Clive Simpson is a gender critical gay YouTuber. Today he posted up a little video commenting on a press report that comedian Eddie Izzard was to star in a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Except the genders were now flipped so that the heroine, whom Izzard would play, is now Dr Nina Jekyll. Izzard’s a transvestite, who has now declared that he is in ‘girl mode’ and the piece reported how Izzard had struggled with his gender identity while calling him ‘she’ throughout. Simpson was much less supportive, complaining that Izzard wasn’t a woman and had taken the role away from a real one. But I wonder if one of Simpson’s commenters wasn’t closer to the truth when she suggested that this might actually undermine Izzard’s desire to be accepted as a woman, because it occurred to her that they had cast him precisely because he didn’t look female.
I think the commenter has a point. A few years ago Tilda Swinton would have been the go-to actor for this type of role. Decades ago she starred in a film of Virginia Woolf’s book, Orlando, about an Elizabethan boy who changes sex and lives for centuries. She also appeared as an angel, Gabriel, in the film version of the comic book Constantine. My guess is that the producers were similarly looking for an actor able to play androgynous roles. I don’t think its just this movie which as a transgender hero/heroine. Mr H, of Mr H Reviews, reported a little while ago that the forthcoming Hellraiser reboot would have a transgender Pinhead, played by a woman. This is, he said, in line with the original book. Rather than being powerfully masculine, in the source novel, Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, Pinhead is actually rather camp. The pins hold jewels, and his voice is said to be that of an excited girl. Mr H was looking forward to it, as no doubt were many fans of Barker’s original film and horror fiction. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard much about it since.
There has been a craze in recent years for gender-flipping the central characters in remakes of old movies. I’m not sure any of them have done well. The 2016 feminist reworking of Ghostbusters was a flop and torn to shreds by a fandom that really wasn’t impressed. There have been very many successful films with a powerful, strong woman as the central character ever since Ripley in Alien. People don’t like favourite, legacy characters being changed into the opposite gender, so it would be far better to make original films instead with a strong female central role. My guess is that a gender-flipped Jekyll and Hyde will suffer the same fate as the other gender-flipped movies.
But I also foresee an additional problem. It has a kind of predecessor courtesy of Hammer. Way back in the 1970s this mainstay of British ‘orror released Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde. In this reworking, Jekyll’s potion transforms him into a sexy, glamorous, murderous woman. Of course, this classic of British cinema was made nearly fifty years ago in 1971, but somebody will no doubt remember it and comparisons may well be made. Unless it’s done very well, this movie could be doomed.
The anti-racist/ anti-religious extremism website and magazine, Hope Not Hate, has posted up a piece by their contributor, Patrik Hermansson, describing his year-long mission to infiltrate the Alt Right both in Britain and in America. Mr. Hermansson is a young, gay and very anti-Nazi Swede. During his year amongst the assorted Nazis and Holocaust deniers, he met and became close to the far right London Forum and its leaders, Jez Turner, Stead Steadman and Mick Brooks. He also encountered smaller, associated Nazi groups like the Extremists Club and various Nazi Odinist groups, which worship the Norse gods.
He also met the Traditional Britain Group and its founder, Gregory Lauder-Frost. This has links, as has the London Forum, with the Nazi publisher, Arktos Media, and has hosted meetings, whose speakers have included other members of the international New Right such as Alex Kurtagic and Tomislav Sunic, John Morgan, formerly of Arktos, now working for Greg Johnson’s Countercurrents, Marcus Willinger of Generation Identity, and Richard Spencer and Mark Tait of the Alt Right. The Traditional Britain Group has also had links to Breitbart. The TBG has also hosted events attended by the UKIP MEP Gerard Batten, and Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who later apologized for attending.
