RosieBell

Populism Unleashed

Prescient piece by Niall Ferguson who back in May was taking Trump's chances of winning the election seriously

 

He describes Trump not as a Fascist - he doesn't go in for the marching in uniforms and military conquest - but as an anti-immigration populist.

Ferguson describes populism as containing five ingredients (1) rise in immigration which in the USA declined markedly from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s; (2) rising inequality; (3) perception of corruption in the political establishment; (4) a big financial crisis; (5) a demagogue.

The demagogue makes a macho appeal to the most embittered parts of the electorate. Trump is to be compared, not to Mussolini, but Denis Kearney, leader of the  Workingmen's Party of California in the 1870s during another time of financial crisis. The Party's slogan - “The Chinese Must Go”. Success for the anti-Chinese campaign came with the 1882 Exclusion Act. 

The anti-immigration sentiment swept the western world, taking the form of vicious anti-semitism in Germany and France, and the UK too. (The 1905 Aliens Act in the UK was passed to control Jewish immigration, and anti-Irishism was fairly virulent as well). 

Ferguson did not dismiss Trump's chances of winning when many pundits were scoffing at the idea, and he found the thought frankly terrifying. 

Populism and Identity Politics

I had hopes that it would not have been a 55/45 split in the Scotland's referendum but more of a 35/65 one.  Instead the vote swung from closer towards independence than most had anticipated a year ago and the Scottish National Party has gained thousands of recruits from disappointed Yessers and those on the left who have given up on the Labour Party. They are likely to win most of Scotland's eats in the next general election.

This, along with the rise of UKIP this swing to nationalistic and populist politics should not be surprising in Britain.  It's happening all over the continent, with France's Front National having a good chance of winning the presidency  and the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece and of the Sweden Democrats. This sort of politics with its whiff of the thirties is very alarming.

Kenan Malik's piece here is excellent on the rise of right-wing populism within Europe:- "What are considered populist parties comprise, in fact, very different kinds of organizations, with distinct historical roots, ideological values and networks of social support. Some, such as Golden Dawn, are openly Nazi. Others, such as the Front National are far-right organizations that in recent years have tried to rebrand themselves to become more mainstream. Yet others – UKIP for instance – have reactionary views, play to far-right themes such as race and immigration, but have never been part of the far-right tradition.

What unites this disparate group is that all define themselves through a hostility to the mainstream and to what has come to be regarded as the dominant liberal consensus. Most of the populist parties combine a visceral hatred of immigration with an acerbic loathing of the EU, a virulent nationalism and deeply conservative views on social issues such as gay marriage and women’s rights. The emergence of such groups reveals far more, however, than merely a widespread disdain for the mainstream. It expresses also the redrawing of Europe’s political map, and the creation of a new faultline on that map. The postwar political system, built around the divide between social democratic and conservative parties, is being dismantled. Not only has this created new space for the populists, but it is also transforming the very character of political space. …

The new political faultline in Europe is not between left and right, between social democracy and conservatism, but between those who feel at home in – or at least are willing to accommodate themselves to – the post-ideological, post-political world, and those who feel left out, dispossessed and voiceless. These kinds of divisions have always existed, of course. In the past, however, that sense of dispossession and voicelessness could be expressed politically, particularly through the organizations of the left and of the labour movement. No longer. It is the erosion of such mechanisms that is leading to the remaking of Europe’s political landscape. …

as broader political, cultural and national identities have eroded, and as traditional social networks, institutions of authority and moral codes have weakened, so people’s sense of belonging has become more narrow and parochial, moulded less by the possibilities of a transformative future than by an often mythical past.

The politics of ideology has, in other words, given way to the politics of identity…

we need to establish new social mechanisms through which to link liberal ideas about immigration and individual rights with progressive economic arguments and a belief in the community and the collective.

Those who today rightly bemoan the corrosion of collective movements and community organizations often also see the problem as too much immigration. Those who take a liberal view on immigration, and on other social issues, are often happy with a more individualized, atomized society. Until all three elements of a progressive outlook – a defence of immigration, freedom of movement and of individual rights, a challenge to austerity policies and the embrace of collective action – can be stitched together, and stitched into a social movement, then there will be no proper challenge to the populists."

