Source: Infernal Machine

We now have a country where an act of mass murder ‘inspires’ people to openly threaten Muslims with similar actions.

To put it simply, societies tumble off the abyss and become what the medieval historian RI Moore once called ‘persecuting societies’ because the forces that might have prevented this outcome  either don’t recognise the warning signs in time or they don’t act on these signs when they have the chance to do something about them.

Here in the UK it is becoming increasingly clear that a transformation has taken place that goes beyond the shenanigans and political convulsions in Westminster, and will not be resolved by ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexits or arguments about the kind of deal on offer.  Consider the events of the last week.

Last Saturday a Romanian woman in Doncaster was savagely beaten by a group of teenagers who called her a ‘Polish cunt’ and told her to ‘fuck off to your country.’ The following Monday the yellow jacket thug James Goddard and his followers virtually took over a court hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, and forced the judge to flee the court. Goddard’s followers went on to storm the Attorney General’s office.

Last Thursday the Labour MP for Brighton Kempton Lloyd Russell-Moyle was attacked on the street and called a traitor because he called for a delay to Brexit.  In the same week MPs were advised to take taxis to and from Westminster in case they were attacked, and  Independent Group MP Anna Soubry announced that she no longer goes home because she is afraid of attacks.

Yesterday the monitoring group Tell Mama reported a staggering 593% rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes across the UK since the Christchurch massacre. These incidents included attacks on five Birmingham mosques with sledgehammers, another attack on a mosque Scotland, and the stabbing of a teenager in Surrey.  In Oxford, Southampton and north London, Muslim men and women reported gun gestures or firearms noises being directed at them, and verbal abuse that included shouts of ‘you need to be shot’, ‘you deserve it’ and ‘Muslims must die.’

There was a time when you might have expected people who feel like this to keep their mouths shut—in public at least—in the aftermath of a white supremacist atrocity in which  49 Muslims were savagely murdered.  Instead being chastened by the massacre in Christchurch, however, it’s clear that the perpetrators of these hate crimes were inspired by it, and felt confident enough to actually threaten British Muslim men and women with something similar.

Contemptuous disregard for the rule of law; threats against MPs; violent attacks on foreigners; the exultant celebration of mass murder—if these are not warning signs then I don’t know what is.

None of this fell out of the sky. It’s been clear ever since 2016 that the referendum has actively emboldened and empowered the older far-right and its newer variants, and that Brexit has given these forces a cause celebre and a new constituency that is willing to listen to an ethnonationalist agenda that is profoundly hostile to Muslims, foreigners and immigrants, and also to the Westminster ‘traitors’ and ‘liberal’ elites who supposedly facilitated the foreign (and Muslim) ‘invasion.’

This is why Jo Cox was killed. Yet even when an MP was murdered by a white supremacist shouting ‘Britain first’, this horrific crime was dismissed as the act of an isolated ‘loner’ with mental health issues.

Three and a half years later, we now have a country where an act of mass murder ‘inspires’ people to openly threaten Muslims with similar actions. We would be very foolish indeed to dismiss the possibility of these threats being realised, and if we are to have any possibility of preventing the country sinking any deeper into the toxic political sewer, we need to recognise that this transformation is partly due to Brexit.

Neither the Brexit right nor the Lexit left likes to admit that Brexit has contributed to this emboldenment and empowerment.  To do so would undermine the image of Brexit as a popular rebellion against the ‘elite’ which both the right and some sectors of the left still adhere to.

Suggest that Brexit is, in part, an ethnonationalist project with racism and xenophobia at its core, and you’re likely to hear the same banal arguments that ‘not all Leavers are racists’ or ‘ it’s not racist to be concerned about immigration’ or ‘a few bad apples don’t define a country’ etc, etc

But we need to join the dots, even if they produce a picture that we would prefer not to see. We need wide and deep mobilisations across the country to defend our communities and uphold the diverse, open society that an emboldened and empowered extreme right is now looking to ‘take back’.

We need to take the country back – from them. And unless we can do this, these forces will get stronger and more vicious, till it is no longer possible to ignore or escape from them.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Source: Infernal Machine

Time for politicians to stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism. 

