, and the respected Jewish historian, Geoffrey Alderman, found himself criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews because his research into the British Jewish community showed that 2 per cent of them supported the National Front, BNP and other ratbags. They did so because they didn’t want their children going to school with the new Black and Asian immigrants. And one of the Jewish bloggers – it could have been Tony Greenstein – noted that at elections in Barnet one of the right-wing Tory politicos, who was Jewish, used to hang around with the BNP at local elections. He used to complain to them about how it was terrible that the nationalist vote was split between Tories and the extreme right. Obviously, the vast majority of Jews, like the vast majority of severely normal Brits, despise Nazis and with very good reason. But I mention that there is, or was, a fringe that were prepared to support the far right against non-White immigration simply to make the point that conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, which blame them for mass immigration, are nonsense.
I’ve posted up a number of blogs about Correct, Not Political and their fascism, which really is quite overt. When they begin a livestream, the run-up starts with old footage of Mosley and the BUF goose-stepping in front of adoring crowds while the Adagio for Strings weeps plaintively in the background. I suspected that there was an anti-Semitic undercurrent there – it would be odd if it wasn’t, considering the BUF’s Jew-hatred. It’s veiled, but becoming increasingly overt. The same type of people also comment on Simon Webb’s videos, but to his credit he’s not an islamophobe and very definitely anti-Semite. He’s even posted several videos attacking the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and it drives them nuts that he isn’t a Nazi like them. So much so that some of them are convinced he must also be Jewish. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Correct, Not Political, and I wonder how long they can go on before it becomes blatant or they get banned.
I got a notice on my phone this afternoon that ultra-right-wing nutters Correct, Not Political, are holding a livestream this evening on the subject of ‘Freemasons and Moneychangers’. As I’ve said, Correct, Not Political go around broadly left-wing protests and try to undermine them by engaging the protesters in conversation and trying to get them to question their beliefs. Usually. At other times, as when they protested against Drag Queen Story Hour outside the libraries which were holding them, they also chant accusations of paedophilia. At first glance they appear to be just right-wing, reactionary Tories. After all, sections of the Conservative party are against the militant trans and gay rights movements, as well as environmental protesters, pro-immigrant groups, socialist, ‘commies’ and the trade unions. You can find similar sentiments on GB News, TalkTV and mainstream, allegedly respectable papers like the Heil. But then they start their livestreams, and the mask slips. They’ve held a couple before, and they’ve begun with footage of Oswald Mosley and his wretched BUF marching, while exchanging fascist salutes with an adoring crowd. All while the Adagio for Strings from Platoon or is Full Metal Jacket plays. The impression is that the marchers are supposed to be some kind of ‘lost generation’, like the courageous men and women, whose lives were wasted in the battlefields of Flanders in the First World War. The BUF aren’t a lost generation. If Mosley had had his way, he would have destroyed our precious democracy and installed a totalitarian dictatorship similar to that of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany. And Jewish Brits would either have been expelled, barely tolerated or sent to the gas ovens. He also called for the indigenous east Africans to be cleared off their homelands so that they could be developed as White colonies.
I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t anti-Semitism lurking somewhere in the organisation. There are no blatant rants against the Jews, but the subject of this livestream is coming close. Fascists and other dictatorial groups and ideologies hate the Freemasons as subversive organisations. The Nazis banned them, they definitely wouldn’t be tolerated in the Communist bloc, and I think they’re also illegal in various Islamic states like Iran. As for ‘moneychangers’, well, fascism claims to be fighting the stranglehold of international finance capital. By which they usually mean the old nonsense about the Jewish banking conspiracy. This livestream seems to be taking it in the direction of religion and mysticism, as the subtitle was that Freemasonry was a form of kabbalah. The kabbalah is traditional Jewish mysticism. There was also the stupid Kabbala cult that Madonna got involved with, which involved people tying red ribbons to their wrists and buying massively overpriced copies of the Zohar. That cult seemed to be a money-making scam based on the older, and far more respectable Jewish tradition.
I’ve no idea whether Freemasonry is based on the Kabbalah or not. There were suggestions decades ago in books like Inside the Brotherhood that they worshipped a trinity of gods called Yah-Bul-On, who of whom was Baal. Or that they were Satanists, but unless you’re a very high level mason, you don’t know. And they’re not going to be telling. It’s possible that they were influenced by the Kabbala as it was taken up by a number of Christian mystics and occultists in the Renaissance, like Robert Fludd and John Dee, as the old Aristotelian philosophy was being questioned. Some historians of science have said that it was influential in the origins of modern science through being taken up by the first pioneers of the new natural philosophy. It therefore wouldn’t surprise me if Freemasonry wasn’t also influenced by it.
