Far Right ‘Free Speech’ Gathering This Sunday to be Opposed by Anti-Fascists

This is another little video from RT, warning about a demonstration at Whitehall which is due to be held this Sunday, 6th May 2018. The demonstration is being organised by the far right, and include Tommy Robinson, Milo Yiannopolous, Count Dankula and Laura Southern.

The organisers have said it is to defend freedom of speech, without which our other freedoms crumble away.

Antifa have said that it will be a march of far right, anti-Muslim bigots and ‘anti-Fascists from across the country need to take to the streets to oppose them.’

Tommy Robinson is the founder and former leader of the Islamophobic English Defence League. Milo Yiannopoulos is the Alt-Right speaker and ‘virtuous troll’, who attacks gays, ethnic minorities, feminism, Islam and the left in general. Earlier this week I put up a video of him leaving a New York bar. He’d popped in just as the Democratic Socialists of America New York chapter were holding a meeting. So they chanted at him, ‘Get out, Nazi scum!’

Yiannopoulos was claiming that he was pushed and threatened, but as the video shows, nothing of the sort happened. Sam Seder and his team over at Sam Seder’s Majority Report also questioned whether it was quite an accident that Yiannopoulos just happened to go there for a drink while the Democratic Socialists were holding a meeting. It looks, they said, like he was trying to put himself back in the news and trying to boost his ailing career again.

And Lauren Southern is another fixture of the Far Right. She was part of the anti-immigrant team, who were planning to cruise round the Med rounding up immigrant boats. They were stopped after a massive outcry and campaigns by anti-racist groups like Hope Not Hate.

Yiannopoulos and the rest of the Far Right have been trying to organise meetings and conferences under the claim that they are defending freedom of speech against attack by the left.

There are issues of democracy involved, so they’re right about that. The legislation criminalising ‘hate speech’ does contravene absolute freedom of speech. But it does so in order to protect ordinary people from abuse, assault and possibly murder whipped up against them for no other reason than that they are of a different ethnicity, colour or religion.

And I don’t believe for a single minute that the far right believes in true freedom of speech either. Fascists have always done their level best to suppress the activities and arguments of their enemies through brute force.

I don’t like the implicit threat in this report, that the meeting will result in violence between the Far Right and the anti-Fascists. But I agree with the principle that anti-Fascists have to march to protest them.

The Klan in 1981 Showing the Fascist Reality of Anti-Migrant Boats for the Med

I found the above picture in Morris Dees and James Corcoran’s book, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat (New York: HarperCollins 1996). it shows an anti-immigrant vessel crewed by members of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a 2,500 man paramilitary army set up and headed by Louis Beam, The boat terrorised Vietnamese fishermen by running ‘gunboat’ near the docks and their fishing fleets. Dees is a member of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an anti-racist groups which prosecutes Fascists and right-wing extremists. The book states that the SPLC brought a lawsuit against them, which forced Beam to disband his army of racist fanatics. As you can see, a couple of these Nazis are wearing Klan costumes.

I’m putting this up, because there have been demands for similar boats to deal with the migrant ships crossing the Mediterranean. Lauren Southern, a Canadian Alt-Right propagandist, was involved with a project by a group of European Fascists to set up an anti-migrant patrol boat, until it was scuppered by a campaign by Hope Not Hate. But other Fascists groups are making the same demands, like CasaPound, an insignificant Italian Fascist party, a video on which I put up about a week ago. And Katie Hopkins, the rightwing bigot and loudmouth, whose career on this side of the Pond spectacularly imploded a few weeks ago when she became too toxic for even the Scum and the Mail to employ, was responsible for a particularly odious tweet in which she recommended gunning down migrants and their boats without remorse. She then dared the TV presenter, Philip Schofield, to challenge her on these monstrous sentiments. This came a day or two before the bodies of the migrants aboard one such ship, which had sank, washed ashore, including the infant son of a man, who had stayed behind in Turkey.

Although this photo is from another time and place, it shows you exactly the kind of Fascist patrol boat the Fascists are demanding today. And it isn’t pretty.

Dick Coughlan on the Six Greatest UKIP Excuses

This is another funny and informative video, courtesy of the internet. In it, Dick Coughlan takes apart UKIP’s six greatest excuses for their blunders and generally foul behaviour. He starts with a general point about the implausibility of Nigel Farrage’s statement about the party’s decline from its supposed massive rise last year being due to establishment opposition. This is clearly disproven by the fact that Farrage was given every opportunity to speak all over the television news, and was given columns in the Independent and Express. Coughlan states that the real reason must have been because Farrage was permanently drunk, as whenever he appeared, he had a pint in his hand.

And then Coughlan moves on to the other excuses UKIP have had to make. These include trying to explain away Kilroy-Silk’s racist rant against Arabs in the Express. His secretary tried telling everyone she had sent it by mistake. It was an earlier, unedited version of an already-published column. Kilroy hadn’t sent it, because he doesn’t know how to operate emails and electronic messaging.

Then there was the case of the Kipper, who took a photograph of himself in blackface with a funny clown nose, and the tried to explain it as a face mask for acne. Nigel Farrage, again, tried excuse himself arriving late for a meeting in Faversham in Kent by complaining that it was all due to immigrants clogging up the roads. Another Kipper, who was photographed making the Nazi salute, and tried to explain that away by telling the world that he was reaching for his phone, which was held by his girlfriend. He wanted to take it off her, ’cause he didn’t want to look like a pot plant. Right. Another Scots Kipper issued a long rant against gays and immigrants tried to explain his comments away as due to the effects of the medical drugs he was taking. A neuropharmacologist explained that was untrue, because sedative drugs merely make the patient more likely to tell the truth by removing inhibitions. It takes more effort to lie than to tell the truth, and so their real feelings are more likely to come out if people start taking sedative tablets. Coughlan draws the obvious conclusion from this is that Trump must be taking thousands of such drugs to come out with his racist bilge.

And finally, there’s the case of the Kipper, who had the horrendous statement that the three year old boy and his brother, whose bodies were washed up in Turkey after falling out of a migrant boat, were the victims of their families’ greed in trying to get to Europe from Turkey in search of a better life. In fairness to the Kipper, he does unfortunately have a point. The migrants had taken refuge in Turkey for safety, but had then the tried to move on to Europe. The Turks, unfortunately, do have their problems with Islamic radicalism. There have been terrorist attacks there, just like those in Paris, London and Brussels, and Erdogan has been giving covert aid to the jihadis. But it’s much safer than Syria. Nevertheless, the children’s death is horrific, and the Kipper’s use of them to make a general point about economic migration appears cynical and tasteless.

I don’t agree with Coughlan’s atheism, but I’ve decided to reblog this as according to Hope Not Hate, there are over 1,500 extreme Right wing candidates standing at the election on Thursday. Most of them are for UKIP. Hope Not Hate makes the point that they’re not as bad as the hard Right, like the NF, BNP, National Action and the other Nazis. Nevertheless, they are promoting racism. This last point has been reinforced by Farrage appearing in the news yesterday whining that the Brexit campaign didn’t include enough about the threat of immigration. I also oppose them as Farrage and the leading lights of the party are Neo-Libs, who want to get rid of the welfare state and privatise the NHS. That alone should be enough to make people want to keep them out of government.