Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:30 pm
Solidarity with the social centre Dordoni in Cremona which has been attacked by 50 fascists from CasaPound, leaving a comrade named Emilio in a coma with a severe brain hemorrhage. Here’s hoping that the cowards who did this get what’s coming to them sooner rather than later.
solidarity with antifa in Cremona and everywhere
by jakell » Mon Jan 19, 2015 6:27 am
Searcher08 » Fri Jan 16, 2015 4:52 pm wrote:jakell » Tue Jan 13, 2015 10:58 am wrote:Joe Hillshoist » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:52 am wrote:“Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis.” It is not revolutionary in the socialist or anarchist sense: “Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself… in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule.”
When those guys (Sakai and Hamerquist) talk about fascism and its power to generate mass support I also think it has to do with loss of economic power and status. They unhappy masses want what they lost as opposed to what they never had - its a different motivation to an uprising by the oppressed people of the world. Usually its economic security and some sort of status - i don't think losing one or the other isn't enough on its own.
Its the opposite of an oppressed uprising. Its an uprising by people who are facing a leveling of the playing field in some way. Often that leveling of the playing field costs them jobs and living standards but not the upper middle classes and ruling classes. It isn't really a leveling of the playing field, just lower economic standards to the lowest common denominator - driving down wages doesn't ever cost the bosses. They do use these movements tho, cos there's something essentially conservative about them, I guess its got to do with holding onto wealth and power.
Ultimately it means the grass roots fascists aren't resentful of the people rorting them - the boss class - they're resentful of "the other" people usurping their place in a hierarchy they essentially support. That is what i reckon anyway. What these guys describe is happening in Australia right now. The potential for a fascist mass movement is there... er here.
A slight nuance here, which can be levered up into something quite powerful... they are opposed to the loss of something they think they have lost (it's worth keeping Kubler Ross in mind). These this can actually be more significant because if a sense of loss is connected to something intangible, the stuff of myth and self-image, then it is less likely to be deflated by a reality check at some point.
I've been watching the far right in the UK for some time now, something more instructive than waving one's hands at some supposed international situation, and that sense of 'things lost', even though often based upon a shred of reality, is often inflated quite massively. These are based upon nationalist sentiments and are strong in themselves, when based upon racial identity the claims are even harder to counter.
I think this is a very interesting point and much more on the money than "Guides By Idiots".
This type of thinking was very evident in the bollocks 'romantic nationalist dreams' of the Ireland of deValera, where he articulated a vision of a country happily second to the Holy Church and ruled locally by the Parish Priest, one which was primarily agricultural, where women were baby factories and meal makers who endured an occasional slap... he saw that as a thing that had been lost and his whole political movement was about recovering it.
I think that it is resonated by factors such as the localisation of immigration. The actual impact of immigration on the whole of the UK is relatively minor when looked at as a whole, however the impact seems to be dramatically concentrated in particular, often very poor areas, which already have problems. For example concentrating Roma populations into specific already run-down areas of Sheffield, with no coherent integration strategy has resulted in devastating effects in those particular places - the locals get very upset and emotional contagion of their state results in a much wider antipathy towards new arrivals, interestingly - especially when there is a marked difference in those peoples treatment of women - so for example the arrival of Polish people in Northern Ireland seemed to cause a very noticeable positive input.
by American Dream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 9:47 am
by American Dream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 9:55 am
Racialization, Difference And The Politics Of Working-Class Formation
by Geoff Eley
Though too broad as an historical category, ‘racialization’ is nevertheless very effective when applied to the contemporary period.
First published: 19 January, 2015
Satnam Virdee’s essay and associated book, Race, Class, and the Racialized Outsider, offer salutary reflections on the salience of racialized differences in shaping working-class formation since the late eighteenth century. With Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class as a benchmark, Virdee wishes to explore ‘how inserting the presence of the minority worker into the history of the working class in England transforms our traditional understandings’ of this period.[1] The histories of the ‘social and political struggles’ that helped ‘secure economic and social justice and democratize English society’ during that period will look profoundly different, he argues, if we approach them searchingly ‘through the prism of race.’
