LENIN'S TOMB

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

From the mouths of idiots posted by Richard Seymour

As you will have heard, the English Defence League were humiliated in Walthamstow last Saturday. I knew it would go badly for them, but even when I saw how big the march was, it wasn't clear just how badly it would end. You can read the reports here, but it's probably a good idea to look at it from the EDL's point of view as well. In these videos you can see both Tommy Robinson and his deputy Kev Carroll have a massive breakdown, while a section of the UAF rally - most of which is blockading the EDL march - gathers opposite. Robinson cuts a particularly foolish figure, attempting to channel a bit of Mussolini while he shouts and gesticulates at a hostile crowd. I am not complacent about this, but after about a decade of fascist upsurge, this is a real pleasure to witness.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, nazi scum, racism, uaf

Monday, September 19, 2011

The 'white working class' again posted by Richard Seymour

Shall we ever tire, I wonder, of dignifying racists and fascists with the mantle of oppression? They, the pitiable, neglected "white working class". They, the underdogs, oppressed in their own nation, by the politically correct, the educated, the middle classes and (sotto voce) the uppity minorities. No matter how many faces they kick in, no matter how many people they stab, no matter how many times they pose with guns as if in tribute to their co-ideologue Breivik, there will always be those who entertain a patronising sympathy for these primitive oiks and their native moxie.

For example, here is the knuckle-dragging bore, Brendan O'Neill, late of the RCP, explaining to his rich, white audiences that opposition to the EDL is the behaviour of a rich, white clique motivated by class hatred. Here, he is followed by the Telegraph's leader-writer Damian Thompson, an Islamophobic reactionary who takes up the same theme while bringing his historical acumen to bear on it: "The street battles between the Anti-Nazi League and the National Front in the 1970s pitted white middle-class students against white working-class thugs: in both cases there was a sense that the ethnic minorities they were fighting over were almost irrelevant." (Here, just for reference, is a picture of white middle-class students seeing off the National Front in the 1970s). Why do I bother with these idiots? Only because there's a sort of interesting story behind this.

After the recent success for anti-fascists in Tower Hamlets (again, here is a picture of the white middle-class students protesting against the EDL), there was a video that was circulated supposedly involving two UAF supporters giggling like schoolboys over a humiliating kicking allegedly inflicted on a female EDL member while their bus was caught in the middle of Whitechapel Road. I do not know whether the assault took place. But let us just say that from my perspective it would be indefensible if it did, as it would not appear to involve self-defence but merely a brutal beatdown. Further, the two men laughing about it on the video appear to take a misogynistic glee in seeing a 'dog' beaten like this. That is one reason why I instantly distrusted the video upon viewing it. They don't sound like anti-fascists. I know of no one in Unite Against Fascism or its periphery who thinks that misogynistic violence is a tactic of anti-fascism.

Still, the reason Brendan O'Neill decided to write about the subject is that he reads Laurie Penny's columns. And Laurie Penny had written this frankly strange piece attacking 'class snobbery' against the EDL, in response to the Youtube video. She wrote:

It's not just the incident itself which is shocking, but the attitude the video bears out, a smug, nasty condescension replacing real political analysis. The video was posted on EDLRaw – a pro-EDL YouTube channel – and its source has not yet been verified. However, when I shared it on social media, asking for confirmation, a handful attempted to excuse the jeering with the mantra "a fascist is a fascist". The implication was that violence, class prejudice and misogyny can be tolerated on the left as long as its targets have attended a terrifying racist intimidation parade.

Now, having been involved in that social media conversation, I know that the argument "a fascist is a fascist" was not made by someone defending "the jeering". Rather, the person claimed (wrongly in my view), that it made no difference whether the victim of the assault was male or female. This issue should be judged, the person suggested, not as a case of potential misogynistic violence, but rather as an understandable, if tactically misguided case of someone lashing out at a fascist who had come to beat up Muslims. This was poor, but it was also the closest anyone came to 'defending' any part of it, and no one defended "the jeering". However, in the discussion a number of people did make the claim, which Laurie Penny also makes in this article, that said jeering reflects "a distaste for the far-right's working-class base that is as much about prejudice as it is about politics ... Class snobbery is part of the reason that the EDL are on the streets in the first place." I will return to this claim in a moment.

To her credit, Penny acknowledged that "the jeering" reflected nothing about UAF, or any other anti-fascist organisation. O'Neill and Thompson were not as scrupulous. While O'Neill used the issue to incriminate the left and anti-fascists in general, Thompson went further and asserted falsely that UAF describes EDL supporters as "chavs", and had no problem declaring the two men on the video to be "middle class [sigh] supporters of United Against Fascism". Making up quotes and playing fast and loose with the facts is roughly the sort of behaviour that this weaselly scribe was lambasting Johann Hari for not long ago. So, before going any further, it is worth noting that the men behind the video have nothing to do with Unite Against Fascism. The charming personality on-screen is that of comedic hopeful, Anthony Richardson. He, in a public apology for the video (to the best of my knowledge, this is genuine), explains that "We were bystanders and had not been actively involved in either side of the protest." He goes on to say that: "I can categorically state that I am not part of any political party or particular leaning". The pair were not anti-fascist protesters, middle class or otherwise. Nothing they did or said, and nothing about how they did or said it, tells us anything about why people protest against the EDL.

So, let us return to this business about the EDL, the far right and their "working class base". There are a number of things to say here. First of all, just as a rule of thumb, any organisation that aspires to have any degree of political success, will develop some sort of working class support. It is not possible to build an organisation that entirely excludes the class making up the majority of the population. Even the Conservative Party has a sizeable working class electorate. This does not make it a working class organization. Secondly, the research on the far right is limited. What research there is suggests that fascists do not identify themselves in class terms - it is not an idiom they are overly concerned with. They are not motivated by class snobbery. Far from it, they seem to be highly sensitive to minute hierarchical differentiations, particularly to ways in which they are superior to their neighbours. (True, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon claims to represent the 'white working class', but as a wag put it, the guy is a small business man who owns a tanning salon - he actually represents the orange petty bourgeoisie). Further, they tend not to be class-motivated voters abandoning Labourism for some nebulous fascist proletarianism, but rather tend to be traditional right-wing voters - people shifting their votes from Tories, UKIP and other right-wing parties. And inasmuch as there is any research on their class basis, it concerns the BNP's electoral bloc. And that shows that the BNP's working class supporters tend not to be the poorest of the working class, but rather is concentrated in the posher end of towns and estates. Moreover, their acquisition of significant working class support is recent. Like most fascist outfits, the BNP began with a largely lower middle class electorate, as the Democracy Audit survey published in 2005 suggested. Later, they expanded into working class areas. There is no such research into the EDL's base, or even any sure sign that they yet have much of a base beyond the extant far right, racist and hooligan fringe.

Thirdly, it follows from the above that no one who identifies the EDL or far right as having a working class base is doing so on the basis of the evidence - for such evidence is thin on the ground. How, then, do they identify this salt-of-the-earth working class volk? Laurie Penny's article is clear on where the class contempt lies - the two buffoons in the video refer to the woman whose assault they describe as a tattooed "scrote", implying that she deserved a good kicking for being just that. But how do we know what class this woman, or indeed any of the assorted weirdos, thugs and quacks accompanying her on the bus, belonged to? How do O'Neill and Thompson divine the class location of EDL supporters? How do they know so much about what estates they live in, and with whom they share those estates? How, in short, do we divine what their class base is? Did these writers simply look at the EDL dirt, the rabble, the scum, the ordure, and think "this is what working class people look like?" Because, if so, it would seem that the snobbery is entirely on their side.*

* I mean this in a very precise way. There is a conception of class implicit in this argument that has nothing to do with class as a category of political economy. It is not even the old status-culture model of class that underpins official statistical classifications. It is a chimera, a purely sentimental, pseudo-ethnic model of class, in which a working class person is defined by certain sumptuary and sartorial habits, attributes which make for convenient genre markers but which by themselves yield no sociological insight. It is an object of nostalgia and melancholia, the deus ex machina of reactionary polemic that strictly does not coincide with the working class as it actually lives and reproduces itself. That working class, the 'actually existing working class' for want of a better term, has anti-fascists and anti-racists in it. And leftists, and trade unionists. And students, and autodidacts, and other educated people. And people who dress well. Once this is clear, the identification of the working class as the natural home of the far right cannot but appear as a patronising slur; and talk of the 'white working class' a sleight against the actual working class, which stubbornly resists colour-coding.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism, tories, white working class

Saturday, September 03, 2011

Tower Hamlets: they did not pass posted by Richard Seymour

There are a few points that need to be made about the events in Tower Hamlets today, which marks a major defeat for the English Defence League and its supporters. The EDL did not march in Tower Hamlets today. A small number of their supporters eluded police control after the 'static' protest was finished, and eventually managed to make their way to Mile End, before being rounded up. But the EDL did not march, stand, yell, or assault in Tower Hamlets today. They attacked people, and had some ungainly fights with police officers. 'Tommy Robinson' himself showed up, disguised as an orthodox rabbi (yes), and was nicked for breaching his bail conditions. Yet they did not set a foot in their intended target. I did, they didn't. So, to those points. I should warn you that I'm about to claim vindication for a particular set of perspectives. Though I'm aware that this can be boring - when have I ever been proven wrong? - it forms an important part of the analysis for why the EDL were so thoroughly defeated today.

