Hospitality and The Hairworm

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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 17, 2016 11:37 pm

https://indypendent.org/2016/11/14/mobi ... path-power


Mobilizing Resentment: Trump's Path to Power

BY CHIP BERLET
NOVEMBER 14, 2016


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The Trump campaign was a study in populist insurgency. Specifically, a right-wing populist insurgency that focused on mobilizing white nationalism, anti-feminist misogyny, xenophobia, Christian nationalism, and conspiracy theories about the threat of treacherous liberals and totalitarian “big government.”

Trump supporters make up the classic right-wing populist constituency, the same kind of people who populated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and who voted for Hitler in the late Weimar period in 1930s Germany. Many of the Trump voters are objectively downwardly mobile, or fear they will soon be pushed down the economic ladder. White people — especially white men — also fear the loss of their power, status and prestige in political, social and cultural sectors. They feel displaced by unworthy others.

Trump supporters inhabit information silos, trusting only information from sources they deem reliable, such as Fox News, Breitbart News Network and bloggers like Michelle Malkin. Armed with the supposed truth, they then begin publicly articulating their grievances — first to family and friends and then on AM radio call-in talk shows or social media. In such settings, they can be mobilized to air their grievances through attending a rally or meeting, where movement organizers draw them into participating in rightwing social and political movement activities on a regular basis.

Right-wing populist movements rarely succeed, and even when they do, they rarely lead to fascist state power. But once a right-wing populist movement gets going, there are victims. Some of Trump’s supporters will feel the need to repress, suppress and oppress the bad people; defined as women, people of color, immigrants, religious minorities. The danger is not only individual acts of violence — although those will undoubtedly come — but also a longterm political mobilization. It is a trajectory that social scientists have written about for decades. The late Jean Hardisty, a political scientist, termed this process “mobilizing resentment.”

The John Birch Society, founded in Massachusetts, started spreading right-wing conspiracy theories in 1959. Subsequent studies revealed that Birchers— often dismissed as crazy or stupid by Democratic Party strategists — had, on average, a higher income level and educational attainment than most Americans. By 1964, the Birchers had joined with Christian Right activists and anti-communists to promote Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, Jr. for President. Goldwater lost big time, but the Right’s Republican strategists learned they needed to energize a mass base of voters to capture the White House.

The Republican Party harnessed right-wing social movement activism to the GOP bandwagon, targeting movements fighting integration, abortion, big government, and creeping communism among liberal elites. The result was a “New Right” coalition of Christian evangelicals, economic libertarians, and militarists who put Ronald Reagan in the White House in the 1980 election.

As Republicans were successfully hitching themselves to right-wing social movements in the 1970s, the Democratic Party was doing the reverse, shunning the social movements of the left. Democratic Party elites were horrified by the 1972 presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), who brought as delegates to the Miami convention a significant number of grassroots activists from the civil rights, antiwar, student rights, women’s rights, environmentalist and gay rights movements.

An elite faction of the Democratic Party intentionally sank the McGovern campaign. They then rewrote party rules to favor bigwigs and Inside-the-Beltway-types who they called, with no sense of shame or irony, “superdelegates.” The Democratic Party quickly accommodated the demands of the corporate elites for austerity and government cutbacks — joining the Republicans as champions of neoliberal capital.

All of which leads us to 2016. Clinton sought to cloak herself in a progressive mantle that she and husband Bill betrayed decades ago. Meanwhile, candidate Trump built a neo-fascist mass base. He was celebrated by former and current neonazis, Klansmen, White Supremacists, anti-Semites, and Islamophobes for moving their agenda to center stage.

White members of the downwardly mobile working-class are susceptible to Trumpism: the scapegoating of people of color and immigrants and the belief that liberals are treacherous and subversive.

It’s for the hearts and minds of all blue-collar workers that progressives must fight if they wish to combat Trumpism in the wake of Trump’s victory. Unlike the complaints of relatively privileged core Trump supporters, working-class economic woes are real, and can be addressed with real solutions. Since many Trump sympathizers live in the alternate Foxy post-fact universe, however, the only way to get them to consider alternative political, social and economic solutions is through face-to-face organizing. This is what the AFL-CIO did in the last three weeks of the election, recruiting activists to “knock on one million doors in key battleground states.”

Human rights activist Scot Nakagawa, in his blog Race Files, warns that whether or not the left can build a movement “in time to get ahead” of the organized Right, “will be the difference between winning the day as the demography of the U.S. changes, or losing out to an increasingly reactionary” white plurality. But he urges progressives to see this moment as an opportunity:

We ought not be pessimistic about what lies ahead. We have struggled long and hard to arrive at a moment when old norms can fall to new ones. This moment may not be what we’ve imagined, and the fight before us will likely not be waged entirely on our terms, but the opportunity to act and make a meaningful, definitive positive difference is nonetheless before us.

Movement-building should have a second aim: pulling the Democratic Party left. This is what Trumpism and its predecessors can teach the left, just as the left once taught it to the right. Many religious right leaders openly admit that they learned their tactics and strategies from the labor and civil rights movements. It’s a fact: strong and vibrant social movements pull political parties in their direction.

Some progressives will opt to try to take over the Democratic Party. Others will decide to become active in social, economic and political mass movements outside the Democratic Party. We need both strategies. Deploying an inside/outside strategy is exactly how right-wing social movements pulled the Republican Party to the far right.

As we move beyond the horrifying 2016 election, let us join local, diverse, and collaborative campaigns to defend the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, union members, water rights activists and public schools defenders — any and all people upon whose backs Trump, with his false claims and conspiracist rants, has painted a target. It’s time that we organize to take power.


Chip Berlet is the co-author with Matthew N. Lyons of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford Press, 2000). He is currently building a progressive resources website at http://www.progressivemovements.us/ .
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 08, 2016 9:52 am

Interview with Elise Hendrick on Liberal Naivete and Entryism
SEPTEMBER 21, 2014

C. Derick Varn: Recently, you have a comment on the “Opposite of what America” does meme on your facebook page in which you noticed that a lot of liberals and soft leftists tend to either romanticizing or just flat wrong about what goes on in other parts of the world. Why do you think American liberals are so given to this romanticizing to a point of almost “inverted exceptionalism”?

Elise Hendrick: Well, I think that liberals in general have a problem with analysing social phenomena in any depth. In an excellent piece by Max Ajl, he refers to liberalism as inherently containing a certain degree of “historical amnesia”, and that certainly fits my experience.

Overall, I think there are a couple of phenomena at work, and, I should add, not just amongst liberals – a lot of people in the US who, in terms of what they advocate, tend to be more leftist than liberal, suffer from the same problem.

One part of this is the general recognition that things in the US really suck. That’s as good a starting point as any, but it doesn’t get you too far if you haven’t got a tolerably in-depth understanding of history and institutional structures to help you understand the basis of the malaise.

Also, in the US, political illiteracy is pandemic. The population has been systematically depoliticised, and so people are really unaccustomed to thinking about these things in any depth; and since, as the polls show, they’re also very likely to be either mis- or uninformed about anything they don’t know about from their own experiences. These the perfect conditions for superficial analyses to be taken seriously.

C.D.V.: What do you think these memes indicate that many Americans don’t understand about the political economy of other parts of the world? I know the first one I saw was on education statistics which focused Finland, although largely without specific context, but did not look at the other major competitor for the top, South Korea, which does MORE of what many American liberals dislike about the US system than the US even does, and it only seemed to have gotten worse since that particular incarnation of that meme.

E.H.: I seem to have addressed quite a bit of what I have to say in response to this question in my answer to the question above, so this is going to be mercifully brief. Even when the claims made in these memes are accurate – as is occasionally the case – they totally erase why the policies are different. It wasn’t that the entire society woke up one day and said: “Let’s see what the yanks are doing. Oh, that’s horrific, as expected. Our task today is to find the opposite of that monstrosity.” There is a balance of power that is noticeably different in a lot of these societies, in ways that either allow or force elites to make policies that are more humane than what goes on in a totally business-run society like the US.