The force and ramifications of this argument – whether in terms of historiography or contemporary political and social discourse – cannot be denied. But at the same time, there are difficulties. Tilting against the more familiar origin story of the Empire Windrush, Virdee rightly invokes the far longer history of the English working class as precisely ‘a multi-ethnic formation’:Former enslaved peoples of African-American and Caribbean descent, Irish Catholic labourers, African and Asian lascars, ayahs, servants and seafarers, along with Jewish migrants escaping the racist pogroms within the Tsarist Empire, all made their home in Britain at different moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and sometimes earlier.’
However, this conflates differences borne by diverse populations and social categories across a variety of contrasting conjunctures, merging them beneath a single explanatory rubric: that of racialization, as Virdee understands it. The consequences of such heterogeneity for an argument about class formation – about the forms of collective solidarity that operate at the level of local or national governance and political action, let us say – varied drastically across the two centuries concerned. It mattered not only how stable and reproducible class identities may have been at the level of the whole society and polity, but also how the complex social histories of class formation worked themselves out in particular places and at any one time (demographically, occupationally, residentially, culturally, institutionally, attitudinally, politically). If we know anything from the wealth of social historical scholarship of the past several decades, surely it is the importance of building our arguments about working-class political agency around complex narratives that recognise the necessary distance between the ordinary outlook of workers on the ground and what becomes institutionalised into political organisations like the Labour Party, national institutions and traditions, or some type of generalised patriotism per se. Whether at the local level of practical class belonging and collective self-identification (in neighborhoods, workplaces, communities, places of everydayness, containers of sociability of all kinds) or at the level of organised parties, unions, movements and campaigns – in other words whether from ‘above’ or from ‘below’ – we may then ask how far and in what forms specifically racial differences became operative and whether they impeded, enabled, or otherwise shaped the actually realised manifestations of working-class collectivity.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 10:50 am
Islamophobia Allowed, Anti-semitism Not – Charlie Hebdo’s Double Standards
Wednesday 14 January 2015
BY DAVID ICKE
‘In 2009 a left-wing cartoonist was fired and charged with ‘anti-semitism’ for suggesting that Jean Sarkozy, son of the French president, was converting to Judaism for financial reasons.
The writer, Maurice Sinet (pen name ‘Sine‘), faced criminal charges of “inciting racial hatred” for the column he wrote in the magazine. He was dismissed from Charlie Hebdo due to the controversy his article sparked.
This incident highlights the hypocrisy at work at Charlie Hebdo in the way they react to what is perceived as ‘anti-semitism’ but allow and encourage ‘Islamophobia’.’
by coffin_dodger » Mon Jan 19, 2015 11:41 am
PM on Pope comments: 'There is a right to cause offence' BBC News 19 Jan 2014
Prime Minister David Cameron has disagreed with a comment made by Pope Francis, who warned against mocking others' religions.
Following the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the Pope made his point by saying someone who insulted his mother could "expect to get punched".
But Mr Cameron, speaking to CBS News, said the media had the right to publish material that was offensive to some.
cont - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30869585
UK must do more to 'wipe out' anti-Semitism- May Jan 19 2014
The UK must redouble its efforts to "wipe out anti-Semitism", Home Secretary Theresa May has said.
Mrs May said she "never thought I'd see the day when members of the Jewish community" would be "fearful" of staying in the UK.
She was speaking at a service in London to remember those killed in the terror attacks in France this month, including four people in a kosher supermarket.
Police say there is "heightened concern" about risks to Jewish people.
cont - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30870537
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 11:44 am
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 3:16 pm
JANUARY 19, 2015
Europe's Coming Battle
An Islamophobia of Convenience
by JOHN FEFFER
In the first Crusade, on their way to fight the Muslim infidels in Jerusalem, the armed pilgrims asked themselves a provocative question: Why should we trek so far to kill people we barely know when we can just as well massacre infidels closer to home?
And thus the crusaders of the 11th century embarked on some of Europe’s first pogroms against Jews. These anti-Semitic rampages in the heart of the continent had the added advantage of helping to finance that first Crusade, as the pilgrims expropriated the wealth of the Jews they killed.
Europe is once again witnessing the collateral damage of conflicts in the Middle East. Extremists who are involved in a modern-day crusade in the Middle East — or have been thwarted from making the journey to Iraq or Syria — have asked themselves a question very similar to that of their 11th-century counterparts: Why not kill the infidel at hand rather than the infidel afar?
