Tory Lawbreaking Mentality: The Fuhrer Protects Justice

Zelo Street has put up an article today further exposing the Tories’ proposed legislation breaking our previous agreements with EU. It quotes from the FT’s article about this, noting that the new law goes much further than has been commonly reported and enters a world of such official contradiction that not even Orwell predicted it. Zelo Street writes

‘Take, for instance, the last line of Paragraph 44, which says simply “Certain provisions to have effect notwithstanding inconsistency or incompatibility with international or other domestic law”. So it’s illegal? No problem – it’s now legal.

‘The scope of the proposed legislation should also give concern: it defines “relevant international or domestic law” very broadly indeed. Included here are “any provision of the Northern Ireland Protocol … any other provision of the EU withdrawal agreement … any other EU law or international law … any provision of the European Communities Act 1972 … any provision of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 … any retained EU law or relevant separation agreement law”. And then it goes further. Much further.

Here we proceed through the looking glass: “any other legislation, convention or rule of international or domestic law whatsoever, including any order, judgment or decision of the European Court or of any court or tribunal”. It is possible that even the Enabling Act passed by the Nazis in 1933 was less blatant in its disregard of democracy.’

This a fair comment. One of the accusations used against Jeremy Corbyn, if I remember rightly, was that he approved the quote ‘everything Hitler did was legal’. But the quote was correct: Hitler’s rise to power was entirely constitutional. As was his passage of the Enabling Act, the law which granted him absolutely power as dictator. The German constitution provided the head of state to take absolute power and rule by decree during a period of emergency, which could last up to four years before expiring. Then the law would have to be renewed. Hindenberg, the last German president, was already ruling by decree thanks to a deadlocked Reichstag in which none of the parties had a majority and the pillars of the German Weimar coalition were now no longer working with each other. After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were able to declare a state of emergency. And so Hitler became constitutionally Germany’s absolutely dictator. And every four years, he recalled the Reichstag, packed full of Nazis who were the only permitted party, and got it to renew the declaration of the state of emergency.

Even the massacre of the SA during the Knight of the Long Knives had a legal justification. It was formulated by the brilliant, radical right lawyer Carl Schmitt, who later became disenchanted with Hitler and his murderers. He published a piece ‘The Fuhrer Protects Justice’. Roughly summed up, the argument was that Germany had entered a state of lawlessness. In order to restore law and order, any actions by the authorities were justified, even if they in turn broke the law.

The Tories didn’t get their ideas about passing legislation allowing the violation of existing laws and international treaties from the Nazis. I believe a more immediate inspiration was George W. Bush’s odious Tort Reform law over in the Land of the Free. The Smirking Chimp wanted to help firms get round laws guaranteeing certain workers’ rights. Instead of repealing the legislation, his way of circumventing them was to pass another law, which banned anyone from using them to sue their employers.

Passing one law to make another illegal. That’s what Shrub did, and what the Tories have done now.

This comes on top of Priti Patel continuing her attacks on ‘activist lawyers’ trying to protect the rights of asylum seekers crossing the channel in flimsy, dangerous boats. Even after her department was told that such language was illegal.

Zelo Street’s article quotes lawyer and commenter David Allen Green on the Tories’ move to illegality:

‘“The Conservatives, once the part of law and order, are going to deliberately break the law … on the issue of State Aid, a legal cornerstone of Thatcherite economics … because they agreed a border in the Irish sea, even though they are nominally a ‘unionist’ party. Weird”.’

He also quotes Thatcher herself, who told her party at their 1975

‘The first duty of Government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when it is inconvenient, if Government does that, then so will the governed, and then nothing is safe – not home, not liberty, not life itself”.’

He then dryly remarks that they used to revere her every world, and concludes:

Any MP who votes in favour of this Bill is not only not a democrat, but is unfit to serve. We have arrived at a dangerous moment. Britain is close to becoming a very dark place.

Absolutely. This is a real step towards the creation of a lawless, authoritarian state where legislation can be invoked or violated at whim like Putin’s Russia.

To mangle one of Orwell’s metaphors from 1984, the Tories are taking out the jackboot ready to stamp on our faces forever.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/09/tory-law-avoidance-law-revealed.html

Loser Johnson Loses Majority, Loses Vote and Purges Rebels

Ho ho! Things definitely aren’t going too well for the Blonde Generalissimo. Yesterday he lost his majority in the Commons when Philip Lee crossed the floor to join the Lib Dems while he spouting something about the G7 summit. Lee gave his reason for joining them his opposition to the immense harm being done to this country by Brexit. He declared

“This Conservative government is aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways. It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk unnecessarily and it is wantonly endangering the integrity of the United Kingdom. More widely, it is undermining our country’s economy, democracy and role in the world. It is using political manipulation, bullying and lies. And it is doing these things in a deliberate and considered way.

“That is why today I am joining Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats.”

Even with the odious DUP supporting him, BoJob only had a majority of one. Now he doesn’t even have that. Which means that, democratically, he can’t pass any legislation whatsoever.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/tory-mp-defects-to-lib-dems-now-dictator-johnson-has-no-majority-in-parliament-at-all/

But the humiliation got worse. The 21 Tory MPs who were threatening to rebel against Johnson over the vote whether to debate a bill preventing a no deal Brexit put their money where their mouths were and actually did it. They voted with the opposition. From today backbenchers have control of commons business. The Old Etonian Duce becomes the first Prime Minister since Pitt the Younger to lose his first vote.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/mps-defeat-government-theyll-debate-bill-to-prevent-no-deal-brexit/

The Tories, who voted against him were Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Guto Bebb, Rory Stewart, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames, Richard Benyon, Steve Brine, Alistair Burt, Greg Clark, Justine Greening, Sam Gyimah, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Anne Milton, Caroline Nokes, Antoinette Sandbach and Ed Vaizey. Clarke is, I think, the father of the House, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major. Hammond was also Chancellor until a few weeks ago, while Oliver Letwin and Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames have been prominent, even notorious, Tory politicos since the days of Thatcher, as I recall. And unlike many Tory chancellors, such as George Osborne,Clarke did seem to understand something about economics. When a prominent MP like him rebels, the fault’s very much with Johnson, not with him.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/the-21-tories-ejected-from-their-party-for-voting-with-their-consciences/

But BoJob also reacted as he threatened. He removed the whip from them, effectively expelling them from the Tory party. But there are also rumours that, following the advice of his adviser Dominic Cummings, he also removed their parliamentary passes so that they’d find it difficult getting into the Commons today to vote against him. One of the rebel MPs, Sam Gyimah, was reported by Sky News to have said that it seemed he had disabled their passes when they came in yesterday evening.