Those elites would generally love to do whatever monstrosity the US is doing, because US monstrosities tend to be profitable monstrosities.



C.D.V.: What do you see as the best way to get people in the states have the right impulses but the wrong information and social context to be nudged in the right direction?

E.H.: First of all, just so no one gets the wrong impression, I’m speaking here more from my sense of the matter than I am from any great track record of success stories in counteracting the depoliticisation of the population in the US. What I do seems to work a lot of the time – at least often enough that I haven’t seen any cause to reevaluate – but there are plenty of times when it doesn’t go over as well as I’d like.

With that caveat in mind, I think there are a few things that are important in this context:

1. We need to avoid the stereotyping and reflexive contempt for the US public that I sometimes see. Yes, a good deal of the population is so misinformed on a wide variety of important topics that it is a bit scary. Yes, most people don’t have a lot of theoretical background and understanding of aspects of this society that are outside of their immediate personal experience. That is all true, and it is what anyone looking to organise and struggle for social justice in this country is facing.

All too often, however, I see people speaking very insultingly and condescendingly of the public here, either calling them stupid or backward, or suggesting that they could easily inform themselves if they weren’t so lazy, or something of that nature. Often, these sorts of remarks come from people with enough time on their hands to read theory, a good enough educational background to understand the texts, and access to JSTOR or some other repository of academic journals, not to mention a reasonably good overview of the available sources of information and analysis.

We need to remember that that is not the reality for most people. This is a country where people are working more and more hours at ever shittier jobs just to get by, and are often overwhelmed with the basic tasks of survival. We show a serious ignorance of the working class in this country if we expect that, when they come home knackered from whatever job they’ve been able to find, they will spend a few hours researching where they can find good information.

It seems easy enough when you’ve already found a good range of sources, but that’s not the perspective we need to be using. We need to be looking at this from the perspective of someone who knows she’s being fed a line of crap by the TV news and the newspapers, but has absolutely no idea where to start in finding trustworthy information. That is a very overwhelming place to be, particularly so when you also come out of an educational system that barely teaches you to read, let alone to read critically. If we’re making people feel like shit for the position the capitalist system has assigned them, we’re doing the ruling class’ work for them.

We need to have empathy, and to reach people where they are, rather than expecting them to have an extensive background in the things we have dedicated our lives to studying just in order to interact with us. This will be a recurring theme, because I think it is key.

2. In the same vein, we need to be careful with language. I try to stamp out jargon – by which I mean uncommon terms used to describe things that commonly used terms describe at least as well – wherever I find it. In my writing, I try as much as possible to use terms that most people will be familiar with, and to explain any more specialised terms that I have to use because there’s no good alternative.

This, it should be noted, is not the same thing as “dumbing down”. Really, what I am suggesting comes down to good habits of writing and speech: Use clear, descriptive language, avoid arcane terms wherever possible. So much of the intellectual output of the academia-based leftists is written in language only they can understand; rarely have I ever come across a thought expressed in academic Marxist jargon that couldn’t be expressed as well, or even better, in common language.

3. Don’t assume much. In other places I have been, a lot of what might be called the “left lexicon” is fairly well established in the general public, even those not involved in left organisations. In the US, even concepts such as “capitalism”, “communism”, “socialism”, “class” are new to a lot of people; as such, I think it is important to provide as much detail and explanation as possible, and not to react defensively or condescendingly if someone doesn’t understand the concepts under discussion. No one should be made to feel bad about asking an honest question – in fact, if people want us to elaborate on something, it means they haven’t rejected what we’re saying out of hand, which is as good a place to start as any.

4. We need to ensure that what we say relates clearly to what people know from their daily lives. The opinion polls are one way to go about finding a good overall jumping-off point (almost everyone hates the insurance industry, majorities support public-sector single payer health care, people are overall reluctant to support military aggression unless they’re convinced that there is a major threat to their safety). But in general, it’s important to listen to people and learn from them. They need help making sense out of the situation they’re living in and what can be done about it; we need help understanding the most deeply and immediately felt needs of people in this society. The more our organising directly improves people’s lives in ways they notice, the more confidence people will have that we mean well and that we have ideas that might be worth considering.

5. We need to find ways to help people reclaim their voices. One very common complaint is a sense that people don’t have any real voice, that even if they did decide to complain, there’s no one who would listen. People are used to being silenced in one way or another in this society. We need to help create environments in which they can express themselves and talk with each other about the things that matter to them. We need to create environments where people can see that their voices really matter, and that when they express a concern, it is taken seriously.

6. We need to fight conspiracism wherever we find it. I can’t emphasise this enough. There is a lot of work debunking this or that conspiracy theory, but nowhere near enough serious work analysing the ideology of conspiracism (the idea that all of world history is down to a few blokes twirling their well-waxed moustaches in a smoky room someplace) and examining the corners it originates in.

in a society where people are depoliticised and unsatisfied, conspiracism is an extremely attractive nuisance. People are looking for some alternative to what they rightly recognise as bullshit in the papers and on TV, something that matches their experience of feeling powerless at the hands of rich, powerful people who are feathering their own nests. Conspiracism seems to provide that.

I have spent a lot of time studying conspiracism first hand in various places, and I came to the conclusion some time ago that conspiracism is the default analytical mode of fascism. Every fascist and reactionary ideology or regime has had some form of conspiracism, from the backlash against the French Revolution to the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s. It is also interesting how few links you have to click in order to go from “9/11 was an inside job” or “chemtrails” or the like to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and openly neo-Nazi material. Sometimes, you don’t even have to leave the site.

Conspiracism has a cult-like dynamic that sets up anyone who questions or doubts it as either one of the “sheeple” (a “sherson”, perhaps?) or, as one person once claimed about me “in the pay of the shadows”. Because of this, once someone takes the bait on one of the “gateway drugs” like 9/11 “truth” etc., they will many times tend to start believing more and more of it, until one gets to the openly racist “theories” that are never too far from the surface.

To me, this is an area where we have a lot of work to do. These “theories” are being pushed by fascists, and they are succesfful far too frequently for comfort. We need a clear understanding of the dangers of this ideology and of the importance of calling it out (including pointing out its origins) and debunking it and exposing its pernicious consequences, and a practise of combating it wherever we find it. We trivialise this problem at our own risk.

C.D.V.: How much energy do you see wasted on conspiracism in a lot of possibly politically engaged people around you? This problem in my view is no where near as limited to the just North America or the US, the way the first trend we were speaking is.

E.H.: It’s hard to quantify these things, but I know I certainly rarely go through an entire day without seeing some conspiracist canard being tossed about as fact. My impression is that, whilst there are of course fewer really hardcore conspiracists spreading whatever Rense or Alex Jones or Henry Makow or Naturalnews is serving up as if it were fact, there are definitely quite a few people who, for lack of factchecking, end up buying into one or other conspiracist claim.

Plus, we have Russia Today promoting the likes of Webster Tarpley as an “analyst”, whilst PressTV gives that title to the racist Gordon Duff of “Veterans Today” and Scott Rickard, a Rothschild conspiracist who promotes “Jewish Bolshevist” nonsense that’s straight out of Goebbels (and has smeared myself and two friends of mine, Sylvia Posadas and Karen MacRae, by placing on a bogus list of “Pro-Israel Facebook Accounts” merely for challenging his Rothschild myths). So I’m not really sure how much time is wasted believing and debunking this material, but I would say it’s probably significant. And when one factors in the really nasty, defamatory attacks people are often subjected to just for challenging this crap (including sustained smear campaigns like Rickard’s bogus list, which has been shared fairly extensively, including by right-wing multipliers like Zionist musician Gilad Atzmon), the amount of physical and emotional energy involved in the project is substantial, especially when one is acting in isolation.