Johnson has also set up groups like the London Forum in New York and Seattle. Guests and speakers at these events have included the anti-Semitic editor of the Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald, and the British Alt Right vlogger Colin Robertson, who vlogs under the monicker ‘Millennial Woes’. In Seattle, he also met the infamous Nazi ceramicist, Charles Krafft. Amongst other things, Krafft makes teapots of Adolf Hitler, one of which is shown. The Seattle Forum is Whites only, and is attempting to purchase land on which to found an all-White colony, Cascadia. He also met Jason Reza Jorjani, the co-founder of Alt Right Corporation and editor of Arktos Media, who later resigned his position at both to concentrate on overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jorjani’s middle and surname suggest that he’s of Iranian heritage, so it’s no surprise that he wants to destroy the Islamic Republic and create an Indo-European world order. Many of the Iranian languages, like the majority language, Farsi, are Indo-European, the same as the Indian languages derived from Sanskrit. The father of the former Shah decided on renaming his country Iran, instead of Persia, following a suggestion from the Nazi ambassador in the 1930s. ‘Iran’ is derived from ‘Aryan’.
These groups attempt to offer a complete, parallel society to that of the mainstream, so that the people within it not only attend political events with their fellow Fascists, but also socialize and go to and organize cultural events with them.
They also have links to the White House, and its current denizen, Donald Trump.
The article also includes a diagram of the various groups and organisations making up the Alt Right, and the links between them.
Hermansson also describes how he found the year within the movement emotionally numbing. These are viciously racist groups, with a violent and genocidal hatred of Jews, non-Whites, gays and feminists. They deny the Holocaust and joke about the murder of the Jews by the Nazis. They also cheered at the new of the Orlando shooting, when a sexually repressed and conflicted gay Muslim took out his anger and self-loathing by murdering people at a gay nightclub, many of whom were Latinos/Latinas. Hermansson describes how meeting and immersing himself in this milieu every day has the effect of normalizing their extreme and disgusting views. He states
I learnt a huge amount about how people and groups are connected, how the movement operates and what it was planning. I found out how the movement interacts internationally and how important the social aspect of activism is in radicalising and retaining members. These groups attempt to become all-encompassing organisations that go far beyond politics, into art, religion and social life making them incredibly difficult to leave. Tragically I’ve seen how social pressure inside these groups can make ordinary people support genocide.
The far right is often treated with complacency. Should we let them into the public debate? Their views might be different, but aren’t they just other opinions
What’s obvious after a year inside the alt-right is that we cannot become complacent. These are not just opinions. These are organisations that actively foment hate and promote violence towards large groups of people. They are dangerous and their dangerous ideology must be confronted, wherever it appears.
The article concludes with his description of the events in Charlottesville.
In addition to the diagram, there are also numerous photographs taken by the author.
It’s been a week for murder by extreme right-wing nutters. On Monday the world was shocked by the news that a gunman, Omar Mateen, had opened fire in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Before he was killed in turn by armed police, he had killed 49 people and wounded another 50.
Then on Thursday another maniac, Thomas Mair, shot to death Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen. Cox had just been holding a surgery, meeting her constituents in a library in Birstall, a village in Yorkshire. She was outside the library when Thomas Mair shot her twice, first in the face, and then on the ground, before stabbing her. Mair was tackled by a very brave local man. A witness, Hitham ben Abdullah, said the gun looked homemade. Before Mair attacked her, he was heard shouting ‘Britain First’, or ‘You don’t put Britain first’, either in reference to the Referendum – Cox was a supporter of the Remain team – or the British Nazi group of the same name.
Britain First’s initial reaction was to deny they had any connection to Mair and the murder. Others on the extreme right were all too eager to express their sympathies for the murderer’s actions. Daniel Hall, a member of the Notts Casuals Infidels, from Sutton in Ashfield, posted on their Facebook page that ‘We knew it was only a matter of time before we took it to the next level. We have been mugged off of for far too long.’ Hall is the brother of Jordan, a Kipper and an activist for Pegida. The Notts Casuals Infidels are a mixture of the EDL and the North West Infidels, another anti-Islam group. He also said that another politician, Rachel Maskell, the MP for York Central, needed to ‘disappear’. And the South East Infidels greeted the shocking news of Cox’s murder with a post on Facebook hoping that the murderer was a Muslim.
