Metamorphosis: Another Comic Attacking Farage

Earlier this week I put up a post about reports in the Belfast Telegraph and ITV that 2000 AD was planning to skewer Farage in a forthcoming Judge Dredd strip. This will pit the hardest lawman in Mega-City One against the corrupt, racist politico, Bilious Barrage.

Now it seems that the Independent also is publishing their comic strip attack on the Purple Duce. I found this piece posted on the SlatUKIP site, reporting a piece in the Independent about the launch of the Metamorphosis comic strip, by one of their cartoonists. The strip seems to take Kafka’s novel, Metamorphosis, and puts an extra spin on it to turn it into a modern parable about racism.

Kafka’s novel is about a man, who wakes up one day to find that he has been transformed over night into a beetle. In this strip, giant intelligent cockroaches have appeared, and are being victimised in same way as foreign immigrants are in contemporary Britain. There is even an anti-cockroach party, UCOC, led by a politician, who looks exactly like Farage. Here’s the link.

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/metamorphosis-an-exclusive-satirical-comic-we-recommend-you-read–eJlV0wWby1b

Apart from Kafka, the strip also seems influenced by Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This was an alternative comic narrating the experiences of Spiegelman’s father and the situation of the Jews in the Third Reich as an animal fable. The Jews were mice, the Germans cats, and the Poles were pigs. The Independent’s Metamorphosis seems to be following Spiegelman in using comics to combat racism, and animals as metaphors for the different racial groups.

A little while ago I posted a piece lamenting the absence of underground and alternative comics tackling the great issues of modern Britain. Now it seems they’re coming back. And that can only be a good thing, so here’s to more of them, and more power to their artists’ satirical elbows.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Disability

While this comic book uses Kafka’s idea of transformation into an insect as a metaphor for racism, the original novel can be read as a parable about disability. Though Kafka himself spoke and wrote in German, the novel’s title in Czech is Zuk, which literally means ‘beetle’, but can also mean anything loathsome or disgusting. Kafka was a clerk working in the insurance department, and his novels of labyrinthine bureaucracy are basically fantastic extrapolations from the real bureaucracy in which he worked.

In Metamorphosis, the hero’s transformation renders him unable to work, and he eventually either dies or commits suicide, because he is an increasing drain on his family. This could be seen as a metaphor for the all-too real predicament the disabled and their families ended up in 19th century Bohemia, when accident or disease rendered them unable to make a living.

Which is basically another good reason for why no-one should ever vote UKIP. Farage, Nuttall and the rest of stormtroopers would like to see the welfare state completely removed and the NHS privatised. Various Kipper politicos have made monstrous comments about the disabled, and denied the right of disabled children to be born.

This morning I reblogged another great piece from Tom Pride on the Nazi ideas of the Kippers’ European ally, Janusz Korwin-Mikke. This particularly Nazi has stated that the disabled should not be on television, which should be reserved for the strong, healthy and able-bodied. He also announced that supporting the disabled hadn’t yet spread to Africa, which was why they were going to become so much stronger than Europeans. In his view, this will lead to them invading and massacring us.

It’s bog-standard, 19th century eugenics crap, and could almost have come straight from Hitler himself, or any of the biology textbooks published in the Third Reich. It’s particularly ironic coming from a Pole, as the Nazis viewed all the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe – Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Russians, Czechs and Slovaks, among many others, as sub-humans. They were to be enslaved and worked to death after the Nazis conquered their countries. As well as the extermination of the Jews and Gypsies, the Nazis were also responsible for horrific atrocities against these peoples, including in Poland.

Farage made an alliance with Korwin-Mikke’s party to get EU money by forming a voting bloc of extreme Right-wing and anti-EU parties within the European parliament. It shows a cynical absence of any kind of morality, and the underlying Fascism behind Farage’s democratic façade.

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.