Whilst it definitely is not merely a US problem, I have to say that I encounter much more of it in the US (and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Latin America) than I do in discussions with people in Europe or Asia. This may in part be due to the fact that some of the leading exponents of this stuff are located here in the US, and probably also in part to the fact that there is no functioning left in this country providing a serious analysis of the society. There are leftists, in fact quite a few, but no “left” in the sense of a cohesive political entity that is of any real significance in the society, and fascists like Jones, Rense, Makow, Rickard, and the rest of them are happy to fill that analytical vacuum.


C.D.V.: Do you see similar things in Counterpunch publishing Israel Shamir or Zero books publishing Gilad Atzmon? And do you see this as related at all to the far right growth? Often Americans don’t seem to know how to identify rightwing thinkers that don’t look like those whom they are used to dealing with.

E.H.: Alex Cockburn’s role in promoting “entryism” has not been getting anywhere near the attention it deserves. He gave a “left” platform to the likes of White Nationalist Paul Craig Roberts, Atzmon, Israel Shamir, and even allowed holocaust denier Mary Rizzo smear Tony Greenstein, whilst refusing Greenstein an opportunity to reply and correct the numerous factually inaccurate claims made. I have my doubts that people like this would be getting an undeserved respectful hearing if CounterPunch hadn’t made them palatable to a left audience.

I definitely think part of the problem is that people don’t always know how to identify a right winger or a fascist when they see one. A lot of people can’t tell the difference between the positions of an antiimperialist like Noam Chomsky and the superficially (and only superficially) similar foreign policy positions of the likes of Ron Paul. The analysis begins at “they’re both antiwar” and more or less ends there; there’s often very little interest, in my experience, in examining the principles behind the stances, when the principles are the most important bit.Plus, there are plenty of white supremacists and the like who have spent recent years reinventing themselves. Ron Paul did a bit of that (as in his denial of having written the racist newsletters, when he had publicly admitted to having written them when he was just dealing with a local Texas audience in 1996), and even David Duke of all people has managed to hitch a ride on the Palestinian solidarity movement thanks to the likes of Ken O’Keefe, who has helped him rebrand himself as some kind of human rights activist. When one doesn’t have a strong analytical framework, it is very tempting to buy into that popular “third position” refrain that “we need to look beyond the false left-right paradigm” (a claim that, in my experience, virtually always comes from someone who turns out to be some kind of (crypto-)fascist) and assume that similar superficial positions are what matters, and not the radically different underlying principles. A friend of mine by the name of Ariel Zúñiga, who is a left political commentator in Chile, once remarked that “the left has no immune system. It has no way of identifying its enemies”. I think that that is the exact problem.Plus, there’s enough underlying-yet-denied racism and misogyny amongst leftists that is easy for a lot of people to treat the white nationalism of a Paul Craig Roberts, or the misogyny and racism of Gilad Atzmon and Ron Paul as somehow secondary to some more important goal. Those doing this, for the most part, are in the privileged position of not having to worry about fallout from inviting bigots like this into activist spaces, since not one of them has any problem with white men. This is yet another fundamental problem that needs to be challenged if the left is ever to be a functioning political entity that is capable of defining itself around principles; but, as someone who dedicates a great deal of time to dealing with this very issue, I have to say that the resistance to acknowledging it, let alone changing one’s practices in order to combat it, is enormous.

C.D.V.: Do you think this has been blurred even in places where you’d think people would know better such as Telos, a journal tied to Frankfurt school Marxism, publishing European new right figures? These aren’t depoliticized people so I have more trouble with the motivation?

E.H.: I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with Telos. I would say, however, that CounterPunch, to me, is an example of “people who ought to know better”. I don’t think that Alex Cockburn and colleagues can really claim ignorance about the sort of authors and material they’ve been publishing, especially when they refuse to allow people those authors have defamed (as with Mary Rizzo’s smears against Tony Greenstein) to respond and set the record straight.

One thing that I’ve noticed that I think is closely related to this phenomenon is the tendency of some to dismiss criticism of racism or misogyny (etc. etc. etc.) within left circles as “liberal” or “PC”, the idea apparently being that it is somehow less, or even counter-, revolutionary to challenge systems of privilege and oppression that people in leading positions benefit from (see, e.g., the utter mess over at the SWP UK, where we see the combination of structural misogyny and a longtime association with the racism of Gilad Atzmon, who recently went so far as to claim that he is the true victim of the rape scandal there).

It’s much easier to critique and struggle against hierarchies that we’re on the wrong end of; the minute we’re confronted with a critique of a hierarchy we actually benefit from, it calls into question things about ourselves that we would like to believe are entirely based on merit.

In the case of the anti-Jewish racism of the sort promoted by Rizzo, Atzmon, the misleadingly named “Deir Yassin Remembered”, Jeff Blankfort, and others, we see another important factor at work: The accusation of antisemitism has been used with such cynicism against those who express any criticism of the US-sponsored crimes of the State of Israel that people can easily be convinced that there is no such thing as antisemitism at all (the thesis, for example, of Cockburn & St. Clair’s book on the subject). Similarly, the concept of racism has been cynically used by Democratic Party hacks like Melissa Harris-Perry to silence any criticism of Obama, as in her article that claimed that the only reason that people were dissatisfied with Obama was what she called “electoral racism”. This sort of cynical posturing makes it likely that critiques of power and privilege will be met with even more resistance from the beneficiaries of the power and privilege in question than they already would be otherwise.

C.D.V.: Do you think some people have delusions of a red/brown alliance here?

E.H: Honestly, I think it’s worse. A lot of people don’t seem to realise that they’re getting into a potential red/brown alliance situation, where “alliance”, of course, is to be understood in the sense of that great alliance that forms between a tapeworm and its host. If people were openly saying “let’s form a red-brown alliance”, you could reply to explain the myriad reasons that is a superbly bad idea; when people don’t realise that’s how they’re dealing with, on the other hand, you first have to spend ages convincing them that they are in fact dealing with fascists, which requires a great deal of effort in supplementing the extremely spotty knowledge most people have of what fascism actually is.

I see these “signs of fascism” lists going around, which, for the most part, are quite accurate in terms of what they do show, but the things that are not included are even more important: there’s never (in my experience) any discussion of the economic philosophy of fascism or of the way in which fascism looks at history. Those bits are essential to being able to detect whether one is dealing with a fascist or a fascist group, since the modern strategy is to take a “softer” approach and avoid being open about the actual ideology and goals of the groups in question.

C.D.V.: Anything you’d like to say in closing?

E.H.: People need to realise that it isn’t so much what one reads as how one reads it.

I get the impression that the bulk of the woo and conspiracism that have impinged upon the discourse is down to people realising that the dominant corporate media are not to be trusted. There’s certainly no disputing that realisation, but there are two basic conclusions one can draw from this (apart from simply throwing up one’s hands and resigning oneself to the notion that there is no place to go for information):

One can decide that, if this particular set of sources (the dominant media) prove unreliable, one must set out to find another source someplace that can be implicitly trusted, based largely on it reporting things differently (or different things) to the dominant media. The underlying assumption that there must be some source that one can simply trustingly receive without critical analysis remains untouched, with the familiar consequences.

OR one can decide that this means that ANY source must be approached with caution, and set about taking a more intentional approach to dealing with sources, learning to evaluate the angle the source is coming from, what it is trying to communicate, what interests it might have in the conclusions it suggests, whether the factual claims made are consistent with each other or with facts reliably documented elsewhere; and one can learn to read between the lines and glean what truth is available from deceptive reporting and analysis.