The question — and the answer as it played out last week in the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris — is as ugly today as it was more than 900 years ago.
In both cases, the crusaders believed that their actions were of world-historical importance. In the 11th century, it was Pope Urban II who issued the call to arms that turned sedentary Christians into global marauders. Today, it is the Islamic State and al-Qaeda who are calling for their followers to slay the ungodly.
But as with those initial pogroms — not to mention the 2011 massacre by Anders Breivik in Norway or the serial murders of ethnic Turks in Germany by neo-Nazis between 2000 and 2007 — the recent atrocities in France are nothing but criminal acts.
This is not, in other words, a showdown between the forces of Enlightenment and the forces of barbarism. I have nothing but sorrow for the victims and nothing but rage at the perpetrators. But we must resist the temptation to confer the status of combatant on the murderers or the status of defenders of civilization on Charlie Hebdo.
The Real Battle
If these murders do not constitute a war, they nonetheless point to a deep conflict inside Europe. This conflict is not over whose religion is the one true religion. It is about the very identity of Europe.
In the 11th century, what animated the crusaders was not just the status of Jerusalem but the fear that Islam was lapping at the shores of Europe itself (and indeed, Islam already had a firm foothold on the Iberian peninsula). Today, a similar fear animates the Islamophobes and immigrant-bashers of the continent.
They fear that their old-fashioned vision of an overwhelmingly white, Christian Europe — with reassuring borders that define who is French and who is German and who doesn’t belong in the cozy culture of “Western civilization” — is fast disappearing. They disapprove as much of the border-erasing trajectory of European integration as of the demographic transformations of European immigration. They desperately stick their fingers in the civilizational dike to preserve the Christian heritage of the continent.
But the Europe of their imaginations, to the limited extent that it ever existed in reality, has already passed into history.
Immigration to Europe is nothing new, of course. Particularly after World War II, colonial connections diversified the continent as Indonesians came to Holland, Algerians to France, and Trinidadians to the UK. During the labor shortages of the 1960s and 1970s, guest workers from the Balkans, Turkey, and North Africa poured into countries like Germany and Switzerland, which had little or no colonial connections, to supply surplus labor. Many guest workers returned home, but some stayed to raise families and create multiculturalism avant la lettre.
Those changes prompted the first wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. In 1968, Enoch Powell gave his infamous “rivers of blood” speech to his fellow British Conservatives in which he predicted future violence because of the influx of Commonwealth immigrants. The National Front began mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiment in France as early as 1970. The similarly xenophobic Republican Party in Germany started up in 1983.
Although Powell’s “rivers of blood” did not come to pass, the anti-immigrant strain in European politics has only grown more virulent. And Europe has continued to change. The wars of the post-Cold War era — in Bosnia, Kosovo, across North Africa, and in the Middle East — brought in refugees and migrants, and the attractions of a unified Europe drew people from all over the world.
The demographic shifts in Europe over the last decade have been dramatic.
Between 2005 and 2013, according to UN population surveys, the immigrant population in Switzerland jumped from 22.9 to 28.9 percent, in Spain from 10.7 to 13.8 percent, in Italy from 4.2 to 9.8 percent, in Sweden from 12.3 to 15.9 percent, in Denmark from 7.2 to 9.9 percent, in Finland from 2.9 to 5.4 percent, and in the UK from 8.9 to 12.4 percent.
Such rapid increases in a short period of time have created anxiety in populations that do not consider their countries to be “immigrant societies” like the United States or Australia.
An Islamophobia of Convenience
In the German heartland, the organization Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (Pegida) has proven to be both enormously popular and an embarrassment to top German politicians.
This week, Pegida organizers went ahead with a rally in Dresden in the wake of the French killings and attracted 25,000 people despite calls by German Premier Angela Merkel and other leading political figures for people to stay home. Although a counter-demonstration in Dresden attracted 35,000 people, Pegida is on a roll, with more rallies planned in other German cities and even in other countries.
The leaders of Pegida grew up in East Germany, and their Monday marches recall the Monday demonstrations that took place in Leipzig in 1989. Some of Pegida’s rhetoric mirrors the chants of the East Germany democracy movement — such as “We are the People” — but with a more sinister slant.