This was followed by the bizarre behaviour of the Polecat himself. It seems that with nothing to do during the debate except wait, Cummings retired to the bar, where he became, as Private Eye would have said, ‘tired and emotional’. Peter Walker, one of the Groaniad’s hacks, spotted him wondering down the parliamentary press corridor, lost and clutching a bottle of red wine, looking for the office of a particular newspaper. Then Cumming lurched over to Portcullis house where, according to Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Murdoch propaganda sheet the Sunday Times, he started yelling at Jeremy Corbyn ‘Come on Jeremy, let’s do this election, don’t be scared’. Shipman claimed the Labour leader was then whisked away by horrified aides. The Labour MP Cat Smith tweeted that, ‘As one of several shadow cabinet members stood right next to Jeremy (who was on the phone at the time) I just thought there was some loud bloke who stunk of booze yelling at us’. Commenting on this bizarre spectacle, Brexitbin tweeted ‘ Drunk & disorderly in Westminster is a new low even for him. The way to beat these people is not to play their game. Put them under pressure and they crack”. To which Zelo Street added ‘Didn’t need much pressure, did it?’ and concluded ‘Cummings is cracking up. Expect more pissed apparitions before he is taken away.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/dominic-cummings-go-home-youre-drunk.html

Did Boris Johnson really cancel Parliamentary passes of rebel Tory MPs? And what did drunken Dominic do?

This really doesn’t look good for BoJob. Corbyn could seize power, as the Skwawkbox says, it Jo Swinson wasn’t so determined to preserve Tory power in order to keep him out. https://skwawkbox.org/2019/09/04/johnsons-majority-shattered-lab-could-form-govt-if-mps-really-want-to-stop-no-deal-time-to-revisit-corbyns-offer/

Johnson has also confirmed that he’s a Stalinist by purging the Tory rebels, who now have absolutely nothing to lose by voting against the government and bringing it down. And as various bloggers, like Zelo Street, have already remarked, it also shows up the horrendous hypocrisy of the press. They were howling a few months ago that Corbyn was an evil Stalinist because he gave the constituency parties the power to deselect their MPs. How terrible and dictatorial, reinforcing internal party democracy like that! In fact, Corbyn hasn’t deselected anyone. But Johnson has. And the Tories are likely to have been embarrassed by it. When BoJob first made the threat, James Cleverly – surely a misnomer? – tweeted out that the party has no mechanism for deselecting MPs. Perhaps not, but Duce Boris has still kicked them out of the party nonetheless. Still, it could have been worse. Dictator Boris could have gone full Hitler and had them all killed like the SA during the Night of the Long Knives. I wonder who would have taken the part of the SS? Conservative Future, perhaps? They seem to be racist enough, if not necessarily that violent.

Here’s the Guardian’s video of Philip Lee crossing the floor:

I hope these are just the first of many defeats leading to this vicious, murderous government finally collapsing. And hopefully taking the whole Tory party down with it for good.

TYT’s Francis Maxwell Tears Into Charlottesville Nazis in Less Than Five Minutes

In this short clip, The Young Turks’ Francis Maxwell uses his dulcet Scots tones to rip into the Nazis who goose-stepped into Charlottesville last week with stinging ridicule. Maxwell states that he’s mocking fun of them because they do not deserve to be taken seriously or to be given the dignity of anything but mockery and ridicule. And he also lays into those from the Right, from Donald Trump and Laura Southern on down, who condemn both sides. Because this equates anti-Nazis with Nazis, those who protest against racist violence and discrimination, with those who would perpetrate.

Amongst the Nazis and White Supremacists he attacks is the young man, who claims he wasn’t really a racist. He points out that if he seriously means that, then he should have take a trip to Las Vegas instead of joining a Nazi rally. He then posts up multiple pictures of the guy, with a paedophile moustache added so that he resembles his hero, Adolf Hitler.

He also tears bloody chunks off an older man, in T-shirt with long, greying hair, whom he calls ‘Gandalf’. This man spent years planning armed attacks against Black and Jewish businesses. He’s a career criminal, who, if they were serious about their march being all about heritage and not a campaign for racist violence, shouldn’t have been allowed in the local demonstration.

He also launches another attack on a yet another moustachio’d man, who cried that he’d better be kept a hundred feet away from a school.

He also mocks them for their lack of personal hygiene, their terrible fashion sense – deriding them as ‘neckbeards’ who have stolen their father’s khaki chinos, and their entire lack of attractiveness to women. He calls them ‘basement dwellers’, who have never ‘touched a breast’, and says that ‘Gandalf’ should have taken his crew to a brothel instead of the march, as there they would have had a 20 per cent chance of actually talking to a woman. Although this was still high estimate of their chances of success. He also accused the lad wearing the neckbeard of having grown it to hide how many times women had swiped left on him when they’d seen him on mobile phones.

The Young Turks in their blurb for the video state that this is how you rip into them, and they’ve got a very fair point. As for the Nazis’ sex appeal, or lack of it, The Young Turks have also made a video revealing that the young men, who joined their march were encouraged by the organisers, who told them that this would make them attractive to women and would get them girlfriends. Some hope of that! As the Turks themselves also pointed out, this was the same recruiting tactic ISIS uses: that if young guys join them, they’ll be inundated with jihadi brides all wanting their bodies and their children.

Counterpart also published a piece commenting on the Nazis’ sexuality as well by a female sex therapist, who has contributed a number of articles to their site. She also observed their massive lack of appeal to women, and stated that rather than confronting the fact, they simply retreated into massive misogyny and hatred towards women in order to try and explain it to themselves. She also declared that many of them were repressed gays trying to suppress their fantasies about their fellow stormtroopers, and tormented by fantasies of well-endowed Black men satisfying their wives or girlfriends.