Correct, Not Political are, however, seem to be taking us back to the old conspiracy theories about a masonic plot to undermine the traditional Christian order, as when books like Proofs of a Conspiracy, published in the early 19th century, claimed that they were behind both the American and French Revolutions. Michael Pipes, in his book on conspiracy theories published in the ’90s, traces the origins of modern anti-Semitic ideas of Jewish plots to these early beliefs about the masons. At first the theories were only about the masons, then they included the Jews as the mason’s partners, and then finally it was the Jews who were the major forces behind these conspiracies. These ideas of Jewish conspiracies against the traditional, feudal European order have been around since the days of Nesta Webster and Rotha Orne Linton in the 1920s. Quite apart from better known works like the utterly fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And today’s fascist blame mass immigration on the Jews, who are trying to use non-White immigrants to enslave and destroy the White race.
I might be wrong, but this seems to be the underlying beliefs of the people behind Correct, Not Political. I wonder how long it will be before they come right out with it and the banhammer comes down. I do wonder if they were trying this in Germany they’d be rounded up on charges of violating the Basic Law. This is one of the cornerstones of anti-Nazi legislation and forbids all organisations that oppose democracy. It was used several times in the ’60s and ’70s against the National Democrat Party and other extreme right-wing groups. I don’t know if it was repealed after the Fall of Communism, but if it’s still around it’ll almost certainly be used to prosecute the 25 nutters, who were arrested for trying to set up a coup this week.
Correct, Not Political should be glad that, however diminishing genuine free speech is in Britain, they have far more of it than Mosley would ever have allowed them.
They’ve done it again. The man behind the extreme right-wing vlog and group, Correct, Not Political, held another livestream this week. And once again they gave an indication of their true political colours by prefacing it with black and white newsreel footage of Mosley marching with his BUF storm troopers, all to weeping string music, of course. The group go around staging counter-protests against Drag Queen Story Hour, gay pride, environmentalists, pro-immigrant groups, and people they class as ‘socialists and commies’. They were out today at the ‘Solidarity with Postal Workers’ demonstrations, which they declared to be ‘commies’. Now to be fair to them, they aren’t violent and just try to catch their victims out with awkward questions. They are less fascist in that way than antifa and the militant trans rights protesters, who do threaten violence, scream abuse and hurl smoke bombs around as well as making death threats. But I wonder how well they understand or agree with Mosley’s ideology. For example, at one point their main man said he was a ‘free speech absolutist’. In that case, why support a monster like Mosley? He didn’t, and he tells you over and again he didn’t. It’s in his autobiography, My Life, where at one point he says that free speech is worthless if you’re starving on a park bench. If, God help us! – Mosley had actually got into power and become dictator, the only free speech he would have permitted is the freedom to agree wholeheartedly with whatever nonsense he was spouting that day. If you watch the Channel 4 series about him, there’s one scene at a political meeting where Mosley is expounding his fascist views. And the other politicians condemn it as an attack on traditional British liberties. He denies this, and says it is just marshalling all the forces of the state. But his opponents knew far better.
I also have doubts about their education and intellect. In one of their videos, they urge people to boycott Selfridges, Bella Freud and other stores, whose goods are well out of the price range of ordinary people. Their reason for doing so is because they’re selling branded goods supporting Allen Ginsburg. Ginsburg was a beat poet, and a friend of William S. Burroughs of Naked Lunch infamy and Jack Kerouac, the author of On The Road, a classic of mid-20th century American literature. Except their guy couldn’t pronounce ‘Kerouac’. He got as far as ‘Ker-, Kerw-‘, before giving up. In fact their attack on Ginsburg is actually quite reasonable. They didn’t like him anyway, ’cause he was a Commie, who kept getting thrown out of Communist countries for supporting gay rights. But he was also a paedophile, and the play a recording of him talking about his attitude to people enquiring about NAMBLA, the main American paedophile organisation. Ginsburg didn’t want members to reply, in case it was an attempt to entrap them. If that’s true, then Ginsburg isn’t someone to be celebrated. But I also wondered if lurking behind this boycott there wasn’t a bit of anti-Semitism as well. I don’t know, perhaps there isn’t, but it’s too much like the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.