First of all, the EDL suffered some of their worst defeats before they even arrived. Having been unable to agree a static protest point with police in advance of their planned incursion, they attempted to organise various 'muster' points from which they would proceed. They were shut out of Liverpool Street station by the RMT. They were barred by the pubs on Euston after anti-fascists rang the bars up and let them know of the EDL's plans to gather there. The attempt to offer them a rally in the car park in the Whitechapel Sainsburys fell flat, as both the mayor and Sainsburys objected. (I should explain that this supermarket overlooks Whitechapel market. Putting the EDL there to shout their racist filth and lob missiles and fire crackers would certainly have been a provocation.) In the end, the EDL had to improvise a solution, finding a pub in Liverpool Street in which to get suitably Brahms and Liszt before negotiating a limited protest in a pen at Aldgate, outside the boundaries of Tower Hamlets. All of their battles with police took place outside the borough.

The fact that the EDL lost so much before they even started belies the simplistic idea that anti-fascist mobilisation is ultimately oriented toward a set-piece confrontation between fascist and anti-fascist posses. It's a political argument, and a political struggle, in which anti-fascists are most likely to be successful when they counteract pressures to 'leave it to the police' and treat EDL activism as primarily a 'law and order' problem. The evidence of UAF placards being hosted on Whitechapel market stalls and in business windows is suggestive of hard work having paid off. Activists spent weekends giving out thousands of leaflets, holding rallies and meetings, and working hard to consolidate support for this sort of response to the EDL. One of the major rallies hosted over a thousand people in the East London Mosque just one week after Breivik went on the rampage, and featured Norwegian socialists and trade unionists urging East Enders not to allow fascists and racists to march on Tower Hamlets. That argument was evidently won among large numbers of people, and it counteracted the pressure to wind down the counter-demonstration and leave it to the police. This is how racists and fascists are defeated: patient, grassroots work, preparing the ideological terrain, organising coalitions and disorganising the opponents' strategies as much as possible.

The next point is this. The victory against the EDL shows that it was right to have a counter-demonstration. Many of those who campaigned for the ban subsequently asked people to stand down from any counter-protest. This was for two main reasons. The first is because they considered the Home Secretary's decision a 'victory' - a remarkably self-deceiving position, given what it actually entailed. The second is that they feared the potential for violence. This underestimates the seriousness and discipline of those taking part, as no one had any desire to be provoked or allow some youth to be arrested if it could be avoided. But what it also misses is that the counter-demonstration, by altering the situation on the ground and changing the calculations of the police, had a pacifying effect. Had people stood down as asked, had the East London Mosque and others acquiesced in this appeal, then the scale of mobilisation would have been much smaller. Had the counter-demonstration not taken place in Whitechapel, with large numbers of people gathered around the mosque, which was the racists' main target, the EDL would not have had such difficulty negotiating a protest point in Tower Hamlets - and quite possibly near the mosque itself. This would have been disastrous, and one can all too readily envision how the EDL would have availed themselves of the opportunity presented therein. In fairness, some of those who called for people to stand down actually participated in the event - not least Mayor Rahman himself, who spoke at the UAF rally. So the argument against the counter-demonstration was ultimately overcome by the evidence that it was a worthwhile and important event.

Third point. The Home Secretary used the call for a ban to impose a thirty day ban on marches in five London boroughs. I think this is a deliberate attempt to set a precedent that can be invoked again in more testing circumstances. The anti-fascists decided to make a point of defying this ban, in defence of a basic democratic right. They marched down Whitechapel Road toward Aldgate and formed a barrier to prevent any attack on the mosque. When it was clear that the EDL had been sent home without reaching their target, the anti-fascists broke through police lines, held a victory march back up the road, and were received in the East London Mosque. The EDL didn't march in Tower Hamlets today: UAF did.

As I said before, no one who signed the petition, nor even those who organised it, could have anticipated how the Tories would try to leverage this situation. But the fact that they did underlines just how flawed the strategy of calling for a 'ban' is. People naturally want a ban only on the EDL in such circumstances. This is never what the state delivers. What it actually does is impose a general ban on protests in the name of public order, which in practise mainly harms the anti-racists, anti-fascists and the Left. So, now would be a good time to reappraise the strategy, especially given how much energy was subsequently expended on demobilising people in order to defend the 'gain' made in the Home Secretary's march ban. And those who think it makes most sense to call for both a ban and a counter-demonstration should probably reflect on the fact that, in practise, each demand pulled in the opposite direction.

Here's some footage from today's 'victory' march:

Labels: anti-fascism, edl, english defence league, fascism, racism, tower hamlets, uaf

The Metropolitan Police and the EDL posted by Richard Seymour

If you want to understand why the police are not to be relied upon when dealing with the far right, this story offers part of the answer:

Scotland Yard has been accused of underestimating the threat from the English Defence League (EDL) after the head of the unit monitoring hate groups declared it was not an extremist organisation.
In an email obtained by the Guardian, Adrian Tudway, National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, said he formed the view the EDL were not extreme after reading their website.
Today the EDL, accused by Muslims of fostering hate against them, will stage a "static" demonstration in Tower Hamlets, east London, in one of their most potentially provocative displays so far.
The Metropolitan police obtained a ban against a planned march through east London by the EDL, fearing clashes with anti-fascist groups and also the prospect of British Muslim youths taking to the streets to defend their communities against feared racist attacks.
British Muslims have claimed police have not done enough to protect them against the EDL.
In an email sent on 27 April 2011, Tudway told a Muslim group they should try opening up a "line of dialogue" with the EDL, who have been accused of staging attacks and directing hostility at British Muslims.
Tudway wrote: "In terms of the position with EDL, the original stance stands, they are not extreme right wing as a group, indeed if you look at their published material on their web-site, they are actively moving away from the right and violence with their mission statement etc.
"As we discussed last time we met, I really think you need to open a direct line of dialogue with them, that might be the best way to engage them and re-direct their activity?"

Labels: anti-fascism, edl, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, metropolitan police, muslims, racism

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Not banning the EDL posted by Richard Seymour

This weekend, the EDL are attempting another incursion into Tower Hamlets. Local community groups campaigned for a ban on the racists' march. This was a miscalculation. The government was never going to stop the EDL from coming to Tower Hamlets. At best, they would impose a ban on marches and permit the EDL to hold a static protest. In such circumstances, EDL members don't tend to have difficulty breaking out of any police pen and causing a ruckus. But I doubt anyone anticipated that the Home Secretary would actually opt for something as unacceptably draconian as banning all marches in five London boroughs for thirty days. This is an absolute gift to the government, who know very well that marches are coming up, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. As it is, my understanding is that the EDL intend to handle this by gathering at their various 'muster points' and 'walking' (ie marching under police protection) to their 'static' protest point. So, in effect, they get their march through this symbolically important place for them, under police protection.

Let me be clear that from my perspective, this is not a 'free speech' issue. The EDL are about physically terrorising people. Their mode of organisation, involving squads of football casuals, is predicated on the expectation of physical violence, and they habitually do all they can to fulfil this expectation. As Nina Power puts it in this piece:

"It is clear to everyone that the EDL's motivation for marching in Tower Hamlets is far less about exercising its right to freedom of expression than it is to harass and intimidate the local Muslim population. The EDL itself has no qualms about attacking other protesters. The EDL's leader, Tommy Robinson, explicitly threatened student demonstrators last December, and the group violently attacked an anti-racist meeting in Barking in May, hospitalising a female NHS worker."

