Left-wing vlogger Maximilien Robespierre has a feature on his YouTube channel, ‘Fool of the Week’, in which he puts up clips of mad right-wingers saying or doing absolutely stupid and senseless things. His recent one was about a truly bonkers bloke from Croydon, who seems to have a unique solution to the migrant crisis: sharks. I’m afraid I didn’t watch the video, so I don’t know how truly mad he was, although in fairness he was a caller to LBC.
It may be that at some point in the near future we do have sharks in the English Channel. As the oceans have warmed, marine life adapted to warmer climates has moved north. There was a bit of alarm a few months ago when a Great White shark was spotted off Cornwall, and I think other shark species have also been seen, such as Basking sharks. But you really, really wouldn’t want predatory sharks just off coastal waters or in the Channel. Quite apart from the sheer inhumanity of wanting migrants and asylum seekers deterred from coming here because they’d be eaten on the journey.
Mitch Benn’s a YouTuber who specialises in satirical songs and monologues making very pointed comments about contemporary issues, including Brexit and the utter incompetence, self-interest and sheer contempt for the poor of the Tory party. In this video he takes aim squarely at the advert popping up trying to get us to watch Piers Morgan, former editor of the Mirror during the ‘City Slickers’ share-ramping scandal, breakfast television host and right-wing pundit. Benn makes the point that, contrary to what Moron’s supporters and the Tory media say, he very definitely isn’t a lone voice standing up against the left and political correctness or wokism, or whatever. Rather, Moron is just one of a slew of right-wing pundits, personalities and blowhards, including Mike Graham, Jeremy Clarkson and Julia Hartley-Brewer, among too many others. And opposite him, representing the left, is, er, James O’Brien on LBC. Here’s the video.
This should be ‘at least’, as Johnson lies so frequently that I think he’s constitutionally unable to tell the truth. I think Mike’s already put this video up, but it’s worth doing so again just remind everyone just what a flagrant liar he is. There’s also an irony in that this video was posted up by mad right-winger Alex Belfield. One of the lies Johnson gets caught out on is his claim that he isn’t going to privatise the NHS. The video shows Corbyn accusing him of this, and waving around the very documents that Johnson signed to hand parts of it to the Americans. It’s a bit ironic that Belfield should repost the video, as he seems to believe very much that privatising the NHS will solve its problems.
Here are the lies in the video.
An angry father in a hospital rails against him for destroying the NHS and then appearing there for a press opportunity. Johnson denies the press are present despite the fact they are. The father points them out.
TV interview in which he is asked about being sacked when he was part of Michael Howard’s team, the former head of the Tories at the time. Johnson was having an affair, and denied it.
A clip from Gogglebox, in which the viewers see a piece from the leader debates or a similar television confrontation. Jeremy Corbyn has caught Johnson promising in a secret document to open up the NHS to American private medical companies as part of the trade negotiations for a post-Brexit deal. Johnson lies that he has not done this. The Goggleboxers wonder if they’re being lied to, and what the document is, if it isn’t the secret deal.
GP registrar Sonia Adesara tears apart Johnson’s claim that he’s building 40 new hospitals. He isn’t. He was only refurbishing six, not building any new.
A piece from Sky News, in which they catch him lying about his statement that money was being ‘spaffed’ up the wall on historic sexual abuse claims. Johnson definitely said it, but when questioned by Sky News’ journo, went and denied it. There then follows a clip from LBC showing Johnson actually saying it.
The video ends with Johnson being questioned about whether he lies. True to form, he denies it, and says merely that he may have got things wrong.
Well yes, he did get things wrong. Deliberately. He’s a liar, who cannot be trusted. He is destroying the NHS. He did agree to open parts of it up to purchase by American healthcare companies. He most definitely hasn’t built anywhere near 40 new hospitals. And while he might think they’re a waste of police time and money, the victims of historic sexual abuse still deserve and demand these cases to be investigated and be given justice.
Unfortunately, the rest of his party are exactly like him, judging from the hundreds of lies or so one fact checking organisation found in their election statements. He’s a liar, who is head of a party of liars.
And if he goes, can we expect just another Tory liar?
Last week LBC’s right-wing mouthpiece, Mike Graham, provided the British public with some unintentional hilarity when he solemnly informed the world that concrete grows. Graham was interviewing a young man from Insulate Britain. He started off with a barbed comment, asking the chap what he was glued to. The man calmly replied that it was just his screen at the moment. Graham then asked him what he did for a living. As Zelo Street has already commented, Graham was clearly hoping the man was unemployed so he could give him a rant about getting off his backside and getting a job. This failed, because the chap did have a job: he was a carpenter, which uses wood, a sustainable material. Graham claimed that it wasn’t, because the trees were cut down. The carpenter replied that people planted more trees, which grew. Unlike other materials like concrete. It was at this point that common sense finally abandoned Graham’s skull, and he declared that concrete did, indeed, grow. This ended the interview, as the Insulate Britain man remained silent except for a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of the head. Graham then abruptly ended the interview, saying goodbye to him.
