Hospitality and The Hairworm

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Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 29, 2016 10:00 pm

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hospita ... -hairworm/

Hospitality and The Hairworm

By KATHRYN HAMILTON

Image

When most people think about bugs, it’s usually about how to get rid of them. Applying the metaphor of a bug to a human scales them down to a realm where death is quotidian and inconsequential.

When I began writing this piece about parasitism and hospitality, I was living in an Istanbul in shock from the bombings at Ataturk airport. I was living in a nation where the trending hashtag was “We don’t want Syrians in our country,” referring to them as “dirty, vermin, parasites, freeloaders.” By the time I came to make the final edits I was living in an Istanbul reeling from the attempted coup, after a night spent diving to the ground and hiding in a neighbor’s kitchen as the sonic booms of jets rocked the building and gunfire blasted through the streets outside. Two days later, as news of the purges of thousands of judges, military personnel, police, prosecutors and academics spread, I heard that language again. This time it came from the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as he announced that he would remove all viruses from state institutions.

Two years ago I was on another part of the European continent, taking the night train between Spain, where I was working, and Portugal, where my family lives. The night train starts in Paris at noon and arrives in Lisbon in the early hours of the next morning, crossing the borders while its occupants sleep. When I embarked in Madrid, I found that the passenger before me had left a book in the luggage rack above my bunk: Derrida’s lectures on radical hospitality. Bookmarking one of the pages was a magazine cutting on the lifecycle of the Nematomorpha, or the horsehair worm.

Here is what that article described. The larva of the parasite Nematomorpha develops inside the body of a cricket, eating its way through everything non-essential to the cricket’s basic functioning. Once grown, the worm needs to return to water to reproduce. So, having eaten its fill and having reduced the cricket to head, shell and legs, the hairworm begins to secrete mind-controlling substances which create suicidal urges in the cricket, driving it towards, and then into, the closest river or lake. The cricket drowns, and the hairworm emerges from the corpse and swims away to mate. In a particularly romantic twist, this clipping suggested that the hairworm waits for a moonlit night to take over the mind of the cricket, using the reflection of moonlight to guide its host to a watery grave.

Strangely, considering the metaphoric and semantic overlaps between insect symbiosis and the language of hosting, in that book of lectures that I found on the train there was only one mention of parasitism. Derrida invokes it early on in order to draw the distinction between a “guest” and a “parasite.” “How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite?” he asks.

In principle, the difference is straightforward, but for that you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered have to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction. Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don’t have the benefit of the right to hospitality, or the right to asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced ‘in my home’ as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest.


The “law” that Derrida refers to here is one pole of a dialectic that these lectures seek to deconstruct. He sets it in opposition to the capital-L Law of hospitality, of a radical hospitality that cannot be constrained by a “limiting jurisdiction.” Under this “Law” then, there would be no “limiting jurisdiction” and therefore no possibility of a guest who is “wrong, illegitimate, clandestine.” Derrida does not consider the parasite as being, of itself, different from the guest. What distinguishes them is determined by the conditions that the “law” happens to impose. The one who arrives is nothing more than an arrival. Only after they have knocked on the door do the laws that they meet determine their classification as either parasite or as guest.

The first prediction that comes up on a google search for “insect” is “insecticide.” It’s an indication that on the most quotidian level, when most people think about bugs, it’s usually about how to get rid of them. Applying the metaphor of a bug to a human is a literal belittling, which scales them down to a realm where death is quotidian and inconsequential. There is a well-documented history of the dangers of a semantics which dehumanizes, in particular one which anthropod-morphizes. When some public figures (such as UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who referred to people at the Calais Jungle migrant camp as a ‘swarm’ headed towards his country) use this language, the response is swift condemnation and a reminder of the murderous history that such associations invoke. When Erdogan uses the language, his supporters take to the streets.

“Swarm,” “parasite,” “virus,” and “vermin” (that which carries the parasite) are used in similar syntactic situations, but with differing associations. While a “swarm” suggests something en masse, beyond control, and beyond the individual agency of the participating organisms, a “virus” suggest infection and uncontrollable multiplication; a “parasite” brings up opposing images of something calculating, pernicious, rational and controlling: something sneaky and evil-intentioned which will take on-the-sly, abusing the generosity of the host.