Nina's examples are hardly exhaustive, and I recognise and defend no right on their part to do this. The problem with the banning strategy is not that it's 'illiberal', but that it is ineffective, counter-productive and demobilising. It never results in a ban on the EDL, but always on all marches. It never stops the EDL from showing up in the communities they intend to target. And it undermines counter-mobilisation by local communities, especially if people get the misleading impression that the EDL have actually been banned (which they haven't). Worse, the government's ban on all marches in five London boroughs, affecting a range of legitimate protests, is not simply a random consequence of the ban call. There is a wider strategic issue on the Left and in the labour movement about how to respond to a whole range of problems, from cuts to racism. The call for a ban segues into the broad strategy of 'winning hearts and minds', which in practise means avoiding confrontation or controversy. This argument is made at length by bat020 here:

Despite all the hype about bans from the home secretary, in both Bradford and Leicester the EDL protests went ahead as so-called “static” demos. All that was banned were proposed marches that the EDL had applied for permission to hold.
In fact, the banning orders made no specific reference to the EDL, instead banning all marches in the city – including any anti-racist ones. So the EDL got to hold their static demos as they had done on every other occasion, including Stoke-on-Trent where they ran riot. In fact, it is common practice for the police to “escort” the EDL to their assembly point – thus creating a de facto march even when the protest is officially a static one.
Moreover, once the EDL has assembled for its rally, police efforts to contain them have been patchy to say the least. On almost every occasion groups of EDL have broken out of their pen and attempted to go on the rampage – in Stoke, Dudley, Bradford and Leicester.

...

Moreover, when legislation is passed giving the state powers to control protests, it is invariably framed in terms of “public order” rather than being deployed against racist or fascist groups. These supposedly “neutral” formulations are then used to crack down on the left and the right, or on the left rather than the right.
We can see this logic at work in the bans on marches mentioned earlier. We can also see it in historical examples. The 1936 Public Order Act banned political uniforms and required police consent for political marches – measures ostensibly directed against the Blackshirts. In practice these measures were deployed primarily against the left, striking workers and Irish Republicans. We can expect an identical pattern today.

...

But there is a deeper problem with the strategy of calling for state bans, above and beyond the documented ineffectiveness of such tactics and the risks of strengthening the state’s repressive apparatus.
The problem lies in the very gesture of appealing to the authorities to “do something”, rather than looking to our class’s own power. Capitalist society tries to structure our lives as powerless individuals, and capitalist ideology encourages us to think of ourselves as powerless individuals. Revolutionaries face a constant uphill struggle to counter these processes and instil collective self-confidence into the working class.
This is why the “common sense” position adopted by much of the left – that of supporting both counter demos and state bans – is problematic. In practice, the first of these works to mobilise a mass movement, while the second demobilises it. That is why those who formally adopt the “common sense” position in practice always tip one way or the other.
Searchlight’s latest policy shift moves from implicit to explicit demobilisation. They are now openly trying to dissuade people from attending counter demonstrations and undermine those who attempt to organise such protests. And Searchlight’s allies in Bradford and Leicester have gone further, branding anti-fascist counter demonstrators as an equivalent threat to the EDL.
The administrator of Hope Not Hate’s Facebook page for Bradford sent out a message on the eve of the demo declaring that “the UAF are just as dangerous” as the EDL. In Leicester, a councillor working with Hope Not Hate told the local paper: “People will have heard about the EDL’s plans to protest in Leicester on Saturday, and about the counter-protest planned by UAF. There is nothing we can do to prevent these demonstrations, but what we can do is to make it clear that any organisation that promotes hatred and fear is not welcome here.”
In fact Searchlight has for some time now been arguing against any anti-fascist tactic that involves mobilising large numbers of people. It opposes anti-racist music carnivals, claiming that such activity “drains and diverts activism away from local campaigning”. It opposes “rallies, marches and pickets” against the fascists on similar grounds – they are, allegedly, “a distraction from the real work required in the communities”. The nature of this “real work” is never very clear. In Bradford it involved getting people to sign a statement against the EDL that did not even mention the word “racism”.
But as the October 2010 issue of Searchlight makes clear, this strategy of demobilisation is not intended to be restricted to anti-fascism. Nick Lowles and Paul Meszaros write: “This debate over strategy reflects a wider debate in the trade union movement over direction and tactics. At the TUC conference there were clear lines of disagreement between those who preferred a strike-based approach to opposing the cuts and those who believed the focus needed to be on winning the hearts and minds of union members and then taking the campaign out into the community.” The tactics being used by Searchlight to demobilise anti-fascist activism are a test case. The intention is to use the same tactics to choke off militant action against cuts and job losses. “Winning hearts and minds” in a nebulous “community” becomes the excuse for scuppering strike action by actual workers.

So, we now have a situation where a very intense 'community' campaign did in fact win many 'hearts and minds'. A petition calling for a ban was signed by tens of thousands of people. The local political establishment largely supported the campaign, community groups ditto. The government responded as they always do, by implementing a ban that seems to be far more aimed at the anti-fascists and anti-racists than the far right. And now there are people claiming success, and many people believe that the EDL has been banned from 'protesting' in Tower Hamlets, which it hasn't. The strategy has been a complete disaster. In fact, the reality is that it has been a gift to the EDL, because the only circumstances under which they were going to be able to march through Tower Hamlets was if the government imposed a 'ban'. That is why it is so important that the UAF counter-demonstration is going ahead.

Labels: anti-fascism, edl, english defence league, fascism, protest, racism, tories, uaf

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

After Oslo: Europe, Islam and the mainstreaming of racism posted by Richard Seymour

Miriyam Aouragh and yours truly:

An hour before Anders Breivik embarked on his massacre of the innocents, he distributed his manifesto online. In 1500 pages, this urgent message identified “cultural Marxists”, “multiculturalists”, anti-Zionists and leftists as “traitors” allowing Christian Europe to be overtaken by Muslims. He subsequently murdered dozens of these ‘traitors’, the majority of them children, at a Labour Party youth camp. His inspiration, according to this manifesto, were those pathfinders of the Islamophobic right who have profited immensely from the framing and prosecution of the “war on terror,” including Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and Bat Ye’or.
Yet, almost before the attacks were concluded, a ‘line’ was developing in the mass media: it was jihadists and certainly an ‘Al Qaeda style’ attack. Peter Beaumont of The Guardian was among the first to develop this narrative, but it was rapidly taken up across the media. Glenn Greenwald describes how on the day of the attack “the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.” Meanwhile, “the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible”. A hoax claim of ‘responsibility’ for the attack from an unknown group, disseminated by a dubious ‘expert’, was used to spin this line well beyond the point of credibility...

Labels: anti-fascism, europe, fascism, islam, islamophobia, norway, racism, terror

Mainstreaming fascism, again posted by Richard Seymour

Forget, for a second, the arguments about the 'no platform' policy. We can return to those. This is not an argument about 'no platform'. Nor is this an argument about that much misunderstood idea, 'free speech'. On Monday's BBC Newsnight, the programme hosted the EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a former BNP member and convicted violent offender. This was shortly after the EDL's major funder had described the attack as 'chickens coming home to roost', and just as there were serious allegations of major organisational connections between the EDL and Anders Behring Breivik.

The official brief, as announced on Twitter, was to investigate those alleged connections between Breivik and the EDL. In fact, what took place was that Yaxley-Lennon was given ample space in which to represent and misrepresent his position. I won't pretend that Yaxley-Lennon was made to look good: he couldn't possibly look good in this context. He looked shifty, sweaty, determined to avoid answering important questions, talking over his interlocutor as much as possible, etc. Yet, this was entirely out of proportion to the intensity of Paxman's questioning, and the EDL leader was permitted to utter, without being seriously challenged, a number of outright falsehoods and misrepresentations. For example, he was permitted to claim that he had no knowledge of Daryl Hobson, the EDL member who apparently liaised with Anders Behring Breivik. This was a lie. Since the television programme was supposedly investigating these connections, the least it could have been expected to do was the bare minimum of research before the programme began. But in fact little research was evident, and Yaxley-Lennon's claims were typically taken at face value. He was permitted to claim that Breivik was hostile to the EDL on the grounds that they are an 'anti-racist' organisation, which is also untrue. He quoted from page 1438 of the manifesto written by Breivik to the following effect:

The EDL are in fact anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi. They have many members and leaders with non-European background (African and Asian)…EDL and KT (Brievik) principles can never be reconciled as we are miles apart ideologically…The EDL harshly condemns any movement that use terror as a tool, such as the KT. This is why, we, the KT, view the EDL as naïve fools.