It’s become a cliché in far-right and conservative circles to claim that ‘Islam is not a race’, that Islamophobia doesn’t exist, and that hostility towards Muslims may have some kind  of legitimacy.   At best these arguments are a product of confusion and ignorance, and at worst a deliberate obfuscation intended to avoid accusations of racism.   Either way they are extremely useful to the  ‘new’ far-right and also to ‘hard conservatives’ alike, who have placed Islam and Muslims at the centre of their 21st century ‘clash of civilisations.’

The idea that ‘Islam is not a race’ enables the right to say all the things it used to say about Indians, Pakistanis and Arabs while all the time maintaining that it isn’t their ‘race’ they’re concerned about, it’s just their ‘religion’ or their ‘culture’.  Such arguments allow you depict Muslims as terrorists or terrorist supporters, barbarians, rapists, and invaders without ever having to mention race or racism overtly.

Such arguments assume that racism is only racism when it’s based on  biology or skin colour or the size of one’s skull.  They nevertheless have a powerful political salience, echoing  older confrontations between Islam and Christendom in which Islam was identified as the antithesis of civilisation.  They make it possible for barely-educated psychopathic killers and Oxford graduates to trace grand historical trajectories from the Battle of Tours/Poitiers and Charles Martel, through the Siege of Vienna in 1688 to the  21st century ‘Muslim invasion of Europe’ by immigrants and refugees.

In this way mainstream pundits like Douglas Murray and knuckledragging nazis and white supremacists have been able to propagate paranoid narratives about the Islamicisation of Europe and the ‘end of Europe’ that reach from the pages of the Spectator to the fringes of social media, where violent dreams of murderous ‘resistance’ are gaining traction.

The manifesto produced by the murderer calling himself calling himself ‘Brentan Tarrant’ makes it clear that he was an out-and-out racist, bigot and ethnonationalist.  No one will be surprised that he cited ‘Justiciar Knight Brievik’ as an inspiration for the mass murder he perpetrated yesterday, and said that he had ‘received a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights.’  Or that Tarrant listed a number of white supremacist murderers including Dylan Roof and the Finsbury Park Mosque killer Darren Osbourne.

Like his hero Breivik, Tarrant’s manifesto was steeped in paranoid and explicitly racist narratives of ‘white genocide’ and ‘the ‘great replacement’, which identity migrants, refugees and Muslims as a common threat to Europe, and he made it clear that his murders were intended  ‘ to directly reduce immigration rates to Europe by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves.’

In killing Muslims in Christchurch in order to ‘save Europe’, Tarrant’s savage atrocities demonstrate how the white supremacist movement that he belongs to has become ‘borderless’ in the age of social media, in much the same way that the transnational terrorist jihad has become borderless.

It’s tempting – and convenient – to depict Tarrant as just another lone psychopath who has been nurtured in the danker corners of the Internet, but the attitudes that led him to kill yesterday belong to a wider spectrum that reaches above and below the media radar.   In his manifesto Tarrant praised the pro-Trump conservative Candace Owens, who only recently launched the Turning Point UK chapter with the observation that Hitler was ‘ok’ until ‘ he became too ‘globalist.’  Tarrant also hailed Donald Trump as a ‘symbol of white identity and common purpose.’

It is clear that the election of Donald Trump has coincided with an increase in far-right extremism.    According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre 2018 report,at least 40 people in the U.S. and Canada were killed last year by individuals ‘motivated by or attracted to far-right ideologies,  embracing ideas and philosophies that are cornerstones of the alt-right.’ The SLPC linked the growth of alt-right groups and ‘fight clubs’ to the election of Trump, which  ‘ has opened the White House doors to extremism, not only consulting with hate groups on policies that erode our country’s civil rights protections, but also enabling the infiltration of extremist ideas into the administration’s rhetoric and agenda. Once relegated to the fringes, the radical right now has a toehold in the White House.’

This ‘toehold’ is reflected, among other things,  in Trump’s policies at the border, in his ‘Muslim ban’ and his depictions of Muslims and migrants in general, in his tacit support for white supremacists such as the demonstrators at Charlottesville, in the incitement to violence that characterised his election campaign.  Only two days ago Trump  told Breitbart News ‘ I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.’