Read the whole.

Waiting for the Fascists

What a lot there has been about the turning of Tommy Robinson, once leader of the EDL. 

I don't want to make light of the fear the EDL inspired in Asian shopkeepers who were victims of their haphazard campaign against Islamic extremism, but I always thought they were a feeble lot compared to the real horrible Eurofascists like Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece.  Not even Fascists in fact, a bunch of thuggish nationalists with a football hooligan element.

It is to the credit of the UK that (a) it has a history of being very poor at producing full blown Fascist movements and (b) that the stated aims of the EDL were not Fascist but a kind cultural conservatism, of a very British kind, that is, an invented one, like investing the Prince of Wales or Victorian Christmases.  The EDL were of course outraged at the lack of respect and patriotism shown by the poppy-burning Islamists,  but also at their antisemitism, homophobia and sex inequality - and getting upset at the last three is a fairly recent invention - post 70s I'd say.

They were bigged up a good deal by the activist class, who you could see got a real charge at having something that was tangibly fascist-like to confront. I remember when their Scottish equivalent, the SDL, were supposed to march in Edinburgh.  The SWP and other groups turned out.  There was a rally in Princes Street Gardens.  As it happened, the police bundled the 40 or so of them into a pub and sent them off, and the activist websites were buzzing with their overwhelming victory. 

I found myself nodding along with an article in Spike by Patrick Hayes:-

The EDL has been a spent political force for a couple of years. In 2011, when it was at its peak, it could get together several thousand people for its demos; today, it is hard pushed to reach triple digits. In fact, you’ll find fewer EDL supporters than police officers on a typical EDL demo today, the police’s primary role being to keep the EDL away from the ranks of anti-fascist protesters that trail around after the EDL like aggressive groupies. The EDL doesn’t even have any real membership base to speak of, often referring to the number of ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page as evidence of its alleged popularity

. . .

Robinson’s sudden self-rebranding as a moderate has been as much of a shock to anti-fascist protesters as it has been to his loyal ‘soldiers’ in the EDL. Having spent the past couple of years waving banners comparing Robinson to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik – ‘different face, same evil’ – anti-fascist commentators are now absurdly claiming that Robinson’s latest move is part of a fascist conspiracy to gain mainstream acceptance. . .

. . .it seems the people who would be most upset if ‘Nazi’ street groups such as the EDL disappeared are the activists, community workers and professional politicians who make a living or gain a sense of moral purpose from ostentatiously standing against such ‘fascism in our midst’. They wildly talk up the EDL’s threat because without the EDL their own political lives would become meaningless.

Cavafy's famous poem Waiting for the Barbarians, comes to mind.  I have updated for contemporary relevance:-

What are we waiting for, assembled in the streets?
 
            The Fascists are due here today.
 
 Why are we tense and bracing ourselves?
Why is everyone hiding stones and bottles?
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today.
            What else can we do but resist them?
            Once the Fascists are here, then we'll start the struggle.
 
 Why are they there, the newspaper sellers?
Just now, when no-one reads newspapers?
Crying, Smash Capitalism, Smash Fascism!
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today
            and this is a time for them to recruit.
            It's known that when the Fascists come
            You can sign up so many supporters.
 
Why have they come out, those speakers?
Crying Islamophobia and anti-imperialist?
Why do they shout, it's Cable Street again
Why the raised clenched fists, the No Pasarans?
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today
            and things like that frighten the Fascists.
 
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
 
            Because night has fallen and the Fascists have not come.
            They are on Facebook and watching X-Factor,
            they are in the pubs cheering football on Sky.
 
 And now, what’s going to happen to us without the Fascists?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Book display in Aleppo, Syria

I've been on holiday, starting off in Istanbul, then taking the train to the south of Turkey and then buses and train through Syria, ending up in Jordan.  Damascus is a fascinating city and almost everyone I met in Syria was friendly, but this book display in a shop window in Aleppo gave me a start.  The shop was round the corner from my hotel in the commercial district.