Paxman allowed him to do this, and did not challenge his account. However, if you read the manifesto, and I have (and you would expect Jeremy Paxman to have read it), you will know this quote (which does appear in some versions of the document) does not exhaust the references to the EDL, and is inconsistent with other segments. In other references, it is clear that Breivik is deeply sympathetic to the EDL and admires their tactics. He is concerned that, in his terms, "conservative intellectuals contribute to help them on the right ideological path. And to ensure that they continue to reject criminal, racist and totalitarian doctrines". In other words, this mass murderer and racial supremacist is worried that the EDL might become a bit too racist and thuggish for his tastes. The thrust of Yaxley-Lennon's lies and misrepresentations was to exonerate the EDL, and Paxman let him do it.

Lastly, he was permitted repeatedly to attack Islam, describe Islam as a "threat" and claim that Muslim leaders shared the ideology of terrorists. And he suggested that within five years there would be similar violence in the UK if nothing was done about the Muslim problem. (This is not the first time he has made this threat. It is the first time has made it after a major European fascist psychopath has gone on the rampage, killing dozens of 'traitor' children). Having thus deflected the blame from the EDL, and planted it squarely on Muslims and Islam, he issued a threat of violence that he denied was a threat of violence. And Paxman accepted his explanation of that threat as a non-threat, and treated this lunatic as if he was a normal human being. Given the circumstances, the EDL was given the easiest possible ride, and came out having put the best possible face on it. This was facilitated by the BBC and by Jeremy Paxman. In fact, there's a history of Paxman being singularly unable to deal with EDL or fascist leaders, despite him having such a mountainous reputation as an intimidating interviewer.

Part of the problem here is context. The media feeds from the media. Interviewers, even braying, horse-faced, upper class pitbulls, essentially work within a consensus defined by the media. They ask questions based on what they think the average pundit would want to see asked. But that in turn is limited by what the average pundit is likely to know. And one would not know from the media's coverage that the vast majority of 'terrorist' attacks in Europe are the fruit of various nationalist struggles, nor that the preponderance of recent preparations for terror in the UK have been coming from the far right. So, Paxman works within a media consensus that has reserved the 'terrorism' label for Muslims, defined Muslims as a major security threat, and repeatedly construed Islam as containing something essentially at variance with 'Western civilization'. Meanwhile, it has depicted multiculturalism as a failure, a source of 'legitimate grievances', and the 'white working class' as an ethnic-cultural entity that ostentatiously inarticulate spokespersons like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon can claim to represent. This at least partially explains Paxman's extraordinary timidity in dealing with racists and thugs.

Which brings me to this: even setting aside the arguments about 'no platform', there is a perfectly excellent reason why the BBC should not host racists and fascists. They're no bloody good at it. They always claim that they're 'exposing' the fascists, showing them up, letting people know what they're really all about. And they never deliver on that promise. Time after time, BNP and EDL members have been brought on television in what are often the most cosy circumstances and permitted to ventilate lies, misrepresentations, slanders and threats without serious challenge. And now, after Yaxley-Lennon's appearance on Newsnight, it turns out he's been doing the daytime television circuit. This thug, this violent racist at the head of a gang of violent racists and Nazis, is being normalised. His ideas are being communicated to mass audiences without serious rebuttal or challenge, and are thus being normalised - and this is happening in a situation where the EDL and the BNP and all the thugs in their periphery should be languishing in utter disgrace.

ps: There's a petition being circulated over this issue, please sign.

Labels: anti-fascism, bbc, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, norway, racism

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Still blaming Muslims posted by Richard Seymour

We understand that the media would rather be talking about Islam. They jumped on the first sign that the killer of dozens of Norwegian children might be a jihadi group, despite its lack of plausibility. They didn't even wait for that sign - the assumptions were already embedded well before then. Long after the rumours had been disproven, and the culprit emerged as a white, right-wing Christian from Norway, many papers still wanted the conversation to be about Islam and 'Al Qaeda'. We understand this, just as we understand the media's discomfort at dealing with an outrage in which the very Islamophobia which they do most to propagate is implicated.

However, if you want to understand the attitude of the punditocracy to fascist terrorism, consider the query put by BBC News to the former Norwegian Prime Minister yesterday: "Do you think not enough attention was paid to those unhappy re immigration?" Or, consider this New York Times article blaming the failure of multiculturalism. Or, look at this Atlantic article, which describes such racist terrorism as a "mutation of jihad" - that is "the spread of the 'jihad' mentality to anti-immigrant and racist groups". You begin to get the picture. The idea is to find some way in which all of this is still the fault of Muslim immigrants. The logic will be: the fascists express legitimate grievances, but go too far. Or worse, in their natural outrage, they have allowed themselves to become like them.

These memes are replicating across the right-wing blogosphere as well as the news media. By one means or another, what is being avoided here is that Anders Breivik's politics were shaped not by the fact of immigration, nor by jihadism, nor by any actually existing Muslims, but by ideas beginning in the mainstream right and radiating out to the far right. The 1500 page manifesto he has written under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick comprises, alongside a set of instructions for little would-be fascist killers, a distillation of standard right-wing Islamophobic material from Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, as well as a regurgitation of just about every poisonous attack on multiculturalism from the gutter press and politicians.

The core of it is the development of an historical narrative detailing various clashes between 'Western Europe' and 'Islam', the two key protagonists. Like much far right literature these days, it is ostentatiously 'philosemitic', or at least expends a lot of energy charging Islam with antisemitism. It has the standard references - the gates of Vienna, the Lebanon, Moorish Spain, Turkey and the Armenian genocide, etc. - with extended quotes from the aforementioned sources. It is pro-colonial and pro-Israel and is concerned to defend the nation-state against 'multiculti', 'cultural Marxists', 'traitors', Muslims and so on. Of course, the whole document is laced with the usual fascist mysticism and augury, and concludes with the proclamation: "By September 11th, 2083, the third wave of Jihad will have been repelled and the cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist hegemony in Western Europe will be shattered and lying in ruin, exactly 400 years after we won the battle of Vienna on September 11th, 1683. Europe will once again be governed by patriots."

Anders Breivik, though not a Third Reich enthusiast, is obviously a fascist of some description. His manifesto, his activism and his links to the UK far right scene, talked down by the Norwegian police, are evidence that he didn't seek to be simply a lone ranger. He has made it clear that his massacres were an attack on the political system, and he clearly intended that they should be followed by others. But the ideas that led him to fascism are not at all marginal. The Islamophobia that has been energetically disseminated by the belligerents of the 'war on terror', the view seriously entertained by many that Europe's Muslim minority constitutes a threat meriting legal supervision and restriction at the very least, has provided the intellectual and moral basis for the mass murder of Norwegian children. No one who is not prepared to countenance this can have anything morally serious or even creditable to say about this slaughter. And anyone who starts from the idea of blaming Islam is placing themselves in a contemptible affinity with the perpetrator.

Labels: 'war on terror', anti-fascism, bnp, clash of civilisations, edl, fascism, islam, islamophobia, norway, racism

Saturday, July 23, 2011

That Viking Jihad, again posted by Richard Seymour

So, it turns out that the Norwegian terror suspect who murdered an estimated 91 people, most of whom were kids, was in contact with the EDL, whom he admired and wished to emulate:

The man arrested for yesterday’s murderous attacks in Norway admires Britain’s far right English Defence League and claimed to have held discussions with it.