Yesterday the Christchurch murderer ‘went bad.’   And there will almost certainly be others like him, who will take encouragement from a US president who explicitly threatened his political opponents with violence, and will take inspiration from the fear and loathing of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular that have become the cornerstones of the far-right resurgence.

According to a 2018 Europol report ‘The violent right-wing extremist spectrum is expanding, partly fuelled by fears of a perceived Islamisation of society and anxiety over migration.’

These ‘fears’ produced the murderous hatred that we saw yesterday.   It’s time to call out those who propagate them – some of whom are now shedding crocodile tears over Christchurch.

It’s time for politicians to show some real courage and stop pandering to the vicious anti-immigrant hostility that is becoming a seedbed for fascism.  It’s time for the security services to treat the far-right threat with the seriousness it deserves.

It’s time to recognise that Islamophobia is real – and it can be deadly.  And even as we mourn the dead of Christchurch, we should reject the rampant racist ethnonationalism that was unleashed yesterday, and stand up for the diverse, open societies that Brentan Tarrant and his cohorts would like to destroy.

Source: Infernal Machine

Anti-feminist, anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT – what’s not to like for Tory headbangers in the just launched far-right Turning Point?

For some of them it’s a famous victory in a wider ethnonationalist assault on the international institutions that underpin ‘globalism.’

Others see it has an opportunity to reconfigure British society.   But what kind of society do they want to build?

Some of the answers can be found in the campus-based organisation Turning Point USA, which launched its British version this weekend with a ghoulish cast of ‘young people’, most of whom are connected to the Tufton Road/Matthew Elliot stable.

TP is chaired by ex-Bullington Club yob and millionaire son George Farmer, who has given more than £60, 000 to the Tory Party and received an invitation dinner with Theresa May as a sign of her appreciation.

All of these dismal luminaries appeared in a clunkingly dim video that went out on social media over the weekend.

The Left believes they have a monopoly over young people. It's time us young people fought back. We are so excited to announce the social media launch of Turning Point UK, which will be launching across UK campuses soon. #TPUK #TimeforaTurningPoint pic.twitter.com/xb62JN539Z

— Turning Point UK (@TPointUK) February 1, 2019

As the accompanying tweet suggests, Turning Point wants to convince ‘young people’ that they have been brainwashed by the left since, like, forever, and promote a new cultural revolution against this ideological tyranny.

It’s fair to say that the British video is not much of a call to arms, with its half-baked, barely-articulate messaging, and a succession of pampered buffoons asking questions such as ‘Why does the left hate everything good?’ that are so devoid of even a semblance of meaning that they begin to make you feel like the guy in Munch’s The Scream just for having heard such idiocy.

But TP’s aspiration to turn British youth on to ‘conservative values’  has attracted support from from the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel and Steve Baker.   So it’s worth taking a bit of a closer look into this dank well and see what’s lying at the bottom of it.

Turning Point USA was established in 2012 by a young Republican activist named Charlie Kirk (on the right of the featured picture).  Its website describes itself as a ‘conservative grassroots movement’ whose mission is to ‘identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.’

These goals are accompanied by ‘innovative social messaging’ like this.

 Much of this would be laughable, but TPUSA is only unintentionally funny.   It now has more than 1000 college chapters in the US.  Its annual budget has gone up from $78, 890 in 2012 to $8, 248,059 in 2016.

As a registered charity, many of its donors are not known, but an International Business Times investigation found that most known financial contributions came from big Republican donors, many of whom, like Kirk himself, are avid Trumpites.    According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, many  TPUSA donors are connected to the energy industry and what Kirk calls the ‘fossil-fuel space.’

TPUSA also published a booklet for college students with a forward by Kirk, on ’10 Ways in which fossil fuels improve our lives.’

In addition to being anti-climate change TPUSA is anti-feminist and anti-LGBT, and some of its college chapters are steeped in serious political slime.  The national organisation has compiled a McCarthyite black list of ‘biased’ professors deemed to be too leftist or liberal or too willing to promote ‘myths’ about fossil fuels and climate change.