As a general observation on the weird sexuality of Fascist groups, this is very accurate. Ludwig Theweileit, a German historian, wrote an entire book, Male Fantasies, arguing that an important psychological component in Nazism was homosexuality. 75 per cent of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, who were wiped out by the SS on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives, were gay.

This doesn’t mean that the Nazis were at all tolerant of gays, as claimed by some supporters of the Republican party. They weren’t. Homosexuality amongst Jews was promoted before the Holocaust as a method of stopping the Jewish people from reproducing. Aryan gays were persecuted as well as the other racial, religious and political groups banned by the Nazis, and were interned in the concentration camps. If I remember correctly, there was even a play about the Nazi persecution of gays, Bent, staged in the 1980s.

And lurid fantasies and fears about the racial other preying on Aryan women is also a standard part of White racist/ Nazi psychology. Hitler had a recurring nightmare of a chained, blonde woman terrorized by a Jewish butcher. One of the anti-Semitic myths promoted by late 19th century racist ideologues is that Jews are more highly sexed than gentiles. And Blacks have also suffered from a similar racist myth – that they are more sexually motivated than Whites, and have larger genitals.

As for their lack of success with women, this reminds me of an article about a Far Right musician, who was part of the Nazi Black Metal/ Industrial scene in America in Adam Parfrey’s collection of articles on apocalyptic America, Cult Rapture. The article was entitled, ‘Where Can I Find a Girlfriend for this Nice, Young, Nazi Psycho-killer’ or something similar. This particular specimen of walking race hate had produced a book or pamphlet arguing that, rather than being prudes and puritans, the Third Reich was a sexual wonderland. The author himself was also spectacularly unsuccessful in attracting the attentions of the opposite gender. He did manage to get himself a date once with a female White supremacist, but he was too much even for her. She escaped from him by claiming out the windows of the ladies’ toilets after telling him that she needed to powder her nose.

Of course, they’re a very serious threat under all this. But the Nazis are such a bunch of twisted individuals that they deserve all the ridicule they get.

Alt-Right Meeting Celebrates Trump Victory with Cries of ‘Hail Trump’

As the Alt-Right starts settling into a position of power through their links to Trump, any pretense that they’re remotely mainstream is rapidly coming off, and their true Fascist face is coming through. In this piece from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, Michael Brooks comments on an Alt-Right meeting at the weekend in which the movement’s leader, Richard Spencer, laid bare the movement as White Nationalism. He declared that White people were the children of the sun, a race of conquerors and creators, who had been marginalised in contemporary America. At the end of the speech, a group of three of his stormtroopers cried ‘Hail Trump’ and ‘Sieg Heil’, with Nazi salutes.

Brooks comments that there are three components to the Alt-Right. One could be described as neo-Fascist, neo-Nazi or neo-Dixiecrat. Another section was people clustered around computer games. And then there was this, which was simply Fascist or Nazi.

He goes on to say that he would like to have Scott Atran on the programme. Atran’s an anthropologist, who conducted research interviewing terrorists, exploring what attracted people to it, and particularly what attracted young men. He’d like to ask him what was attracting young American men to the Alt-Right. He states that some of it is the sense of meaninglessness prevalent in late stage capitalism. He can see how this would attract young people to terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s more obscure in North America, but nevertheless it’s still a factor.

He also notes the role of sexual frustration. He states that he is not making this comment out of snark, but these men are putting all their emotional and sexual frustration and projecting it on to society. He notes that one of the two men in the photo has ‘hover hands’, the gesture some men make, who would like to touch their female companion, but are afraid to do so. Fascists are afraid of everyone, including women.

This last comment is very accurate. A large section of the Alt-Right seems to be Men’s Rights activists, who are bitterly anti-feminist. And many of them seem to resent the female gender simply because women don’t fancy them. Kevin Logan in his series of vlogs ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’ covers these individuals. Each of his vlog posts is on an individual denizen of the manosphere, who, in his view, is trying to drag our species back into the sea. The series now includes more than 30 posts. Not all of these men are misogynists through sexual frustration, but it accounts for a fair number.

The Nazi and Fascist movements considered themselves to be male, anti-feminist movements. They appealed to men of extreme right-wing views, who felt threatened by feminism. The Futurists, an artistic movement of militantly techno-Fascists, which celebrated the car, the aeroplane, the new machine age, speed and violence, declared in their manifesto that they advocated ‘scorn for women’. Ludwig Theweleit, a German historian, has gone further in the case of Nazism, arguing in his book, Male Fantasies, that it had a very strong homosexual component. This has been taken up in its turn by the American Right, who have argued that Nazism was militantly gay. 75 per cent of the SA were homosexual, but they were wiped out by Hitler during the internal purge of the Night of the Long Knives, and male homosexuals were interned in the concentration camps during the Third Reich. I think Sir Ian MacKellen acted in play about the imprisonment of gays by the Nazis in the 1980s, called Bent. In the case of the American Right and the Republican party, the homosexual element in the Nazi party is used to smear gays and the gay rights movement. The argument seems to be a simple syllogism: the Nazis were all gay, therefore, all gays are Nazis, or gay rights is a Nazi plot. It’s specious rubbish, like most of the stuff the Right spouts. Nevertheless, it’s believed.

Regardless of their sexuality, the Alt-Right is now a growing menace in America, and their potential to harm millions of people, and empower similar movements on this side of the Pond, is immense and terrifying. We need to stop them. Now.

Critical Biography of Benjamin Netanyahu Published

Also looking around the bookshelves last Friday, I found that someone has written a new biography of Benjamin Netanyahu. And from it’s title, somehow I don’t think it’s going to be complimentary about the Israeli leader. It’s called The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu. This seems to be a reference to the Bertold Brecht play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which was a parable about the rise of Adolf Hitler. This portrayed the Nazi leader as an Italian gangster. It’s a pretty fair description of Hitler’s character and the way the Nazis themselves behaved in the 1920s and early 1930s, when they were involved in street fights with leftists and Jews and planned assassinations, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS exterminated the ‘left-wing’ branch of the Nazi party, the SA. Historians of Nazism and the Third Reich, and politicians, who lived through this period have described Nazis as gangsters.