Even lies contain a bit of truth – at a minimum, they tell us what the author of the lies (or the institution the lies are promoted by) would like us to believe, and/or what the source of the lies is intent on having us NOT believe. Even knowing just that, we can begin to get a useful framework for analysing the propaganda on a particular issue.

The development of these skills in dissident sectors of the society is to me a matter of life and death, given the stakes we face these days.



Excerpted from: https://symptomaticcommentary.wordpress ... -entryism/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:54 am

British domination of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century involved white Britons conquering other countries, exploiting their national resources, and legitimizing this through a myth of racial superiority. Assiduous attempts are made in our public sphere to domesticate this history - by erasing the stories of massacre, plunder and racism that made up the Empire. Conversely, the greater social liberalism that exists in contemporary Britain – something the mainstream media often pays lip service to – would have been unthinkable without multiculturalism and immigration, themselves the historical products of Empire and decolonization. If we are to resist the myths being peddled today, we need to engage seriously with the real past, instead of an imaginary history of unbroken glory and virtue somehow poisoned by ‘migrants’.

We need to engage seriously with the real past, instead of an imaginary history of unbroken glory and virtue somehow poisoned by 'migrants’.

Politicians and commentators, none of them working-class, conjure up the spectre of 'ordinary working class people’, invariably defined as homogenously white and inherently racist. This myth is used to justify policies that leave refugees drowning in the sea or herded into camps on the basis that ‘we have to give the people what they want’. This ignores the existence of a multi-cultural working class across the UK, and erases a long history of BME people living and working in Britain. British society, past and present, is indeed scarred by racism, and migrant communities have often become scapegoats for the worst effects of austerity. Yet to claim that racism is the special preserve of ‘the working class’ is historically and factually incorrect. In fact, working class communities are far more ethnically diverse than public schools and the Houses of Parliament. At its best, the British labour movement has been a place in which alliances between Black and white working people have been built, and BME workers have played a central role in struggles for improvements in pay and conditions for working-class people across ethnic boundaries.


open letter from the history department of Warwick University









http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/10/19/da ... spitality/

British Hospitality

Daniel Trilling 19 October 2016

An estimated 387 child refugees who have relatives in the UK are stranded alone in Calais. The UK government doesn’t really want to bring them over, and has only started to after being sued by a group of charities. Three teenagers who arrived this week have been accused of looking like young men rather than children. The way the right-wing press has singled out these boys and published their faces in a hit parade is straight-up racist intimidation, playing on a stereotype of non-white foreigners being freakishly and threateningly overdeveloped.

People like the Conservative MP (not the Brexit secretary) David Davies– ‘These don’t look like “children” to me. I hope British hospitality is not being abused’; ‘Migrant “children” must be given dental X-rays to prove age’; ‘didn’t see any children in the camp’ – claim that they’re interested only in ensuring that genuine children get the protection they need. Somehow I doubt it. Davies’s ‘concerns’ are part of a general narrowing down of the category of ‘deserving’ refugees, with the aim of taking in as few as possible. The terms are shifting constantly; when you answer one objection, another appears. OK, there’s a refugee crisis but the real refugees are the ones who stay in camps outside Europe. OK, there’s a crisis in Europe but the real refugees are the ones who stay in the first European country they set foot in. OK, there’s a problem in Calais but we only need to protect the lone children. OK, but not the teenagers. And so on.

Davies’s invoking of British ‘hospitality’ is also questionable. One might ask what kind of hospitality it is to leave thousands of Afghans, whose country Britain recently occupied for 13 years, and many of whom have relatives in the UK, living in the mud in Calais. One might also question the wider theme of ‘Britain’s proud history of welcoming refugees’, as it is often called. The UK has indeed taken in certain selected groups of refugees at certain points in its history, and this has made a real difference to the lives of the people who came here. But it might be more accurate to say that Britain has a history of mainly trying to keep refugees out, while occasionally welcoming limited numbers. People tend to forget that the British government, which kept its doors closed to most Jewish refugees from Europe in the 1930s, was pressured into the Kindertransport by Jewish and Quaker organisations – and even then, it only took the children and left their parents to die. The ‘proud history’, as often as not, is used to justify keeping refugees out.

Unaccompanied children are often in greatest need of protection and should be given priority, but helping them is not enough. Most of the migrants are adults. It’s the restrictions on their movement that create the situations in which children get trapped. And while a rhetorical focus on children may seem an easy way to skip the difficult political questions and appeal straight to people’s emotions, it may not be the best way to help refugees in the long run.

The migrants in Calais and elsewhere are not so much ‘innocents’ as people trying to retain control over their lives and making morally complex decisions about what risks to take, what rules to flout, what lies to tell – including, in a minority of cases, saying you’re under 18 when you’re not. If these details are kept out of the picture then it makes it harder to ask the questions that need to be asked. Why should anyone, for example, from small children to adult women and men, have to put up with these conditions? What set of interests does it serve to regulate their movement and encourage people to fear them? And how likely is it that a state which treats refugees in this way will behave similarly to its own citizens?
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 24, 2016 9:01 am

https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2 ... -the-left/

Racist Anti-Semitism on the ‘Left’.


I signal this on the We are Committed to Voting Labour site.


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It has not been removed.



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Posted by Abul Monsur “I am a Muslim and will never support a wrong doing of another Muslim or Muslim nation. Religion teaches us to be fair and just to ALL.” says he.

This follows Ian Leask

Criticism of the Rothschilds is starting to be suggested as antisemitic. Presumably by those who don’t like that criticism, and by friends of Israel who like to cover up the horrendous atrocities being undertaken by the Israeli state by branding that criticism as antisemitic too.

Well frankly I don’t give a damn where the Rothschilds come from or what religion they follow, if any, and I’m not drawing any comparison between them and the state of Israel either. All I can see is that the state of Israel is a grotesque terrorist fascist Apartheid Country, and the Rothschilds are obscenely rich and do indeed own personally, if not 80% of the World’s wealth, then an amount grossly out of proportion to their worth to the planet. There’s nothing antisemitic about that. Fuck it. If only these people getting all up tight about screwing things round to be antisemitic when they’re not, would also spend as much energy directing criticism of anti Islamic hate too. But that seems to be mainstream. In a decent society you should not tolerate either, but accept criticism where it is due.I campaign against Racism in any shape or form but when someone or group deserve to be critised for there actions against the morals of sociaty as a whole then I will speak out no matter who that individual or group Is!
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 30, 2016 11:21 am

In a right state

Brexiteers tend to make a fetish of the nation state as an alternative to the European Union. They see it as the source of popular sovereignty and thus the purest expression of democracy. The remain campaign focused on economic consequences, rather than principles of sovereignty. This has fed a mutual misunderstanding.

The nation state has not always been with us. The ideal of the autonomous, sovereign state stems from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The idea that the source of sovereignty is the will of the people came afterwards, mainly through the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The idea of ethnic nationalism, that the nation is composed of specific peoples, came later still, giving rise to the advocacy of the self-determination of nations from the nineteenth century onwards.

The problem is that nation states have a dual nature. They have successfully built democracies, liberated oppressed peoples, and grown prosperity. However they have also turned long existing populations into ethnic minorities and persecuted them relentlessly. They have harboured expansionist ambitions and launched wars of conquest. They have been grotesquely corrupt tyrannies, and, if R. J. Rummel is correct, nation states have killed 262 million of their own citizens in the twentieth century alone. Yes, 262 million. And we moan about a few regulations about health and safety and agricultural subsidies. Nationalism may have given us Tom Paine, but it has also produced Adolf Hitler. Controlling the nation state has been as much a problem in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as has been promoting national self-determination.


http://fatmanonakeyboard.blogspot.com/2 ... state.html
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Fri Jan 13, 2017 7:06 pm

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2017/01/i ... -like.html


Friday, January 13, 2017
I don't like flags and I don't like nationalisms but...
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for Palestine and the Palestinians anything and everything.