Alex Bein’s 1964 essay “The Jewish Parasite” outlines the history of this word “parasite.” Contrary to contemporary usage, which invokes the biologic and anthropodic as a metaphor for the social, the passage of the word through time shows that the scientific sense is in fact a transfer from its original, social, meaning. The etymology of the word has its roots in the greek, παρα, “beside,” and σιτος, “grain, food,” or by extension “one who eats beside.” It was originally used in a positive sense, referring to “the officers of the sacerdotal and municipal services,” who “received their provisions at the expense of the state.(Ironically, it is members of these municipal services that are currently being labeled “viruses” in Erdogan’s purge). By the fourth century BCE its meaning had shifted, referring instead to the poor who would gather outside the houses of the rich during the midday meal — no longer beside them at the table, but subject to mockery and humiliation in exchange for the scraps of charity. Marxist theory would later adopt the word parasite to refer to the capitalists who lived off the labor of others. The metaphor is displaced to the opposite end of the power and wealth spectrum, but retains the association of unproductivity. The arrival, in order to be a guest, must have a productivity to offer — a “guest” worker visa confers a status in exchange for extractable labor.

From the beggar at the gate, the parasite became a stock character in Greek comedy, and through this it entered European language and literature via Molière, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson and others. Not until the mid-19th century, with biologists such as Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (1809–1894), who studied the life cycle of the tapeworm, did the word assume its current scientific significance. Then in the 20th century, borrowed back as metaphor from science with all its accumulated layers of association, it became a central pillar in the ideology of Nazi Germany, a foundational myth of the Holocaust which saw the Jew cast as a parasite, an unproductive and destructive outsider that has entered into and is feeding off the body of the German nation. In the 1990s came the language of the Hutus, who labeled the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ during the Rwandan genocide, and in the dark corners of the internet the accusation of parasitism is alternately leveled at Israelis, Palestinians, the Polish, Romanians, Mexicans, people on welfare, and unemployed youth, all the way through to the current European crisis of migration, Brexit and the potential dissolution of the United Kingdom. In Turkey today it is concurrently deployed at opposite ends of the spectrum, at both the Syrian refugees and the accused coup-supporters in the municipal services.

The “migrant crisis” (which, in the phrase “migrant crisis” enacts another semantic mis-transference, applying to the migrants themselves what is really a crisis of the Europe receiving them) is the most recent occasion for this language of parasitism. From politicians to tabloid media to far-right nationalists, these insect metaphors are being deployed to denigrate and dehumanize those who are arriving, accusing them of dependency, or exploitation, of taking and bringing nothing in return, and of posing the threat of destruction to the ones already there. A small syntactical twist in these metaphors that cast immigrants as insects brings us to the language of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National in France, who recently proposed a health initiative to, “Dénoncer et éradiquer toute immigration bactérienne.” While she protested that she had meant only to find solutions for new bacteria arriving in the country as a result of the movement of peoples, the double meaning of such a phrase — to eradicate immigrant bacteria — is impossible to ignore. In one sentence Le Pen manages to combine the migrant as both bacteria and as the host of bacteria — both the carrier of disease and the disease itself. She goes on to state: “Les hôpitaux font face à la présence alarmante de maladies contagieuses non européennes, liées à l’afflux migratoire.” In her double-tongued phrases “Non-Europeanness” is contagious, a threat, a kind of pernicious biological warfare being waged by the incoming strangers.

European media is applying similar semantic gymnastics to the “flesh eating” parasite, “Cutaneous leishmaniasis” also known as the Aleppo Boil, which has been endemic in Syria for generations and is now, with forced migration, the destruction of medical infrastructure, and inadequate conditions in refugee camps, spreading to neighboring countries. Tabloid reports, for example in the UK’s Daily Mail, while not directly calling the refugees “flesh eating bacteria,” manage to syntactically confuse the bacteria, the carrier, the host and the ways in which it is spread. The effect is a disingenuous blurring of associations, in much the same way as Le Pen’s proposition.

What is this paranoia that collapses migrants with parasites, with contagion and disease? The transference from the organism of the individual body, to that oft-used nationalist metaphor of the body politic contains a terror not just of the negative changes that the new arrival might enact, but of the idea of change itself. Consider European nations like Slovakia, which claim they cannot welcome Muslim migrants on the grounds that they have no mosques. The new arrivals threaten change, but change itself is intrinsic to hospitality.