 

Terror and Honour

Good piece by Shuggy on terrorism and how the usual view of it is Eurocentric - Jacobin France, Tsarist Russia, Baader-Meinhof. But there is an old tradition of terrorism in the USA:-

In 1870, a federal grand jury designated the Ku Klux Klan as a 'terrorist organisation'. In 1999, the city council of Charleston came to the same conclusion. There are good reason for this. From its foundation in 1865 to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, the KKK were the most prolific terrorist movement in the United States, responsible for numerous acts of intimidation, violence, arson and murder. Prior to 9/11, up to and including the Oklahoma City bombing, practically all acts of terrorism in America had been committed by angry white males. Now, their 'grievances' were, I think, illustrative of the point I'm struggling to make. Defeat in the Civil War, Abolition and later the dismantling of Jim Crow were racist repositories for their rage at a loss of status. The response was typical of extreme reactionary and fascist movements everywhere in that it was near nihilistic towards the present and dreamed of the resurrection of a mythical lost age. What is always characteristic of these imagined histories is that they are places where everyone knows their place.

Honour killings are a local form of terrorism. They attempt to intimidate all women in the group where they occur, keeping other potential victims cowed and fearful. They are less indiscriminate in who they kill, but are the method by which men try to hang on to a past where the patriarch’s word was law and they were little despots to their families and respected by their neighbours for being so. Mehmet Goren, who was found guilty of killing his daughter, was a criminal and gambler but still demanded obedience from the womenfolk, just as a shiftless piece of white trash was outraged at being treated in an uppity way by a black man. As stated here:-

An honour killing uses violence as theatre to intimidate others. It stands to enforce a sexual code of conduct by violence and threats. An honour killing is part of an organized effort to subjugate women to a specific and oppressive view of society. Although the total number of honour killings in Canada is still relatively small, probably less than 50 in total to date, the impact on the community as a whole is huge. When compared to a worldwide figure of perhaps 5,000 honour killing a year the implied threat is heightened. But numbers alone do not tell the story. Even at its height, the number of lynchings in the American South was fairly small (probably less than 100 a year) but the intimidation huge. Southern blacks knew the danger of speaking up for their rights; with honour killings, women can see the risk of behaving outside their place.

Transforming snow

For urban dwellers, in our heated homes and in our warm clothes, the snow is  an adventure.   I stood at the bus-stop a few days ago and watched a snow-plough drive past.  At work people were full of how they had taken two hours to come in, or were on phone saying they couldn’t come in.  We exclaimed at how the landscape was transformed.   After the dramatic heavy falls of snow then came the ice compressed on the pavements, and someone warned me at the top of the Telfer underpass, “Don’t go down there.  It’s an ice rink.”  I did go down there, clinging to the banisters.

Christmas Day it had thawed slightly, and the roads were clear enough for me to cycle through a windless drizzle to my housebound friend’s place, my panniers laden with food.  The left side of the road was piled with slush but there was little traffic, so I could cycle close to the middle of the road without holding up the traffic.  I left my friend’s place at about 8:30 pm and the roads were sparkling with frost and with black ice.  I cycled with extreme care, and what cars I saw were moving slowly, so got back without accidents but someone who had left later than me rang and said that he had walked and had seen one crash on his way home.

Boxing Day it was raining slightly. I went and chipped away the ice on the path to the back door and also on the pavement in front of the house, and it came off in sheets.  In some countries it is the law that you clear the space in front of your house.  It was a grey still afternoon and later I went for a walk to the playing fields, which were covered with broken snow and looked like the surface of the moon.  A fog was rising and the few people out greeted each other as they don’t normally in cities. 

It’s a fine clear icy day today.  There was a slight fall yesterday and the path I cleared has turned into a thin sheet of ice. 

I’m an urban dweller who lives close to my office job in a city with a good public transport system.  The weather doesn’t usually make much difference to me unless I want to go out on a cycle (which looks impossible at the moment).  But now the thought of snow and ice presses around and I get a whiff of what it must be like to be a farmer, shepherd, soldier or sailor, where changes in the weather are a matter of livelihood or even life and death.