Posted by As'ad AbuKhalil at 9:23 AM
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 15, 2017 10:45 am

OCTOBER 3, 2016
Thoughts on Antisemitism

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Twitter is aflame once again with fiery accusations of antisemitism. As if we hadn’t all enjoyed the thoroughly edifying earlier instalments of this particular three, five, ten-act play? Forgive my cynicism but my initial reaction to this and previous variations on this theme is that many involved don’t give a damn about antisemitism. Nor can anyone seem to agree on what it is.

Antisemitism in the Age of Corbynism

The spark for the latest conflagration has been, as now seems depressingly inevitable for any debate involving “the left” in British politics, something said or done by someone related to Corbynism. What then follows the viral reaction is a process of mediation through mainstream platforms before everyone decides whether or not to condemn or support it and/or the person. The person in question is Jackie Walker, a member of Labour and Momentum. Not knowing anything about her nor being a supporter of either the party or the campaign group means I have no particular interest in defending Walker. I think her comments questioning security at Jewish schools i.e. whether Jewish people are more at risk of violence or oppression in British society are entirely valid – Islamophobia and anti-blackness structure contemporary politics, state violence and discourse a hundred times more. I have rarely if ever suffered much discrimination on the basis that my mother is Jewish. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t antisemitic attacks or that those more identifiable as Jewish don’t suffer far more than me. Not to mention that everywhere is different, and a Jewish person living in, for instance, present-day Hungary would undoubtedly be at greater risk of oppression and violence. But the point stands that the level of antisemitism in British society shouldn’t be exaggerated for political effect, especially as other forms of racism are seeing a marked upsurge in violence.

I also think discussing definitions of antisemitism, as Walker attempted to do, should not be off limits. Indeed, for Jews (of which she is one), it’s a necessity. Such debate (itself a bulwark of Jewish culture) is crucial because, contrary to what many are saying, how antisemitism is defined remains a much-disputed terrain of historical struggle & intellectual enquiry both inside and outside of the Jewish community.

Jackie Walker seemed to question the need for marking, or at least centring, the Holocaust with Holocaust Memorial Day. The way she did this was clumsy because she made it sound like she was minimising the scale of horror wrought by the Nazis, rather than merely draw attention to other groups of people exterminated by the Nazi state or other genocides of recent and less recent history. I remember my grandma and grandpa, a Jewish American POW held in solitary confinement and tortured by the Nazis, always emphasised to me growing up that “never again” meant anywhere, to any group of people. Walker mentions that only post-1945 genocides are marked on Holocaust Memorial Day and asks why the mass enslavement and murder of the Atlantic Slave Trade should not similarly “count”? Perhaps the marking of a day is of less importance here but this is a good question and one which Alana Lentin answers here. Lentin explains that a dehistoricised and “frozen” conception of “race” and racism is promoted in society today,

“the longer history of race as a political project, beginning with the invasion of the Americas through the spread of European colonialism, the expropriation of lands and resources and the genocides of indigenous peoples, the institution of slavery and later indentured servitude, became severed from the telling of the story of race, leaving just the specific moment of Nazism.”


Other comments I’ve seen linked to Walker about Jews being responsible for the slave trade are, however, wrong and dangerous. This is not only inaccurate and helps to reproduce common antisemitic tropes, it is also shows a bad understanding of how capital works – here seen as a conspiracy orchestrated by small groups of people rather than a set of particular social relations that spread and come to dominate society.

But I can’t help but find it more than distasteful to watch an army of pompous, reactionary MPs and journalists, many of whom have supported and constructed Britain’s institutionally racist immigration detention and border regime – living evidence that racism remains a salient arbiter of life and death, not just a matter of name-calling – pile onto a black woman as they suddenly decide to show off their anti-racist credentials.

When people are reacting to what Jackie Walker said, their reactions simply cannot be disentangled from their interest in the overarching matter at hand – a furious power struggle over the future of the Labour Party. People are playing position – whether it’s to take a swipe at Corbyn, to protect the image of Momentum or simply to make themselves look good. Interventions here cannot escape this situation’s own particular genesis, which means that while a discussion about the nature of antisemitism is to be welcomed the conditions out of which this discussion has developed appear unlikely to lead to an enlightened exploration of it.

The right of the Labour Party, bolstered and dragged along by the right of the country at large and the structural tendencies of mediating institutions, have tried everything in the last year to defame, delegitimise and depose Corbyn and cut off the head of a demographic and organisational challenge to their prevailing technocratic rule of the Labour Party. The weaponisation of antisemitism – through the deployment of a narrow definition of it and the false claim of its particularity to “the left” – has, without question, been part of this. But this is not the same thing as claiming that there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party, among Corbyn supporters or across wider socialist, Marxist and anarchist traditions. Because there is and I’ve seen it in all these places.

Corbyn’s reaction to accusations of antisemitism amongst his supporters in the past has been “there is unity in the party in opposing any form of anti-Semitism, any form of racism,” and other statements similar to this. This mythologising about the anti-racism of the Labour Party and the workers’ movement is part of the problem. Apart from it patently being untrue – Labour are a party that seeks to rule through the capitalist state, the wellspring of racism in society, and the role played by trade unions at Grunwick were no anomaly – this mythologising serves to homogenise the historical production of racisms and calcify them into a moralistic framework whereby “racism” is produced by contextless “ignorance” and “hatred”. Antisemitism isn’t “racism like any other”, it has its own particular history and mode of operation and needs to be analysed as such. Indeed, it now seems clear that the cynical deployment of antisemitism accusations by MPs and commentators exemplifies this particularity – these people wouldn’t dream of making anti-blackness their favoured campaigning tool of parliamentary political point-scoring because it wouldn’t and couldn’t work in the same way.

My intention in writing this piece is not to perpetuate the trend for squeezing all writing through the funnel of the Corbyn Labour saga and it certainly isn’t to either condemn or exonerate a particular individual. Rather, I want us to come to a clearer understanding of what antisemitism is, how it operates and its relation to capitalism, broader racism and class.

Antisemitism in Focus

Let’s first define our terms. Antisemitism has wildly different definitions depending on who you ask – I remember at school that kids used to look at me when they made a Jewish joke to see if I “approved” – but subjective definitions can’t really cut the mustard here. Not when definitions of Jewishness itself are also in dispute. There is a country of nearly eight and a half million people, with a large diaspora of extra-national supporters, many of whom will believe Jewishness to be a biological religious ethnos, now consecrated as a modern nation-state on the land of its ancient peoples. To people who believe this to be true, the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism makes total sense, and indeed the two do sometimes overlap. But to oppose the actions of a nation-state, or even its existence, is not the same as wanting to attack or get rid of a particular group of people. When it comes to Israel and people’s position on it, including most on “the left”, my question is always: “yes I oppose the state of Israel, I oppose all states. Why don’t you?”

I think Moishe Postone’s bifurcation of historic and modern antisemitism is a useful one. Postone distinguishes between the centuries-long oppression of Jews since ascendant Christianity and the variant of antisemitism that emerges out of late 19th century European capitalist industrialisation. The kind of power attributed to the figure of the Jew is unique among other racial taxonomies. In traditional antisemitism this includes the power to “kill God, unleash the Bubonic plague and, more recently, to introduce capitalism and socialism.” Quite the C.V. Furthermore, the historical enforcement of Jews as moneylenders under the rule of medieval Christendom gives birth to the long association of Jewishness with money and greed.

Postone’s formulation of modern antisemitism has it that with the rapid development of industrialisation in the 19th century, the attribution of power to Jews becomes that much more abstracted, intangible and totalising – especially amidst a wave of 19th century nationalism spreading across Europe with Jews becoming that much more the people with no nation. The Jew is no longer the moneylender, instead the Jews control the money system. Antisemitism becomes a central pillar for explaining a complicated and confusing world. The huge technological and social change wrought by capitalist development was transforming the environment and upending certainties and ways of life and this became associated with Jewish control.