I realise that this bizarre incident has been covered several times elsewhere, such as on Zelo Street, but I thought my esteemed readers would want to see it for themselves. Here it is being discussed by Novara Media’s Michael Walker and Dalia Gebreal, whose minds are well and truly boggled by Graham’s ignorance. So boggled, in fact, that they play the clip of the short interview twice. Even more astonishing, LBC put the clip up on their Twitter page as an example of an Insulate Britain fail. Graham and LBC made monumental fools of themselves, and didn’t realise it! In fact, Zelo Street reported that Graham had gone on to another show to make the same stupid claim about concrete growing.
Now I’ve read SF stories in which buildings are grown using self-replicating nanomachines, but that’s far beyond our abilities at the moment. Not that I think Graham reads much SF. And concrete doesn’t grow at all.
But I think the main take-awaylesson from this is what it shows about the level of knowledge of the people telling you that climate change isn’t happening.
The right-wing media just can’t resist pushing the anti-Semitism smears any way they can. But yesterday this reached a new low on Mike Graham’s programme on LBC. Graham was talking to Ozzie Conservative Helen Dale about Suzanne Moore’s departure from the Guardian, and a piece the veteran feminist had written in retaliation. Moore’s crime was that she had written a piece stating that she did not regard transwomen as real women. This is obviously intensely controversial and the subject of much acrimonious debate and horrendous, personal abuse. J.K. Rowling has been vilely accused of hatred and wishing to harm transwomen simply for stating this view, even though she said so in a tweet that wished transfolk to live the best lives they could, dress however they want and sleep with anyone who would have them. At the heart of the controversy is the issue of what defines womanhood and who has access to women’s spaces.
Dale and Graham clearly found it ironic that someone from the censorious left should find herself censored in turn. Dale went on to say how surprising it was for her to share a view with Moore in this, as Dale herself is a Conservative and not a feminist. She then went on to say that she found the whole notion of the patriarchy problematic, as it sounded like a conspiracy. And her she made the smear about the Protocol of Elders of Zion. Because feminists’ idea of the patriarchy was similar to the bogus piece of conspiracy literature, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This nasty forgery, concocted by the monk Nilus in the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, in order to encourage Nicholas II to be even more persecutory in his treatment of Russian Jews, has been the inspiration for countless Fascist and anti-Semitic movements. And according to Dale, it was behind the anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
She says this in a video of her interview with Graham put up yesterday, ‘Young people believe being called a slur is the same as physical assault,’ says Helen Dale, at around 1.42 or so in.
No! The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were definitely not part of the anti-Semitism controversy in Labour.
I’ve said again and again that Corbyn and his supporters were anti-racists, and opponents of anti-Semitism, just as they opposed all forms of fascism. And they included plenty of Jews, such as the good peeps of Jewdas and Jewish Voice for Labour. Jackie Walker, who is one of the victims of the smear campaign, is both of a woman colour and Jew by birth and faith, as well as a veteran anti-racism campaigner. Marc Wadsworth, another victim of the smear campaign, is also a longstanding anti-racism campaigner. He’s Black, and in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies to bring in legislation to stamp out genuine anti-Semitic attacks made by members of the NF and/or BNP in London. Neither of them, like so many of Corbyn’s other supporters, should ever have been accused of anti-Semitism. And as for the wretched Protocols, it may well be very likely that they’ve been the victims of people whose view of Jews has been poisoned by it.
They certainly haven’t been influenced by it themselves.
But it is true that the anti-Semitism smears were made by the self-proclaimed British Jewish establishment, the Board, Chief Rabbinate and other organisations, as a way of deflecting criticism away from Israel for its oppression of the indigenous Arabs. This has been the standard tactic of the Israel lobby since the 1980s. They obviously can’t defend Israel’s actions, so the only way they can nullify such criticism is to claim that those, who stand up for the Palestinians like Corbyn, must be anti-Semites.
This is despite the fact that many of the opponents of Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians are self-respecting Jews.
The vilification of Corbyn’s gentile supporters is vile enough, but the smearing and abuse of his Jewish supporters has been particularly so. Many of them have been the victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as have their gentile friends and allies. But these people have been reviled as ‘self-hating’. And the accusation that they are anti-Semitic is particularly noxious and harmful given Jews’ centuries of persecution.