The Griffin Encounter:- an airport novel for short haul flights

Chapter 1

  "You’ve done well, Nicky," said Duke, as they sat in the back seat of the bullet proof car. "You’ve pulled that party together. It was a rag-tag mob of criminal gangsters and street fighters before you re-organised it."
  Nick Griffin bent his head. "All learned through you, El Duke." Only David Duke’s closest comrades called him "El Duke".
  "Yeah, well it’s common sense really. We didn’t make much of a head way with the old robes and fiery crosses. We had a lot of fun, mind you, but the time comes when you have to chuck away those swastikas and put on a suit. It’s the public image, always." He looked at his watch. "Faster, Siegfried!" he said to the driver. "We don’t want out English friend to be late for the Movement."
  The Movement! Griffin felt his heart swell. The car had taken a circuitous route, but now drove into a car park under what looked like an unlit building. Following Duke and the bodyguards through reinforced door after reinforced door, Griffin arrived at a huge room which was filled with young men, tattooed and wearing Viking helmets and black T-shirts with the White on White logo. Duke led him through the crowd, up to the podium at one end and introduced him with the words: "the British are coming, Yee ha" and he was standing there above them, an Aryan among Aryans. His voice rang through the room and his audience’s eyes glittered.
  "The British National Party isn't about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too. It’s about selling your ideas. That means using saleable words - freedom, security, identity, democracy.
  "Nobody can criticise you, nobody can attack you on those ideas." Then, as he wanted to present a nobler vision than that of being a salesman, and to offer the heady sniff of power he went on, "Perhaps one day, by being rather more subtle, we'll control the British broadcasting media and then perhaps the British people might change their mind and say every single one must go.
  "But if you hold it out as your sole aim to start with you are going to get nowhere, so instead of talking about racial purity, you talk about identity."
  The room filled with applause, cheers and whooping. He left the podium; they stood up for him, shouting his name.
  "That was great, Nicky," said Duke afterwards, at their final meeting in his office. "Keep up the fight, my Aryan warrior." He clapped him on the back, then grasping his arm with one hand, with the other he shook Griffin’s own hand heartily. When Griffin had gone, smiling modestly, the Duke opened a drawer, pulled out his trusty old bed sheet and wiped the lees of sweat away.

Chapter 2

Yes, Griffin did feel like an Aryan warrior, but he knew he didn’t look like one He longed to be six foot two with blue eyes, not for his own vanity but because then he could lead the Movement and clear Britain of its dark filth. And after Britain, then Europe. But he had come a long way. The party was gaining momentum. They had a few councillors now. He himself had been voted in as an MEP. They were really going places against enormous odds. One day, if Hollywood was taken over by Duke’s kind instead of the liberal Jewish conspiracy, Russell Crowe would play him in a film, as he had played the gladiator Maximus or the Master and Commander. Or maybe Mel Gibson would be a better choice, the heroic Braveheart who had led his people to victory against the foreign invaders. Though they were English. . .  But history had always confused him. 
  Now the sneering ultra left establishment that ran the BBC had asked him to appear on a political programme with four other guests. He would face them on their own ground and defeat them. He would stay calm, measured, a man of the people, not rising to their bait. He had briefed himself on the issues of the day, like that war in Afghanistan and the postal strike. This would be his start of the journey from the beer hall to the Reichstag. It would make a fine opening to the film.
  While they were waiting in the studio for the cameras to roll he mentally cast the other panellists - Jack Straw (Ian Richardson or was he dead now?), Chris Huhne (some actor from The Bill), David Dimbleby (David Dimbleby) Baroness Sayeeda Warsi (Shilpa Shetty) and Bonnie Greer (Whitney Houston). In spite of their racial origins, both Warsi and Greer really were strikingly good looking women. There could be a fine scene in the film where they fought each other for his favours.
  The programme began, and while the mongrel crowd howled and the Jew Straw waffled, he thought Warsi revealed herself to be a stuck up bitch, but Greer, sitting next to him, was speaking to him pleasantly, addressing him as "Nick". Her voice was beautiful and it was undoubtedly flattering that this cultured woman was listening to him with attention. She was getting the measure of him, feeling his worth. He moved a little closer to her. Someone mentioned the Holocaust. That old chestnut! Wouldn’t they ever get over it? He laughed it off. Someone else mentioned David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. He grabbed at some words, "I was trying to make sure some youngsters weren’t led astray," he said, gulping a bit and a momentary vision of the Duke, in full bed sheet, hood and carrying a flaming cross, appeared before his eyes.
  The hour long programme seemed to last forever but finally it ended. He’d been told there was usually a dinner after the show but no-one mentioned it. As he left the BBC building Bill Thugge, his body-guard, stood protectively close, but he was distant in his manner, and the red marks on his face where he had had his eagle and swastika tattoos removed were throbbing and angry looking. His other henchmen were avoiding his eyes.
  "It wasn’t so bad was it?" he said to one of his lieutenants. "That Bonnie Greer was eating out of my hand, talking to me about history." The lieutenant was silent, then growled. "We’ll limit the damage as much as possible. Back to head-quarters to write a few press releases."

