In Today’s I Newspaper: Desmond, Express Magnate Backs UKIP

Private Eye: Desmond Considering Supporting UKIP

In today’s I newspaper is the news that Richard Desmond, the pornographer and owner of the Daily Express, has come out and backed UKIP. This isn’t entirely surprising. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, long before it was bought by Dirty Des, the newspaper was extremely Thatcherite, publishing articles attacking the unions, benefit scroungers and, of course, non-White immigrants. Under Desmond, it has tried to compete with the Daily Mail, and so become even more shrilly Right-wing and bigoted than Paul Dacre’s mighty organ. This isn’t exactly news, as Private Eye revealed in its issue on Wednesday that Dirty Des was planning to support UKIP. Representatives of Fuehrer Farage’s party visited the newspaper’s offices last week, and Farage had re-hired Lord Stevens, who represents UKIP in the House of Lords. Nevertheless, this represent a new low even for Desmond.

Desmond Grandson of Ukrainian Jewish Immigrants

Desmond is Jewish, and his grandparents came to London in the 1900s from the Ukraine. The Eye described how he wrote a moving piece in the Jewish Chronicle two years about how his grandparents came here from the Ukraine, and the pilgrimage he and his son, Robert, made to Auschwitz. According to Desmond, this helped him to understand not only the vast scale of the atrocity and the immense logistics involved, but also the mentality and the millions required to co-operate in the holocaust in order to bring it about.

The Kippers’ Ally, Korwin-Mikke, and Holocaust-Denial and Anti-Semitism

By supporting UKIP, the Eye pointed out that Desmond would also be supporting some very unpleasant, and deeply anti-Semitic people, who are the Kippers’ partners in the European parliament. Like the extreme Right-wing Polish party, the Congress of the New Right. Their leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, is a critic of what he calls ‘the holocaust industry’, and, while not denying the holocaust, follows other extreme Right-wing parties and groups in claiming that it was actually much smaller than everyone else believes. Korwin-Mikke has also stated that the Jews ‘are our worst enemies because they are very talented Communists.’ We’re back to the usual Nazi claim that the Jews are part of the Communist threat. The Eye points out that the Kippers have their own ‘Friends of Israel group, but quotes the Chronicle as saying that they were an ‘unpalatable’ lot after meeting them last week. It’s therefore deeply grotesque that Desmond, as the grandson of Jewish immigrants, who left their homeland because of persecution, should back UKIP, an anti-immigration party, many of whose members are indeed extremely racist.

Nazis Dangerous Even When Small and Insignificant

Desmond’s public embrace of the Kippers is extremely dangerous. Now the actual numbers in the Nazi extreme Right has always been extremely small. Similarly the amount of votes cast for them at elections, though for a time in the 1960s and ’70s it did look as though the NF or BNP would overtake the Liberals as Britain’s third party. The closest the BNP got to power, it could be argued, was a few years ago when their Fuehrer Nick Griffin got elected as MEP and appeared on Question Time. The party’s success didn’t last long, as society recognised the threat Griffin and his stormtroopers posed, and subjected them to a barrage of criticism and attack. As result, the BNP has just about collapsed, split into a number of minuscule warring factions and grouplets, while Griffin himself has been ousted.

One reason why the Nazi Right has been regarded as such a threat despite its small size in Britain, is because of the parallels between them and the Nazi party in Germany, and the Fascists of Mussolini’s Italy. The Nazis were similarly a tiny fringe party for most of the period of the Weimar Republic, the number of Germans who voted for them was similarly small. What raised them to power and made them a political force was a series of crises. They gained their first electoral breakthrough in 1924 in Schleswig-Holstein, where they represented the peasant farmers after an the shock of an agricultural crisis. They were further catapulted into power by the global depression caused by the New York stock market crash of 1929.

The Italian Fascists were similarly a minute, electorally insignificant party. Despite Mussolini’s boasts, the Fascists were soundly beaten in the 1919 elections. When Il Duce stood for election in his home town in a later election, he too lost badly. Very badly. In fact, the only way the Fascists actually gained power in Italy in an election was through a massive piece of gerrymandering in which the whole of Italy was declared to be a single constituency.