More than 80 people attending a Labour Youth gathering were shot dead near the Norwegian capital Oslo when a man dressed in a police uniform opened fire.
A car bomb killed seven people earlier the same day outside Norway’s main government building in central Oslo.
Members of the ruling Labour Party were the targets in both cases. The killings have sent shockwaves around the world.
The media and “security experts” rushed to blame Islamic terrorists. But Norwegian police have arrested a Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik.
Breivik posted messages on a Norwegian website expressing his admiration for the English Defence League.
Among rants about Islam and Communism is the following (roughly translated from Norwegian):
“I have on some occasions discussed with SIOE [Stop Islamification Of Europe] and EDL and recommended them to use conscious strategies.
The tactics of the EDL is now out to "entice" an overreaction from Jihad Youth / Extreme-Marxists something they have succeeded several times already. Over The reaction has been repeatedly shown on the news which has booster EDLs ranks high.
This has also benefited BNP. WinWin for both.
But I must say I am very impressed with how quickly they have grown but this has to do with smart tactical choice by management.
EDL is an example and a Norwegian version is the only way to prevent Flash / SOS to harass Norwegian cultural conservatives from other fronts. Creating a Norwegian EDL should be No. 3 on the agenda after we have started up a cultural conservative newspaper with national distribution.
The agenda of the Norwegian cultural conservative movement over the next 5 years are therefore:
1 Newspaper with national distribution
2 Working for the control of several NGOs
3 Norwegian EDL”

There has been a lengthy queue of ostensible experts filing into broadcasting suites and newsrooms - and no doubt policy chambers and intelligence briefing rooms as well - who have maintained until the last hour that this was definitely jihadism. The basis for this was feeble from the beginning. They said it must be the cartoons controversy, or Afghanistan (though Norway is a secondary player in that crusade). They said it must be Mullah Krekar, the small-time Kurdish Islamist, taking revenge for actions taken against him by the Norwegian state. (Ironically, even the meshuggeneh Harry's Place has done better on average than most of the papers.) I don't mind telling you that I think this was wish fulfilment. That is, I think that these pundits and their employers largely would have liked nothing better than for it to be an Islamist attack, because then they have a set of responses that they can energetically put into motion, and a pre-determined narrative around which they can cohere those responses. Far right racists murdering young leftists, on the other hand, is not a subject on which they can rapidly form plausible responses.

Now, readers of this blog will be aware that there have been many, many foiled terror plots by far right activists in the UK alone. This has failed to receive the sort of attention that similar attempts by Islamists would generate. With the spread of fascism across Europe, these people are beginning to receive a degree of ideological and organisational sustenance that they might previously have lacked. It's no good looking to security measures or intelligence-led operations to deal with this problem. It is a political problem, and it has to be combatted politically through the assembly of anti-fascist coalitions capable of frustrating and isolating the organisational bases of fascism in the continent. This is a task that becomes all the more urgent in the high stakes battles over austerity.

Labels: anti-fascism, austerity, fascism, islamism, islamophobia, racism, terror

Monday, January 03, 2011

Moving On from Zizek (or not) posted by Richard Seymour

I agree with those who say we should move on from Zizek. And I would have nothing more to say about this debate, if people would stop defending Zizek on utterly spurious grounds. However, I have had my ear nipped by a number of people who want to challenge my recent criticisms of Zizek, and the sheer irrationality of the defences offered is jaw-dropping. On Twitter, for example, @khephir argued that Zizek was not attempting to vilify gypsies, but to “immanentize” them. Asked if the specific claims about gypsies were correct, @khephir replied that “looking for truth in argumentation” is “silly”. The claims about gypsies being thieves and murderers are “rhetorical”, not “critical or exhaustive”, and anyway “we’re all thieves and murderers”. If you’re not laughing, you need to pinch yourself. There’s others, but I’ll spare you.

More seriously, though in my opinion not much more seriously, the blogger ‘Sebastian Wright’ has engaged in a critique of my overall criticisms of Zizek, which he attempts to read symptomatically in light of the SWP’s politics of anti-racism, with which Sebastian has differences. He alleges that after I started to criticise Zizek when he made what I thought was an appalling argument about the ‘Danish cartoons’ bullshit (sorry, ‘controversy’), I have “operated via a single strategy: take Žižek’s reflections on a subject, from whatever angle they might be, and simply shout them down with charges of racism: a kind of rhetorical ‘nuclear option’.”

Hot crackers, I take exception to that. I don’t go around baselessly accusing superstar philosophers of racism. Where I have accused Zizek of engaging in racism, I have dealt with specific examples, providing details and argument. In this specific instance, I simply ask: are Zizek’s claims about the gypsies, and specifically the Strojan family, true? Is he merely stating a well-known truth, something which the politically correct brigade is trying to suppress, or is he fabricating, lying egregiously? The answer is that it’s the latter. I find no evidence that the Strojan family are car thieves, and they didn’t murder anyone. It is true that locals blamed the Strojan family for a number of thefts, but it’s also true that they acknowledge when pressed that the Strojans have been scapegoated on this issue. So, what Zizek said wasn’t true and, pardon me, he had no good grounds for claiming it to be true. Did Sebastian bother to check this before reflexively leaping to Zizek’s defence? No sign of it in this post.

Next question: if it wasn’t true, then why would he say it? The context is that he’s denying, or at least putting in serious doubt, the idea that the pogrom against the Strojan family was racist, and that the mob itself was racist. He puts this charge in scare quotes. He’s trying to explain the terrible burden of living with a gypsy family nearby, in order to give a real, material pretext for the violence. I do not say that he cheered on the violence. I was quite specific about this. He championed the mob and its ‘legitimate grievances’ – a familiar technique of right-wing tabloids and shock-jock commentators. He’s acting as an advocate for the poor, ordinary guy whose son comes home beaten up by gypsies, and who lashes out in grief. So his fabrications – and they are fabrications – are an act of apologia.

Third question: can such allegations be separated from the racist discourses about gypsies that are current in Europe, and particularly in Slovenia where this pogrom took place? These discourses have long depict gypsies as anti-social thieves and killers. Such was a key component of the ideological basis of the Nazis’ extermination programme. These discourses scapegoat gypsies for real social problems – there is theft and murder and anti-social behaviour as a matter of course in all capitalist societies. They Other the gypsies, making them appear as an alien intrusion in an otherwise cohesive, integrative society. In Slovenia, there are over ninety gypsy settlements. Gypsies have long sought legal normalization, an end to segregation in schools, an end to de facto segregation in access to property, infrastructure, running water, and that sort of thing. The discourses which dehumanise them as anti-social, a burden, thieves and killers, aside from just happening to rely on anecdotes which – where they can be checked – prove to be untrue, blame gypsies for this appalling state of affairs, and validate their racial oppression. Zizek’s specific claims, aside from being untrue, and hitched to an unjustified apologia for a racist mob, are inseparable from these wider discourses from which they were undoubtedly culled.

It is so important to get the facts right about this, as the consequences could not be graver. The demonisation of gypsies is liable to get someone killed – how’s that for a rhetorical nuclear option? In light of this, to refer coyly to “real antagonisms” just isn’t good enough.

***

I am also, as part of this wider critique, misrepresented over the Danish bullshit: “Seymour simply asserts that cartoons lampooning Muhammed are racist, ergo any attempt to think the reaction to them as anything more than justified rage against an obviously evil act of injustice is also racist.” Those of you who spent time on the blog during that disgusting fiasco will remember that I was prepared to be quite boring on the subject. I went into some considerable length and detail, through a number of posts, explaining why these specific cartoons (not just any old cartoons lampooning Muhammad) were racist.

The cartoons collectively drew on a series of essentialising tropes about Islam that have nothing to do with the facts of Islam, but which have everything to do with the demonisation of Islam. These held that Islam is, from is inception, a doctrine of violence, fanaticism, and the oppression of women. It so happens that this isn’t true. The cartoon about the virgins for suicide martyrs, for example, reproduces with a commonplace idea held about Muslims and their beliefs among Europeans and Americans. But it is not based on anything in the Quran or the Prophetic Tradition. These are tropes which became important to colonial pedagogy because of the encounter with Muslim resistance to empire, in Indian in 1857, in Egypt in 1882, in Sudan in 1898, in Iraq in 1920, and so on. In each of these cases, resistance had to be explained in terms that did not reference the injustice of imperial predation. It was therefore explained in terms of, among other things, Mahometan fanaticism and a propensity toward violence.

“Imperial feminism” in the same era depicted colonised male subjects as being inherently more barbaric in their treatment of women. In practise this conviction, which was propagated by the likes of colonial administrator John Stuart Mill and perpetuated by conservative, bourgeois feminists, weakened the struggle against female oppression in Europe. It formed part of the advocacy for empire, as in Mill’s famous arguments, after the 1857 uprising, for the East India Company’s progressive social role in India. So, the treatment of Muslim males as being inherently more barbaric in their treatment of women has a pedigree, and its function today is not dissimilar to that of its original formulation.