I’ve no doubt that Netanyahu will secretly bridle at the comparison. In the past, Israeli spokesmen have angrily denounced any comparisons between their country and the Third Reich as ‘anti-Semitic’. But the Israeli state has adopted many of the same murderous policies as Hitler’s Germany. It’s been engaged in a decades-long campaign of terror and murder against the Palestinians, with the ultimate aim of seizing their land and forcing them out of their ancestral homelands. Mass murder has been an integral part of this policy.

While comparisons with Nazi Germany are offensive, they’re also apt. And if the Israelis don’t want people to make those comparisons, their government should not act like Nazis and Fascists.

The Real News on the Israel Lobby’s Attempt to Discredit Dr Cornel West

Earlier this morning I put up a piece commenting on a post Mike published yesterday about a piece in the Mail. This was another smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in Momentum. They were, once again, accused of being anti-Semitic and compared to the SA, the radical paramilitary wing of the Nazis, who were massacred by the SS in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’. As I’ve said before, this is a gross libel. Those accused of anti-Semitism included principled anti-racist, anti-Fascist campaigners, many of whom, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, another Labour activist, are Jewish. They have been smeared as anti-Semites because they have dared to stand up to the Israel lobby over the persecution of the Palestinians.

It’s not just in this country that the Israel lobby is desperately trying to discredit its opponents with such smears. The major Zionist political group in America is AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. This works to promote Israeli interests amongst American politicians, including through political donations. And they’ve been smearing those on the American Left as anti-Semites also when they’ve dared to criticise Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. One of Bernie Sanders’ staff, the woman in charge of the Jewish Outreach part of his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, was sacked after she was also smeared as an anti-Semite. This was despite the fact that she was not only Jewish, but also very active in her community.

One of the others Left-wing politicians on the other side of the Pond, who also was the victim of an attempt to discredit him, was Dr. Cornel West. Dr. West is a Black Christian theologian and politician. He was one of the major figures in Bernie Sanders’ election team. He’s everything the Republicans despise – anti-Racist, pro-welfare, pro-working class, anti-poverty, pro-feminist, pro-environment. I would also imagine that it drives them mad to hear this coming from a Christian theologian, when they want to have the absolute monopoly on Christian opinion in the United States. Dr. West angered AIPAC because he made a speech stating that the safety of ‘our dear Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel’ could not be secured with the occupation of Palestine, and that events in Gaza, the West Bank and other Palestinian areas had shown that for too long the humanity of ‘our dear Palestinian brothers and sisters’ had been denied. Dr. West describes everyone as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, following the pattern of the rhetoric in some Christian churches, though I don’t think it’s just rhetoric either, but a sincere expression of his desire to live in love and peace with the rest of humanity. He was also very clear in condemning anti-Semitism. He declared that it had gone hand in hand with every Christian civilisation, and many Islamic. And it was to be condemned.

So, a critic of Israel, but not an anti-Semite, nor even hostile to Israel. He stated clearly that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was acting against the safety of the Jewish people there. But it was too much for AIPAC. in this piece from The Real News, the anchor talks to Glen Ford, a Black newsman, about a letter condemning West’s comments from 50 Black Democratic politicians. Ford comments that this is common tactic of the opponents of Left-wing Black politicians – to set one Black man to discredit another. The letter was written by Bakari Sellers, a Black activist who is also a member and activist for AIPAC. The letter is mostly quotations from Hillary Clinton praising Israel, with approving comments from AIPAC through Sellers. Ford and the anchor agree that the real issue, as the letter seems to acknowledge, is West’s advocacy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign, which Sellers/ AIPAC denounce as a new form of anti-Semitism, and accuse it of going behind the back of official attempts to find a peaceful solution through negotiations. They state that peace can only come through these official overtures, and not private protests.

Ford and the anchor also discuss how the majority of Black politicians are supporters of AIPAC, but also afraid of them too. As are White politicians, and those of other ethnicities. Ford says that AIPAC isn’t afraid of, and actually boasts about, destroying politicians. He even compares them to ISIS. The willingness of Black Democratic politicians to support the Zionist lobby contrasts very much with the attitude of younger, more radical Blacks, such as the activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. This young people draw parallels between the American police’s brutal treatment of Blacks, and the brutal treatment of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians. This linking of the struggle for Black civil rights in America and the struggle of the Palestinians for dignity and independence was made as far back as 1967. This was when the student activists at the Student Non-Intervention Co-ordinating Committee – SNICC – expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians at the time of the Six Day War. However, since then AIPAC has been actively recruiting Black supporters on College campuses. One of these was Bakari Sellers, although his father was one of the pro-Palestinian members of SNICC.

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rvn87ozUBw

This is what’s really going on: the Zionist lobby, both here and in America, are bullies, attempting to destroy any politician or activist, Black or White, Jewish or Gentile, who dares to criticise their atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. They’re doing it to the Labour Left; they did it to Bernie Sanders, and his staff, including Dr. West. It makes no difference if you are sincere anti-racist, who has actively campaigned against anti-Semitism, and faced racial hatred yourself, as many of those, who’ve been smeared by the Zionists have. Many of the Jews and people of Jewish heritage, who’ve been libelled as such have been the victims of anti-Semitic abuse themselves. one of these was the Scots lady, who found her election to the NEC scuppered by Jim Murphy, because she was connected to Momentum, who were ‘anti-Semitic’.

These allegations of anti-Semitism are to direct attention away from, and render out of bounds, all criticism of Israel and its butchery and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Palestinians the Israelis have expelled also include thousands of the country’s indigenous Jewish population. It’s a European-American colonialist settler state. And one reason the denunciations of anti-Semitism are now being made so frequently and so shrilly is that an increasing number of people, including Jewish Americans, are becoming aware of this and demanding change.

Vox Political: Daily Mail Calls Corbynites Nazis. Oh the Irony!

Yesterday evening, Mike put up a piece critiquing an article published in the Daily Mail by a Jewish Labour donor, Michael Foster attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in Momentum. Foster described them as the Sturm Abteilung, the radical, paramilitary branch of the Nazi party that was all wiped out by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives. He then further compared them to the Nazis by stating that they were all blindly following Corbyn with cult-like devotion. The Corbynistas had no policies of their own, and were just divisive. If you disagreed with them, you were excluded and briefed against. He also moaned that if you were a Jewish donor like him and made complaints about anti-Semitism, you were accused of conspiring to make false allegations in order to damage the Left.