Sometime after finding that book on the night train I was back home in Istanbul. (My passage there, across Europe via train and then by air onto Istanbul, was a kind of a parody-of-ease in comparison to the inhospitable journey so many individuals are making, simultaneously, in the opposite direction.) I was having dinner at the house of Yassin al Haj Saleh, the Syrian writer and intellectual. The conversation turned to the fear in Europe in response to the arriving Syrians. “I think the problem stems from the concept of being yourself.” Yassin told me. “Western modernism tells you all the time “be yourself.” Why? Why should the dynamic always be moving you, the motor that is working to make you move forward is to stay like yourself all the time? Hospitality is related to this, in a way. When you change yourself, you will be open to those who will be agents in your change. You change yourself through struggle, through friendship, through love, through hosting people within you. Modernity is mean in this way. You are rational, calculating, you are homo-economicus. And this is the opposite to change and hospitality.” The basis for hospitality is, across cultures, often identified as a kind of mutual assurance of security — I must offer hospitality to the stranger so that someone will offer hospitality to me when I am a stranger. Yassin reframes it not as a necessity but as an opportunity. The possibility of change is predicated upon an openness to the agents of change. In this framing, the symbiote is not something to be tolerated by the host, but something to be desired.

Derrida’s lectures explore the transference of the metaphors of host and guest from the interpersonal to the international, as if we could apply the codes of hospitality that we enact at the level of the home to the level of the nation state. But this simple semantic transfer from the interpersonal to the international is faulty for the many reasons that manifest themselves in the current European crisis over migration. The most prominent one is that although both media and politicians couch the situation in the language of hospitality, the arriving migrants are not considered guests. “Refugees” Yassin told me, “are not being dealt with as guests; they are being dealt with as beggars. English has that expression ‘beggars cannot be choosers,’ and we have the same expression in Arabic شحاذ ومشارط, shahhadh wa msharet. You have to accept what we offer and you are not expected to have dialogue, to have ego, to represent yourself. When you are a beggar you cannot impose the rules. And if you treat someone as a beggar they will not respond to you as a guest, but as someone who has been shamed.”

It may not be something that European citizens want to recognize — that the refugee is treated as a beggar, rather than as a guest, but the truth of this assertion is visible in the reactions of outrage when refugees arrive with smartphones, refuse the first job they are offered or don’t accept with obsequious gratefulness the hand-me-down donations offered to them. Europe is treating the new arrivals as beggars, while couching their actions in a Biblically infused language of guest and host. The confusion between the word and the deed, between the name given and the actions taken is part of a matrix of a shallow pseudo-Christian morality and is responsible for much of the confusion and disorientation occurring in European nations “hosting” incoming refugees.

Last year The Gatestone Institute published a paper which claimed to document the ways in which migrants arriving in Germany were “proving to be ungrateful and impatient guests.” The Gatestone Institute is an American think-tank accused of funding and promoting anti-Muslim sentiment, not exactly a neutral source. But the tone of offended opprobrium that it takes in the article is recognizable across European newsmedia. Examples that the article gave ranged from a refugee who successfully sued the German government for taking 16 months to process his application papers. (As if recourse to the law should not be a right of refugees, as if to protest 16 months without status or work permit were “impatience”), to “400 migrants, mostly from Africa” who occupied an abandoned school in Hamburg to protest unreasonable living conditions in the tents they had been housed in, and then, upon the arrival of the police, threatened to set themselves on fire if their case was not addressed. The accusation of “ungrateful guests’ leveled at individuals who threaten to set themselves on fire over their desperation at inadequate housing conditions is telling as to how far the semantic confusion over metaphors of hosting extend. If my guest were threatening to set themselves on fire over the conditions I had hosted them in, I might reconsider my skills as a host.

The metaphor of hospitality, then, is misleading and confusing when applied to the case of the nation state. Let’s turn to the metaphor of the “parasite.” Is there any way to strip the word of its murderous historical associations and return it to its original, positive sense, “to eat beside”? If so, it might be possible to reclaim it in the service of new ways of imagining relations of hospitality. What if the word “Parasite,” with all the associations of history, was replaced with “para-site,” in the hope that the slight lexical shift would jar the reader away from the instinctive associations of the word, and bring it closer to its original meaning. Para: besides; site, sitos: food. To eat beside. In every culture this image is one of the most essential symbols of hospitality. In a fitting evolution, the medical and scientific meaning of the word parasite now seems to be performing the dance of the ouroboros, the hair worm and its clan looping back around to eat its own semantic tail. Scientific developments are pushing beyond the metaphoric association with the scrounger, the scavenger, back to the word’s original, positive, social significance. It turns out that an organism may in fact require the other which feeds at its table, just as much economic research suggests that migrants, who in the short term may require support, in the long term add to the economic value of the nations they settle in. What have the immigrants ever done for us? Rather a lot, according to a new piece of research, The Economist, November 8th 2014. Recent research indicates that diseases from MS to hay fever could be related to the levels of hygiene in modern life, which have rid the human body of parasites and destabilized it. Experimental treatment is now being conducted on at least two conditions — M.S. and Crohns disease — by infecting the patient with a parasite, Trichostrongylus axei, the stomach hairworm usually found in pigs.