Charlie Kirk is a contributor to Steve Bannon’s alt-right propaganda site Breitbart.  A number of TPUSA campus events have been supported and attended by white supremacist and white national organisations, which is not entirely surprising given that TPUSA’s National Field Director Crystal Clanton once texted ‘ I hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.’

None of this stopped Kirk from claiming that ‘Turning Point needs more Crystals; so does America.’

And why not?  Because racism is like, just a label that intolerant libtards and cucks use to brainwash you, right?

Despite claims to the contrary, TPUSA also has connections to far-right organisations such as the ‘western chauvinist’ Proud Boys and American Renaissance.  In February,  Kaitlin Bennett, president of the TPUSA Kent State University resigned from the organisation because TPUSA’s field director Frankie O’Laughlin was ‘liking tweets from notorious Charlottesville attendee and white nationalist icon, James Allsup.’

One former Afro-American employee later left the organisation after attending a TPUSA national student summit, where speakers ‘ spoke badly about all these black women having babies out of wedlock.  It was really offensive.’

TPUSA events have also had a notable anti-Muslim tinge.   Last month Sophia Witt, director of Israel outreach for TPUSA told its annual student summit to ‘expose Islam’ for the ‘ugly thing’ that it is at a session on ‘ Addressing Terrorism on Campuses.

In a slideshow Witt accused Muslim students and professors or promoting terrorism and claimed ‘ I don’t even want to call it “radical Islam” – it’s just Islam.’

In addition to this TPUSA is anti-feminist, anti-Black Lives Matter, and anti-LGBT.

In effect, therefore the initiative that Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel praised yesterday is part of a ideological and financial pathway in which radicalised mainstream conservatism merges with the far-right – supported by astroturf lobbying groups.  Its a pathway that connects Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Farage, Anne-Marie Waters, Aaron Banks’s Westmonster site, Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, and the extreme right of the Tory Party.

That is bad enough, but TP’s arrival in the UK is also an indication of how Brexiters on both sides of the Atlanic see the future of the country: an asset-stripped libertarian theme park with government stripped to the bone, purged of ‘leftist brainwashing’ about feminism, climate change, racism etc – all dressed up as a cultural ‘free speech’ insurrection and financed by corporations and millionaires.

And you wonder why so many of us oppose Brexit?

Because it was obvious, all the way back in 2016 that something like was being planned.  The arrival of Turning Point is just one small step towards its realisation.

Source: Infernal Machine

In the panoply of sleazy demagogues, charlatans, populists, white supremacists and outright fascists who have become paladins of the people these last few years, Orbán has acquired a special place in the far-right imagination.

One minute you’re staring into their eyes and nodding approvingly as they tell you that your heritage and your identity are in grave danger from immigrants and ‘aliens’, and then you realise that you and your country have got poorer while your would-be saviours have mysteriously got a lot richer.

Take Hungary’s Victor Orbán. In the panoply of sleazy demagogues, charlatans, populists, white supremacists and outright fascists who have become paladins of the people these last few years, Orbán has acquired a special place in the far-right imagination.

Orbán’s Fidesz party has been in power since 2010, but he first established his international reputation as a defender of ‘Christian Europe’ in 2015, when Hungary began trapping migrants within its borders even though most of them didn’t even want to stay there, and were trying to get to Germany.

After allowing his police to attack migrants with tear gas and water cannons, Orbán went on to build a border fence along Hungary’s borders with Serbia and Croatia.

When the EU asked Hungary to accept quotas of refugees, Orbán refused, declaring that Muslim immigrants were incompatible with Hungary’s Christian culture.  Such defiance led Marine le Pen to describe him gushingly as ‘the only one protecting the external borders.’

This was how Orbán appeared to his foreign admirers and perhaps to himself: a modern incarnation of the Magyar soldiers who once patroll the perimeter of the Hapsburg-Ottoman militargrenze (military frontier), now defending Hungary and ‘Christian Europe’ from the refugee hordes.

In the face of the ‘globalists’ and ‘liberal elites’ intent on promoting Muslim immigration, Orbán proudly proclaimed Hungary to be an ‘illiberal democracy’ and a ‘Christian democracy’.  He identified the far-right’s bete noir George Soros as the enemy of  Christian Hungary and Europe, passing a ‘Stop Soros’ law enabling the government to fine and imprison NGOs who helped refugees.