But back to Mosley. Fascism is a weird mixture of the radical left and capitalist, pro-private enterprise right. Mussolini believed, if the opportunist believed anything, that Italy should be governed as a corporate state. Industry was to be organised into corporations, in this case the successors to the medieval guilds, in which trade unions, management and proprietors represented their industries in a ‘council of fasces and corporations’ which replaced parliament. Mosley initially believed the same, before he rejected it as ‘too bureaucratic’. Under him, the House of Lords would be abolished and replaced with a similar industrial chamber. It’s an interesting idea, but if it was like Mussolini’s Italy, it wouldn’t have done anything except cheered and clapped Mosley and automatically pass every piece of legislation he proposed. But it’s a good question to ask Correct, Not Political. Would they want to replace the House of Lords with a similar industrial chamber following the theories of the corporate state. My guess is that they’d be horrified by the idea, because trade unions = commies. When one of the rival fascist groups wanted to ally themselves with Mosley, he asked them what their views on the corporate state were. They immediately denounced it as Communism. At which Mosley left them. My guess is Correct, Not Political have the same views.
Ditto Mosley’s views on Europe. After the War he turned up, promoting ‘national syndicalism’, his term for his version of the corporate state and calling for the formation of a united Europe, again along fascist lines, against the Communist threat. I think he later claimed to be a pioneer of the idea of the EU, which I’ve no doubt would have horrified the real founders. So, are Correct, Not Political also for the idea of a united Europe against the threat of plutocratic capitalism and Communism? As I’m sure they’re all Brexiteers of the racist stripe, that’s probably another one which would cause them difficulties.
I may well be misjudging them. Perhaps they do have a strong grasp of Mosley’s ideas, and could provide well-informed answers to those awkward questions. But perhaps not.
Here’s a really unpleasant development. I’ve blogged on here about a right-wing group and its YouTube channel, Correct, Not Political. They’re a bunch who go to various left-wing demonstrations and protests and attempt to argue the opposite case to the demonstrators. They turn up at gay pride parades, outside libraries presenting Drag Queen Story Hour, environmentalist demos by people like Extinction Rebellion, anti-racism and migrants’ rights protests, and they have a special part of their website devoted to ‘socialists and commies’. I thought first of all that might be just right-wing Tories with a few weird ideas. But no. This afternoon they’ve organised a livestream with a title quoting St. Paul about the ‘synagogue of Satan’ and ‘those who say they are Jews but are not’. St. Paul was a Jew himself, and proudly boasted that he was ‘a pharisee and the son of a pharisee’. As he believed that Christ came to save the Jew first, then the gentile, when he entered a town on his preaching mission he started by preaching in the local synagogue. The statement about false Jews and the ‘synagogue of Satan’, from what I understand, was about one particular Jewish community in what is now one of the Turkish cities, that strongly opposed early Christian preaching. I think they may have requested the local Roman authorities to clamp down on them. That’s the Biblical context of the quote, from a time when Christianity was a Messianic sect within Judaism. But passages like that from the New Testament tragically have an appeal to Fascists.
Intrigued by this title, I clicked on the channel. It was a few minutes before it started properly, but things definitely did not bode well. It showed an old B/W newsreel footage of people marching in a BUF rally, complete with the ‘Roman’ salute and the BUF banner. It also showed the cops forming up to police them. All this was set to the adagio for strings piece which gets played in films and TV programmes about the horrors of war. I think it comes from the end of Platoon or Full Metal Jacket when the film ends with its heroes being gunned down. After a few minutes of this, it began. It switched to some kind of studio with a quote from a rabbi to one side of the presenter, ‘Some call it Marxism. I call it Judaism.’ At that moment the presenter started speaking. I couldn’t hear him properly, so I have to admit I got bored and turned him off. Perhaps I’m being prejudiced, but I thought I’d seen enough.
I think the livestream was supposed to be about Israel, but it seemed to me to be a return to the old Fascist conspiracy theory that the problems of the western world, and particularly non-White immigration, all due to evil Marxist Jews. Well, to quote The Young Turks’ Ben Mankiewicz, if there is a Jewish conspiracy, nobody told him. Nor any of the other Jews I’ve met or had dealings with. As for the Biblical quote, it looks like an attempt to play down the anti-Semitism by doing what Oswald Mosley himself used to do: claim that they’re only talking about some Jews, but not all Jews. And those you’re attacking aren’t real Jews, of course.