Not surprisingly, given its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim message, the group has attracted a hard core of extremists associated with football clubs and motorcycle gangs. But make no mistake: anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment is very popular even among the so-called respectable elements in Germany.
Thilo Sarrazin was a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party when he published Germany Abolishing Itself, which described immigration as the weapon by which the country was committing suicide. The screed became a bestseller, and it was not because racist skinheads suddenly became avid book-buyers. In a German poll last month, half of the respondents declared their sympathy with Pegida and its anti-Muslim agenda.
In England, meanwhile, anti-immigrant fervor has catapulted the UK Independence Party into third place in the polls. In the wake of the tragedies in France, UKIP leader Nigel Farage spoke of a “fifth column” inside European countries “holding our passports, who hate us,” a sentiment that led to an uptick in his popularity. (Of course, Farage is an equal-opportunity bigot. In the spring, after new labor regulations went into force that allowed Romanians the right to work anywhere in the EU, he said, “Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.”)
But the organization best positioned to leverage the Islamophobia welling up in Europe is France’s National Front. Before the recent killings, Marine Le Pen was already leading early polling for the 2017 presidential contest, and her party was on top of the polls for local elections in March. Le Pen has called for a reinstatement of both border controls and the death penalty, which would put France at odds with the rest of Europe. She is the face of the new extremism: sufficiently liberal in some respects (divorced, pro-choice) to reach out to the mainstream but just as aggressively intolerant as her predecessors to appeal to the base.
The Islamophobia of these far-right movements is largely incidental. They traffic in anti-Islamic sentiment because it is both popular and more palatable than, say, racism or run-of-the-mill xenophobia. Charlie Hebdo, after all, wasn’t running cartoons that made fun of black people or Roma. But it’s open season, intolerance-wise, on Muslims. This Islamophobia, however, is the tip of the spear. The real thrust of the far right is to keep out immigrants of all stripes.
Preventing the Rivers of Blood
The first Crusade “liberated” Jerusalem in 1099 in a great outpouring of blood as the crusaders slaughtered Muslims and Jews alike in the great city.
It was but the first of a half-dozen crusades that raged across Europe and across the next couple centuries. The victims of later Crusades included pagans, Orthodox Christians, Albigensian heretics, and even, during the fourth Crusade, the Catholic population of Zara in present-day Croatia. The cycle of violence initiated by Pope Urban II’s call to religious arms claimed victims of all faiths and backgrounds, and produced a good deal of European-on-European violence as well.
Extremists on all sides would love to see the return of the Crusades. The Islamic State and al-Qaeda would like to see rivers of blood in the streets of Europe. And the far right understands that an all-out war with a committed enemy is one path to political power. Once in charge, they will recreate their own 9/11 moment in order to reverse European integration, build up a huge fence around Europe, and begin deportations.
Forget the false frame of the West versus Islam. It’s not historically or conceptually accurate, and the two are basically on the same side against the crimes of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The real battle is over the soul of Europe. And the far right is rallying like it’s 1099.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 19, 2015 6:05 pm
Netanyahu and Europe’s far right find common ground
Jonathan Cook
January 18, 2015 Updated: January 18, 2015 06:21 PM
Israel has been having its own internal debate about the significance of the Paris killings this month, with concerns quite separate from those being expressed in Europe.
While Europeans are mired in debates about free speech and the role of Islam in secular societies, Israelis generally – and their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular – view the attacks as confirming Israel’s place as the only safe haven for Jews around the world.
The 17 deaths in Paris have reinforced Israeli suspicions that Europe, with its rapidly growing Muslim population, is being dragged into a clash of civilisations that it is ill-equipped to combat. More specifically, the targeting of a kosher supermarket that killed four Jews has heightened a belief that Jews outside Israel are in mortal danger.
If surveys are to be believed, such anxieties are shared in Europe’s Jewish communities. One published last week found that 56 per cent of British Jews think anti-semitism in Britain now is comparable to the 1930s.
As one calmer Israeli analyst pointed out, the findings suggested “a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria”.
Such fears have been stoked by images like the one posted on Facebook last week by the Israeli embassy in Dublin, showing the Mona Lisa wearing a hijab and carrying a large rocket. The line underneath read: “Israel is the last frontier of the free world.”