I am absolutely sure that the vast majority of Corbyn’s supporters heartily loath the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They know what it is, and the immense pain and suffering it has caused. And for Dale to claim that they were the inspiration for anti-Semitism in the Labour party is a new low. Though I note that she was very careful not to say Corbyn or any single individual was inspired by them. Obviously she didn’t want m’learned friends to get involved, and get sued for libel.
Starmer’s now in power in the Labour party, but the right-wing media and political establishment are still terrified of Corbyn and his supporters in the party. Hence the use of this lie to smear them. Which shows how desperate and utterly ideologically bankrupt they are. Thatcher’s precious neoliberalism is zombie economics. It should have ended decades ago, and the Tories know it.
And the only way they can stop people realising this is to distract them with poisonous lies about Labour anti-Semitism.
I just caught on the lunchtime news today the announcement that Boris Johnson is going to set up a commission to examine the knotty question of racism in the UK. He said something about how this had to be done because of the way people up and down the country had gathered in mass meetings to protest against it. While it showed that Johnson had been paying attention to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations here, America and across the world, not everyone was convinced that Johnson was entirely serious about his proposal. The Beeb’s report said that he’d been criticised already, as there were existing recommendations made in previous reports which hadn’t been acted upon. The Labour MP David Lammy also appeared to give his tuppence worth. He began by noting that Johnson had provided any specifics about this proposed commission. To me, it looks very much like another typical Tory dodge. Johnson will set up this commission to make it look like he’s really bothered about the issue and understands public concern, while making sure that it doesn’t actually do anything and hope that the matter will go away. I do know some genuinely anti-racist Tories. But the Tory party itself has consistently opposed non-White immigration and parts of it are viciously racist. Like the members of the Tory youth movements, who used to sing ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks and Asians’ to the tune of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’. The people that Jacobsmates exposed posting violently racist messages on the internet sites for supporters of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The people that formulated and backed the Tories ‘hostile environment’ policy, which saw hundreds of people illegally deported. People, who had been granted citizenship and then suddenly found it stripped from them by a racist, duplicitous government.
And you have to wonder where Starmer and Angela Rayner are in all this. So far their response has been very muted. After the protests at George Floyd’s murder broke out, Starmer and Rayner issued a statement last week declaring that they were shocked and angered at the killing. Rayner tweeted that ‘We stand in complete solidarity with those standing up against police brutality towards Black people and systemic racism and oppression across the United States, here in the United Kingdom and across the world.’ But actions speak louder than words, and no, they don’t. The suppressed report into the conspiracies by members of the Blairite faction within the party to unseat Corbyn and his supporters and actually make the party lose elections also revealed how these same plotters racially abused the Black MPs and activists Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Clive Lewis. It showed that there was a poisonous culture of anti-Black racism, dubbed Afriphobia, in the party that wasn’t being addressed. As a result, according to the Huffington Post, the Labour Party is haemorrhaging Black members, who say they feel politically homeless.
Starmer’s response to the toppling of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol has also been muted. When he was asked by caller Barry Gardiner on LBC radio what his views on it were, Starmer simply replied that it shouldn’t have been done that way, and that he didn’t condone lawlessness. This cut no ice with the mighty Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary, who tweeted that they’d been trying to have it removed legally for the past forty years. As for the Labour party’s attitude to ethnic minorities, she tweeted
The Labour Party is not a safe place for Black people The Labour Party is not a safe place for Muslims The Labour Party is not a safe place for anti-zionist Jews The Labour Party is not a safe place for anti-zionists period The Labour Party is not a safe place for socialists
Mike in the article above argues quite correctly, in my opinion, that Starmer believes in a hierarchy of racism. He was quick to give his full support to the Zionist Jewish establishment, but has done nothing about the racists persecuting Blacks in the party. This is almost certainly because the persecutors were Blairites like himself, and he doesn’t want to alienate his supporters. At the same time, he is also using the fast-track expulsion process that has been set up to deal with alleged anti-Semites to start throwing out members. This is a real kangaroo court, as those accused are not giving a hearing and have no opportunity to defend themselves. And those expelled naturally include socialists and followers of Jeremy Corbyn, and especially anti-Zionist Jews. Tony Greenstein has written a couple of articles about this already. In an article posted yesterday, Tony describes how Starmer was handed a list in March of the people the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement wanted purged. As the Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer refused to prosecute the coppers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes, whom they mistook for an Islamist terrorist. He was also not in the least interested in the deaths of Blacks in police custody. His expressed support for Black Lives Matter is hypocritical, as the Zionist movement in America has been doing its level best to destroy and discredit it because BLM has declared that Israel is an apartheid state, and supports the Palestinians. It considers that their condition in Israel is comparable to that of Blacks in America.