Chapter 3

In her elegant flat Bonnie Greer was lying on her Ron Arad sofa listening to Laurie Anderson playing the violin with an edgy passion. The phone buzzed. Checking that the number was one on her approved list of callers, Bonnie answered it, nodding at Laurie, who put down her bow. "It’s Sayeeda here," said Baroness Warsi. "I wanted to see how you are after that ordeal."
  Bonnie’s lovely low pitched voice was an octave higher than usual. "I’ve just had my third shower and thrown out the clothes I was wearing. Eerrgh, errgh. You know he nestled up to me. He was like some creep coming onto you in a pub."
  "I’ve not had that experience," said Sayeeda. "But I literally felt for you, Bonnie. I felt my skin crawl for you. "
  "Errgh, errgh, errgh, euch, euch," said the normally eloquent Bonnie. "He wanted to stay in touch. In touch! Euch, euch."

Chapter 4

"David Duke called you," Griffin’s wife said curtly. She could barely bring out the words and she wouldn’t look at him.
  Griffin’s hands were still shaking but he managed to dial the private number that he was proud of being one of the few to know.
  "Hi there, Nicky," said Duke. "That was a surprise, you know. I invited you in good faith to address the young members of the Movement and you tell 8 million Limeys that it was to stop them from being led astray. I feel a bit hurt. Betrayed even."
  Griffin swallowed. "I didn’t mean it, you know I didn’t. It’s all part of the public face," he said. "I can’t go on the BBC and say that I hang out with the Ku Klux Klan."
  "Oh, I realise that," said Duke. "I was only teasing you. But you did screw up badly there, Nicky. What you said about me was a lie that anyone could have seen through, even the great British public morons. Don’t tell dumb lies like that. You should have stood with your head high. When they got on to that Holocaust crap you should have denounced the fact that thousands are held in European jails for talking about history. And why did you crawl to that black mammy who should be scrubbing your doorstep?" He went on for another quarter of an hour but at the end he said in a more kindly tone, "Come on. Nicky. There are young lions in our Movement. They want to hear you roar! Keep on with it, fellow warrior." He ended the call.
  "He wasn’t pleased?" said his wife, coldly.
  "It could have been worse."
  "How?" said his wife. "If you had done a dance? It isn’t Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson who would play you in a film, it’s Ricky Gervais. The David Brent bloke. Because that’s what you looked like."
  Griffin sighed, made up his milky Ovaltine, went to his bedroom and picked up Mein Kampf, which lay at his bedside. It had been a tough day. After a while he began to think of that chocolate voiced honey trap. She had come on to him, she had been deliberately trying to get him worked up with her hot, sexy, African ways. If it hadn’t been for her he would have parried the questions, Straw would have blown away, he would have impressed that Warsi woman and won over the folks at home. But she, the sultry bitch, she had screwed it for him. Adolf would never have agreed to appear on a platform with a black woman. He had let Adolf down.
  He could hear his wife going to bed in the room next door. He must try and sleep. After putting on his black pyjamas with the death head pattern, he pulled back the duvet. There, lying on the fitted sheet, was a goat’s head. He gasped but did not scream. This happened about four times a year. Lee John Barnes, the party intellectual and legal adviser had broken in again after a sacrifice to Odin. He would be in a foul mood tomorrow, spilling his guts to the media, ranting to all and sundry. If only he could be got rid of. But Barnes had the footage of Griffin in a compromising position with ...