Nick Griffin, now sponging off eastern European Nazis after he was ousted from the BNP, attacked Cox as a warmonger for supporting the bombing of Syria. And the north east branch of the Nazi group, National Action put up a post urging its readers ‘Don’t let this man’s [Mair’s] sacrifice be in vain. Jo Cox would have filled Yorkshire with more subhumans!’
Mair himself had a long history of mental illness. However, it seems he was also a very committed member of the Nazi right. From the late 1990s to the early years of this century he purchased $600 worth of books from National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the National Alliance, America’s and the world’s biggest neo-Nazi organisation. The books he bought were manuals showing how guns and ammunition could be made from ordinary ingredients and parts bought in hardware stores. Mair appears to have been very much a peripheral figure in the extreme Far-Right. At one time he attended the meetings of the Springbok Club, a society for pro-Apartheid expatriate White South Africans, and may have gone to the meetings of the ultra-Conservative Swinton Circle/ London Swinton Circle.
As for Britain First, while they’ve disowned him, they did run camps instructing their members how to defend themselves in knife fights, and promised ‘militant action’ and ‘direct action’, against elected Muslim politicians, whom they regard as ‘occupiers’, leading the Islamification of Britain. One of these ‘occupiers’ is the new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. On the night of her election, Cox was shown with a shawl round her head in the company of some of her Muslim constituents. This would have sent Britain First and similar Nazis into apoplexy, as they would have seen her as a collaborator and ‘race traitor’.
See the Hope Not Hate article: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/a-hater-at-heart-4919
This also makes sense of an comment a ‘John Gaines’ posted over on Mike’s blog at Vox Political, which ran ‘Here we go, what have you Political imbeciles done to our Country? you scum will not stop until we are completely another damn Middle East mess. Never mind ‘Remain’ run for your lives from all political idiots.’ Which shows what a political idiot Mr Gaines is.
See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/16/mp-critically-injured-after-shooting-and-stabbing-attack/#comments.
Despite the cruddy attitude from the Far Right, which you’d expect, MPs and the leaders of all the mainstream parties expressed their shock and sadness at Cox’s death. Referendum campaigning has been suspended, and the other parties will not contest Jo Cox’s seat.
Cox was a woman of deep integrity and compassion, by all accounts. She was dedicated not just to her constituents, but had also been an active member of Oxfam. She should have had a brilliant political career ahead of her. Instead she was murdered in cold blood in the street by a maniac. She leaves a husband and two children.
Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, apparently phoned up ISIS and swore allegiance to the murdering scum, before going out to commit his own horrendous atrocity. He had been investigated by the FBI before, as one of his friends had been a suicide bomber. They’d let him go. Now questions are being asked about the investigation and the soundness of their decision.
My guess here is that the FBI probably did have to face a genuinely difficult decision. Many people know someone personally who is a ‘bit dodgy’. For most people, it’s low-grade criminality, nowhere near the level of mass murder. The problem with looking at networks of people is that just because person X knows Y, who might be a known crim, or be a member of an unpleasant political or religious organisation, doesn’t mean that person X is either. Of course, ISIS are bound to claim him proudly as one of their own, because they are, after all, a gang of cut-throats with a twisted sense of morality and a need to kill and maim. But that doesn’t mean that Mateen joined them out of any deep religious or ideological reasons. He could just have joined them because he was an angry, nihilistic thug with a need to take out his rage on innocents, and ISIS gave him a pretext, a rationale for his atrocity.
Way back in 19th century France, Paris was rocked for a time by a series of bombings committed by Ravachol, an anarchist. Yet when Ravachol himself was caught, his self-declared ideological reasons for blowing up cafes and their patrons looked less than sound. He has no connection to other anarchist groups, and far from attacking the ruling classes, his bombings were of working class bars and cafes. He might have been genuinely motivated by the ideas of Bakunin and the other advocates of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Or he might simply have been a maniac with a need to kill and maim, and seized on anarchism for his rationale. Just as Mateen used ISIS.