Orbán also closed down the Soros-funded Central European University, in order to defend Hungary against political enemies he described as ‘ not national, but international. They do not believe in work, but speculate with money. They have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.’

No prizes for guessing who those enemies might be.  But Orbán’s many fans, from Nigel Farage to Steve Bannon, didn’t ask.  Orbán also acquired a fan in Vladimir Putin, giving Russia a 12 million euro contract to build Hungary’s only nuclear plant.

All this has transformed Orbán into a key player for the European far-right; the mitteleuropean strong man who is now supporting the Salvini-Polish proposal to remodel the European Union on far-right, anti-immigrant lines in the forthcoming EU parliamentary elections.

Until recently Orbán was rarely questioned inside Hungary itself, even when his party gerrymandered electoral boundaries to keep itself in power, and set out to control the media and judiciary.   Orbán also cultivated an oligarchical  political network based on gross levels of corruption and nepotism, handing out jobs and contracts to his friends and family, and enriching himself in the process.

Most Hungarians didn’t know about this,  because Fidesz controls ninety percent of Hungary’s newspapers, television and radio stations.  That’s what ‘illiberal democracy’ means.  It’s a new kind of fascism that acquires power not through streetfighting and military coups, but through stealth and a veneer of legality – culminating in a reconfiguration of norms in favour of a particular party or leader.

Orbán has played this game well,  but too much power can go to anyone’s head.

This month he installed himself in Budapest’s Buda Palace complex – the former seat of the Hungarian government more than four centuries ago – which Orbán is having expensively refurbished.  No one knows how much this restoration has cost, but estimates reach as high as $92m.  He has even got a luxury restaurant to provide the food for its canteen.

But then last December Orbán’s government passed a law raising the overtime cap from 250 hours 400 hours, and giving companies three years to pay workers for it instead of one.  400 hours is a lot of unpaid overtime, in a country where forty-two percent of the population earn the minimum wage and have no choice but to work extra hours.

The government justified this measure because of Hungary’s labour shortage – a shortage caused partly by high rates of Hungarian emigration – some 350,000 people, and also – who would have thought it? – a lack of immigration.

For the first time since coming to power, Orbán found himself under serious pressure, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets and rejected the government’s ‘slave law.’  These demonstrations are still ongoing.  Hungarian trade unions are now threatening a general strike on January 19, unless Orbán concedes a series of demands including the abrogation of the ‘slave law’ and a public sector pay rise.

Suddenly, it seems, the saviour of Christian Europe may no longer be impregnable.   And that is good news, not only for Hungary but in the other ‘illiberal democracies’ that have sprung up in Eastern Europe in Slovakia, Serbia and Poland, where civil society has begun to mobilise against their own authoritarian governments

But Orbán is one leader who needs to be weakened.  And better still he needs to go.  Because Hungary doesn’t need politicians like this.  And Europe doesn’t need them either.

And instead of looking to men like this to save us, we would do better to look more closely at how we can save ourselves from them.

Source: Infernal Machine

The far-right Vox party is a direct threat to everything that Spanish democracy has achieved since the death of Franco.

Even the Partido Popular (PP), which swept up much of the post-Franco right, was essentially a mainstream conservative party rather than a far-right right formation.

As we now know, the mainstream is no longer what it was, and last December Spain joined the European trend when the extreme-right party Vox unexpectedly won 12 seats in the Andalusian regional elections. Founded only four years ago, Vox is now entering into coalition in the Andalusian regional government with the PP and the new ‘anti-corruption’ centre-right party Ciudadanos (CS).

Where the PP contained elements of Francoism, in its personnel and its political behaviour, Vox is the full package, combining ‘old’ Spanish fascism with its newer Trumpian variants.

Vox proposes to deport 58,000 undocumented migrants. It wants to eradicate Spain’s autonomous regions completely and devolve the powers of all regional governments back to the central government. Like its counterparts elsewhere, it loathes ‘feminazis’ and ‘feminist supremacists’.