The Media and the Message

I was off sick for three days this week, and so lay around listening to Radio 4.  On every news item the BNP’s appearance on Question Time was the lead item or one or two down.  It's been driving me barmy.  How X at the BBC responded to Y criticising the decision to put them on.   Y would then be interviewed.  On the next news broadcast the news item would sound, “Speaking on the Today programme, Y said that the decision to” . . . and so on.  The news became one of those closed cycle systems where shit - compost - food - shit.    Also, to add to the surreality, people get the two acronyms BBC and BNP mixed up, so you’d hear some BBC spokesman saying, "It's not remiss of the BBC to have the BBC on Question Time.  The BBC won a certain amount of the vote at the European elections.".  The Beeb and my part of blogosphere have gone on about nothing else.

It's like a royal wedding.   Speculations about The Other People on the Panel.  Groans at the make up of the Panel.   Interview with Griffin's make up girl (her retching).   Comments from Gok Wan about the cut of Griffin's suit. Body language experts saying that Griffin is relaxed/uneasy/lying (‘cos you saw his lips moving).  Columnists murmuring, It was a grey day at the end of an Indian summer and the protesters were falling like leaves.  I was back at work today.  We get the latest feeds from the BBC news and every third item has been about the BNP, Nick Griffin and the BBC

Manipulated by the media?  I can feel its oil covered hands massaging every bloody muscle in my brain and a puppet master jerking at my eyes so I end up focussing all three on Question Time, which is something I have never watched for more than 10 minutes in my life before.  It pisses me off like mad that I’ve got sucked into it as well.

I've also been listening to Clive James's latest instalment of his autobiography, The Blaze of Obscurity, which tells of his time as an interviewer.  He said,  "Television gives a general impression.  Nobody ever remembers what you said, but everybody remembers how you came over."  So only the anoraks will be listening for inconsistencies and impossible policies in Griffin's answers.  The rest will have their minds made up or else may just notice that as well as being a fascist he is also a horrible guy.  

.

Subtle and Subversive

I was listening to Kenan Malik on the BBC's Analysis discussing liberal responses to the BNP. What caught my attention especially was Chris Keates, General Secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (about 6 minutes in and transcript here.)

Malik:- Chris Keates however wants to extend the idea of no platform to deny the BNP not just airtime but also access to much of the public sector.

Keates:- We have been pursuing changes to the teachers' contract which would prohibit members of the BNP actually working as teachers. In fact we would like to see contractual change right across public service to prevent the BNP working in public services

Malik:- Suppose you have a teacher whose work is exemplary. who has taught white children, minority children without complaint then you find that he or she is a member of the BNP? Should they be sacked?

Keates:- Racism can be covert and silent, and teachers are in an extremely powerful position so we might say that that teacher has done everything expected of them within a code of conduct expected of teachers, but that teacher as a member of the BNP, they could quite easily in a way that is extremely difficult to detect find themselves privileging one group of pupils, giving more attention to particular groups and it can be subtle and it can be subversive.

Malik: What you are really saying is that you want to ban them not for something they might have done but for something they might believe In other words it's not their actions you want to ban them for but their thoughts.