Tony has also posted this article about the mass expulsion of anti-Zionist Jews from the Labour party, as well as other, self-respecting anti-racist members.
Starmer’s reticence on anti-Black racism contrasts very strongly with the party’s direction over the previous forty years. After Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 or so, Labour strongly supported the aspirations of Britain’s Blacks and Asians for equality. The party put forward a new generation of ethnic minority MPs, who strongly articulated the desire for real change. This was extremely controversial – the Tory press blamed the 1981/2 race riots on Black racism and viciously attacked the new Black MPs, like Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant. And, in my opinion, some of them didn’t help. Brent council under Grant was particularly zealous in its determination to root out racism, to the point where it pursued a vigorous policy of censorship from its libraries. A policy that appalled others in the party, who were equally left-wing but less inflexible and intolerant. I’ve heard stories from people, who grew up in the area how extreme Grant could be in his accusations of racism. One of those he accused was the head of a local school, whose wife was Black and who was supposedly a member of the Communist party. In Bristol the five members of Labour’s ‘unofficial’ Black section went off on a trip to Ulster to support the Roman Catholics. They believed that Ulster’s Catholics were a colonised minority like Blacks. They had a point, but this allowed the Tories to paint the party as ‘loony Labour’, inhabited by embittered Communists, who hated Britain and supported the IRA. Nevertheless, it was this period that led to the vital implementation of policies, like ‘positive discrimination’ to improve conditions for Blacks and ethnic minorities. And Labour continued to include anti-racism, or at least anti-racist rhetoric, under Blair. Some Black activists did feel excluded and that Blair was less than serious about these issues. But I can remember Blair praising the example of America’s General Colin Powell, and wishing that Britain could also be a place where Blacks could rise to the highest ranks of the military.
But Starmer seems to be turning his back on all this in his determination to return Labour to the Thatcherite, neoliberal centre ground. It’s the inevitable result of Blairite triangulation. Blair studied what the Tories were doing, and then adopted it and tried to go further. He began in the 1990s by taking over scrapped recommendations for the restructuring of the civil service by Anderson Consulting. He continued the Tory policies of privatisation, including that of the NHS, and the destruction of the welfare state. And some Blairite MPs even began to make the same type of racist recommendations as the Tories. It’s also dangerous, as under Cameron the Tories did try to gain ethnic minority support by embracing Black and Asian community leaders.
Black Lives Matter and the anti-racism movement shouldn’t be above criticism. But Labour should be taking the lead in the debate. Instead, Starmer seems determined to alienate some of the party’s staunchest supporters.
All in the hope of appealing to the Thatcherites and neoliberals.
It isn’t just statues to Europe’s and America’s racist and imperialist past that are being toppled by the BLM movement. Nigel Farage, former Fuhrer of UKIP and now Fuhrer and owner of the Brexit Party Ltd, has also been removed from a public platform. A few days ago LBC radio announced that they were not renewing his contract.
The station’s announcement of his departure was anodyne, and gave no hint of the supposed reasons for it. LBC simply tweeted “Nigel Farage’s contract with LBC is up very shortly and, following discussions with him, Nigel is stepping down from LBC with immediate effect. We thank Nigel for the enormous contribution he has made to LBC and wish him well”. As the mighty Zelo Street, it means he’s been sacked.
Part of the reason for it was that many people, including Black and Asian employees within LBC itself, were unhappy that the station was employing him because of the inflammatory comments the Fuhrage had made about the BLM movement itself. These were in clear conflict with the station, which had endorsed the movements and its battle against racism sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Farage had released a series of tweets condemning the attack on Churchill’s statue – which is fair enough – but had denounced the protests as a form of anarchy. He declared he was going to tell some home truths about BLM on his LBC show, before going way over the top and comparing the movement to the Taliban. “A new form of the Taliban was born in the UK today. Unless we get moral leadership quickly our cities won’t be worth living in … If Boris Johnson won’t lead and stand up for the country, as its symbols are trashed, then people will start taking it into their own hands. Full on race riots are now possible. Show leadership and fast”.
At one level, it’s a fair comment. Others, like the anti-trans feminist activist Posie Parker, have made the same prediction. She too condemned the undemocratic way the statues were removed, and feared that the same disenfranchised Whites that voted for Brexit would rise up in their turn in a tide of Fascism. And yesterday the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance did stage a violent protest against BLM and attacked the police. But coming from Farage, the prediction also looks very much like dog whistle racism. Many people thought Farage was actually calling for such White racist violence while appearing to fear and condemn it.