Mike drily observes that all this makes a change from the usual ‘rebel Trot’ nonsense. He also makes the very good point that it is highly ironic for the Heil to start denouncing others as Nazis, considering that Lord Rothermere published the infamous article ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, and praised Hitler for his policies against the Jews. He was also very firmly against Jewish immigration to Britain, running articles about how we needed to be protected from criminal eastern European Jewish immigrants flooding into Britain. Which is pretty much what the Heil is saying today, only it’s dropped the anti-Semitism, and eastern Europeans are only the latest of the immigrant groups to exercise the Heil’s intolerance. Mostly it rants about Blacks and Asians. One of its regular contributors, Melanie ‘Mad Mel’ Philips, is particularly vehement about the Islamic threat. And then of course, there’s its reactionary views on sexuality and gender – its bitterly homophobic, and very definitely sees a woman’s place as being in the home, rather than at work. So it’s actually in no position to accuse anyone of racism.

Mike in his article makes a point for point rebuttal. He points out that the Corbynites have very well-defined policies. As for isolating and briefing against dissidents, that’s what Blair and his coterie did to those MPs they deemed were ‘off message’. Or looked like they were going to upstage the Dear Leader in the nation’s affections. One of those, who got it, if memory serves me correctly, was Mo Mowlam.

Mike also makes the point that the anti-Semitism allegations were weapons against Corbyn, but asks rhetorically if anyone had personally accused Foster. Obviously, they haven’t, as Foster puts his statement about anti-Semitism in the conditional ‘If, like me, you are a Jewish donor’ – suggesting that no-one has.

Mike states that Foster sounds like a sad, embittered Blairite, and concludes that if he’s reading his article, the best thing Mr Foster can bring to the discussion next time is silence.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/14/when-did-the-mail-start-using-nazi-as-a-term-of-abuse/

Foster’s article is a reassertion of the old smear that Momentum is anti-Semitic, and Foster describes himself as a ‘Jewish donor’. But what comes across is that the real reason for Foster’s anger is once again the threat Corbyn poses to the massive support Blair gave the Zionist lobby and their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

I’ve pointed out time and again that very many of the people accused of anti-Semitism by the Blairites – let’s call them what they are – were no such thing. Very frequently they were Jews or people of Jewish heritage with a proud history of anti-racist, anti-Fascist campaigning behind them. Men and women like Jackie Walker, whose mother was a Black civil rights activist, and father was a Russian Jew. A woman of colour whose partner was also Jewish. Red Ken in his book, Livingstone’s Labour, bitterly criticised racism of all stripes, including anti-Semitism, and the Labour party’s policy of recruiting Nazis guilty of the most appalling crimes during the Holocaust as part of the Cold War against Communism. Last week or so I blogged about a piece by Tony Greenstein, another Jewish Labour party member, who had also been suspended on charges of anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact that he was a member of the Jewish Socialist group in the Labour party. His crime was like the others: he dared to criticise Israel.

Tony Blair was very close to the Labour Friends of Israel group, and the Zionist lobby, through Lord Levy. Blair met Levy through the offices of one of the pro-Israel groups, and Levy was instrumental in getting the Israel lobby to fund Blair. This gave him the financial independence he needed to attack the unions and the Labour grassroots. Lobster’s done a series of articles describing this. And the Israel lobby is very defensive at the moment, because the Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign, which includes many Jews, is having an effect on forcing Israeli businesses to leave the occupied West Bank, if they want anyone to buy their goods. The response of the Zionist lobby has been to label them anti-Semites, and make the usual hysterical accusations comparing them to the Nazis. I’ve put up pieces here, including videos by Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein, both bitter critics of the Israeli state’s persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. These scholars have stated that the Israel lobby smears anyone who dares criticise Israel of being an anti-Semite. Mr Foster’s rant in the Heil is another of these.

Saturday evening I put up a video by Catherine Love, in which she explained that Corbyn had been criticised and closed down by the Conservatives, as he had dared to go to Palestine to try to arrange peace talks with the Palestinians, and this was interfering with theirs. This sounds like the Tories were upset, as the Palestinians a decade or so ago did offer a peace deal, which would recognise Israel if it retreated back to its 1967 boundaries. Both nations would share Jerusalem. This was rejected out of hand by the Israelis.

And we’re also backing Israel, as are the Americans. So does the Heil, despite it’s historic anti-Semitism pre-WW II. A few years ago it ran an article describing the foundation of Israel, including extracts from the diary or letters of a Jewish girl from London, who was one of the new settlers after the War. She was excited at the Jews finally having their own country. Except that it wasn’t. It was the Palestinians. The Jews, who came to settle it were Europeans and Americans, and they had absolute contempt for the Mizrahim, the Arab Jews already in the Middle East. In the 1960s Israel expelled about 60,000 indigenous Palestinian Jews because they were culturally indistinguishable from Arabs. And this was only part of the long history of the Israeli state’s policy of ethnic cleansing towards the indigenous population.

This is what looks to me as the real political reason behind the article. It’s an attempt to smear as racist and anti-Semitic decent people, who are campaigning against Israel because it, not they, is racist and colonialist.

Understanding Trump’s American Fascism

Okay, I’ve tried for about a week not writing about Donald Trump. I know some of you feel that I’ve given too much attention to this moron, and that this country has enough on its plate with the thugs who are in power over here. Including the one that left office late Thursday evening, the fall-out of which is still continuing. The problem is, Trump’s too big, too slow moving and the parallels with real Fascism too glaringly overt. You can compile a list of all the elements in Fascism, which are present in Trump’s campaign or the general background of right-wing anxiety and hysteria, which has contributed to it.