Covert, silent, subtle, subversive and difficult to detect. The insidious politicising and professional misconduct you never actually catch in the act and for which you can find no evidence but that must exist, somehow, given someone's beliefs. This sounded familiar so I did a google search with the words "McCarthyism, teachers, subtle, subversive" and found this:-

When speaking around the country in 1949 and 1950, Truman's Attorney General, J. Howard McGrath, sought to arouse the public to recognize the all-pervasive menace of Communism. He urged those who believed "in God's law and the dignity of human personality" to take up the "modern struggle against pagan Communist philosophies that seek to enslave mankind." Warning against the subtle subversion of students' minds by their teachers, he emphasized the need to invite anti-Communist speakers onto the college campuses and to ensure that anti-Communist books were promoted in local bookstores.

So I suppose we can expect loyalty oaths and declarations of party affiliations for teachers as pre-requisites before they're allowed to enter classrooms, as well as constant surveillance of their subtle, subversive, covert, silent and difficult to detect racist behaviour towards pupils. Doesn't Chris Keates realise how creepy she sounds, like a cross between HUAC and Stasi. And doesn’t she realise how this principle could be extended eg how Catholic teachers might be a little chilly towards the invincibly ignorant Protestant pupils, Muslim teachers convey the faintest hint that schoolkids outside of the Faith are like cattle, and atheist teachers roll their eyes ever so slightly at students with a religious bent.

Dave Osler has a piece over here about the practical difficulties of banning BNP members from teaching:-

. . any ban based on organisational affiliation would be almost impossible effectively to police. Who decides which parties and factions are blacklisted? Fringe political groupings come and go, and cliques of Hitler worshippers form and disband with clockwork regularity.

How will the rules deal with a fascist teacher who isn't in the BNP and signs up with some newly-formed whackjob six member neo-Nazi outfit that nobody has ever heard of instead? What about cases where people sidestep the regulations by not taking out a party card, but otherwise think and act just as a BNP member would?

. . .

In short, discipline racist teachers for racist words or deeds; disciplining them for their politics alone would be a serious mistake.

I agree, but Chris Keates seems to be a natural authoritarian, like Gordon Brown, who I remember once wanted to "root hatred from people's hearts" and thought it could be done by legislation. We are to be pure in thought as well as word and deed. 

Netting the Fringe

The last File on Four dealt with the rise of the violent far right, with emphasis on the English Defence League.  Listen to it here.

The English Defence League tried to push an “anti-Islamic extremist” schtick which soon enough revealed itself to be old-fashioned xenophobia.  Salma Yaqoob was interviewed and said that she would rather Muslims did not rise to the provocation, since street punch ups are, in fact, what the EDL are looking for.  This debate on confrontation v ignore it and hope it will go away will no doubt continue.

What I found interesting was the role of the internet in right wing fringe, and by extension, any fringe politics.

For the authorities it means flash demonstrations, which are difficult to police:-

“The whole new dynamic here is the internet.  All the communication and discussion goes on across the internet.  At the last minute people can come together and form up and do whatever they choose really anywhere.”

That from the West Midlands Assistant Chief Constable Sharon Rowe who argued that the laws on public order need updating.   She’s looking for more powers of course, to ban the EDL from protesting and also to ban the counter protesters.

(According to today’s Sunday Herald the Strathclyde Police are going to ban the newly formed Scottish Defence League from demonstrating in Glasgow.)

For the far right the internet brings together and politicises the disaffected who would once have moaned quietly in twos or threes in pubs.

Allan Urry (the presenter):-  “The web is a big factor in how those on the right organise and speak with each other, validating their viewpoint.  And it’s not just the EDL.”

Edmund Standing, the author of The BNP and the Online Fascist Network, was interviewed:-

“The internet has opened this stuff up to a wider audience.  Anyone can get hold of this stuff and you don’t even have to join a wider group.   You don’t have to know a single person.  All you have to do is go on there and the ideological and intellectual justification for carrying out attacks, terrorist attacks, racist violence. . We don’t live in a society where people would tolerate people openly walking round the streets and tolerating Nazi ideas, race war and that kind of thing, so the Internet is re-invigorating it cos it’s easier getting it out to a wider audience, making it easier to connect to each other in a way that you couldn’t do in the past. . . ”  

Edmund Standing went on to talk about how websites with recommendations for violence create an atmosphere encouraging the lone wolf would-be terrorist, which he thinks more dangerous than organised groups as they are harder to trace.   Neil Lewington (possession of explosives) and Martin Gilleard (four home-made nail bombs)  were both caught by chance.