Of course Jews were also seen as being behind the emergence of socialism and social democracy at this time which might suggest that this surge of a reformulated antisemitism constituted a revolt against modernity itself. Postone here argues that Nazism is constructed out of these elements. The massive explosion of capitalist development followed by war, social catastrophe and capitalist crisis paves the way for a restructuring of accumulation and a redirection of nationalist ideology in Germany based on the ‘volk’ (or German race) which highlighted the virtue of concrete, industrial labour in the service of family and nation whilst abstract financial capital, under the control of the nationless, untrustworthy Jew, must be expunged entirely to restore health to the nation.

It is up for debate whether Moishe Postone’s explanation of the Holocaust and his formulation of modern antisemitism through the use of Marxian value theory is entirely adequate to explain such momentous historical events. However, his exposition of the so-called “anticapitalism” of Nazism is extremely important. The desire to be rid of the “Rothschilds” or whatever other names are used to describe the supposed shady puppeteers controlling global finance (and governance) remains extremely prevalent today among people who identify as conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists and anarchists. Perhaps such a diversity lends credibility to the suggestion made by Theodor Adorno, as well as other thinkers, that this form of antisemitism is even immanent to modern capitalism.

Apart from being an inadequate understanding of what it is that dominates our lives – does the continuation of industrial production and wage labour ad infinitum somehow minus financing institutions (without even mention of ongoing imperialism) sound like utopia to you? – this also remains the source of much antisemitism on “the left”. It is important that while everyone is slinging the mud of antisemitism around people stop to think about what antisemitism is and how it figures in our understanding of how capitalist society works. The idea that behind the hostile coverage of Corbynism is an elite “conspiracy”, or that “the banksters” being “greedy” and “evil” is the cause of all the world’s problems is a framework for misunderstanding the world that works best with “the Jews” at the top of it. One need only search a few choice words on Google or Youtube to see that apparently “they” still are.

by Michael Richmond


https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14738
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 18, 2017 11:32 am

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/in-the-water/


In the Water

By KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

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An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility–they might become our neighbor


And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
–Epilogue, Moby Dick, Herman Melville


THE pax romana of my personal life saw unprecedented peace and stability last summer during the mercifully constant coverage of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The opening ceremony was full of bombast and bad politics, but I still cried when the first ever Refugee Olympic Team walked in, waving tiny white flags and dressed like a college a cappella team. The stadium erupted into a standing ovation.

The network ran segments on the athletes. Yusra Mardini, now an 18-year-old swimmer, fled the Syrian civil war on a small boat headed to the island of Lesbos off the coast of Greece. The boat was overcrowded and, on its way there, began to sink. Mardini and her sister, two among four people on the boat who knew how to swim, jumped into the water and helped push the boat for three hours until they reached the shore. The boat carried 20 people. Mardini, the daughter of a former swim instructor, had always been a talented swimmer, but had not trained for two years because of the war. She was ecstatic to be at the Olympics and gave serious interviews. “It was quite hard to think that you are a swimmer, and you are going end up dying in the water,” she said of her decision to jump into the water to push the boat to shore. This is, of course, a hero’s natural fear; no valiant swordsman wants to imagine being hoisted with his own petard. But those are also the worries of an expert, a master. The official website for the Rio Olympics ran a story on Mardini and her “41st place finish that felt like gold.” Inherent in the article’s title was the erasure of Mardini’s ambitions as an athlete, supplanting them with those assumed of a refugee: surviving somewhere away from dust and death. Athletes are not generally known to feel that anything but gold is gold and, indeed, Mardini is training for the next Olympics.

If there is something mythical in the telling of this particular story, it is because in narrating the journeys of migrants, the form of the epic is hard to shake. Epics tell the story of nationalization. The classic backdrop is an Ancient Greece that has just formed or is about to fall, and the stories often follow a single theme, fate, or argument with a god through generations and genealogies. Epic heroes are born mere mortals and become heroes only when they are tested. These stories break down their impulse to fight: why, how, for how long. These are the same fundamental questions that migrant narratives seek to answer.


THE American immigration narrative is, in some hands, an epic: a story about people who force their indigeneity onto a land that tries to expel them. With few exceptions, it is always a story about water and dry land, the wet and the dry. Imagery of early European immigrants arriving in New York is split into two camps: one involves a boat on the Hudson, and the other, processing at Ellis Island. The stories about immigrant names misspelled, the invasive examinations, the literacy tests, are the first examples of immigration that American schoolchildren encounter in textbooks. These interactions all occurred on land, but the huddling masses yearning to breathe free huddled and yearned on boats in the water. This parallel imagery holds true today: An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility–they might become our neighbor.

In 2016, the image most associated with immigration in the United States was that of a brown man. The American anti-immigrant pejorative “wetback,” translated from the Spanish “mojado,” loses some of the latter’s material meaning, because English forces a choice between noun and adjective. A crude translation from the Spanish makes no distinction between noun and adjective: it simply means wet. The 2005 song “Mojado,” a collaboration between Guatemalan singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona and the Mexican folk band Intocable, became a popular radio anthem during the May Day immigrant marches of 2006 and is equal parts symbolic and literal: “The wetback feels like drying off / the wetback’s wet from all the tears flowing from his nostalgia.”

The term “wetback” originally referred to migrants who crossed the Rio Grande. It has always been a slur, first to describe migrants who would swim across the river in order to enter the United States, and later to refer to any undocumented immigrant. It’s a difficult cross to bear; not only is the river fast, but there are also material obstacles in the way. Crossers could get stuck on shopping carts or tires, or on water plants, like the hydrilla, an invasive species. Often, migrants take off their clothes and put any identification or money they have into plastic bags that they carry above their heads. If they drown, the water will destroy their features, or fish and turtles will eat away their faces and fingers, such that nobody could identify them–not the locals who see the bodies washed up on their shores, nor the authorities that have to respond to those calls. Not that there is money for that anyway. Bodies that wash up to shore do so on the coastlines of some of the country’s poorest towns. Migrants that die crossing the river are called “floaters” by people on the ground, a name ascribed within 24 to 48 hours after the drowning. It’s a taxonomic category of utter anonymity. Floaters are usually naked, which ostensibly makes the river easier to cross, but also dissuades authorities from conducting any investigation, because these bodies are identifiably migrant. Autopsies are not performed. Writing about the migrant dead that wash up on the small town shores generally focuses on the cost to local coroners, funeral homes, and cemeteries, the human-interest angle being the question of where the migrants will be buried. Stripped of the language of affect, it is fundamentally a question of local politics and real estate.


THE ocean will always be the last frontier; its place in our imagination has no rival. Although this is not quite true in reality–there are maritime limits and boundaries–we tend to regard the ocean as a place where man has no jurisdiction. It is easy to admire the immigrant who crosses angry waters to make it to this country. It is a way to admire both the ocean and ourselves, or, at least, our ability to recognize in the immigrant something we value in ourselves, something we claim belongs to the “human spirit.”

In 1995, the Clinton administration revised the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act to accommodate a new policy, which eventually came to be known as the “wet foot, dry foot policy.” If Cubans fleeing the island were found in the water somewhere between Cuba and Miami, they would be sent back. If they made it to Miami and literally stepped foot on sand, they could remain in the United States with legal recognition. Coast Guard employees, acting as de facto immigration officers, would come to intercept more than 80 percent of rafters. The interest in the rafts as objects was widespread, so much so that the Transit Home and Museum in Key West houses remarkably constructed rafts. They truly are a model of human ingenuity–rafts made from planks of wood, bed sheets, melted Styrofoam cups to form a catamaran, even a green 1950 flatbed Chevrolet made buoyant by 55-gallon drums and a propeller.