In similar vein, the Arab affairs correspondent on Israel’s Channel 10 broadcast a fear-mongering “investigation” from London supposedly proving that the city was overrun with jihadis.
The hysteria is echoed by Israeli politicians, not least Mr Netanyahu. Since the Paris attacks, he has repeated warnings of a “poisonous” Islam conquering the West – ignoring the reality that Europe, including France, is far safer for Jews than Israel has proved.
Politicians on both the left and right have parroted his message that European Jews know “in their hearts that they have only one country”. Israel apparently persuaded the families of the four Jewish victims of that: they were flown to Israel to be buried in Jerusalem.
In contrast, the burial in Paris of Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim policeman also killed by the gunmen, sent a message of French unity, noted a French Jewish leader. This was the moment, he added, for his community to say: “We will be buried here, just like everyone else. We are French and we have not given up.”
Mr Netanyahu has other ideas. At a time when the number of Jewish migrants from France is already rocketing, he has established a ministerial committee to find ways to induce yet more to come to Israel.
It was widely reported in Israel that the French president, Francois Hollande, had appealed to Mr Netanyahu not to participate in the solidarity rally in Paris a week ago, fearful that he would use the occasion to exacerbate tensions in France. Mr Netanyahu ignored the request.
He had good reason to want to be there, not least to grandstand with world leaders during Israel’s election campaign. In addition, proselytising for his claim that the so-called Judeo-Christian West is on a collision course with Islam usefully places him on the side of the angels as he tries to build a Greater Israel, crushing Palestinian ambitions for statehood.
But it would be wrong to view Mr Netanyahu’s argument as solely opportunistic. It is underpinned by an authentic worldview, even if one with paradoxical antecedents.
His approach is embodied in recent efforts – delayed because of the election – to pass a basic law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. That would crown Mr Netanyahu leader of Jews worldwide rather than of Israeli citizens, a fifth of whom are Palestinian.
Such a conception of citizenship and nationhood is based on ethnicity, not territory. It opposes multiculturalism, believing instead that loyalty to the state derives from a tribal attachment rather than a civic one. It stands in stark opposition to most European countries’ notions of citizenship.
As a result, the Israeli leadership assumes that all Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens, cannot be trusted and that there can never be real peace in the region. That is why Israel has been building iron walls everywhere to create a fortress Jewish state.
But the logical corollary is that Jews too cannot be loyal to the other states they live in, such as France. In Mr Netanyahu’s conception, a Jew’s primary bond should be to their “true home”: the Jewish state of Israel.
Paradoxically, that view is shared by Europe’s far-right, including groups like France’s National Front, whose popularity has been growing on the back of attacks like the one in Paris. They argue that minorities are inherently suspect and that Europe is better off without them.
In this regard, Mr Netanyahu and the far-right share much common ground. He wants a Europe free of Jews – as well as Muslims who undermine Europe’s support for Israel – because he thinks that is in Jewish interests. The far-right wants the same because it believes it will be in the interests of a supposed “native” white majority.
One Israeli commentator noted pointedly that Israeli politicians like Mr Netanyahu were helping to “finish the job started by the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators: making France Judenrein”.
In calling for Jews to flee after the Paris attacks, Mr Netanyahu is bolstering the dangerous arguments of Europe’s far-right.
Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist based in Nazareth
by American Dream » Tue Jan 20, 2015 12:14 pm
Britain Pushes Rightwards
by Josh White on Jul 9, 2014In 2011, a group of activists splintered from the BNP amidst the infighting which had erupted under Nick Griffin. They soon registered a new party. First it was called the National People’s Party, but it was to be renamed Britain First. Not immediately pursuant of electoral gains, Britain First contented itself as a street pressure group.
Much like the English Defence League, the organization seemed to be opting for the favourite strategy of the far right, what we might call, ‘march and grow’. In the same way that the BNP and the EDL have jumped on the chance to take advantage of rising anti-Muslim sentiment – normalised, supported, disseminated by the media – Britain First sets itself as an opponent of Islamism. Even anti-Jewish hatred has taken a back seat, as Islamophobia has become increasingly acceptable in British society.