The beauty of the internet is that it puts the like-minded in touch with each other, even though they may live in different cities or different countries. But the like-minded includes racist nutters, and racist nutters united are stronger than racist nutters alone.  Racist nutter speaks unto racist nutter in cyberspace, then meet in the real world for a little aggro, or a solitary racist nutter has fantasies of himself as a hero cheered by websiters if he leaves a home-made explosive by a mosque.

Another feature of the internet is that as in places of recreation for wearers of gimp masks with safe words you can disguise your identity and get up to things you would rather other people didn’t know about.  There is a fair amount of social stigma for Kevin Smith being seen to leave a Fascist meeting. On the web you can call yourself Akitsaws or Battle88 if you like, and bang slogans and diatribes from your keyboard.  You can even get something of the excitement of being in a whipped up crowd as you hammer your keys, as is evident on many blog threads.  In the 1930s the far right were famed for their quasi-military style marching and mass meetings where hecklers were chucked out with kickings and beatings.   That sort of mass meeting has been replaced by the vituperative comments thread with abuse and counter-abuse, shared bigotry and violent fantasies.

Disseminating propaganda (yours) and information (mine) has become much cheaper. Statements like this one from the introduction of Steve Cohen’s book  (1984) That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic will soon sound archaic:-

Even in draft form, the book has been attacked by individuals on the Left and the Right. However, what has made it possible and worthwhile has been the tremendous encouragement from so many different people (many of whom I have never met). Not least are those who have donated the entire cost of the production. . . .

That’s Funny is pamphlet size and prints out comfortably as a PDF.  It was as a PDF that I read Edmund Standing’s The BNP and the Online Fascist Network.  Costs of production and distribution hardly come into it now every person is their own publisher.  (I would recommend Standing’s report if only to read the selected ravings of Lee John Barnes, who is given to obscene violent fantasies, sub-sub-sub Neitzschean abuse of Christianity and soft humankind in general mixed up with an Odin-worshipping paganism.  Barnes is also a legal adviser to and occasional spokesman for the BNP.  Having such an embarrassing loon in a position of power would be destructive to any mainstream party, but this all seems to be water off a duck’s back as far as the BNP crowd are concerned.)

So the internet has opened up debate to a far-flung audience and made disseminating information easier.   But its anonymous nature presents difficulties, eg gauging how much of what is expressed on blogs is fantasy, wind up merchants, mischief makers, trolls, or infiltrators. In Canada the Human Rights Commission used to send out pseudo-Nazi provocateurs to see what they could elicit on Nazi hate sites by being more Nazi in their comments than the Nazis. Counter far right activity could include infiltrating their sites and spreading a few scurrilous rumours around, with some misdirection thrown in.  If nothing else, it would piss them off. 

Another aspect of anonymity is how to turn diatribes on threads in cyberspace to action in the real world, which includes keeping pressure on backsliders. BootFoot and HeadSkin swear to smite the foreigners then are no shows. An EDLeaguer who was one of the few who turned up to the 11th September Harrow protest complained (comment 155):-

“we had an almost non-existant turn out on sunday from the EDL, many of us were left with our dicks swinging in the breeze. Thanks to everybody who couldn’t be bothered to get out their pits and shout for the cause. i’m begining to think this is just an armchair warrior organisation. If you can’t be bothered to turn out to help us, go and join Granny Murrys kniting forum. With so few of us on sunday it was dangerous. Once again, Thanks.”
 

How the blog and the password-for-initiants forum will affect politics is still in the early stages, but as a start authoritarian governments try to control the internet and arrest bloggers as they have always seized printing presses and arrested writers.  Advances in communications technology affect the dynamics of politics as advances in weapons technology affect the dynamics of war.  The invention of printing, the growth in literacy, cheap pamphlets, photographs from the frontline of the American Civil War, the radio, the televised beatings of Civil Rights protesters and the napalm in Vietnam - all of them affected the politics of their times.