Friday’s edition of the I, for 12th June 2020, also carried an article about the affair. Titled ‘Farage ‘dropped’ from radio show after BLM row’, the article by Benjamin Butterworth, ran
Nigel Farage has been dropped from his nightly radio show at LBC amid anger among some staff over his opposition to Black Lives Matter.
Sections of production and presenting staff were “furious” that the station was publicly claiming to honour the questions raised by the movement while still employing Mr Farage as a host.
One insider said disquiet intensified after Mr Farage compared the anti-racism campaign to the Taliban during an appearance on Good Morning Britain on Tuesday.
LBC has denied any complaints among staff and says the decision not renew his contract had long been in discussion.
Yesterday black members of the staff at Global Media, which owns LBC, spoke to the website Huffpost to air concerns about Mr Farage’s ongoing employment. Shortly after the concerns were put to Global, the company announced that Mr Farage had been axed “with immediate effect”.
LBC said this claim is “wholly untrue” and told I: “Mr Farage had been in discussion with LBC about the natural end to his contract.” Last week, two of the company’s high-profile presenters, Capital Xtra breakfast hosts Yinka Bokkini and Shayna Maria Birch-Campbell, accused Global Media of failing when it comes to responding to the anti-racism movement.
Editors spoke with staff during recent days about the complaints about Mr Farage. One employee said management was told “they either stand with him [Farage] or against him.”
A source told I: “everyone across the board was furious. The mood was not great. Both production and presenters made our feelings know to the bosses.
“Lot of chats have been going on this week. It’s not like we haven’t said this before but this time it was finally taken seriously as people were not happy the minute silence was being honoured while he was on air spouting hate.”
The Brexit Party leader has hosted a phone-in programme five days a week since 2017, with his show being heavily promoted on billboards and adverts. In an official statement the station said: “Following discussions with him, Nigel is stepping down from LBC.”
All things considered, it looks very much like staff dissatisfaction with Farage and his racism was responsible for him getting the heave-ho. Good! It’s about time. Farage isn’t a friend of this country’s working people, whether they’re Black, White, Brown or whatever. He’s a far-right Conservative who wants more privatisation, more welfare cuts and the NHS to be sold off. He’s extremely pro-American, which means that any deal with America he supports will be to their advantage, not ours. He won’t be missed.
It’s just too bad that other extreme right-wing hacks and Tory shills like Nick Ferrari and Julia Harley-Brewer still have jobs.
Since Colston’s statue was pulled over and lobbed in the docks in Bristol on Sunday, others have called for the removal of similar statues and monuments to those connected to the slave trade. Down in Devon there have been calls for a statue of the Elizabethan explorer Francis Drake to be removed. At Oxford University demands have started up again for the removal of the university’s statue to the 19th century imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. And on Sky News’ The Pledge, Afua Hirsh managed to get LBC’s Nick Ferrari in a right tizzy for suggesting that not only should Rhodes’ statue be taken down, but also Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill.
I can’t defend Rhodes. He seems to me to be have been a thoroughly ruthless character, who was intent only on grabbing as much land for himself and Britain on any pretext whatsoever. I might be wrong, but I’ve got a horrible suspicion he was one of the people behind the Anglo-South African or Boer War during which tens or hundreds of thousands of Afrikaner women and children died in concentration camps. He was also instrumental in the creation of Rhodesia’s colour bar.
Nelson and Churchill are going to be much more controversial. Most people only know of Nelson for his victory at Trafalgar during the Napoleonic War. This was to stop the French imperial domination of Europe, and Napoleonic forces had also invaded Egypt. I think most Brits will therefore take an attack on Nelson as an attack on a key figure, who kept Britain and Europe free. Yes, he’s a symbol of British imperial strength, but I doubt many people associate him with the oppression of Blacks and Asians. It’s going to look like a spiteful attack on Britain, rather than a gesture of Black liberation.
Ditto Hirsh’s other target, Winston Churchill. I’m absolutely no fan of Churchill myself. He was an authoritarian aristocrat, whose real reason for opposing Hitler was that he saw Nazi Germany as a threat to British interests in the North Sea, not because he was an opponent of Fascism. He sent troops in to shoot striking miners in Wales, and was all for calling them in during the General Strike. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative prime minister at the time, wanted him kept well out of the way to avoid exacerbating the situation. As for Ireland, back in the 1990s there was an interesting little programme on BBC 2, The Living Dead, which was about the way Churchill’s heroic view of British history in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples had influenced subsequent politics. One of the key offenders here was one Baroness Margaret Thatcher, who had been strongly influenced by the great war leader herself, and tried to invoke his memory at nearly every opportunity. The programme interviewed a former member of the Irish republican paramilitary group, the INLA. He said that it was easier to recruit members under Thatcher than under Ted Heath because of Thatcher’s celebration of Churchill. For Irish nationalists, Churchill was the monster, who sent in the Black and Tans. His sequestration of grain from the Bengal peasants during the War resulted in an horrific famine which killed something like 2-4 million people. This is comparable to the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis, and some senior British army officers saw it as exactly that. Churchill, however, declared it was all their fault for ‘pullulating’, or having too many children.