After all, if Mateen was a dedicated Islamist, it looks like he left it rather late. Rather than phone them up before going out and shooting people, you’d have thought he’d have done it long ago. And then there’s his choice of venue. He had a very specific hatred of gays. I think this is remarkable, because in previous Islamist atrocities, they target the general population indiscriminately. They’re just interested in killing Western unbelievers, which includes those Muslims, who don’t share their warped views. You think of the 7/7 bombers. They targeted public transport. They didn’t target gay pubs. I’m not saying that they didn’t hate gays. It’s highly likely they did. But specifically targeting one particular group wasn’t their aim. They wanted to kill all infidels generally. The same with the Boston bomber. He targeted a marathon in order to kill the maximum number of people in a public place, irrespective of their sexuality.
Now it could be that Mateen was a genuine Islamist, and that from killing the patrons of the nightclub, he would have moved on to other sections of the population, apart from gays. But I wonder. At the moment, it looks to me like he was a nasty homophobe with a specific desire to kill gay people, rather than being a warrior for Islam.
Yesterday, the world was shocked by the news that Omar Mateen from Afghanistan had gone into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire with a gun. 50 people were killed and another 50 were injured before the thug was finally shot by the cops. Today, people have been lighting candles in remembrance, and sending their hopes, prayers and best wishes to friends, lovers and relatives of the victims and the people of Orlando. People around the world, whatever their sexuality, are standing with the gay community to show their hate and disgust at the crime.
Unfortunately, some morons over here have chosen to learn the wrong lesson. Mike put up two posts yesterday about the effect this would have on the Vote Leave campaign. In the first he expressed his fears that they would seize on it to promote more fears of immigrants. And in the second, he expressed his disgust at finding them realised. Some idiots in the ‘Leave’ campaign had stuck up a piece warning that if Britain didn’t leave the EU, something like it would happen here.
This last piece has an eye-opening, and eye-watering list of the stupid reasons some people gave for shooting others. These include domestic arguments in which one spouse has grabbed the gun, so the other grabbed it and shot the other one.
In fact, Britain already has had something like the mass killing in Orlando. This was 7/7, when four suicide bombers killed and maimed hundreds on a bus and in the tube. Those four butchers weren’t immigrants, however. They’d been born here, and were 2nd or 3rd generation. They certainly weren’t recent arrivals off the boat or plane. And many of the idiots, who’ve gone off to join al-Qaeda or ISIS, and so dedicate their lives to ending those of others in the name of a crazed misinterpretation of Islam, have been exactly like them: the British-born children of immigrants.
As for the crime itself, unfortunately there have been more than enough White Americans fouling the airwaves over the other side of the Pond with demands and exhortations for their compatriots to do something similar. One of the videos Secular Talk put up a few days ago was about a right-wing radio host – or politico – who asked why they didn’t shoot trans people anymore. Well, I guess there are a variety of reasons, but I would think that the main one was that people had sympathy with those, who felt they were of the wrong biological gender, because they had medical condition that was causing them distress, rather than that they were wicked or perverted.
Secular Talk also put up a piece from another right-wing talk radio programme, in which a frothing nutter ranted about how people should be rioting in the streets about gay marriage and the rise of gay equality in America. He seemed to think it was a cause for bloody revolution. My guess there is that many people have come to realise that whatever their own views on homosexuality, it’s with a consenting adult and doesn’t affect a person’s moral worth. Being attracted to one’s own sex does not mean that they don’t pay their taxes, support their local sports teams, give to charity and otherwise behave exactly like the rest of the population. One Christian American woman expressed her absolute lack of support for banning gay marriage by stating that she was in ‘a Christ-centred marriage’ with her husband. Now gays had the right to marry. So she had to check her own. ‘No,’ she said, ‘still in a Christ-centred marriage with my husband’. Another man from one of the Southern states put up a video in which he went poking around looking for any gays that might suddenly have fallen out of the sky, to inundate America with gayness. Nope, despite the passage of gay marriage, he couldn’t find any more gays suddenly materialising around the place. It was an ironic attempt to show what a non-issue it all was.