The Britain Firsters have been successful in spreading themselves across social media, particularly on Facebook, and have garnered the attention of the press. The inroads Britain First has made into social networking has amassed hundreds of thousands of ‘likes’, giving the group access to the newsfeeds across the country. It’s all been accomplished by common-sense appeals around such issues as animal rights and paedophilia. Thousands of people share and like their posts without looking into their agenda. Images of emaciated dogs prompt the sympathy of like-minded people. The memes draw people in only to open them to the tropes of nationalist populism. The focus is on Muslims, who are accused of trying to take-over the country, through Sharia courts, grooming ‘our’ children, introducing halal meat, preaching terrorism.
Like much of the far right these days, the Firsters imagine a Left-Islamist alliance flodding the UK with immigrants and promoteing multiculturalism to undermine the nation-state and its cultural stock. Culture here stands in the place of race. The group asserts a brand of British nationalism blended with Christian conservatism to shift the emphasis away from race but to culture and national sovereignty. The primary target is now the British Muslim community, who they subject to ‘Christian patrols’ in reaction to the so-called ‘Muslim patrols’ in Tower Hamlets. The Firsters have been known to force their way into mosques, filming the place, not taking off their shoes, asking people to become Christians. It amounts to an organised campaign of harassment and intimidation.
Points of Convergence
At the helm we find a double-act Paul Golding and Jim Dowson. Golding leads the Christian patrols, which consists of a campaign of intimidation against the Asian British community. He was a BNP councillor from 2009 to 2011 and left amidst the infighting around Nick Griffin. Dowson is a much more mercurial figure. He ran the BNP call centre in Northern Ireland and pumped £4 million into the Party’s coffers to provide fuel for a public relations campaign. As he was in the Six Counties, Dowson found natural allies in the Ulster Loyalist movement, and has been organising Union flag protests. Before all of this, the Scottish friend of British nationalism was a Calvinist minister and a pro-life campaigner, with ties to the American Religious Right.
Extremists on trial. Court 8, London. February 2006.
Never a member of the BNP, Dowson now says he would prefer to see UKIP go from strength to strength. He has been explicit that the aim of providing support to the BNP was to “push everyone over to the right” and that has resulted in the “success” of UKIP. As Britain First put up candidates for the EU elections of 2014, the group recommended to its supporters to vote for UKIP, or the English Democrats, in areas where they could not put up a candidate. The only other recommendation was to not vote British National Party. Dowson has said that he foresees a Holy War, and that he agrees with Islamists who call it jihad. He only stipulates that it’s really a crusade.
It’s not the first time that the British far right has moved to appropriate religious sensibilities. It’s not surprising, as fascism is a ‘scavenger ideology’, to quote Robert Paxton, which constitutes itself by plucking up whatever may propel it forward. After the National Front was humiliated at the ballot box in 1979, its members moved on to experiment with a kind of fascist Christian mysticism. This was led by Derek Holland, a devout Catholic, who declared himself a ‘political soldier’, advocating an austere and disciplined life committed to the purity of nationalist ideals. The drift into esotericism was no doubt furthered by the infighting which ultimately led to the Front splitting up.
The ‘crusade’ Dowson envisions has international dimensions. The Christian infused nationalism has obvious allies in those parts of the world where religion still plays a serious role as an identity-marker in political conflicts. On the Britain First Facebook page, you can find pictures which demonise Bosnian Muslims, while others celebrate the Lebanese Phalange. No doubt this is to align Britain First with Serbian ultra-nationalists and a Maronite Christian organisation founded out of admiration for Adolf Hitler. This is just what you can find out if you canvas their Facebook page with scrutiny in one’s eyes. As we have already seen this wouldn’t be the first time that the far right has forged unexpected alliances.
Going too far
When the National Front broke into two factions in 1986, Nick Griffin led the Official National Front with Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland. The opposing faction was led by Andrew Brons and known as the Flag group, to distinguish it from the ONF. Griffin traveled to Libya at one point, in order to procure funding from the Gaddafi regime. By this point, the ONF had pledged solidarity to revolutionary nationalist movements seeking self-determination for their people. (This even applied to Arab and African nationalists, as well as Black nationalist and separatist groups in the West.) The journey to Libya was a complete failure, though they did bring back thousands of copies of Gaddafi’s Green Book.