The soliciting and repeated publication of these cartoons, the refusal to acknowledge diplomacy for months before there was a single protest, and the desperate attempts by newspapers to provoke a reaction by talking them up before there was a reaction, is obviously not separable from the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the civilizational narratives that have moralised and rationalised its prosecution. So, again, I charge racism on very specific grounds that the implied depiction of the subject is false, Othering, and is part of the means by which their oppression is validated and perpetuated. Sebastian may disagree with this. But no one, certainly none of Zizek’s defenders, has been willing to engage with the argument on its own level.

Sebastian also alleges that my position on the Danish cartoons logically entails that the “reaction to [the cartoons]” doesn’t deserve real anatomisation. Any attempt to read into them more than a reaction to injustice is written off as racist, he avers. This is not so. I am more than happy to countenance an analysis of protests against Danish cartoons which suggests that they are more than a protest against an injustice. Arguably, other dynamics included the willingness of US client-states to allow people to vent steam over the issue. But it is unreasonable, putting it no more strongly than that, to write off any injustice without proper consideration of the issues. Further, as I argued, Zizek is not plainly equipped to carry out such an anatomy. An important part of his argument was that Muslims were targeting Denmark despite its being a haven of tolerance, despites its efforts to be open to all races, creeds and cultures. But those who follow these sorts of things knew that this was false. Denmark was never the epitome of tolerance, and certainly neverparticularly tolerant of its Muslim minority. And unfortunately, when Zizek comes to explaining what the protests are “really” about, he falls back on a crude, essentialist analysis of Islam and its texts, which bears the same relation to Islam and its believers as Raphael Patai’s work does to the ‘Arab mind’.

***

Lastly, the symptomatic critique holds that the SWP is trying to uphold a liberal anti-racism, in its efforts to defend oppressed communities in the UK, and that my position on Zizek’s outbursts on the gypsies amounts to nothing more than a defensive This ‘liberalism’ is chiefly expressed in, whisper it, “permanent united fronts with Tories, right-wing Muslim groups, and so on”. This works by conflating a tactic, the united front, with an ideology. It also conflates specific work on combatting fascism, with wider anti-racist work and output. The SWP’s position on fighting fascism is simply that it will work with whoever is opposed to fascism. In Unite Against Fascism (UAF), this unites a part of the Labour Left, some of the trade union bureaucracy, mainstream Muslim groups, Jewish anti-racist organisations, the SWP and independents. We are open about our politics within UAF, but we don’t expect everyone else in that organisation to share our perspective. The Tories’ only involvement to date involved David Cameron signing the UAF’s founding declaration. I make no apologies for the fact that Cameron felt that he had to associate himself with this campaign. As for the SWP’s position on the short-comings of ‘multiculturalism’ and liberal anti-racism, this has been outlined in the journal, in the newspaper, and at public events. My view, stated plainly, has been that the neo-Powellite revival of racism has operated partially occupying some of the ideological terrain mapped out by official multiculturalism. Our analysis of racism is unapologetically marxist, our response based on that marxist analysis. But if it’s true that in my criticisms of Zizek I am basically upholding the SWP’s politics of anti-racism, then those politics would seem to be validated here. They certainly have a clear political advantage over any position which perpetuates malicious, racist falsehoods, in a context in which the perpetuation of those falsehoods is actually lethal.

Labels: anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, antifascism, colonialism, europe, gypsies, islam, islamophobia, racism, unite against fascism, zizek

Saturday, August 28, 2010

The 'big one' was a washout for the EDL posted by Richard Seymour

Well well. I haven't time to update you on everything that happened yesterday. You should have been following me on Twitter if you weren't. You can see some pics too. But the big picture is perhaps best encapsulated by the well known acronym: wtf? As in, wtf was all of this hysterical nonsense about 'riots'? As in, wtf was all of this about the EDL making Bradford their 'big one'.

Because the first claim, that holding an antifascist demonstration in Bradford would inevitably provoke a riot and couldn't be carried off peacefully, was the rationale for the police delivering leaflets through people's doors warning people not to attend the counter-demo or risk being arrested - reminding people of how many years people were (disgracefully) sent down for after 2001. It was the rationale for the council, supported by the police, calling a poorly attended 'multicultural event' out of its fundament and telling Asian lads effectively that if they didn't want to get arrested they should go to Manningham instead of the city centre. It was the rationale for local council-funded mosques organising day trips to take the youth out of the city. It was the rationale for all the smearing and nonsense from Searchlight and the Telegraph and Argus and the police and the council - though, to their credit, eight local councillors supported the 'We Are Bradford' protest, and one of them turned up and spoke.

The combined forces of the national and local state, the local media and an anti-fascist group with union funding were all against this protest happening at all, and they put incredible pressure on people. We couldn't mobilise many people at Exchange Square. I would have expected a few thousand people under normal circumstances. In fact, it was closer to one thousand, though admittedly it was a rather boisterous one thousand, with music, dancing and brrrraaap-brrrrraaap aplenty. Many of those present would probably rather have been out there with the local people when they decided to confront the EDL directly. But that would not have been possible with so many police present. And the point, that antifascists could stage a peaceful protest in the centre of Bradford without triggering a 'race riot', and that it is the racists and fascists, not antifascists and not local communities, who start riots, was made.

As for the EDL's big day out, it was a shambles that ended with fascists and racists getting their arses kicked and their collars felt. This wasn't mainly because of the police. It was because lots of the normal crowd were scared off by the possibility of having a fight with local Asians. This is going to be a long-term problem for them. They can't physically intimidate Muslim communities in Britain, which is supposed to be their rationale. They can build a periphery of racists, some of whom will come along to their demonstrations if there's little risk to themselves. They can provide the (almost bankrupt) BNP with a recruiting base. They can write acres of masturbatory 'poetry' for their websites, and produce little black hoodies with the EDL logo on. They can beat people up in small numbers. Indeed, where they think they've got an easy target, they can mobilise several thousand people who are ready for a ruck, prepared to break police lines and go on a riot. But Braford, 'home turf', 'the big one'...? No, the majority of the 'infidels' didn't dare turn up to that one.

For most of the protest, 800 EDL were penned into a mothballed shopping centre project surrounded by large fances. They had spent the morning getting tanked up, on an agreement with the police who laid on double decker buses to take them to and from the pubs. They presumably had more than a few carry outs while they were penned in to the 'Urban Gardens'. During this time, they regaled onlooking journalists with their usual repertoire of 'Allah is a paedo', and added a new chant of 'we love the floods' in reference to the recent catastrophe in Pakistan. When it turned out that a small, multi-racial crowd of local people had arrived opposite the EDL protest zone, the EDL started throwing bricks, bottles and even a smoke bomb in their fury. My understanding is that, unlike in 2001, local Asian kids made it clear to police that they weren't interested in fighting with coppers and that their main goal was to defend the local community. To that end, they tolerated a lot of shit and provocations from the police, refusing to be goaded into brawling with them: a lot of tactical lessons have been learned.

In the end, a few hundred EDL succeeded in breaking through the police cordons and started to run riot. Now, I put it to you that if 8,000 cops, with helicopters, mounted officers, surveillance and superior control of the geography, couldn't contain a few hundred fascist and racist thugs, this is because they were more obsessed with 'controlling' Asian youths (the paranoid racism of West Yorkshire Police hasn't changed) and antifascists than anything else. This vindicates the argument that the state can never be relied on to combat fascism. As it happened, it was hundreds of Asian kids, almost a thousand of them, who appeared as if from nowhere and stopped the EDL in their tracks, giving a few of them a good battering before sending them running back to the police to be voluntarily kettled again. If the high point of the EDL's day was getting back under police protection and saving themselves from the local community, you know it's an #EPIC #FAIL.

The tragedy is that those kids had to do it by themselves. The tragedy is that an antifascist group, and the local media, and the police, and the council have spent months mobilising against a counter-demonstration. The tragedy is that people's energies were not harnessed to building up local capacity for resisting the EDL, such that tens of thousands were out in opposition to the fash, so that they didn't dare try to riot. If that had happened, there wouldn't have been a peep from the EDL. They would have been extremely well behaved, for a bunch of bevvied racists, and left early. Instead, that vital energy was wasted in a campaign for a ban that was only ever going to lead to exactly the pattern of 'static' protest followed by EDL rioting, ultimately contained by well organised local people, that ensued. It's a disgrace that people were organising poorly attended separate events (the 'multicultural event' drew about 100 people at its height), doing everything they could to prevent unity on the day. Lessons will have to be learned from this.