I’ve also no doubt that this atrocity would have delighted Jerry Falwell. Falwell was a right-wing televangelist with the usual hatred of anything to the left of Ronald Reagan. He also hated feminists and gays. When Orlando started holding gay pride marches, Falwell started frothing out the mouth and declared that they couldn’t shake their fists at God like that. Instead, the Almighty would punish them with an asteroid, or earthquake or tsunami. Or something. The local newspaper asked the town’s Roman Catholic bishop what he thought of it. The reverend gentleman opined that he thought, overall, the people of his fair city were decent, god-fearing folk. ‘If God was going to send an asteroid,’ he thought, ‘you’d think He’d start with Las Vegas’. Good point.
You can also bet that over the next few days and weeks you’re going to hear mass whining from the NRA and the gun lobby about how liberals are unfairly using this to deprive decent, law-abiding Americans of their right to have high calibre, military-grade firearms. When massacres like these have occurred, including those at schools, they’ve immediately seized on them to go on the offensive. Often highly offensive. Instead of depriving people of guns, more people should have them, including school children. Then the little mites could shoot back the next time a maniac walked in, or one of their fellows went berserk, and opened fire. We’ll probably here something similar now, with gun-nuts asserting that at least all the men in the nightclub should have been packing, ready to defend themselves and the women.
Given what human nature is like, is should be obvious that the last thing that makes places like schools and nightclubs safer is idiots coming in tooled up. Bullying and gang fights tend to be a fact of school life, which parents and teachers and school staff have to deal with. Now imagine what would happen if all of the little darlings involved had guns, and started blazing away.
It’s the same with nightclubs. Fights break out in pubs and nightclubs, when people have drunk too much, spilled someone’s drink, tried to move in on their partner, or simply looked at them the wrong way. People can get seriously hurt, but most of the time, they ain’t fatal. Now imagine what would happen if a boozed-up lout suddenly started to wave a gun around in a roomful of other drunken, gun-toting louts. You don’t have to be a genius to see how that could easily end in mass carnage, rather than the weight of overwhelming firepower forcing the other dude to put his gun away.
Quite apart from the fact that schools should be for learnin’, and nightclubs for dancing away the evening and generally having fun. Guns should have no place in either.
In this piece from The Young Turks, John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss Trump making his supporters swear an oath with their raised right hands, to vote for him. For Uygur, this is a step too far, and Trump may well, in his mixed metaphor, ‘have jumped the shark in the dirty pool’.
John Iadarola begins by describing this weird ceremony, and the unease it has provoked amongst the journalists and media observers, who witnessed it. The clip includes footage of Trump getting the crowd to swear the oath to vote for him, ‘Come whatever’. He admits that he was inclined to dismiss the concerns as exaggerated, until you saw what it looked like from behind the crowd. Abe Foxman, the former director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish organisation which tackles anti-Semitism, and which has also spoken out against anti-Muslim sentiment in the US, pointedly described how disgusted he was as a holocaust survivor at seeing a supposedly mainstream politician, not a member of the far right or Neo-Nazi organisations, going through this ritual with its overtones of the Nazi salute.
Ana Kasparian, on the other hand, thought this was rather too harsh, and while it was strange, it didn’t have the Neo-Nazi connotations that the others considered it had. Trump’s organisation have also posted pictures of other political rallies where the crowd had also raised their right hands. The Turks joked that Sanders’ supporters did so, though in their case it wasn’t because they were swearing allegiance, but because they were also recording the event.
Uygur came to a compromise conclusion. He thought it may have started off as a kind of joke, and may not have originally had the Fascist connotations. But After the denunciation by Foxman and others, he was certainly now aware how it looked. And he had gone on to do the same at a rally in Concord, South Carolina. Uygur believed that the crowd was largely unaware how it looked, because to call Republican supporters ‘low information’ was an understatement. But Trump knew, and was deliberate using the gesture’s Nazi overtones to garner more media attention. It was like his flirtation with the far right in general. He courts it, to get voters from that direction, and then pulls back and denounces it. Then does it again. And it was disturbing to see this ritual at Orlando, with one of the people in the crowd wearing a suit decorated to resemble a wall and the slogan ‘Mexico will pay’. Trump was, Uygur said, dipping his toe in the dirty pool.