It wants to change domestic violence laws to prevent ‘false cases’ against men, remove all state grants for ‘radical feminist’ organisations, and uphold the ‘natural family’ based on male and female parents rather than same-sex marriage. It also wants to rescind the Law of Historical Memory, which has enabled excavations of mass graves containing victims of Francoism both during and after the Civil War.

In true Trumpian fashion Vox also wants to cut income and corporate taxes and build ‘walls’ in the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. Anyone who has been to both exclaves will know that the giant security fences erected around them already are difficult enough to cross, but Vox, like Trump, is fond of political symbols.

All this is steeped in the very particular iconography and historical traditions of the Spanish far-right.

Vox wants to ban the construction of ‘fundamentalist’ mosques and – somewhat laughably considering its own position on gender rights – mosques that ‘disparage women’. It wants to change Andalusia’s regional day to celebrate the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

During its electoral campaign various Facebook ads showed Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal riding through Andalusia with a group of mounted riders, accompanied by stirring music and the slogan ‘The Reconquest will begin in Andalusian lands.’

Franco also depicted his 1936 coup as a ‘reconquest’ and presented himself as a new El Cid waging war against the Marxist hordes, so Vox knew what it was doing here.

What explains Vox’s breakthrough?   The answer lies partly in the politics and economy of Andalusia itself.  For years Andalusia has the poorest region in Spain, with 37.3 percent of the population ( approx 3 million people) living in poverty and an average monthly salary of 327 euros.  The region has been ruled for nearly forty years by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and the until recently the Socialists regarded Andalusia as their political fiefdom.

Both the PSOE and the PP have drained votes seats in the last two regional elections, which explains why the PP has been willing to enter into coalition with them.  Vox did well on a low-turn out, winning 400,000 votes.  It came second in eight Andalusia districts, and only came came first in El Ejido, in Almeria.

No one who has been to El Ejido will be surprised by this.  A soulless gold rush town situated in the heart of Almeria’s ‘plasticultura’ greenhouse industry, El Ejido owes its existence and its new-found wealth largely to its floating population of underpaid migrant workers from African and Morocco.   For years El Ejido was run by the corrupt racist mayor Juan Enciso,  who once declared ‘ at eight in the morning there are never enough immigrants, at eight in the evening there are too many of them.’

Andalusia has also been the first port of call for undocumented migrants trying to enter Europe through Spain. In the last two years the numbers of undocumented arrivals have increased, following the tightened policing of the ‘Libya route’ to Malta and Italy.

In this context Vox’s anti-immigrant politics have clearly gained new traction, and public disenchantment with the two main political parties in Andalusia has enabled it to present itself as an alternative to a moribund and atrophied system.

It would be a mistake to identity Vox as a purely Andalusian ‘protest’ party, however. The military coup that overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1936 was in part intended to suppress Catalan and Basque national aspirations. Vox belongs to the same extreme centralist tradition, and its appearance is clearly linked to the Catalan independence movement.

Vox refers to separatism obsessively in its 100 point program.   It wants to reimpose the Spanish language in Catalonia and the Basque Country, ban all parties, associations and NGOs that seek ‘the destruction of the territorial destruction of the Nation and its sovereignty’,  including regional tv stations and weather forecasts, and penalise ‘ offenses and outrages against the national anthem, the flag and the crown.’

It also proposes to promote and protect a Spanish national identity which celebrates ‘Spain’s contribution to civilisation and universal history, with special attention to the heroic acts and great deeds of our national heroes.’

Though Vox wants to remain in the EU, it doesn’t want to be part of the Schengen Area, partly because it believes that Schengen encourages ‘immigration mafias’, and also because  the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and his fellow ‘golpistas’ – coup plotters – sought political asylum in Schengen member-states.

Where the PP clung rigidly and clumsily to Spain’s democratic constitution in its attempts to prevent the Catalonia’s independence referendum in 2017, Vox proposes to change the constitution completely, and re-impose a Francoist model that would eradicate the constitutional basis of Spain’s democratic transition.

That ‘reconquest’ is a long way off, but a recent poll in the newspaper El Mundo suggested that Vox could win as many as 45 deputies in the Spanish parliament if national elections were held this year, giving it a national balance of power to match what it already has in Andalusia.