In 2000, Gabriel García Márquez wrote an essay about Elián González, the young Cuban boy found on a raft by two fishermen in the waters between Cuba and the United States. His mother had drowned, and the two countries became embroiled in a bitter standoff about his future. The media was obsessed with the boy. A story circulated about dolphins having rescued him. García Márquez observed that “an infallible formula for a positive reception in the United States is arriving in its territorial waters as a castaway.” Although García Márquez was famously close friends with Fidel Castro, his observation is more literary than political. Clinton’s policy made just the slightest sliver of sense, not because it implied that winning a battle against the sea meant someone had strong character and deserved to be our neighbor, but because winning that battle meant they were a strong fighter, a good navigator, a person with enviable fortitude–someone you’d want for war. Because darker-skinned people are often associated with the earth and the natural elements, it is not a stretch to accept that they might be sea-tamers, swimming against currents, walking across scalding hot deserts filled with sharp-tongued ophidians, or mountains even orologists would not climb. But once they arrive on dry land, they have reached the state. It is humans who make borders and enforce laws pertaining to them. On dry land, they are subjects. Or rather, you are subjects, some of you.

Images of migrants on boats are painfully easy to conjure because the European refugee crisis has been photographed extensively. Of these photographs, one of the most widely circulated is of the young Syrian boy Alan Kurdi lying facedown on a Turkish shore. His small lifeless body is, to borrow a term from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, matter out of place. He is too young to be dead. He is a baby. When he was still on the boat, he was packed into the vessel with too many people, swaths of brown skin weighing it down, speaking in Arabic, women and children, but men too; men like the man he should have grown into one day–maybe even an “unassimilable” man. Would a picture of that boat have made us cry too? The boat in the water is another man’s problem, just migrants doing what migrants do: trying their best to not die. Since 2014, ten people a day have died in the European waters. Cemeteries are reaching maximum capacity with unmarked graves.

The drowned bodies are full of water from the ocean.

The drama’s done, Ishmael said. Why then here does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:23 am

"The Left is a history of defeats": an interview with Enzo Traverso


The parties of the far Right do know how to win. You group them under the name "post-fascism." Why is that?

The concept of "post-fascism" seeks to grasp a transition process. It helps us to analyse these new contemporary forces on the Right, which are a moving, heterogeneous phenomenon, in the middle of their mutation. Some of them are cases of neo-fascism, like Jobbik in Hungary or Golden Dawn in Greece; others like the Front National have begun a metamorphosis. Most of these parties have a historical fascist matrix. That is true of the original Front National, in my view. Yet the current Front National can no longer be accused of fascism; its leader’s rhetoric has become republican. As for Trump, he is a post-fascist leader without fascism. He is the ideal-type picture of the authoritarian personality, such as Adorno defined it in 1950. Many of his public statements do also recall fascist anti-semitism: the virtues of a people rooted in a territory, as against the deracinated, intellectual, cosmopolitan and Jewish élites (Wall Street finance, the New York media, the corrupt Washington politicians). But his programme stands far from the statism and expansionism of the far Right parties of the 1930s. Most importantly, there is no fascist movement behind him.

Why not speak of populist movements?

I am very wary of the notion of "populism" — which would mean a form of anti-politics — since the common usage of this term brings together opposite political ideologies as one. For most commentators, populism is both Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and the Lega Nord, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Trump, and Sanders.

The Podemos movement identifies with the word "populism"…

In Spanish-speaking countries "populism," borrowed from the history of the Latin American Left, takes on a different meaning: namely, that of re-integrating the popular social classes into a political system that excludes them. In Podemos’s view, populism will allow it to overcome an out-of-date Left-Right divide. This word cannot be used in the same way anywhere else in Europe. The populism of the post-fascist movements does indeed seek to bring the masses together against the élites, but on the basis of exclusion: the exclusion of the minorities with immigrant backgrounds. This means rallying the people by excluding part of it.

Does the word "populism" say more about who is using it than who it designates?

This is a trick that seeks to avoid any questioning as to the causes of populism. Why are movements that use demagogy and lies rising so quickly? They occupy the vacuum created by those in power. The rejection of politics took off at the end of the twentieth century, when politics had its ideological substance emptied out, instead becoming a pure and simple management of power. This is the reduction of politics to the "impolitic." Over these last few years all countries in Western Europe have seen changes of government, but without it being possible clearly to make out the differences, for instance with regard to economic policy. This conception of politics can only arouse opposition, and in the absence of "horizons of expectation" and left-wing utopias, it has been post-fascist parties who have occupied this space. And they have a long experience of rejecting institutions!

You write that in post-fascist discourse, "national identity" has replaced the "nation"

The nation is a historically dated form: everyone can today experience the global world. In the period of fascism, nationalism was aggressive and proceeded by way of military expansionism and territorial and colonial conquests. Radical Right forces today implicitly recognise how archaic this discourse is. Their xenophobia targets post-colonial-origin minorities, not other nations. All of them also accept that we cannot return to the nation-state such as it used to exist. On the rhetorical plane the nation is now reformulated as "national identity."

One of the particularities of post-fascism, you tell us, is that we do not know the way out of it…

Post-fascism has a fluctuating, unstable, and sometimes contradictory ideological content… It has not yet crystallised. The Front National today seeks to present itself as a "normal" political change, an alternative government, rather than as a subversive force. But if the European Union were to collapse tomorrow, and if economic crisis followed across the continent, in a climate of deep political instability, post-fascist parties like the Front National could radicalise, or even take on the features of neo-fascism…


Excerpted from: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3077-th ... o-traverso
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 27, 2017 9:25 am

The Dog-Whistle Racism of the Neoliberal State

AUTHOR
Adam Elliot-Cooper


Cockroaches, swarms and sexual predators — just some words that have been used to describe migrants in the British press. A 60 percent increase in hate crimes since Brexit, particularly towards Muslim women, has left many feeling that anti-racism is failing us. Compounded by a Trump victory in the United States, post-Brexit Britain is ringing with echoes of the 1970s, when fascist groups such as the National Front and the violence they peddled were a daily reality for Britain’s black and South Asian communities.

Pushing the far-right to the peripheries of political debate can provide some respite from the overt bigotry and violence we associate with it. But state institutions, particularly the police, have developed new ways of articulating racism. As anti-racism gained traction in the 1970s, overt bigotry became increasingly marginalized. But by borrowing ideas from the US, a “neoliberalized” racism emerged in Britain, where the state increasingly employed dog-whistle racism while entrenching existing racial inequalities.

NEW WAYS OF ARTICULATING RACISM

One way of reproducing neoliberal racism is through the way crime is depicted. In the United States, “muggings” became a term used by government and police to describe street crimes they associated with young black men. This racial trope soon spread to Britain. The moral panic around the black mugger was famously deconstructed by Stuart Hall and his colleagues in Policing the Crisis in 1979. Their analyses showed how the press, government and police developed a racist “moral panic” surrounding young black men in urban areas. This moral panic led to the “sus” laws, which enabled officers to stop and search any individual they suspected of committing a crime.

ImageThe resultant police powers, which did not require reasonable suspicion, were disproportionately used against black people, and led to the urban revolts across cities in England in 1981. Hall and his colleagues demonstrated how racist language could be shifted away from familiar bigotry towards racialized tropes that framed targeted groups as deviant. It was part of the prelude to neoliberalization, which ushered in an environment where overt racism became framed as running counter to the meritocracy of the market. Distortions to this meritocratic Britain (a black minority) must be repressed in order to protect the freedoms of others (the white majority). It is through this logic that neoliberalism was able to remain simultaneously committed to both the emergent entrepreneurship of the so-called free-market and the racialized social control of the pre-neoliberal era.