But he also felt that this time, Trump had gone too far, and ‘jumped the shark’. People were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the gesture, so much so that even Republicans were becoming concerned in case others thought that they were racist for supporting him. And there is indication that it is harming Trump. He was expected to win Maine. He didn’t. He lost. He managed to gain two other states, but won them with a much lower majority than was expected. Republicans were increasingly giving their vote to Ted Cruz instead.
Now I hope this is true, although in some areas there’s little difference between them. Both are right-wing Republicans with a very strong suspicion of Islam. And while Donald Trump has made noises about banning Muslims from the US, Cruz has actually been putting bills through Congress to cut down on Islamic immigration. So in some ways there isn’t much to choose between the two. But of the two, Cruz is probably the saner, safer alternative. He comes across at least as a little more restrained and rational than Trump, who has been denounced by Kyle Kulinski at Secular Talk as a ‘savage’ and a ‘demogogue’. I doubt very much that Trump would turn America into a full-blown Fascist state, but he’d certainly make it much more authoritarian and xenophobic. He should not be let anywhere near power, not least because of the precedent his antics are setting for the next right-wing demagogue.
This is extremely ominous. Yesterday at a meeting in Orlando, Florida, Trump got his supporters to raise their right hands and swear their personal allegiance to him. This was reported in the Hill. Mike in his report on it notes the similarity to the oath every German citizen was required to swear to Adolf Hitler. The strangeness of the scene was also not lost on a columnist for Bloomberg. Mike states
The scene is reminiscent of Hitler in 1930s Germany – the crowd with their right hands raised echoing the Nazi salute, and the oath echoing the oaths of personal loyalty to the Nazi leader that Germans were ordered to swear.
Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis tweeted: “I’ve never seen someone swear allegiance to a politician in America, until today. To the Constitution, many times. To the flag, daily.”
I don’t know, but I can kind of guess what Trump would say about this in his defence. He’d probably argue that it’s no different to raising your right hand to swear on oath in the church or in court. Many evangelical Christians raise their right hand during church services when they’re carried away with the worship. German evangelical Christians, obviously, very definitely do not. They raise both hands, just to make it very clear that they are not saluting the Fuehrer and the horror of the Third Reich.
But I don’t think the parallels with swearing oaths in court, or ecstatic gestures during Christian worship, really hold. It is far more like the mass oaths the citizens of the Fascist tyrannies were expected to swear to their dictators – to Hitler, Mussolini and the other goose-steppers. And Mike goes on to make the comment that its unacceptable either way whether or not Trump is ignorant of the historical comparison.
It’s frightening that Trump has the support of David Duke and the Klan, that he’s invited the White supremacist National Cesspool to his rallies; that he intends to deport 11-12 million illegal immigrants, build a wall with Mexico and ban Muslims from entering the US. Let alone his intention to resume torture and kill civilians in the War on Terror. Or is that the War for Terror?
Hitler claimed to be sent from God, and you can hear the same rhetoric around several of the Republican candidates. They claim that they are called by God, or their supporters claim that God has meant them to run for president. It all recalls the line in the oath to Adolf, ‘Oh my Fuehrer sent from God’. To their credit, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would not comply with these claims. They saw Hitler as a secular messiah, and so refused to swear loyalty to him. The only messiah for Christians is Jesus. And they paid for that with internment in the concentration camps.
The Wehrmacht at the Nuremberg Rally: Trump’s model for the Florida meeting?
Trump’s certainly Fascistic, but I don’t know whether he really is a Nazi. It could be that Trump is deliberately pushing the Far Right aspects of his campaign, both in style and substance, as far as they’ll go on the grounds that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. He’s getting talked about, and extensive media coverage. And the more sober media commenters or the Left note the similarities between him and the Fascists, the more popular he seems to become. He seems to be determined to push it as far as possible, until it rebounds.
Or until it’s too late. For America. For freedom. And for millions of innocents around the world.
A line from an old Space Opera I used to watch on TV comes to mind, a prediction given by a departing mage to a fiercely ambitious alien politicians: I see a hand reaching out of the stars. It is your hand. And I hear a billion voices calling your name.’