Nazis and Fascists Gained Power through Support Mainstream Figures

What made a difference with both the Nazis and the Fascists was the support of powerful members of the political establishment, who by giving their support and that of their organisations – their newspapers and businesses – legitimised them and encouraged the rest of the public to vote for them. They were helped into power by mainstream, establishment politicians, who sought their support against their rivals as the system of coalitions governing these two countries broke down. Hence, decades later, the NF and BNP are still regarded as a danger to British society because of the way the Nazis rapidly grew from insignificance to political strength through the collusion and endorsement of mainstream figures. No-one wanted to see the same thing happen in Britain through mainstream political figures, businessmen and celebrities giving their support to the NF or BNP.

Danger of Desmond Supporting UKIP, Like German and Italian Businessmen Supported Hitler and Mussolini

Desmond has broken that tacit agreement by the British establishment to withhold its support, at least openly, from the extreme Right. This means that there is a real chance UKIP will become a genuine force in British politics, despite its vile xenophobia, its misogyny and its contempt for the working and lower-middle classes. Farage has been extremely clever in concealing its true nature under a public anti-racist façade and by suppressing or disavowing those parts of Kipper policy that are aimed at attacking workers’ rights and the welfare state.

He’s made UKIP respectable, and Desmond has fallen for it, just as there were Germans and Italians, who believed that they could somehow make Hitler and Mussolini respectable, and that they wouldn’t carry out their threats and plans.

Desmond and the Kippers have to be stopped, before more people are persuaded into believing that UKIP are an acceptable, mainstream electoral choice.

According to Hope Not Hate’s I’m With the 85% campaign, only 15% of people support Farage and his stormtroopers. Let’s do everything we can to keep it that way and reduce it even further.

Alan Moore on ‘V for Vendetta’

Mike over on Vox Political is, if you hadn’t already guessed, a long term comics fan. He’s blogged several times on the very disturbing parallels between the current financial crisis and the authoritarian, exploitative Coalition government, and the Fascist Britain portrayed in his graphic novel, V for Vendetta. I found the video below on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX7ehbE1vc0. It was originally broadcast on either BBC 3 or 4 in their documentary series, Comics Britannia. Moore here talks about how it came out of his activities with Rock against Racism, and states that like a lot of Science Fiction it was really about what is happening now, not the future. He makes very plain his anarchism and antipathy to leaders. He also says that he wanted to explore the morality of violence and states that he did not want to write it so that because he, Moore, was an Anarchist, it was therefore all right for the Anarchist hero to use violence.

He also wanted to portray the Fascists in the novel as ordinary people, some of whom may even have been likable. The Nazis, he points out, were not monsters from space and did not suddenly arrive from the pit of hell. This is, unfortunately, entirely accurate. Hannah Arendt in her description of the trial of Adolf Eichmann talked about the ‘banality of evil’. Primo Levi, the noted Italian author and holocaust survivor, said of the concentration camp guards that they were no different from the rest of humanity. In his words, ‘they had our faces’. Moore points out that the Nazis included the butchers, teachers and street-sweepers, many whom simply went along with what was going on, or they believed in the ideology. It’s a point which needs to be made. There’s a lot of complete rubbish written about Nazi Germany. Since the book The Morning of the Magicians appeared in the 1960s there has been a slew of books portraying Hitler as a literally demonic force, an evil black magician in touch with malign occult entities. He wasn’t. The Nazis were a product of the racial, geopolitical and eugenic theories then current in Europe and America at the time. There were brought to power by the financial collapse of 1929, the political disintegration and factionalism of the Weimar Republic, and the fear of global Communism and Soviet totalitarianism, although this last has been disputed by some historians. Hitler had read and taken some of his ideas about evolution from the pamphlets produced by the leaders of bizarre, Neo-pagan groups, like Lanz Von Liebenfels and Guido Von List. Their ultimate influence on Nazism was minimal and they were suppressed under Nazis. Some of their ideas survived in Himmler’s SS. For a proper understanding of this aspect of Nazism, see The Occult Roots of Nazism, by Nicholas Goodrick Clarke (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 1992).

The most horrific aspect of the Nazis and other totalitarian butchers is that they were not literal demons or crazed alien machine creatures, like Dr. Who’s Daleks, but ordinary people. That needs to be accepted if we really wish to understand the immense evil they did as part of the dark side of the human psyche.

This is Alan Moore, talking about his work on V for Vendetta.