Recently I came across a paper published by two scientists in Japan, who had been studying my favorite parasite, the Nematomorpha, or horsehair worm. Their research, published by the Ecological Society of America in 2011, found that when they considered these zombie parasites not just in relationship to the cricket, but to the wider eco-system, the horsehair worm became a vital pivot point in the flow of energy across ecosystems. Those crickets leaping into the water provide a food source for an endangered trout, and prevent the trout from eating too many bentheic invertebrates — beetles and other bugs which are an essential food supply for the local bird population. “Endangered Japanese trout (Salvelinus leucomaenis japonicus) readily ate these infected orthopterans, which due to their abundance, accounted for 60% of the annual energy intake of the trout population.” The scientists observed that “Trout grew fastest in the fall, when nematomorphs were driving energy-rich orthopterans into the stream. When infected orthopterans were available, trout did not eat benthic invertebrates in proportion to their abundance, leading to the potential for cascading, indirect effects through the forest-stream ecosystem.”

The parasite here is cast as a disruption that might, up close, seem destructive, but seen within the larger picture, becomes the modifier that balances the system and keeps it functioning. The paper on the Nematomorpha provided the first quantitative evidence that “a manipulative parasite can dramatically alter the flow of energy through and across ecosystems,” re-imagining the function and possible roles of the parasite.

Derrida only mentions parasites once in his lectures, “Of Hospitality,” but he does use the term elsewhere in his writing. J.L. Austin, in his famous passage on performative speech acts from “How To Do Things With Words” claims that the “non-serious” is parasitic upon “normality.” Derrida replies to this by accusing Austin of being trapped in a ‘metaphysics of presence’ which privileges the original over the copy, the self-contained over the dependent, and, Derrida adds, the host over the margin-ad-leftparasite. In a conversation in 1994, Derrida claimed that “All I have done […] is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology […] The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication.”

Derrida leaves us with parasitism not as a state of being, not as a metaphor, but as a strategy. Invited back to the table beside the host, it becomes a means of creative disruption. The word cannot be stripped of the centuries of negative associations, and in particular from the last century of genocide that it gave linguistic permission for. But the “para-site,” re-imagined, can be a strategy of disruption, can open up to new ways of thinking about the assumptions that surround the codes of international hospitality, and can provide a new possibilities for thinking about those who arrive and knock on the door.

In the reality of the political landscape, such a re-imagining seems unlikely. In Turkey Erdogan is repeatedly employing this language to justify his purges, and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe and the US means that “parasite” as an accusation, a term of aggression, is unlikely to disappear from the vocabulary any time soon. Maybe now is not the time for subtle semantics. But language can shift, if nothing else, the way the balance of power is imagined. What is now a case of how much one can give and how much the other will take, can be reframed by the “para-site” on a horizontal plane, as the host and guest sit beside each other, eating from the same table.
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby OP ED » Mon Aug 29, 2016 10:41 pm

Why do you always pester me with these fascinating bits of information?
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 29, 2016 10:50 pm

Because I'm there...
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby OP ED » Mon Aug 29, 2016 11:04 pm

You may not believe this, coming from me, but I missed you while I was away and I am glad you're still here.
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 29, 2016 11:19 pm

Actually, I've had a change of heart/world view and don't care about the same things in the same way as I did before.

I appreciate your testing the flimsy ideas that sometimes get casually offered up here as solid, for leaks.

It's a service that all too often is needed...
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby OP ED » Mon Aug 29, 2016 11:43 pm

Likewise. The fact is also that our politics are probably not so different except insofar as how they're often manifested.