‘My followers?’
‘No. Your victims.’
UKIP Supremo Nigel Farage: Sound Policies for a Happier Britain
UKIP is once more in the news. After a series of scandals by UKIP councillors and politicians, Nigel Farage has responded with a few scathing comments on his party’s membership. In an interview with the Times today (28th January 2014), Farage declared that the ‘wrong kind of people are in UKIP’ and urged the party not to elect Walter Mittys. This follows a series of highly offensive comments by UKIP councillors, such as asking a group of children from care homes how it feels to be ‘takers from society’. If that weren’t enough, another stalwart of the party of Eurosceptics declared that the recent floods in Somerset was God’s punishment for gay marriage. This last comment produced mixed cries of scorn and amusement all over the country. A female friend of mine told me that one of her gay friends had said about this prize piece of Right-wing idiocy, ‘They’re blaming me for the floods! I’ve never had such power before!’
In fact, this particular attitude to the floods is pretty much in line with some of the more ridiculous comments about pro-gay movements and legislation that have come out of the American Right over the past few decades. Way back in the 1990s Private Eye in their ‘Funny Old World’ column printed a piece from one of the local American papers covering Jerry Falwell’s attack on a gay pride march in Orlando, Florida. This most notorious of the Right-wing televangelists attacked the planned march with the statement that if the gay community continued ‘shaking their fists’ at the Almighty, then He would punish them with an earthquake, tsunami or perhaps even wipe the place out with an asteroid. The paper then asked the Bishop of Florida for his comment on Falwell’s diatribe. This man of God put the religious situation in his city into a broader perspective. Overall, he declared, ‘Orlando was a pretty god-fearing place. You’d think if he was going to wipe anywhere out, He’d start with Vegas’.
Yesterday the news revealed that one of UKIP’s MEPs for Somerset had the worst voting record in the European parliament. In a TV interview, the politico acknowledged in response to one of the questions put to him, that the allowance paid to him for attending the sessions were a factor in his turning up at sessions at all, thus adding idleness and venality to the party’s record of bigotry and contempt for the poor and vulnerable.
Hence Farage’s comments about the party having the wrong people in it.
This is a bit rich coming Farage. It reminds me of the proverb ‘A fish rots from the neck down’. Going further back a decade or so ago, Farage himself was also several time in Private Eye himself, after he was spotted having lunch with ‘Nasty’ Nick Griffin of the BNP. Farage has always tried to distance his party from racism and xenophobia, not entirely successfully, so perhaps the two were instead not discussing the politics of race, but the expanding power of the centralist state and the growing threat of Bolshevism in British society.
In fact, Farage’s remarks about his own people strongly reminds me of a comment the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht made about the East German authorities’ absolute contempt for their own people. There had been a popular uprising, and Honegger, or whoever was in charge at the time, responded by sending in the tanks. The man responsible for such masterpieces of Weimar theatre as Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui drily remarked, ‘The politburo has unanimously decided to dissolve the people and elect another’.
It also parallels another disparaging comment by an exasperated leader on the quality of his on a rather less elevated cultural level: ‘Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way But Loose. In this flick, Eastwood stars as a trucker, who falls foul of an outlaw biker gang. After a fight in which the motorcycle maniacs are thoroughly done over by the star of Dirty Harry and his orang-utan companion, Clyde, their leader cries in despair ‘Oh, Lord! Other men you made of clay! Why did you make mine of sh*t!’ It’s a question Farage is clearly asking himself today, though with a less earthy vocabulary. Perhaps he should be a bit stricter in who the party recruits, and needs a better PR department. All the party’s now have extensive spin machines and press officers. Maggie, of course, had Bernard Ingham. From the way UKIP’s politicos act, I think Clyde would be a better choice for them. After all, in the film he had an excellent sense of humour, charisma, and never said anything embarrassing, unlike UKIP’s hordes of blunt Right-wingers.
Clyde the orang-utan expressing his penetrating analysis of UKIP’s grasp of EU economics and the question of the Britain’s position within it during filming with Clint Eastwood.
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