And if Trump gains power, he will be a problem over here. Not just personally, in that his decisions on the economy and policies of the world’s only surviving superpower will have direct consequences for Britain and the rest of the world, but also in the malign political influence his election over there will have on domestic politics. Events in America and elsewhere in the world have a legitimising effect on similar developments over here. Blair and the New Labour clique took their queue from Bill Clinton and his New Democrats. These aren’t to be compared to the Canadian New Democrat party, which is the Canadian equivalent of the Labour party. Clinton’s ‘New Democrats’ were a revision of the Democrat party, which took over much of the ideology of Reagan’s Republicans, especially financial deregulation, curbs on welfare spending and workfare. Clinton was almost certainly better than the alternative, but nevertheless he continued Reagan’s squalid political legacy. And over here, Blair copied him, introducing workfare, and pursuing Thatcher’s policies of deregulating the economy, including the financial sector, and cutting down on welfare spending. And then you can go further back, to the 1920s and ’30s, when Fascist parties sprang up all over Europe in imitation of Mussolini’s squadristi and later the Nazis in Germany. The British Union of Fascists was just one of them. They also included such groups and political cults in this country as the British Fascisti – actually extreme Right-wing Tories and Arnold Leese’s The Britons. If, heaven help us, Trump ever gets into power, his occupation of the White House will mean that European politicians will start aping him. Which means more racism, more misogyny, further restrictions on personal freedom, and domestic politics marked and supported by brutality and violence. So, here’s a bit on Trump’s ideological precursors and the similarity of his campaign to Fascist and proto-Fascist movements.

As I said, you can make a list out of the similarities between Trump’s campaign and personal style of politics, and those of real Fascists. Let’s begin with

Violence

Trump’s campaigns have been marked by his supporters striking and beating protestors. Trump himself has stood on his platform fondly looking back on the old days when those who dared to disrupt political campaigns like his would be taken out on stretchers. He’s even offered to pay his supporters’ legal fees if they assault someone. And at the weekend his scheduled rally in Chicago descended into a near riot when Trump cancelled and refused to show up.

One liberal female newsreader commenting on the violence at Trump’s rallies said that when she was growing up in California in the 1980s, you never saw it except on the extreme right-wing fringe, at was barely politics – Skinhead concerts. Marinetti in his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, an avant-garde artistic movement that became briefly aligned with Fascism, declared

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure and by riot; we will sing of the multi-coloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.

Georges Sorel, a revolutionary Syndicalist, who later became involved with extreme right-wing French royalist and anti-Semitic movements, proclaimed in his Reflexions sur la Violence that it was only in violent revolution that men were truly free, and were able to make a new man inside themselves. He was published by a French artistic group, the Compagnons de l’Action d’Art, who declared ‘Long live violence against all that makes life ugly’.

Marinetti went on to further declare ‘We today separate the idea of the Fatherland from that of reactionary, clerical Monarchy. We unite the idea of Fatherland with that of daring Progress and of anti-police revolutionary democracy’.

It could almost describe exactly Trump’s ideological background. Much of extreme right-wing politics in America is predicated on a profound opposition to monarchy dating from the Revolution. You can see it in such extremist political movements as Lyndon LaRouche’s ‘Democrats’ back in the late 1980s and 1990s, who believed that the Queen and the Vatican were locked in a deadly covert battle for world domination, with Her Maj running the world’s drug trade from the back of Buck House. Alex Jones’ Infowars internet set has been heavily backing Trump as ‘the only anti-globalist candidate’. He’s also paranoid about the British monarchy. There’s a hilarious segment on his show where he talks about Britain’s secret police picking up anybody who failed to show due respect to Brenda during some royal occasion a few years ago. He roundly declared that ‘they (the British) have no freedom’.

Well, I must have been out when that happened. I don’t doubt that the rozzers did pick up a few troublemakers back then. But that last time I looked, you were still free in this country to say what you liked about the Royal Family. A few years ago the Queen turned up in my home town of Bristol to present the Maundy Money at a ceremony in the city’s cathedral. Apart from those due to receive it, and the crowd of royalists and general rubberneckers, there was a demonstration from MAM – the Movement Against the Monarchy. A lot of the pensioners and other members of the public were annoyed at their demonstration, but I don’t recall there being mass arrests.

Trump also retweeted one of Mussolini’s sayings ‘It is better to live one day as a lion that one hundred years as a sheep.’ Trump said he just liked it because it’s a good quote. And so it is. What makes it suspicious is that it comes from Musso, who advocated a similar cult of violence. When he was still a revolutionary Socialist, the future Duce wrote an essay on Nietzsche, published in the magazine La Voce. He announced

We must envisage a new race of “free spirits”, strengthened in war, in solitude, in great danger … spirits endowed with a kind of sublime perversity, Spirits which liberate us from the love of our neighbour.

Misogyny

Trump has an extremely reactionary attitude towards women. When a female journalist at Fox News dared to ask him a difficult question, he sneering responded that she did so ‘because she was bleeding’. This too, is par for the course for the Fascist Weltanschauung. ‘We advocate scorn for women’, declared the Futurists, who celebrated ‘youth, speed, virility.’ This later became ‘Youth, Speed, Violence’, as women joined the movement. This was coupled to the cult of the charismatic leader. Adolf Hitler said, ‘the masses are like women. They want a strong man to lead them.’ Il Duce in Italy was also opposed to women skiing, riding or cycling, as this was supposed to make them infertile and prevent them from their ‘natural and fundamental mission in life’, of having babies.

On this matter, the general attitude of the Republican party and the American Right is very similar to that of Mussolini’s Italy. Musso was also worried about the declining Italian birth rate. In 1927 he made a speech stating that he aimed to increase the Italian population from 40 million to 60 million over the next 25 years. Contraception and abortion were both banned. In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany women’s role was defined as very traditional and domestic. Instead of going out to work, they were to stay at home and raise families.

The Republican party and the Right today is similarly worried about the fall in the birth rate of the White race, and there are websites and discussions on Right-wing internet sites devoted to the demographic decline of the West. The American religious Right is also strongly opposed to abortion and there is similar opposition to women taking up positions of economic or political leadership. I can remember way back in the 1990s one Republican pastor hysterically declaring that Hillary Clinton was ‘the type of woman who leaves her husband, turns to lesbianism, practices witchcraft and sacrifices her children.’ There, and I thought that she was just a bog-standard, rather boring corporate type. Who could have guessed she led such an exciting, subversive life?