One last thing. How is it that all the news noticed that there there was a peaceful UAF protest in the city centre, and that neither Hope Not Hate nor the Telegraph and Argus appeared to? Why were there surreal reports, obviously written from miles away, with wholly invented details and wholly separate events blurred? What is the point of that, after everything else that has transpired?

Labels: anti-fascism, bradford, edl, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, racism, uaf, unite against fascism

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Bradford posted by Richard Seymour

It has been extraordinary, watching the wrangling over the planned EDL rally in Bradford, and the fight to have a counter-demonstration. First of all, just be clear: there is most definitely going to be a 'We Are Bradford' rally this Saturday, in opposition to a 'static' EDL demonstration occurring on the same day. It's happening this Saturday, 12 noon at Exchange Square, Drake Street, Bradford city centre. There are dozens of coaches booked from across the country to take thousands of anti-fascists to Bradford, though the main turn out will undoubtedly be local. You can book your coach ticket here.

The 'We Are Bradford' rally is organised by the local 'We Are Bradford' group, and is supported by Unite Against Fascism (UAF), MPs, unions and faith groups. UAF is, as you know, the result of a coalition between the Anti Nazi League (which in its original form saw off the National Front), the National Assembly Against Racism, and several trade unions. Its chair is Ken Livingstone, and its treasurer is CWU general secretary Billy Hayes. Among its supporters are senior Labour MPs, trade unionsts, anti-racist groups, and members of community organisations, who speak regularly at UAF conferences. Aside from UAF, Labour MPs, trade unionists and local activists support the rally. Jeremy Corbyn MP, John McDonnell MP, David Ward MP (Bradford East) and Peter Hain MP are among the backers.

Four national unions, including the CWU, PCS, UCU and TSSA are supporting the event. It has the support of Respect councillor Salma Yaqoob, civil rights lawyers Louise Christian, Michael Mansfield and Imran Khan. It is supported by Bradford University student union, and local campaigning groups such as Bradford Immigration and Asylum Support and Advice Network, Bradford Ecumenical Asylum Concern, Bradford Education Business Partnership, Communities Organised for the Common Good of Bradford, etc. It has the support of local trade unionists and youth support workers. It has the backing of Lee Jasper, Mark Thomas, trade union leaders such as Jeremy Dear, Jane Loftus, Gill George, Andy Dark, Tony Kearns, and Sue Bond. It has the support of anti-racist groups like the 1990 Trust, musicians and poets such as Aki Nawaz, Michael Rosen, Benjamin Zephaniah, Lowkey... the list goes on. Public meetings have taken place locally, in the face of what I understand to be intimidating behaviour by the police, to coordinate the response to the EDL. It is, just to underline the point, a very broadly backed national protest, as well as a deeply rooted local campaign.

We know why the EDL want to target Bradford. They think of it as home turf - wrongly, as we intend to show. They think they can mobilise thousands of racists and fascists to isolate and attack local Asian communities, just as football hooligans, NF members and BNP supporters did back in 2001. The polarisation that resulted boosted the BNP in the elections and gave them one of their first national breakthroughs. The EDL, after suffering internal schisms and some humiliating setbacks - as when they had to call off their protest in the East End, and then again in Harrow, for fear that they would be massively outnumbered - also wants to rally the troops with a success. And after Bradford, they'll be taking their rolling tour of race riots to other cities, such as Leeds. I would like to believe that we didn't face this problem. I would like to think that it was merely a security issue, and not a political problem, and that it could be left to the forces of the state to deal with it. Unfortunately, lessons must be learned, and the number one lesson of the EDL's brief existence is that the police cannot be depended on to contain the EDL. This is not merely incompetence, but a logical corollary of institutional racism and institutional hostility to anti-fascists, protesters, the Left, trade unionists, etc. Past events, notably in Bolton, have seen police allow EDL to roam free while beating and penning in the antifascists. Dozens of arrests of UAF came to nothing, but an EDL gang did get to stab someone at a pub later, liberally exercising that 'freedom of expression' that they so vocally claim for themselves.

Weyman Bennett of Unite Against Fascism explained the case for a counter demonstration at a Bradford public meeting recently:

The Bradford campaign has been difficult, however, for a number of reasons. First of all, the police are pursuing two senior members of Unite Against Fascism - Weyman Bennett and Martin Smith - on bogus charges. Weyman is being charged with 'conspiracy to incite disorder', and Martin is accused of assaulting a police officer. Rhetta Moran of Greater Manchester UAF is also being charged with 'conspiracy to incite disorder'. A campaign was recently launched in parliament to defend them. Not every police department is identical in its approach. But I think it's safe to say that the West Yorkshire Police cannot be relied upon to treat antifascists fairly. For that reason, I think, unity, cohesion and discipline among the antifascists is going to be paramount on the day. We need to stick together, stay focused on what we are there to do, and rely on our numerical and organisational strengths to see us through.

Which brings us to another difficulty, that being the existence of two concurrent, conflicting campaigns by antifascists. The first, supported by UAF, you are now up to speed on. The second, by Searchlight magazine and its campaigning group Hope Not Hate, has repudiated all talk of counter protests. It has publicly denounced such mobilisation, claiming that it risks a repeat of the riots of 2001. We will return to this in a moment. As an alternative, Searchlight has engaged in a campaign, supported by the local newspaper, to get the Home Office to ban the EDL march in Bradford on that day. Some of us think that while a ban on the EDL is laudible in principle, focusing on it as a strategy is dangerous, since it will demobilise the necessary effort to build up local capacity to resist the racist incursion.

However, the police, evidently concerned about their ability to manage events if the EDL were permitted to have a mobile parade through the city, backed Searchlight's call, and the Home Secretary acceded to the request. The EDL, for its part, made it absolutely clear that if a mobile event was banned, it would still stage a 'static' protest. And, it is the position of the West Yorkshire Police, and the Home Office, that such a protest could not be banned according to the law. The EDL event is going ahead. All that has changed is that any marching around the city by fash will be unofficial. You would not know this for all that Searchlight's supporters have been going round telling people that victory has already been achieved. So, that is why I have had to make clear that the 'We Are Bradford' event is going ahead - because of a concerted campaign to ensure that there is no counter-protest.

Now for a strange turn. Some of those opposed to the counter-protest now say that a 'multicultural event' that until recently was actually unheard of, has been moved from the city centre to the Manningham area of the city, ostensibly to avoid being associated with/'hijacked by' the anti-fascist 'extremists'. This separate event is apparently being coordinated by the Liberal Democrat council leader, though you'd search in vain for any sign of it on the Bradford Council website. Elements of the local political establishment, it would seem, are now joining in the attempt to draw people away from the counter-demonstration, while scaremongering about the anti-fascists. Searchlight's Paul Meszaros, cited by the local newspaper in support of the council leader's baiting of anti-fascists, maintains that getting the EDL's mobile parade banned was already a success, and that having a counter-protest will just hand the EDL a victory. Nick Lowles has gone further, arguing that it "may well provoke a riot". So, regrettably, the campaign against our counter-protest by another antifascist organisation continues, with an element of smearing by insinuation added in for good measure. No good will come of this.

Now, I am sympathetic to pleas for antifascists to overcome their divisions. I think the divisions that have been evident since Searchlight split from Unite Against Fascism in 2005, and supported a separate campaign called 'Hope Not Hate', have been consistently destructive. For that reason, I haven't used this blog to attack Searchlight or its campaign. Where I have mentioned them at all, it has generally been in praise and solidarity. I like to think that we remain on the same side of this struggle, and that these arguments over strategy will eventually be resolved, or rendered insignificant. But its conduct over Bradford has been irresponsible to the point of vandalism. And I'm afraid I also agree with Paul Mackney, former general secretary of NATFHE/UCU, that Searchlight's current posture of relying on the state to fight fascism constitutes an abdication of its historic mission.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. In Harrow, Newport, Glasgow and Edinburgh, counter-protests were central to blocking the EDL. In Birmingham last year, the EDL were chased out of the city. In the East End, they didn't dare carry out their planned march because of the planned counter-protest. In Luton, where there was no counter-protest, the EDL went on a rampage. In Stoke, where the counter-protest was small, the EDL went on another rampage. And in Bradford in 2001, the free hand that the fascists were given by the police, who scapegoated local Asian youths, resulted in some of the worst race riots in Britain for decades. The Anti-Nazi League couldn't mobilise sufficient forces in time and was effectively suppressed by the police and vilified by the media. This meant that Asian communities were largely left alone to defend themselves against the combination of fascists and West Yorkshire Police. That cannot be allowed to repeat itself. When racists and fascists try to attack a town or city, it is quite right that residents should be on their guard and ready to defend themselves - but they should not be left to do so in isolation.