And really I always respect anyone that forces me to reconsider.
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 30, 2016 4:47 am

Likewise- and I also feel that the hype over "occultists" in conspiracy circles owes way too much to people with allegations based on nothing other than the allegations themselves- and/or the world view of the right wing xtians who started a lot of it...
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby OP ED » Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:24 am

Perhaps so. Which is not to say that there aren't any number of dangerous or at least potentially dangerous people in various occult groups. There are always those for whom their religion is merely an extension of their racism, for example, and this malady appears everywhere in religion. I do feel as if there is a concentration of forces aligning a great many threads of fear into a massive web of agitprop. Although this needn't be taken too literally, much of the current reactionary fear mongering is quite predictable in light of the tensioning of our time. That said, I can't shake the notion that somewhere the other shoe is already dropping.

Our future as a species is going to hang in the balance and it will be our responsibility to make certain that we respond correctly and not to allow ourselves to backslide into a new dark age.
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2016 9:46 am

‘Eggs thrown, windows smashed, a family attacked in a park’: how ​Brexit impacted east Europeans


...At the coach, two young women whose boxes are being weighed have received worried calls from their families back home. “They heard news about a Romanian shop that has been broken into in some city in the UK, and vandalised,” one tells me. “And also about people being sworn at, told to go home, generally being treated badly.” The women have experienced none of this and have no intention of leaving. “No, I’m fine,” says one. “In Bristol it’s OK.”

The issue of immigration and immigrants dominated the EU referendum, with much of the focus on eastern Europeans who arrived following EU expansion in 2004. When the result came in, many of them felt the country they now called home had rejected them. A sharp increase in racial attacks was reported across the country. In the first week, London was averaging around three an hour; elsewhere, things were even worse. On Saturday 27 August, in Harlow, a 40-year-old Polish man, Arkadiusz Jóźwik, was beaten to death in the street. It’s not known yet what any motive might have been, but one line of inquiry for police was the possibility of it being a hate crime. “After the Brexit vote it has got worse,” said his brother, Radek. “I have seen people change – it is hard at the moment.” Five boys aged 15 and one aged 16 were arrested on suspicion of murder, but released on bail until 7 October pending further inquiries.


Even though Bristol voted overwhelmingly to remain, it has not been immune. In mid July, Alex Raikes, director of the Bristol-based anti-racist group Stand Against Racism and Inequality (Sari), told me: “We’ve had eight referrals in the last 11 days, so that’s nearly a referral a day of an eastern European family or individual. It’s ranged [upwards] from verbal abuse, and nearly all of those people have been told to go back to where they come from, or ‘go back home’, and I haven’t heard that kind of language in quite a long time. They’ve had eggs thrown at them, windows smashed, cars vandalised. We’ve had people being verbally abused on the bus, we had a horrible case of a family being attacked in a park – the adults and children threatened to set their hair on fire and even kicked them.”

As well as animosity, there have been expressions of solidarity. Friends of Arkadiusz Jóźwik have organised a unity march through Harlow in his memory on Thursday. In Bristol, the Playfull toyshop offered a rose and an apology to all immigrants – a gesture that made the news around the world. “My friend just thought: ‘I want to do something small, something local,’” says owner Kerstin Price, who was away when it happened. She didn’t think that it would be a “mega, mega response”.

In Kopernick, a Polish shop in Sunderland, its shelves stacked with herring, hams, vodka and dried mushrooms, Marina says things have been fairly quiet. Sunderland may have voted leave, but the only response she has encountered has been people coming in to commiserate. “They came to say sorry because they voted to stay, and they’re sorry for us. But I didn’t hear anything nasty, not yet.”

Yet bad news travels fast and far. Marina has heard that things are worse in the factories and everyone coming out of the Romanian church in Bristol knows someone who has faced it.


In Sunderland, the referendum result was less of a shock. Daniel Krzyszczak, a manager at the International Community Organisation of Sunderland, which works mostly but not exclusively with eastern Europeans, notes the rise of Ukip over the past few years, and points out that anti-immigrant sentiment simply intensified following the Brexit campaign. One factory worker, who would not give his name, shows me a poster that was put up in his changing room a couple of days before the referendum, stating: “Vote out EU, come on England, get the cunts out.”

Brexit didn’t introduce xenophobia or racism to Britain, but it has complicated our understanding of both. Like immigrants from former colonies after the second world war, the east European migrants thought they were coming for a short time, stayed longer, did work others wouldn’t and started families. There is also much in the nature of the hostility that chimes with previous scripts. In keeping with the tropes of prejudice and bigotry, they have been depicted simultaneously as welfare scroungers and as workers who “steal” jobs from local people and refuse to integrate.

