In my last piece, I discussed a twitter argument between Raheem Kassam, one of the most vehement leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign, and James Melville on Twitter. The row had erupted when Kassam started moaning about how left-wingers were reporting his comments to Twitter in the hope of getting him thrown off social media. Melville had no sympathy for him, telling Kassam that he was reaping what he sowed after Kassam had put up a piece himself telling his supporters to pile onto Melville’s own account and hound him off the Net. And when Kassam put up a picture of Churchill in a yellow vest, Melville rhetorically asked him if he knew that Winnie had been an opponent of far right extremism. Which brought forth the following tirade from Kassam:
Lol now this guy who had a meltdown yesterday is going through my feed picking out tweets he thinks he can argue with. Churchill defeated imperialistic (opposite of nationalist) National Socialism (opposite of right wing) which wanted a united Europe under Germany (EU)”.
Which was followed by
“Fascism is an ideology. Conservatism is a philosophy. There’s your first problem in attempting to link the two. Fascism concerned itself with a corporate-state nexus (like socialism, and indeed our current pro-EU system does). Your understanding of philosophy is poor”.
Zelo Street commented on the relationship between Nazism and imperialism by pointing out that the Nazis were nationalists, far right and had zero relationship to the EU. Melville himself pointed out that Hitler and the Nazis were Fascists and right-wing extremists.
Kassam’s views on Nazism, the EU, Fascism and socialism are bonkers, but they’re a staple part of much Libertarian and ‘Leave’ campaign ideology. They follow Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, in believing that the Nazis were socialists because, er, the Nazis said they were. Despite the fact that Hitler staunchly supported capitalism, did not want to nationalize any firms except in emergencies, smashed the trade unions and put their leaders and activists in the concentration camps along with leaders and members of the mainstream German socialist party, the SDP, the Communist KPD, and anarchists, as well as other political opponents. Kassam also doesn’t seem to realize, or doesn’t want to admit, that the Nazis and Italian Fascists were very much nationalists. The full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers Party. And unlike the ‘socialist’ part of their name and programme, they took nationalism very seriously. Only ethnic Germans could legally be citizens. German industry, values and identity, or rather the Nazi version of them, were aggressively promoted.
The Italian Fascists were exactly the same, although they retained the trade unions, but incorporated them into the machinery of state government and control and made them subservient to the state and private industry. At the same time, private industry was aggressively promoted. The Fascists also aggressively pursued a policy of italianita – Italian national identity. Ethnic minorities within Italian borders, such as those communities which spoke German or one of the Yugoslavian languages were to be forced to become Italian and made to speak Italian. At the same time the party absorbed much of the ideology and finally the party of the Italian Nationalists, which was merged with the Fascists in 1922.
Kassam is right about Hitler wanting a united Europe under Germany. However, he did not want anything like the EU. The EU supposedly is a union of democratic states with equal status. It is not an empire nor an occupying power, although fanatics like UKIP have claimed it is. The claim that the Nazis were the founders of the EU is based on a piece of Nazi ideology devised later during the War when they were losing to Stalin and the Soviet Union. They weren’t enough blonde, ethnic Germans to fight the Russians, who were showing very clearly that they definitely weren’t the ‘subhumans’ of Nazi racial doctrine. So they tried to gain support from the occupied countries by spuriously claiming that Nazism stood for a united, capitalist Europe against the Communist threat. It was a piece of propaganda, nothing more. The real origins of EU lay in the 1950s with trade agreements between France and Germany and the establishment of the customs union between Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg – the ‘Benelux’ countries.
Then there’s Kassam’s claptrap about corporativism equals socialism. By corporativism they mean state control or regulation of capitalism. The hardcore Libertarians believe that only an economy absolutely run by private enterprise without any state regulation is really capitalist. But this situation has never existed. Governments since the Middle Ages have regulated industry to a greater or lesser degree, and industrialists, merchants and entrepreneurs have always sought state aid. For example, before Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations promoting laissez faire free trade, the dominant commercial ideology in Britain was mercantilism. This was a system of regulations governing British international trade. This included tying the colonies in North America and the Caribbean into a very constraining relationship with Britain and each other in which their exports were rigidly controlled in order to keep them serving the commercial interests of Britain.
From the ’50s to the end of the ’70s there was also a form of corporativism in Britain, in which the economy was subject to state planning in which the government consulted with both the industrialists and the trade unions. It was somewhat like the Fascist version, but within a democratic framework and pursued by both Labour and Tory governments. The current form of corporativism, in which private industry dominates and controls Congress and elected politicians through political donations and sponsorship, in return receiving government posts and determining government policy, is very much in the sole interests of private industry and capitalism.
But I’m not surprised Kassam doesn’t know anything about this. He is, after all, a hack with the extreme right-wing news organization, Breitbart, and has appeared several times in articles by the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organization Hope Not Hate because of his vicious islamophobia. As for his distinction between Conservatism and Fascism, this also doesn’t work. Fascism is notoriously fluid ideologically, and is therefore extremely difficult to define. In many ways, it was whatever line Mussolini thought was a good idea at the time. The Duce wrote a book defining it, The Doctrine of Fascism, but contradicted himself the next year by declaring that Fascism had no doctrine. It was a movement, not an ideology. As for Conservatism, while the Tory philosopher Roger Scruton in his 1980s book on it stated that it was largely ‘mute’, it is also ideological. As it stands now, it promotes private enterprise and attacks state involvement in industry and welfare provision. And a recent academic study quoted in the new edition of Lobster, issue 77, states that Conservative parties in the West are becoming more ideological and are increasingly resembling the authoritarian parties of the former Communist bloc.