The latest permutation of this black folk-devil is the gangster, and it has shaped the anti-crime rhetoric of government and the increasing power of police in Britain over the last decade. Like the racist trope of the mugger, this has been intensified by comparable moral panics around gangs in the US, where the term is also used to criminalize black people and articulate a dog-whistle racism. This was put to use following police killings of African Americans, such as the case of Antoine Sterling, who was identified as a gangster with a criminal history by police and the press.

Prime Minister David Cameron declared an “all-out war on gangs and gang culture” in the summer of 2011. Media outlets played images of burning buildings and masked youths on a seemingly continuous loop. In the midst of the panic were the images of Mark Duggan, a man of African-Caribbean heritage from Tottenham in North London. According to the police, he was wanted, armed and one of the 48 most dangerous gangsters in Europe. The month of August that year saw the most widespread instance of civil revolts seen in England for 30 years. Over 2,000 arrests were made and countless raids, stops, searches and other instances of police violence and harassment ensued.

In the wake of the unrest, both the state and corporate media outlets alerted the public to a moral crisis. Responding to the unrest, David Cameron identified a “gangster culture” with which he was determined to go to war. Yet even those belligerent comments appear almost mild compared to the bigotry and racial hatred that was released post-Brexit. While the language of “swarms” and “cockroaches” has been routinely denounced by the left, the comments made by the police and David Cameron about “gangs” in the summer of 2011 received much less criticism. Rather than identifying black people overtly, police and government used covert racist language, a dog-whistle racism, to communicate a racist message. While Brexit has certainly intensified racism in Britain today, understanding the seemingly unspoken racisms in the undercurrents of neoliberal policies and rhetoric can offer us a possible way forward in tackling racism both old and new.


Continues at: https://roarmag.org/magazine/neoliberal ... le-racism/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Sat Mar 04, 2017 8:42 am

Lords of Disorder

Marine Le Pen’s National Front tries to sow the seeds of chaos to make their far-right rhetoric appear more sensible.

by Samuel Earle

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The French police’s brutal physical and sexual assault of a young black man has sparked a stream of protests and uprisings across the nation. Coming just months before the presidential elections, the political consequences of the assault could prove crucial. While activists have planned a national march against police racism for March 19, the far-right National Front (FN) hopes to use the attack to mobilize more votes.

On February 2, four police officers stopped Théo Luhaka, a youth worker, in his home suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois in northern Paris. Hours later, he was admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery. The officers had beat him, kicked him, allegedly spat on him, and racially abused him. One of the officers had penetrated his anus with an expandable police baton, tearing a four-inch gash in his rectum. His doctor declared him unfit to work for sixty days.

All four officers have been charged with aggravated assault and one of them with rape. Despite video evidence and Luhaka’s scarred body, each denies any wrongdoing.

The police force has happily defended its staff. Spokespeople dismissed assertions of institutional racism, deeming the term “bamboula” — a racially offensive word Luhaka says the officers called him — “basically acceptable,” even “affectionate.” Meanwhile, an internal investigation concluded that the anal penetration did not constitute rape because of its “unintentional character.” Luhaka’s trousers, the report claimed, “slipped down on their own.”


Continues at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/nati ... e-protest/
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 13, 2017 10:11 pm

Post-fascism: a mutation still underway

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June 2015 press conference of far right 'Europe of Nations and Freedom' bloc within European Parliament.


Are Europe’s far-Right movements (the AfD in Germany, the Front National in France, Jobbik in Hungary…) adopting the same codes as fascism or Nazism?

Enzo Traverso: First of all, these movements do share common traits, including their rejection of the European Union, their xenophobia and their racism, in particular in its Islamophobic dimension. Beyond these markers, we can see notable differences. There are clearly neo-fascist or neo-Nazi movements, like Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, etc., whose radicalism is often linked to the extent of the crisis, even if in Greece the rise of Syriza did put a lid on this dynamic. As for France, the Front National does have a fascist matrix, and there are certainly neo-fascists in the party, but its discourse is no longer fascist. After all, it has made a considerable effort at ideological mutation, and that is one of the keys to its success. If it still advanced neo-fascist arguments it would not get a hearing, and could certainly not hope to reach the second round of the presidential election.

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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 14, 2017 9:35 am

MULTICULTURALISM, IMMUNISATION AND RHYTHM
March 14th, 2017

An interview with Alexej Ulbricht (AU) in March 2015, conducted by Jonathan Nassim and Mikala Rasmussen (JN/MR), with introduction and additional questions by David Cecil (DC).

DC:
For many, Britain is an admirably diverse society. In the nineteenth century, London became a destination for immigrants fleeing wars in Europe. In the mid-twentieth century, the subjects of the British Empire (and later Commonwealth) were welcomed in Britain, partly as a much-needed labour force after the demographic ravages of the two world wars. The country became known for its tolerance of differing religious views and ways of life, with a rich tapestry of international cuisine, music, language and fashion in areas like Soho, Brixton and Whitechapel. The social and political means of accommodating this diversity was labelled ‘multiculturalism’, indicating a harmonious co-existence of different cultures. This accommodation was held to be distinct from the more integrationist approach adopted by France (e.g.), which sought to assimilate foreigners into the dominant French culture.

The self-conscious projection of Britain as a multicultural society reached its apogee in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, which elaborately staged symbolic enactments of British culture and history. This gaudy nationalist spectacle, viewed by millions worldwide, included explicit tributes to multiculturalism, notably a dramatic depiction of Jamaicans arriving in Britain by boat in the 1950s.

However, hostility towards migrants and minorities is, if anything, on the rise. The Olympic ceremony was immediately and publicly condemned by a leading Conservative Member of Parliament as “leftie multicultural crap”; the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has successfully entered mainstream politics on an anti-immigration platform; while Germany’s islamophobic PEGIDA recently teamed up with the English Defence League to stage public protests in London.

How are we to understand a situation in which Britain both claims to embrace a diversity of people and their practices, while simultaneously rejecting them? On the one hand, British commentators seem to welcome the enrichment to its culture, but the same voices warn of dangers to indigenous employment, threats of terrorism and even the destruction of our green and pleasant land.

Is this contradiction simply to be dismissed as political opportunism? Or a confusion caused by ‘too much multiculturalism’? Or is there an underlying political strategy in this ‘love-hate’ relationship?

Alexej Ulbricht is a teaching fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), who has recently published a book entitled Multicultural Immunisation: Liberalism and Esposito. This is a timely contribution to our understanding of social and political attitudes to immigration, including the alleged threats to European culture from Islam and globalisation. Ulbricht takes a step back and asks what gives rise to the contradictions at the heart of liberal multiculturalism. He argues that liberalism is a straitjacket which makes multiculturalism possible only in a superficial sense. Liberal multiculturalism ‘immunises’ society by introducing a few safe elements of foreign cultures into the national body. Therefore, the current hostility is not so much a backlash against multiculturalism, but a strengthening of tendencies built into the liberal multicultural project. Ulbricht argues that we must re-think what multiculturalism is, and go beyond liberalism. Some of the answers, or models of an alternative multiculturalism, he finds in the Berlin musical underground and he speculates on how rhythm may offer another way of thinking about coexistence.


JN/MR: What was your initial inspiration for studying multiculturalism?

AU: The idea for this book was motivated by the kinds of things you read about immigration all the time and the way mainstream discourse about immigration seems to have changed rapidly. Hostile discourse was there all along, but the kind of traction it used to have is different from today. In 2005, the Tories ran an election campaign on the slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’, which I remember because it was the year after I moved to this country. The campaign fell flat, but if they’d run it now they’d probably win on that same slogan. Thinking about that got me interested in multiculturalism. What I ended up arguing was that there is a lot more continuity than discontinuity regarding this kind of hostility towards immigrants.

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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:28 pm

Any returns on the election in the Netherlands?
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Re: Hospitality and The Hairworm

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:34 pm

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