Smoke break. London, October 2009.
At one point, Griffin put Colonel Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini and Louis Farrakhan on the front page of their magazine. Branches of the Official National Front began to breakaway and the organisation hemorrhaged members. Eventually the group dwindled into insignificance, from hundreds to tens of members in a couple of years. The last straw came in 1989, when Patrick Harrington contacted journalists at The Jewish Chronicle. He told them that the Front had abandoned its past anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. It was a move to normalise the organisation and its agenda. Harrington hadn’t run the idea past the rest of the leadership, and they were furious. The group was dissolved, and Griffin took around sixty members with him. Harrington took little more than ten.
Nick Griffin took time out from politics after he was injured from shotgun cartridges he accidentally flung into a bonfire. Derek Holland drifted further and further into the depths of mysticism and set out to found a nationalist commune in France. In the meantime, Patrick Harrington set out to build an acceptable nationalist party – which he called the Third Way – staking out a nationalism which he characterised as liberal, democratic, and cultural. He now runs the Solidarity trade union, known for its BNP ties, and demanding “British jobs for British workers”. Without this baggage, Nick Griffin made a name for himself as a Holocaust denier, positioning himself to the right of David Irving. He would make it his mission to take-over the denial industry, the neo-Nazi music scene, and the British National Party. He would only accomplish one of these goals.
The Prospects for Containment
After 15 years of Griffin’s leadership, the BNP is in tatters. He dethroned John Tyndall in 1999 with a campaign to modernise the Party and transform it into a ‘new nationalist party’. He made his agenda clear in 2000 at a meeting of Klansmen and like-minded sorts organised by David Duke. Griffin argued the case for a more sophisticated approach. It was identity politics par excellence deploying saleable words like ‘freedom’, ‘security’, ‘identity’, and, of course, ‘democracy’. The new proposal was to change the key policy from repatriation to a voluntary repatriation scheme in which people are paid to leave the country. It took time, but the campaign began to pay off. Seats were won in local government and Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected to the European Parliament they so loathe. It was to be short lived.
The gains were not capitalised on. The Party was wracked with financial problems and newfound conflicts, after Griffin began to insulate himself from party members. Around this time, the English Defence League burst onto the scene. Initially, this development could not have been seen as a threat by Griffin. It wasn’t until Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson) came to the forefront and set out to publicly define the EDL as a non-racist grassroots movement. The EDL took on an agency of its own, while the BNP became increasingly unstable. Eventually a leadership challenge arose in 2011 from Andrew Brons. Griffin changed the constitution to hasten the contest, and retained his position by just nine votes.
Jim Dowson broke away from Griffin in 2010, and set out to exploit the disaffection within the Party. He first targeted Brons, but this was unsuccessful. Then Dowson became acquainted with Paul Golding. Britain First was launched to absorb the fallout from the BNP’s infighting, but it has gone on to suck in disillusioned EDL supporters. Even still, it can’t be said often enough that the Firsters have the presence in numbers on the streets that they have online. It has this in common with the EDL. At its peak, the Fascist movement led by Oswald Mosley could muster 20,000 people in 1939 and had claimed it had 50,000 members. It mobilised around 8,000 votes in the East End elections, but never made any breakthrough.
Today, the centrepiece of the British far right seems to be in terminal decline, and has lost 10,000 members. Britain First is just one of a few new organisations looking to fill the void opening up. Andrew Brons founded the British Democratic Party in 2013. The English Democrats have been spurred on, and we’ve even seen the National Front crawl out from the darkness. Out of the failed attempt by the EDL to form its own party came Liberty GB. In the meantime, UKIP seems to have capitalised hugely on this disarray, mixing fascist votes with conservative and libertarian votes. Just how this will end is unclear, but we should perceive the Firsters – not as harbingers of a Fourth Reich exactly – as a serious threat to the Asian community.
by Searcher08 » Tue Jan 20, 2015 3:16 pm
by jakell » Tue Jan 20, 2015 4:41 pm
Searcher08 » Tue Jan 20, 2015 7:16 pm wrote:^^^^ This post is just such utter rubbish. ^^^^
Britain First is a Facebook-based scam job.