But this leads on to and is part of another feature of the Fascist Weltanschauung, that is also part and parcel of the GOP worldview:

The Decline of the West

Italian Fascism and Nazism also grew out of the 19th century feeling that Europe was threatened by decadence, and racial and cultural degeneration. It was threatened by democracy, organised labour, feminism, all of which were making Europe enfeebled. Hans Nordung described this supposed decline in his book, Degeneration, as did Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West. It’s an attitude that similarly pervades the Right today, alarmed by the challenge posed by militant Islam, the rise of China as a world power, and mass immigration from the Developing World. Various Republican and Right-wing leaders today in America scream about the threat of Socialism, by which they mean any kind of collectivism or state intervention, as well as feminism, which is also held to weaken America. Mussolini declared at one time that he supported women’s demands for the vote in England, as one women became politically enfranchised they would spread pacifism, leading to Britain’s decline as an imperial world power.

Exceptionalism

Right-wing American politics still has the belief that America is different from and superior to all other nations. It’s more moral, and hence America demands the absolute right not to be bound by the international treaties and conventions it imposes on others. Kyle Kulinski over at Secular Talk commented on the outrage that would occur if, say, one of the Muslim countries launched drone attacks on known White supremacists in America. Drone attacks on Muslim terrorists in countries like Yemen, with whom America is not actually at war, is nevertheless perfectly acceptable. And way back under Clinton, the Americans were keen to set up the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and that the other nations around the world should sign the treaties binding them to it and outlawing such crimes. Except for America. It was felt that America did not need to be so bound, and indeed that this would only be an impediment to the ability of the Land of the Free to export that freedom around the globe.

The Italian nationalist poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose own later excursion to Fiume set up all the political institutions that were taken over into Musso’s Fascist Italy, made the same claim for Italy and her imperialist adventures in Africa. In his ‘Augural Song for the Chosen Nation’ he proclaimed

So you will yet behold the Latin Sea
covered
with massacres in your war … Italy, Italy
sacred to the new dawn
with the plough and the prow.

Racism

Fascism is, for most people, synonymous with racism. In this, Italian Fascism was originally rather different from Nazism. The Italian Fascists, while extremely nationalistic, weren’t originally racists. About 80 per cent of Italy’s Jews managed to survive the War, because many Jews had been extremely patriotic and supported the new Italian state which had been brought into being by Mazzini and the other Italian revolutionaries in the 19th century. A number of them had joined the Fascist movement. One of the leading Italian generals, Ovato, was Jewish, and he was buried with military honours and a headstone ‘For Family, Faith and Fatherland’ at the same time his compatriots elsewhere in Italy were being rounded up and butchered. The Nazis were bitterly anti-Semitic, as is notorious, and took over the scientific racism that originated in the 19th century with Count Gobineau in France, amongst others. Apart from Jews, the Nazis also hated Gypsies and Slavs, as well as non-Whites. Once in power, they organised a campaign to sterilise the mixed-race children of German women and Black American soldiers, who had been part of the army of occupation after the First World War. Mussolini also passed a series of anti-Semitic legislation in imitation of Hitler’s.

Although not initially racist, they also sterilised and butchered the indigenous African peoples in the parts of Africa they conquered. Their nationalism also led them to launch campaigns to force Italian language and culture on the other ethnicities that found themselves within Italy’s borders, like ethnic Germans and Slavs.

Trump’s popular because he has announced that he will build a wall to prevent further immigration from Mexico. At rallies his supporters have also racially abused Black and Muslim protestors. The Young Turks interviewed a group of three young guys protesting against Trump at a rally in West Chester, Ohio. One of them was a substitute teacher. He was worried by White pupils on schools in which he taught coming in, and saying to their Black and Asian classmates that ‘once Trump gets in, you’ll be deported.’ There have also been instances of racist abuse at College sports events. In one instance, the supporters of a basketball team from an all-White area chanted ‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ when playing a mixed-raced team from a much more ethnically diverse part of the same state. Among his supporters Trump has attracted various card-carrying Nazis and White supremacists. He’s even been endorsed by the Klan. There has also been a recent documentary in America by PBS television, which covered the way one southern family had been brought together by Trump. Many of them had not voted for decades, and the family had been divided between Republican and Democrat supporters. But they had all been brought together by Trump. This was fine, until you saw the tattoos on the wife’s arms. These included the type of Celtic cross used by the Neo-Nazi right, and the numbers 88, which in Nazi circles stand for Heil Hitler.

Trump has also announced that he wishes to place a ban on Muslims entering America. Those Muslims permitted to remain will have to carry badges and identity documents. These has naturally alarmed Jewish and civil rights groups, who have noted the obvious parallels with the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich in the years preceding the Holocaust. Mussolini too was an opponent of Islam. In the 1920s he prevented a mosque from opening in Rome.

Militarism

Trump’s actually ambiguous on this. Both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists had at their core radicalised, extremely nationalistic corps of ex-servicemen from the First World War. These former the Brownshirts of the SA in the Nazi party, and the Blackshirts, the squadristi and arditi, the latter elite Italian soldiers in Mussolini’s Fascists. The American Right has also thrown up in past decades various paramilitary movements. The survivalists stockpiling food and guns for the end of the world in the 1980s were succeeded by the Militia movement, who were similarly arming themselves for an invasion. Amongst the loonier theories was the idea that the Russians had left secret tank battalions in Mexico and Canada, ready to roll into the American heartland. A few days ago after one rally, one group appeared on the Net declaring themselves willing to serve as the ‘Trump militia’, working as bodyguards. They called themselves the Lion Militia, and debated online which uniform to wear. One was a lion costume, the other was that of the Brownshirts. I’m fairly certainly these were jokes, but nevertheless, there is something more seriously Fascistic underneath.

On foreign policy, Trump has been vague, issuing blatantly contradictory statements about his intentions in the war in the Middle East. At times he’s said that America should keep out of it, and leave it to Putin to sort out. At other times he’s announced that he intends to go in much harder than the previous presidents, killing not only the terrorists themselves, but also their families. He has also stated that he’s in favour using torture, ‘even if it doesn’t work’.

Mussolini similarly had a contradictory attitude to war. His regime was always strongly militaristic. He demanded that Italians should live in a permanent state of war. He wanted an army of five million men with a forest of bayonets, an air force so vast it would blot out the sun and a navy that other nations would fear as a threat to their security. And yet he also saw himself as a great peacemaker, and was genuinely affronted that he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for the Locarno Settlement.