That is not, however, why Churchill is celebrated over here. He’s lauded because he, Roosevelt and Stalin together overthrew the Nazis and their allies. The War swept away Fascist Italy, and the other Fascist or Fascist-aligned regimes in Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. It liberated Greece and Albania. Stalin was no angel either. He killed at least 30 million Soviet citizens during the purges and deported whole nations and ethnic groups to Siberia. Instead of letting the eastern European countries decide their future for themselves, he imposed a ruthless autocratic Communist dictatorship. I think Churchill would have liked those nations to have been free to decide for themselves. Back in the ’90s there was a radio series on Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, the conference that would decide the post-War European order. It was called The Eagle and the Small Birds, from a quote from Churchill ‘The eagle should let the small birds sing, and care not wherefore they sang’. A Nazi victory would have been the stuff of nightmares, and I don’t know how many millions Hitler would have murdered had he been successful. What the Nazis did to the Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians was horrific enough as it is.
Churchill isn’t the saint or the great molten idol the Tories claim he is by any stretch of the imagination, but he is one of the reasons why Hirsh and Black activists like her are able to make their criticisms of traditional British history and its heroes. If Hitler had won, or his mate Oswald Mosley had seized power in some kind of coup over here, Hirsh and her allies would not have been tolerated. The Nazis’ eugenics programme included not only the murder of the disabled, but also the sterilisation of the mixed race children of White German women and Black American soldiers from the post-First World War army of occupation. Mosley himself would have made Britain an apartheid state, with citizenship granted only to those who conformed to aryan British culture, if not physiology. The War and the horrors of the Nazi and Fascist regimes made eugenics and racism and anti-Semitism far less acceptable than they were before. I am very much aware how institutionally racist Britain is and has been. But it’s much better than what would have existed had Churchill been defeated.
But most of all, I’m concerned that the zeal for smashing statues and monuments may destroy those to abolitionists. Nearly 20 years ago, when I was doing voluntary work in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum here in Bristol, one of the books that found its way into the slavery archive and library was a little bit of local history by the Liverpudlian writer, Fritz Spiegel. Spiegel prides himself on being a ‘Dicky Sam’, the Liverpudlian equivalent of a ‘real Cockney sparrow’. The book was on the fascinating history of the abolition movement in that great city. If I remember rightly, it included not only White abolitionists, but also some of the Black people who also populated the city. It wasn’t just a piece of local history for its own sake, though. In his introduction, Spiegel explained that he moved to right it because, in their zeal to destroy monuments to the city’s slavers, some people had also vandalized those of innocent merchants and abolitionists.
I’m afraid there might be a danger of something similar happening in the current zeal for smashing statues commemorating Black oppression and slavery. There are good reasons for removing monuments like Colston’s. But let’s not confuse those with slavery’s opponents.
It seems that it isn’t just Donald Trump and members of the far right, like Andy Ngo, in America who are blaming the current unrest on bogus, mythical far left conspiracies. On this side of the Pond one of the presenters on LBC radio, Maajid Nawaz did the same yesterday. And he then got terribly shirty when an American philosophy professor, Jason Stanley, called him out on it.
Nawaz had tweeted
“The hard-left has fucked up our youth. These are fruits of their Long March & a consequence of us all giving the hard-left an easy pass on their morally relativist, post-modernism”.
To which Yale prof Stanley replied. asking if his Tweet was a joke and saying that it was impossible to take him seriously when he mentioned post-modernism in that context.
Nawaz replied in turn that he was a Muslim, who had lived through torture and racist violence, and accused Stanley of White privilege and having the dismissive racism of the American left. This did not impress Stanley, who stuck to his guns. He continued asking if Nawaz’s thread was a parody, and pointed out that postmodernism had nothing to do with the protests in his country, and that Marxists aren’t postmodernists. This upset Nawaz even more, who accused him of ‘Whitesplaining’. It didn’t stop Stanley from asking further if Nawaz’s thread was a parody. Mehdi Hasan then joined in to criticise Nawaz’s own, contradictory position:
“Maajid Nawaz has this whole anti-identity politics schtick but as soon as someone calls him on his BS – as my friend Yale professor & fascism expert [Jason Stanley] did earlier – he instantly reverts to a ‘you-cant-criticize-me-because-youre-a-white-man’ line. He is beyond parody”.