If the PP and Ciudadanos translate their Andalusian coalition into a national arrangement, then that would be very bad news for Spain and Europe.

We can only hope that the Spanish left can get its act together, and that Spanish society can mobilise itself against a movement that poses a direct threat to everything that Spanish democracy has achieved since the death of the dictator.

For decades they got away with it. By the time we finally woke up to what they were doing – and what we’d been doing – it was too late.

We knighted them. Gave them tv shows and limitless power. Our politicians courted them. We made them president.

We ignored their shallowness, their lies, their bullying, their petty relentless greed. We were fascinated by them. Some of us practically worshipped them.

When they bought newspapers and tv channels, we lapped up everything they said. We blamed the poor – a parasitic burden, we were told. We blamed foreigners and migrants – usurpers and intruders.

Whatever the Greens, Trumps, Murdochs and Bransons wanted, we wanted that too.

If they didn’t want to pay taxes, we bent over ourselves to let them get away with it. If they wanted to take control of our hospitals, our schools, our railways, our water, we let them. If they decided that ‘austerity’ was necessary- for us not them – we accepted it.

If they didn’t want to do anything about climate change & decided they wanted to cancel any attempts to prevent it & hack down some more rain forest, we let them. They knew best.

If they lied & fleeced people we didn’t care. It showed that they were tough predators

If they bullied and abused the women they worked with we didn’t care about that either. It showed that they were real men. The kind of alpha males that we wanted to be. If they were racist, what of it? They enabled us to be racist too. They were our fantasy friends.

When we looked for role models or sources of inspiration, we didn’t look for scientists, writers, nurses, doctors & all the millions of people who quietly and unselfishly perform little acts of kindness everyday, we looked for the Greens and Trumps – the men with the Midas touch.

Our politicians grovelled before them. We dreamed of becoming their apprentices. We watched them soar.

For decades they got away with it. By the time we finally woke up to what they were doing – and what we’d been doing – it was too fucking late.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Ceasefire Magazine

Austerity has left a trail of poverty, bitterness and resentment across the country – much of which is directed at immigrants or people perceived to be immigrants.

This improbable transformation began two weeks ago, on  27 May, when Robinson was arrested outside Leeds Crown Court, during one of three separate trials involving the same group of mostly Pakistani-heritage men in northern cities accused of the sexual exploitation of mostly white women and young girls.

Robinson’s appearance was part of an ongoing attempt to monetize himself as an independent ‘reporter’ – a vocation that has often focused on the issue of sexual grooming cases. For Robinson, these revolting and deeply disturbing crimes are only of interest insofar as their perpetrators are Muslims and their victims are white.

Like his ideological peers, Robinson has presented these crimes as a product of Islam, and another sign that British society is in thrall to a barbaric and alien Islamic culture/religion, supported by a politically-correct liberal establishment. To promote this agenda, this ‘citizen-journalist’ has taken to hanging around outside ongoing trials of grooming cases, in order to frame them for his audiences as ‘Muslim’ crimes.

Of course, this is not reportage in any conventional sense of the term.  Robinson does not follow the court proceedings themselves. In fact, his activities have actually threatened to capsize difficult and complex trials by breaching reporting restrictions. In one case, in Canterbury last year, he waited outside the courtroom, haranguing the defendants as they came and went from the court. As a result, he was charged with contempt of court and given a suspended sentence – and a warning that his behaviour ran the risk of undermining ongoing trials.

Despite this, Robinson spent more than an hour livestreaming from outside Leeds Crown Court on 27 May, doing exactly what he was told not to do. In his  video, Robinson can be seen haranguing defendants who he himself admits have not yet been found guilty, for no other obvious purpose except to promote himself and transmit his disgust to the 250,000 people who watched.

Nothing  Robinson did that day made any contribution whatsoever to furthering the cause of justice. His interest was purely parasitical. After more than an hour of this vigilante-journalism, Robinson was arrested for breach of the peace,  and subsequently charged with contempt of court. That same day, he was given ten months in prison, and a further three months for breaching his previous sentence.