It’s depressing and worrying that people are seemingly turning once again to the far right after the spectacular collapse of the BNP. I don’t know how many members Correct, Not Political has or how wide their audience. Probably very few. And to be fair, they also don’t seem to be violent. When they do speak to their opponents, the tone is quiet and reasonable and at a conversational level. When shouting and a bit of argy-bargy does occur, it’s more often by the left-wing protesters than them. They really don’t seem to be thugs and bruisers like the NF’s bovver boys.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that they have seemingly turned to real Fascism, which was based on hate and violence. And the really worrying aspect of this is the possibility that it might be part of a growing trend. To which there can only be one response:
I really do wonder what goes on in the mind of Countdown numbers person Rachel Riley. Yes, she’s another fanatical supporter of Israel who can’t tell the difference between anti-Zionism – which is opposition to an ideology – and anti-Semitism, which is simply racial hatred of Jews. But her hatred of anti-Zionists, or indeed, of any critic of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, has now grown so fervent that sometimes she speaks utter nonsense. As when she accused the Durham Miner’s band of being some kind of SS Nazi organisation because they played Hava Nagila at the close of the miners’ gala, just as they did every year. Even a brief knowledge of real Fascism and Nazism is enough to dispel that. One of the first things Hitler did was smash the trade unions, replacing them with a much weaker, pro-management substitute, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Mussolini tried to win over the established socialist trade unions after banning the socialist parties. When he couldn’t, he banned them and made it compulsory for Italian workers to join the Fascist trade unions. The black trade unions which formed part of the MSI, the Italian neo-Fascist party after the war, were anti-socialist and supplied blackleg labour during strikes. In Britain, the opposition to Oswald Mosley and the BUF included the Communists and trade unions, as well, of course, of self-respecting Jews and Irish. And Ken Livingstone, in his 1987 Livingstone’s Labour, describes how bog-standard, ordinary mineworkers and the unions objected to the employment of former Nazis by the Coal Board after they offered their services to British intelligence.
Examining some of her statements, I find myself using the same advice Private Eye gave its readers when reviewing the books written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s esteemed pater. You read it very carefully, and then turned it round 180o, and bingo! You’d reached the right conclusion.
Last week Riley raised her head to claim that J.K. Rowling had suffered horrendous abuse and vilification, not because she didn’t believe that transwomen were women, but because she was opposed to ‘Corbyn and anti-Semitism’. Well, it’s true that she did issue various statements over the net attacking Corbyn as an anti-Semite. She also accused Mike of being an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. All this told me is that, whatever her strengths as a novelist, she was credulous in this regard and believed everything she read in the papers.
Rowling has come under fire for many of her views. The anti-immigration Alex Belfield types attacked her for defending asylum-seekers and the channel migrants. They demanded that if she was that in favour of them, she should put a few up in her multi-million pound mansion. They can’t make the same accusation of Benedict Cumberbatch, of course, because he has indeed taken one of them in.
But most of the abuse Rowling’s suffered came from a tweet she made a few years ago, in which she told her trans readers that they should dress how they want, sleep with whoever would have them, live their best lives, but that transwomen weren’t women. Not a hateful statement at all, as far as I can see. But because of this she was immediately accused of hating transpeople and wanting to kill them. Since then there were moves to exclude her from the documentary marking 20 years since the Harry Potter movies, and trans activists telling the world to read her books but ignore the fact that she wrote them. In all of this, I haven’t seen any evidence of anti-Semitism from her trans critics and opponents. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any evidence of anti-Semitism from trans rights activists at all. Rather the opposite. Maria MacLachlan, who posts her gender critical videos on the Peak Trans channel on YouTube, has one in which she refutes the accusation that ‘TERFs’ – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – are right-wing. Among the tweets she shows which make this accusation is one that says that ‘Terfs are Nazis, literal Nazis’. Which is utter nonsense. Many, if not most, gender critical feminists come from the radical left and are utterly opposed to racism, which includes anti-Semitism and Jew hatred. As for the trans rights activists, in all of their abuse I don’t think I’ve seen one that mentions Jews, let alone expresses anti-Semitism views. As far as I can make out, Rowling’s trans opponents are simply opposed to her refusal to accept their dogma that transwomen are women. And I have to say that her criticisms of Corbyn and the Labour were so long ago that I’d forgotten them until Riley reminded me of them.
Riley’s talking nonsense. I don’t know if she made this ridiculous accusation because her hatred of Corbyn has now become so intense and obsessive that he’s living rent-free in her head, or whether Starmer’s position as head of the Labour party is now so shaky that she’s somehow afraid Corbyn will come back. But she’s talking arrant bilge regardless, bilge which deserves to be refuted along with her other prejudiced statements about the Labour left.
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