Historians of the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe noted that they generally arose in countries, where the military was accorded a very high respect, and which had been united through military action. This included Germany, which was united through Bismarck’s conquests of the individual German states, and Cavour and Garibaldi, who did the same in Italy. It also applies to America, which was created through violent revolution and expanded westwards through military conquest.

The Activist Style of Politics

Conservative critics of Fascism have suggested that Fascism owes its basis partly to the development of the activist style of politics, which arose with liberalism and democracy. Before the French Revolution, politics had been strictly confined to the governing elites. After the French Revolution, all citizens were required to be politically involved. This expansion of direct political activism also involved the definition of those who were outside the new nations. In the case of the French Revolution, this was the aristocracy. In the case of Fascism, it revised the activist style so that those outside the new national community were the regime’s political opponents and ethnic minorities.

America was one of the world’s first modern democracies. It emerged from a Revolution against British government and perceived tyranny. That liberal tradition of democratic political activism is also revised on the American extreme Right. Trump’s backed by Alex Jones’, the motto of whose Infowars internet programme is ‘1776 Worldwide’. Jones, Trump and the other right-wing demagogues believe that democracy is under threat, and can only be defended through strong and sustained action against powerful internal and external threats.

Conspiracies

The Nazi Right has always been characterised by bizarre conspiracy theories. In the case of the Nazis in Germany and their successors, these were anti-Semitic theories, some derived from the infamous Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Nazis believed that Germany and the West was under attack from a Jewish conspiracy linking financial capital to the Communists. Germany had not been defeated in the First World War, but had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Jews. These stupid and vile theories have continued on the Nazi fringe. In the 1990s various members of the American Nazi fringe and Militia movement, like Timothy McVeigh, believed that their government was secretly ruled by ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government, dedicated to exterminating the White race through racial mixing. There have also been all manner of bizarre conspiracies about the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission. Jones, Trump’s supporter, is one of those who believes in these, though I think he’s Jewish. Whatever his religious background, he’s very definitely not anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, he is part of the same conspiracy fringe. These have reached bizarre extremes. Jones and his predecessors, for example, believe that the FEMA legislation passed in the 1990s is in preparation for an act of emergency, which will see Christians and other political opponents rounded up by the regime and placed in concentration camps. 20 years ago, back in the 1990s, the coloured dots on road signs in Philadelphia which marked when they were painted so that the highways authorities knew when to give them their next lick of paint were also the subject of a bizarre rumour. Those dots were supposed to show the location of the secret concentration camps which were going to be set up.

Contempt for Parliamentary Democracy

Both Nazism and Fascism were motivated by opposition to liberal, parliamentary documentary. The Nazis overthrew German democracy through a series of emergency decrees following the Reichstag fire. Mussolini led his Fascists on a March on Rome. Trump has similarly said that there will be riots if his opponents in the Republican party conspire to deprive him of the nomination to be the candidate for the presidency in a brokered convention. In the 1990s there was briefly a call for the Militias to march on Washington, though this was turned down as some of their members feared that it was an attempt to provoke them so that they could be banned by the government. More recently there has been a march in Washington held by the militant supporters of gun rights, though they did not attempt to overthrow the government.

Elitism

Both the Nazis and Italian Fascists believed that only elites had the right to rule, taken from writers like Ortega y Gasset and Vilfredo Pareto in the case of the Fascists. For the Nazis, this was based in Social Darwinism. Businessmen, provided they were Aryans, had the right to enjoy their prominent social positions and economic leadership because they had shown their superior talent and genetic worth through competition in the world of business. It’s an attitude that can still be found in the mainstream Right, both in America and Britain. Trump is the most outspoken in his embrace of this attitude. A businessman from an extremely wealthy family, he has made sneering reference to the poor, and how those from poor families should not have the right to rule because their family background shows that they don’t have the necessary biological inheritance to have made their way to the top earlier. And he has absolute contempt for the poor.

Charismatic Leadership

At the heart of Fascism was the cult of the strong, charismatic leader, whose unique qualities made him supremely fitted to govern. They alone possessed the ability to govern according to the popular will, even if the people themselves didn’t know it was. Furthermore, as men of exceptional ability operating in times of crisis, they were not bound by the judicial constraints placed on others. Carl Schmidt, a jurist, who worked briefly for the Nazis before falling out with them, established this principle in his piece, ‘The Fuehrer Protects Justice’, defending Hitler’s action in the mass killing of the SA by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives. Trump has not gone so far as to advocate the mass killing of his political opponents. But he has made it very clear that his supporters will use force if his claim to power is denied, and that he will revise the laws to permit torture. And at the core of his appeal is his claim to be able to provide America with strong leadership. And that’s always been synonymous with authoritarian rule.

Conclusion: Trump’s Political Inheritance of American Fascism

From this it’s clear that Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. He’s the culmination of a growing sense of threat and militaristic political movements that have been growing since the 1980s. Many of these qualities – the xenophobia, anti-Feminism and hatred of organised labour is actually fairly commonplace and characteristic of right-wing politics in America. But with Trump they’ve became particularly extreme. Some of this is a reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency. The presence of a Black man in the White House, whose background is Islamic though he himself isn’t, has created a profound alienation amongst the more hysterical elements in the Republican party. He’s been denounced as a secret Muslim, Nazi and Communist. In the case of the latter, it’s because of Obamacare, which was in origin a Republican idea. But it’s held to be too close to socialised medicine, and thus to Nazism and Communism. Because both are varieties of Socialism. Or at least, they are to right-wing pundits like Jonah Goldberg.

And the result has been the rise of Donald Trump.

Now I don’t think that once in power, Trump will overthrow democracy, force all Americans into uniform and start opening extermination camps. I do think, however, that American will become a much more intolerant place, and that Muslims and illegal immigrants will stand a far greater chance of losing any kind of political rights. And I can certainly see him interning Muslims, or at least some of them, like the Japanese, Germans and Italians were also interned as enemy aliens in the Second World War.

But his presidency will be a nightmare, and it will weaken democracy and genuinely liberal institutions in the Land of the Free. And that will be a disaster in a world where the forces of Right authoritarianism is growing.