Kassam is therefore utterly wrong. Socialism is not corporativism, and the modern form of corporativism is very definitely capitalist. The Nazis weren’t socialists, they were nationalists and imperialists, and were in no way the founders of the EU. But such distinctions clearly don’t matter to the extreme right-wing propagandists of Breitbart. And especially those, whose own islamophobia is shared by real, overt Fascists in the Alt Right.
For further information, go to the Zelo Street article at http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/01/raheem-kassam-fails-history-101.html
Hope Not Hate on Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and the Islamophobes Speaking in Support of Tommy Robinson
June 13, 2018On Saturday the islamophobic far right held a march to protest against the arrest and jailing of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the EDL, and former member of the BNP and Pegida UK, for contempt of court. Robinson had been livestreaming his coverage of the trial of a group of Pakistani Muslim men accused of child abuse. There are very strict laws governing press coverage of trials, which Robinson broke, just as he had broken them a year or so before in Canterbury. This had earned him a suspended sentence, which automatically kicked in when he repeated the offence last week in Leeds. Robinson was arrested, convicted and jailed.
The laws Robinson broke are there to make sure that everyone gets a fair trial, and apply to all cases, not just those of Muslims accused of paedophilia. But Robinson’s supporters decided that he had been the victim of state censorship and imprisoned for his political beliefs by an establishment determined to protect paedophile Muslims and persecute Whites, hence the march. This was addressed by some of the most notorious islamophobes in Britain and the Netherlands.
Hope Not Hate have an article at their site identifying the speakers, and giving a brief description of their political careers and their very racist views on Islam and Muslims. They included the notorious anti-Islamic Dutch politician Gert Wilders; Anne-Marie Waters, who was formerly a Labour party member before joining Pegida with Tommy Robinson. In October last year, 2017, she launched another far right party, the For Britain Movement; Raheem Kassam, a former advisor to Nigel Farage and editor of Breitbart’s London branch. He’s also the direct of Student Rights, which claimed to be a campus monitoring group dedicated to combating extremism. In fact, it has no student members or links to student unions, though it is linked to the extreme rightwing American group, the Henry Jackson Society. It has also been criticised by several London student unions for targeting Muslim students, and the Institute of Race Relations also noted that its work was used by far right groups to target a Nuslim student event. He’s also the editor of another, Neoconservative news site, The Commentator.
And then there’s the extremely islamophobic UKIP MEP, Gerard Batten, who in 2011 addressed the Traditional Britain Group, the far right outfit that invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to their dinner. Mogg attended, but now claims he only did so because he didn’t really known what they were like. Which sounds very unlikely to me.
As well as vile views on Muslims, the article also describes the vicious hatred towards other groups of some of those associated with the speakers. Like Mandy Baldwin, a member of Waters’ For Britain Movement, who posted homophobic material from a Nazi website on a social media site. For Britain also includes several former members of the BNP and other Fascists, such as Sam Melia, who was a former member of the banned terrorist group, National Action. Another member, Stuart Nicholson, posted extremely anti-Semitic material on his Twitter account before it was withdrawn. In one of these, he retweeted a post that read “National Socialism is the alternative to degeneracy we currently face. It is a pathway to freedom and prosperity. It is an escape from Jewish Tyranny. It is the Future of our people.”
https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2018/06/08/march-tommy-robinson-extreme-anti-muslim-activists-line-speak/
It’s probably no surprise that some of those, who joined the anti-Islam movement also have a bitter hatred of gays and Jews, and openly support Nazism. All the stuff Nazis write about ‘Jewish tyranny’ is a vile lie, responsible for justifying the Holocaust under the Nazis. And Nazism never brought freedom and prosperity. For the German working class, is meant low wages and complete subordination of the workforce to the bosses as part of Hitler’s Fuhrerprinzip, or Leader Principle. Just as it meant the absolute political, social and economic dominance of the Nazi party and the proscription of all competing parties and organisations, whose members were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps.
I don’t doubt that not all members of the anti-Islam movement have views as extreme as these. But it does seem to show that if these people have their way and ban Islam and persecute or expel Muslims, sooner or later they will move on to attack other groups. Like gays and Jews.
Tags:'Student Rights' (Monitoring Group), Adolf Hitler, Anne-Marie Waters, anti-semitism, BNP, Breitbart, Concentration Camps, Courts, EDL, For Britain Movement, Gays, Gerard Batten, Gert Wilders, Henry Jackson Society, Hope Not Hate, Islamophobia, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jews, Labour Party, Mandy Baldwin, MEPs, Muslims, National Action, Neocons, Paedophiles, Pegida UK, Raheem Kassam, Sam Melia, Social Media, Stuart Nicholson, Student Unions, The Commentator, the Holocaust, Tommy Robinson, Traditional Britain Group, Twitter, UKIP, Whites, Working Class
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