Every single person I know who has had their nature pointed out has unsubscribed from them and also told their friends who did likewise.
Suggesting that Britain is 'moving to the Far Right' is nonsense.
by American Dream » Wed Jan 21, 2015 10:07 am
Political activist in coma after fascist violence in Cremona
Posted on 2015/01/20 by Struggles in Italy
On Sunday 28 January, around 6pm, a group of about 50 fascists (mostly from CasaPound) attacked activists from Cremona’s Dordoni social centre. The attack on seven or eight activists was launched by around ten people, and very soon bolstered by 40 more. Emilio, one of the activists and someone very well known in Cremona, was beaten with a bar and then kicked in the face and head as he was lying on the ground.
The attack appears to have been prepared in advance, taking advantage of a football match to bring together fascists from Parma, Brescia and other towns with those from Cremona. Emilio is now in a very serious condition and his life is in danger. Dordoni’s activists have made a complaint that the fascists were merely identified by the police and then released but that the activists who were defending Dordoni were charged.
Anti-fascists from Cremona and from all over Italy have called for a national anti-fascist demonstration in Cremona on 24 January, and for solidarity demonstrations in many different cities.
This episode is not isolated: there have been many different attacks led by CasaPound or other far-right movements over the last few months. In September, in Naples, for example, a high school student was beaten by some far-right individuals because he was wearing an anti-fascist t-shirt. In Rome, in November, a group of far-right militants used bars and sticks to attack supporters of Ardita San Paolo football team.
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Casa Pound Italia
by Searcher08 » Wed Jan 21, 2015 11:32 am
jakell » Tue Jan 20, 2015 8:41 pm wrote:Searcher08 » Tue Jan 20, 2015 7:16 pm wrote:^^^^ This post is just such utter rubbish. ^^^^
Britain First is a Facebook-based scam job.
Every single person I know who has had their nature pointed out has unsubscribed from them and also told their friends who did likewise.
Suggesting that Britain is 'moving to the Far Right' is nonsense.
The final paragraph of the piece does seem to admit this, plus a few hints in the rest of it. In general though, it is similar to a lot of 'anti-fascist' stuff from the UK. They miss the BNP terribly and are upturning every rock looking for its replacement.
At least it doesn't try to fit UKIP up for it this time
by American Dream » Thu Jan 22, 2015 1:39 am
Not your ammo Eric Pickles (fragments)
21/01/2015
By Baal Balagan
This morning a man from Tulkarem, a village in the West Bank, stabbed a dozen people on the number 40 bus in Tel Aviv, was shot in the leg and is now in custody. No names have been released yet.
From Haaretz: When they realized it was a terror attack, he said, “Me and my team of three others identified the terrorist and chased after him. The terrorist collapsed after we shot at his legs. We then shackled him and awaited the arrival of police officers.”
Last weekend in Rahat, a village in the Naqab/Negev, a Bedouin Palestinian man was killed by Israeli police, while he was attending the funeral of a Bedouin Palestinian man, who had been killed by Israeli police. Sami al-Ziadnah, Sami al-Ja’ar, the men killed. The names of the killers have not been released or are unknown, and no one has been arrested.
From Yidiot Achronot: Unrest had erupted in the southern Israeli city after two of its residents were killed during confrontations with Israeli police.
Last week, a man ran into a Tesco in North Wales, shouted “white power” and attacked a man with a machete. Zack Davies, the attacker; Sarendev Bhambra, the attacked.
From the Independent: “A 25-year-old man was held on suspicion of attempted murder, following what is believed to have been a racially motivated assault”
Twenty-six French mosques have been attacked since the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Firebombs, gunfire, grenades, pigs’ heads have been thrown into their sacred spaces. Round the corner from my house, Finsbury Park mosque has been getting death threats.
On Monday this week two hundred people crowded into an east London venue in defiance, and to tell stories of Black and Brown and Muslim people killed and assaulted by police and security guards. In custody, in their homes, in detention centres, whilst being deported. Sean Rigg. Mark Duggan. Jimmy Mubenga. Cynthia Jarrett. Stephen Lawrence. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Too many others.
And in Paris, Netanyahu told French Jews to go to Israel, because there’s nothing like solving one country’s postcolonial problems by contributing to the neo-colonial project of another.
….
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