That's why UAF continues to support the 'We Are Bradford' rally, which is still going ahead this Saturday. Bradford will not be 'home turf' for the EDL. Nowhere will be 'home turf' for the EDL, as long as there are more of us than there are of them.

Labels: anti-fascism, edl, english defence league, fascism, hope not hate, islamophobia, labour, racism, searchlight, trade unions, uaf, unite against fascism

Sunday, June 20, 2010

United East End demo posted by Richard Seymour

There were at least a few thousand people at today's United East End demonstration, an anti-racist gathering supported by the trade unions, religious organisations and local politicians. The crowd mainly comprised local people, kids from the housing estates, a few people from the mosques, churches and synagogues, and a rather small contingent of leftists. It's worth noting that some of those who had expressed opposition to holding the rally nonetheless spoke at it, including the council leader and Bethnal Green & Bow MP Rushanara Ali. It might be relevant to note that there's an East London mayoral election coming up. As far as I could make out, George Galloway received by far the strongest reception at the rally, which was held at Altab Ali park after the demonstration. In general, my impression was that the most popular speakers were well-known local left-wingers such as Rania Khan and Lutfa Begum, former Respect councillors now belonging to the Labour group.

Some, including a few senior Labourites such as Jim Fitzpatrick, had suggested that such a rally could only cause 'trouble'. The logic behind this assertion is obscure, but perhaps it says something about the way the authorities look upon the young Bengali men who turned out in large numbers. Further anecdotal evidence of a peculiar official attitude to said people can be gleaned from the police's provocative behaviour after the event had passed off without disturbance. This included, I am told, refusing to allow white people to walk up Whitechapel because they alleged that Bengalis were violently attacking whites at random. Socialist Worker's report doesn't go quite that far, but notes that police "advised white people not to walk along the road 'because of fears about their safety'", which is ridiculous, nasty, and divisive behaviour. Interesting is it not? When fascists riot, we are told that they are giving expression to "legitimate concerns". When anti-fascists hold peaceful, democratic rallies, we are told they are merely causing trouble. From what perspective, I ask you, can such assertions hold true?

Labels: anti-fascism, anti-racism, east london, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, new labour, racism, uaf

Friday, June 18, 2010

The real eastenders posted by Richard Seymour

You probably didn't hear about this, but the other day some members of the English Defence League engaged in a sort kamikaze mission in Whitechapel, attacking members of the public and ripping the garments off Muslim women. They were rapidly outnumbered by the arrival of hundreds of locals, and police had to lock the EDL idiots in Whitechapel tube station for a few hours. This suicide attack, as it were, was probably the result of despair after the EDL leadership called off an equally suicidal march into the East End, purportedly against an Islamic conference that was to take place on 20th June (that's this Sunday). Now, even if there had been no political response to this, such a march would likely have provoked enormous opposition in this working class heartland.

But there was an immediate response, which was to call a United East End march to oppose the EDL - supported by several trade unions, by UAF, Love Music Hate Racism, by the Muslim Council of Britain, and by the Islamic Forum of Europe. As I've said before, it's important that there is a political response to such attacks, because groups like the EDL and their BNP allies want to polarise the community along racist lines. 17 years ago, the BNP made a small step in this direction by getting their first councillor elected in Tower Hamlets. The council's decision to rehouse Bangladeshi families in Millwall properties that could not be sold was being treated as an act of positive discrimination by the Liberals, who attempted to exploit the issue to win a seat that had come up for bye-election. The BNP, which had been building some pockets of support in the East End in the early 1990s, took the seat and only lost it after an energetic local campaign. They were subsequently shut out of Tower Hamlets for a long time. They stand candidates in places like Millwall and Bow West, but have yet to make a real breakthrough.

Now mark the response of the local Labour leadership. Tower Hamlets council, in the persons of leader Helal Abbas and deputy leader Josh Peck, put tremendous pressure on the organisers of said Islamic conference to call it off, citing allegations of 'views attributed to some of the speakers'. The organisers, the Islamic Society of City University (Isoc), are hardly a threat to anyone, though they are constantly being witch-hunted by the usual dirt from the Centre for Social Cohesion, and subject to repeated baiting by the City Inquirer and the scum over at Harry's Place. The Isoc works in an institution where Muslims are under increasing scrutiny. For example, lecturer Rosie Waterhouse recently called for the banning of the niqab there on the pathetic grounds that she found such dress 'threatening'. Muslims were also attacked in a spate of racist assaults near City University last year, though perversely the university management has used this as an excuse to close the Muslim prayer room. At any rate, the EDL, aware of the allegations against Isoc, attempted to exploit them. And the council seems to have responded by treating Isoc, an entirely peaceful organisation, as an equivalent to the violent bampots of the EDL.

The council also applied pressure to the conference hosts, the Troxy, to cancel the event, saying that they might have to review their working relationship with the company otherwise. That's a pretty big club to bring to any negotiation. The Troxy complied, and the event is looking for another venue. The EDL leadership, admitting that they would have been hammered had they tried to enter Tower Hamlets, called off the demonstration, claiming a victory. The United East End march, intended to underline the refusal of local communities to be divided along racial lines, is still going ahead. It's important, because these racist provocateurs have proven that they are intent on continuing to try and polarise the situation. There are, of course, other activities planned. The EDL are still going to try and march on Wembley, where they are likely to receive just as hostile a reception.

But there is a background of Islamophobic baiting of Tower Hamlets council. This includes Andrew Gilligan's creepy tirade against the Islamic Forum of Europe, through which the media has attempted to attack municipal multiculturalism. The EDL are simply trying to capitalise on that, attempting to position themselves as the cutting edge of the Islamophobic wedge being driven through the East End. The council, as its lobbying of the Troxy shows, is inclined to give in to some of this pressure. The United East End march will be attended by Labour councillors, including Helal Abbas, but it is only fair to note that the East London papers report pressure on the anti-fascists from some local politicians. Predictably, Jim Fitzpatrick, who saw off George Galloway's challenge in the 2010 election by baiting Muslims, has attacked the anti-fascists. You can't expect better from someone like Fitzpatrick. Sadly, Rushanara Ali, who took Galloway's former constituency back for Labour, also called for the march to be called off. It may be of relevance that both local MPs are backing Oona King's bid for mayor against Ken Livingstone. Now Tower Hamlets council, symbolising its commitment to "community cohesion", is flying the England flag from the Town Hall for the duration of the World Cup. Such pointless, trivial gestures neither fulfil their anti-racist mandate nor placate the racist right.

I think this has to be contextualised in terms of the turn being taken by the Labour Party nationally. If the last decade was marked by a revival of neo-Powellite ideology on the Labour right, among the Blairites in particular, that ideological turn is now being aggressively expounded by Labour leadership contenders over, eg, immigration. In a self-serving gesture, they claim that such politics will enable Labour to make amends with "the white working class". This is a cynical move. I suspect that people like Balls believe that by conceding ground to racist hysteria, they can both capitalise on it and contain it. That is reckless, and foolish. Caving in to the racists just gives them more credibility, more armoury, and more space to build in. It benefits the right, in more ways than one. Is it not alarming to Labour members that David Cameron could actually attack Balls from the left over this, characterising the latter as Labour's Alf Garnett? The other context, of course, is the local collapse of Respect. It has one councillor left in Tower Hamlets and no MPs. This doesn't mean its support is negligible, or that it couldn't carry on as a viable local organisation, but its previous clout might have allowed it to resist some of this rightward lurch. I hope it will do well in the upcoming East London mayoral ballot. Because it is the Fitzpatricks of the East End, not the antifascists, who are pursuing genuinely divisive politics, setting working class communities against one another, and attacking the anti-racist consensus that had been established until recently, and giving ammunition to the racists.

Labels: anti-fascism, anti-racism, blairites, east london, islamophobia, multiculturalism, new labour, tower hamlets, uaf, working class