I’ve come across the same view before from the transatlantic right. The hard left, it is maintained by Conservatives on both sides of the Pond, is trying to destroy western culture through postmodernism and its radical destruction of traditional western society and questioning of objective truth.
Postmodernism, Architecture, Linguistic Theory and History
Postmodernism actually started out as an architectural movement. It meant a style of modern architecture which ‘quoted’ features of past building styles. For example, it might include turrets like a medieval castle, or the volutes above the doorways of the Baroque. It was then taken over into French philosophy, where it mixed Marxism with with poststructural linguist theory. Radical philosophers like Liotard, Derrida, Lacan and Irigay argued that, just as there was no innate link between the signifier – a word – and the signified – the object or concept that word represented, so there was no objective truth and all historical accounts were equally valid. Althusser in the late 60s demanded a ‘semioclasm’ – the liberation of words from their bourgeois meanings, In history, postmodernism also sought to attack traditional Eurocentric history which privileged White men. It’s fair to say that postmodernism continued to be strongly associated with the radical left into the 1990s. I can remember attending a seminar at my old college in the 1990s in which postmodernism was invoked to argue that White Europeans could never really understand extra-European cultures, and people talked about being ‘othered’ and alienated by conventional Western discourse.
Sokal and Bricmont’s Attack
But that, dear friends, was a long time ago. Things have changed somewhat since then. In the mid-1990s Sokal and Bricmont, one an American Maths professor, the other a Belgian philosopher, gave postmodernism a thorough intellectual drubbing with their Intellectual Impostures. This was an attack on the way postmodern philosophers, like the above, tried to use scientific and mathematical concepts in their writings without actually understanding them. They simply used them in order to show off. The results were articles that were nonsense scientifically, and really just plain gibberish whose impenetrability was meant to make them look profound. One the offenders the two critiqued was a piece which seemed to claim that philosophy’s job was to quiet down and smooth out the quantum foam, the phenomenon at the subatomic level where particles suddenly pop in and out of existence randomly. The targets of Sokal’s and Bricmont’s fierce demolition hit back by claiming that the two were right-wing reactionaries. They weren’t. Sokal was a member of the American Left, who had taught in Nicaragua under the Sandanistas. They were partly motivated to attack the postmodernists because they followed Orwell’s maxim that if you want to write politics, you should do so clearly.
Postmodernism Passe
By the late ’90s and certainly by the first years of the 21st century, the vogue for postmodernism had passed. When I did an MA history course around 2003, it included postmodernism in the historiography section, but only as one school of history. The others included Historicism, and the French Annales school amongst others. One of these is Marxism, which shows how Marxism and Postmodernism are two separate ideologies. The reading on it we were given accepted the premise that you couldn’t produce a completely objective account of an historical event or movement, but nevertheless considered that postmodernism was important in that it should spur the historian to try as hard as possible to approach this unattainable goal. This was very different from accepting the radical postmodernists’ claim that as objective truth doesn’t exist, all accounts and narratives are equally valid.
Colin Bennett, Postmodernism and the Far Right
By that time, postmodernism had also changed its political affiliation. It was no longer a movement of the left. This was stated very clearly by one of the lecturers. This is demonstrated very clearly by the writings of the Fortean author Colin Bennett. Bennett appeared in the 1990s, when he published a book on the UFO Contactee, George Adamski, Looking for Orthon. He’s now considered a fraud by most UFO researchers, not least because one of the photos he was trying to pass off as a picture of Venusian spaceship was of a chicken coop. He’s also supposed to have remarked in private that he founded his mystical organisation as a way of obtaining alcohol during Prohibition by claiming he was using it for spiritual purposes. Bennett appeared on a panel at the Fortean Times Unconvention one year to talk about his book, and got very irate and refused to give a straight answer when he was asked by another panelist if he thought Adamski was genuine. Bennett definitely considered himself a postmodernist, but he was very far from being a Marxist. He’s an ex-soldier, whose views on multiculturalism and non-White immigration in my view come very close to the White European Fascist fringe. He is Jewish, and so is also very critical of them for their anti-Semitism. As for sexual politics, from what I saw of his writings a few years ago, he was very definitely traditional in his view of gender roles and very bitterly opposed to homosexuality. Several of his pieces contained rants against the British cultural elite for refusing to accept postmodernism, and trying to drag British literature back to the Bloomsbury group and promote what the Beeb used to delicately call ‘effeminacy in men’.
From starting as a left-wing movement, postmodernism had, at least in Bennett’s case, been taken over by the far right.