This is not the first time white people in Britain have been racialised on account of their distinct religious, national or cultural affinities. Jews, Catholics, the Irish and Gypsies have all been, and can still be, discriminated against because of who they are.

In the wake of the Brexit vote the distinction between racism and xenophobia blurred. “It’s not just eastern Europeans facing the abuse,” explains Raikes. “I had a dual-heritage family with a mum and her 11-month-old baby going past the pub the day after the referendum and a load of guys shouted at them and said: ‘Now we’re leaving the EU, go back to where you came from,’ and spat on them.”

And if bigots weren’t making the distinction, neither black Britons nor eastern Europeans were necessarily seeing the commonalities between their experiences either. Examples of Black and Asian voters complaining about eastern European immigrants in the runup to the referendum were legion. And one of the reasons why so many eastern Europeans were shocked by the response post-Brexit is because they thought racism didn’t apply to them.


“European groups who live here don’t necessarily see race equality organisations as representing them,” says Omar Khan, director of race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust. “They don’t necessarily frame their experiences as racism. Often they think they’re white and Christian and so are British people and aren’t we all European. I think also we have to be frank in saying there are real tensions between these groups sometimes. Black British groups can feel that, compared with when they came over, Europeans have better access to benefits; they may also feel that eastern Europeans are more racist than white British people. Obviously, to the extent that they feel that way, it’s a barrier to working together to eliminate discrimination.”

One of the most egregious attacks in Newcastle was against a young black Polish woman who was harassed on a bus. When she got on, a youngster shouted: “I’ve never seen a monkey on a bus.” Then they started talking about Europe. “Something about stealing jobs and things like this,” the woman says.

Then she started talking to her friend in Polish. The boys carried on shouting. When she ignored them, one of them set her hair on fire.

“Do you think that was about you being black or Polish?” I ask her.

“How would I know?” she shrugs.



http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... -europeans
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2016 12:53 pm

Trigger warning:Graphic Racism, but you might be somewhat accustomed to that by now...



Image
That was originally posted to /new/, the predecessor to /pol/—but derivatives of the image could be seen on /pol/ this afternoon.


http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/g ... fs-website
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby coffin_dodger » Fri Sep 02, 2016 1:15 pm

^^ This thread didn't take long to devolve from interesting, to yet more racist iconography presented by the charming AD. And that's just fine and dandy because we all know he's one of the good guys. LOL!
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2016 5:11 pm

On Lexit and other Luckups

Posted by elisehendrick

At this point, it is worth recalling a few basic things about what was at stake in the EU referendum. The EU referendum was not merely a vote about whether it might be a good idea to leave the EU at some unspecified time in the future; it was a vote on whether to leave the EU on the terms set by the most right-wing elements of the most right-wing government in recent memory, and at a time when the left particularly in England and Wales is not in a position to exercise any meaningful influence on the outcome.

As such, any attempt at a ‘left case for Brexit’ cannot merely point out that the EU is an undemocratic, unaccountable, neoliberal capitalist institution with the blood of thousands of refugees on its hands. That it undeniably is, but it does not automatically follow from that the UK leaving the EU under the current circumstances will necessarily improve things, or even that Brexit under current conditions will not make things worse. Anyone wishing to claim that Brexit in this context will improve the situation in Britain and/or Europe as a whole must provide actual argument in support of that assertion. They must explain how Brexit can be beneficial from a left perspective and how the left can avert the obvious dangers of making such a substantial institutional shift under a right-wing government. This is the bare minimum that one must offer in order to make a case for ‘Lexit’ that is worthy of being taken seriously.
What is truly remarkable is that, not only did no Lexit advocate ever attempt to address these basic questions – the indispensable starting point of any strategic analysis of the referendum – the questions do not even appear to have occurred to those purporting to make a left case for Brexit. Nor has anyone attempted to argue against the importance of these questions either in the countless debates in which I’ve participated or any of the pro-Lexit articles that have been published. The extent of the analysis, such as it is, has been ‘The EU is shit; therefore, leaving is good no matter what the circumstances’. One could just as reasonably argue that, since Ryanair is crap, the only thing for it is to jump out of the plane 30,000 feet over Yeovil without a parachute.