Anti-White Racism at University
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t radical left-wing postmodernists teaching at universities. There was a scandal a couple of years ago when a White student at Wash University in Utah recorded the rantings of the Black professor teaching the communications course. The professor rejected space because science was a White invention. The student also recorded his Black students screaming racist diatribes against Whites, some of which were tantamount to genocide. On the recording, one of them can be heard shouting that Whites should all be rounded up and shot into space. The recording caused immense controversy, and was the subject of a number of YouTube posts from American Conservative channels and individuals.
Conclusion
I doubt, however, that there are very many university professors like that one. I don’t doubt that there are others, but they’re going to be in a minority. The vast majority of scientists, for example, are utterly convinced that there is indeed an objective truth, and that their disciplines are finding it. It’s why Richard Dawkins has also strongly attacked postmodernism. Many scientists are themselves critical of some of Dawkin’s views on evolution and the existence of God, but I think they nearly all agree with him about this. Postmodernism is largely confined to the arts and humanities, and even there I very much doubt that very many academics and students really believe in it. I am also extremely sceptical of right-wing claims that universities are dominate by the left. In my experience, teaching staff are of all political opinions. Many of them also take seriously the difference between education and indoctrination, so that some of the most left-wing keep their private views very separate from what they say in the class room and lecture hall.
And it should be very obvious that on its own, no academic discipline, no matter how sophisticated, can get people on to the streets demonstrating. The people marching and protesting in America and Britain do so because of real social, political and economic grievances.
It has zero to do with any bogus conspiracies of far left, postmodernist College professors.
Mike put this up on his blog a few days ago, but it’s well worth repeating and publicising. Cassetteboy is another group of fun-filled pranksters like JOE, who produce satirical videos by carefully editing the speeches and actions of the great and not-so-good so that they appear stupid and nonsensical. They’ve done this yet again to our unfunny, murderous Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to reveal how stupid, cruel and massively unjust his government and its policies are. They’ve edited it so that he’s reciting a description of his failings and injustices to the tune of MC Hammer’s ‘Can’t Touch This’. Which, due to Johnson’s own massive deceitfulness and mendacity, has been changed to the chorus ‘Can’t trust me’.
The video begins with Johnson repeatedly stammering out ‘My, my, my’ and then
‘My Brexit is so hard
Makes you say
“Oh my word.
What about my job security?
Sick pay, healthcare and the economy?”
These are the things
You need to discuss
When I say
“Brexit won’t hurt you much!”
Remember the lies on the side of a bus,
I am a guy who you can’t trust.’
There then appears the caption ‘Sacked by the Times for lying’.
He goes on, singing
‘Can’t trust me.
Then another caption ‘Sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for lying’.
Can’t trust me.
I promised thousands more police
But that’s less than we already cut.
If you trust me you must be off your nut.
I lied to the Queen to get Parliament shut.
I say the Tory party ‘Is the party of prosperity
But not for the 130,000 people killed by our austerity.
Nor for disabled people robbed of money and their dignity.
Or the millions of children our policies
Have left in child poverty.
Are those kids mine? probably not
But I won’t admit how many I’ve got’
Another caption here, ‘Wont admit how many kids he has’.
‘Can’t trust me’.
Then another caption: ‘Lied to the Queen to illegally shut down Parliament’.
‘Can’t trust me’.
‘The planet now is burning at a terrifying rate
And I don’t even turn up to the climate change debate.
And now let me say this, two of my biggest disgraces
Are of course that I’m homophobic and a racist.
Stop. Stammer time.’
The video then moves into footage of Johnson stuttering and stammering away, under which appears another caption, (Affected waffle, disguising genuine lack of preparation, competence and decency).
‘Stop. Stammer time.’
One more thing before this ends,
You don’t judge a man’, and the next voice is that of Donald Trump, completing the sentence, ‘by his friends’.
‘Our standards will fall with a bump as I align us all with Trump,
Allow the NHS to fail and off it to Trump for sale.
It will no longer belong to you though I say
That’s not what we’ll do.
Is that true? Here’s one way of proving if I’m lying
if my lips are moving.
Another caption: ‘Won’t apologist for racist and homophobic comments.’
‘Can’t trust me.’
And then the screen is filled with text showing his various failed and harmful policies.
‘Can’t trust me’.
The richest have tax loopholes
While schools can’t afford loo rolls.
We’ve failed the NHS and left the country in a mess and
To the best to fix it are myself and Rees-Mogg
Is like expecting dog shit to be cleaned up by the dog.’
The video ends with a black screen on which the slogan ‘Vote Boris Out’ is written in white text. There’s then the Cassetteboy jingle, the sound of someone sighing or snoozing, and a final scene of Johnson making a throat-cutting gesture at LBC.
The dialogue’s invented, but everything it says is true.
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