This is strategic incompetence on a positively epic scale. The basic questions that Lexit advocates never even acknowledged are not arcane considerations that only a Clausewitz scholar would think to raise. They are questions we all ask and answer on a daily basis when faced with a decision: What are the likely consequences? Given that, which is the better option? What will I need to do in order to see that it turns out the way I want? Yet, these common-sense questions elude those who presume themselves the intellectual vanguard of the movement. To be sure, it is not a good look.

In assessing what our response to something like the EU referendum should be, it is essential to have as clear a picture as possible of the relevant factors: Why does this referendum exist? Is it the result of working-class struggle from below or has it been imposed from above? What forces are arrayed on each side? Who is in the best position to take advantage of each result? Who has the most to fear from each? Which option offers the left the most favourable conditions, given the current state of left organising?

By none of these strategic measures did it make even the slightest bit of sense for the left to support the UK leaving the EU at this time. This referendum was not the fruit of struggle from below; it was imposed in order to settle a disagreement within the ruling class, between the modernising, internationally orientated élites who seek to take advantage of Britain’s status as a subaltern imperial power at the interface between the US and the EU, and the more reactionary, traditionalist sector who think that everything would be better if the UK simply pretended that the sun never set on it, and who rely to a much greater extent on mobilising xenophobic and white nationalist sentiment in order to push their reactionary agenda.

On the former side, we have David Cameron, much of the Labour Party, the trade union bureaucracy, and the bulk of the multinational corporations; on the latter, we have the likes of Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Ian Duncan-Smith, UKIP, and virtually every fascist group in the UK. Given this array of forces, the most reactionary segment of the ruling class was poised to benefit from a leave vote; it is they who have pushed the issue for decades and almost certainly have detailed plans at the ready for the event of Britain’s departure from the EU. They have prepared this pitch, and given the current government, they were obviously going to supply the umpires and the ball as well.

It is an utterly trivial matter to see who will have the most to fear from the triumph of the reactionaries: migrants, both EU and non-EU, BME communities, actual and suspected Muslims, unemployed workers and people with disabilities, and the working class more generally.


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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2016 7:18 pm

Polish envoy voices concerns about Brexit xenophobia after Harlow killing

Poland’s ambassador to the UK has visited the scene of the killing of a 40-year-old Polish man in Harlow to express his shock at the death and alarm about the rise in xenophobic attacks after Britain’s vote to leave the EU.

Six teenage boys have been arrested in the Essex town after Arkadiusz Jóźwik, 40, was killed on Saturday night. His brother said he had been heard speaking Polish.

Essex police said that Jóźwik and a second Polish man who survived were apparently the victims of an unprovoked attack. The motive is unknown, but one line of inquiry was the possibility of it being a hate crime.

Image
Arkadiusz Jóźwik.

The killing has sparked widespread alarm after an upsurge in hate crime targeted at eastern Europeans followed Britain’s EU referendum.

The Polish ambassador, Arkady Rzegocki, visited the scene of the crime in the Stow area of Harlow, together with the local MP, Robert Halfon. Rzegocki expressed his shock and urged witnesses to help police investigate the killing.

He said he would take part in a “march of silence” on Saturday that is being organised by Polish community in Harlow.

Asked about xenophobic attacks after the Brexit vote, Rzegocki said: “Unfortunately there is much more after Brexit. We have found about 15 or 16 such situations.


Eric Hind, organiser of Saturday’s protest march, said that the Polish community had remained quiet for too long about abuse.

Speaking to the Guardian, he said: “Brexit kind of gave the British people a kind of green light to be racist. My family and friends have all been abused. It happens on a daily basis.

“We have kept our mouths closed too long. This is the reason why I’m keen to organise this. Lots of people say they plan to travel here from all over the place. Everyone is welcome. This time it is the Polish people, but it could be Muslims, it could be any different group. We need to fight racism everywhere, every day.”

The second man who survived the incident suffered suspected fractures to his hands and bruising to his stomach. He was discharged from hospital.

Five boys aged 15 and one aged 16 were arrested on suspicion of murder but were released on on bail until 7 October pending further inquiries.



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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2016 7:30 am

Latest assault on Polish men in Harlow investigated as possible hate crime

An attack on two Polish men hours after a remembrance march for one of their compatriots who was killed in the same town is being investigated as a potential hate crime.

Image
Members of the Polish community on the ‘march of silence’ in Harlow on Saturday.


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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2016 3:12 pm

The problem with anti-Semitism

Image

Christopher Bollyn: believes that being a Jew is a lot like being a wolf



https://louisproyect.org/2016/09/05/the ... -semitism/
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