For the next two days, a strange situation ensued in which the UK press, still obeying reporting restrictions on the trial, did not report Robinson’s arrest even though the news had already gone viral. Within hours, right-wing websites and TV channels on both sides of the Atlantic were reporting on Robinson’s ‘disappearance’, describing him as a ‘political prisoner.’

A petition calling for Robinson’s release garnered 500,000 signatures within a week. On Twitter, he was variously compared to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. Internet memes showed him with his mouth taped. A widely-circulated painting showed Sadiq Khan attaching a noose around Robinson’s neck. Poems were written in his honour,  including a ‘grandma’s poem’ that proclaimed ‘Our government won’t beat us/we will never bend the knee/to the evil plans of Islam/We Britons will be free.’

The tone of this coverage was summed up by a headline in A pro-Trump website Canada Free Press: ‘”Great” Britain Imprisons Man for Speaking Out Against Child Rape’”. Standing outside the British embassy in the Hague, the sinister peroxide imp Gert Wilders compared the UK to North Korea and Saudi Arabia, and warned that “the lights of freedom are going out” all over Europe.

On 29 May, reporting restrictions on Robinson’s arrest were lifted, thanks to a request by a courageous local reporter named Stephanie Finnegan. By that time, demonstrations calling for his release had been held in the UK, the United States, Europe and Australia. On Saturday, June 9th, between 10,000 and 15,000 people took part in a ‘Free Tommy’ demonstration in Trafalgar Square, where they heard speeches from Gert Wilders, Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam, far-right firebrand Anne-Marie Waters, UKIP leader Gerard Batten, and others. As expected, these protests degenerated into a drunken riot, in which hundreds of protesters attacked and chased away the unprepared police.

Incredibly, the ‘#Free Tommy’ campaign has become a catalyst for the largest and most dangerous far-right mobilisation in the UK in decades. It’s a national movement, galvanised and emboldened by Brexit ‘taking our country back’ rightwing ‘resistance’ narratives, and surfing on a toxic wave of ethnonationalism, xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment. Robinson has also become a free speech icon for an international rightwing network that reaches across Europe and into Trump’s America, whose members share a common loathing of Islam, globalism, multiculturalism, immigration and George Soros.

Not surprisingly, the Free Tommy campaign has attracted huge interest in conservative/far-right circles in the US, where Robinson’s arrest has been interpreted as further evidence of the ‘death of Europe’ and a validation of Trumpism. Robinson’s arrest has been heavily covered by all the usual suspects such as Fox News, FrontPage, Jihad Watch, the Gatestone Institute, and Alex Jones’s InfoWars.

It is easy — but nevertheless essential — to point out the idiocy, the ignorance, and truly epic lying and dishonesty that has brought about this bizarre outcome. No one can be surprised that Alex Jones, a commentator who cannot breathe without lying, has claimed that Robinson is being ‘tortured’ in prison because he revealed ‘secret courts in England with massive numbers of Muslims being convicted for running giant child kidnapping and sexual exploitation gangs.’

The (marginally) more mainstream Fox News also claimed that Robinson was arrested for ‘daring to talk about sexual abuse rings run by Muslim immigrants to the UK.’  Douglas Murray — a longtime fan of Robinson’s —  appeared on the network to describe his arrest as an example of how “people in power always try to stamp down on dissent.”

Few of these commentators paid any attention to the actuallegal reasons for Robinson’s arrest, or acknowledged the fact that reporting restrictions are intended to protect the victims and ensure a fair trial. This jaw-dropping indifference to facts is not simply a cultural product of the 21st century ‘post-truth’ era. Robinson’s supporters lie about him because it suits them. In effect, Robinson has become a fictional character in a paranoid fantasy that springs directly from the diseased imagination of the 21st century far-right: the humble English Yeoman who finally stands up to what Alex Jones has called a “foreign cancerous political cult” and leads a rebellion against the ‘elite’ that is supposedly enabling and facilitating the UK’s transformation into an Islamic colony.

Variations on this hysterical narrative have been coursing endlessly through social media these last two weeks, often fused with the ferocious hatred against Muslims and Islam — or against anyone who presents facts or arguments that contradict the narrative. When Stephanie Finnegan posted a thread explaining the facts behind Robinson’s arrest, she was viciously abused, and — naturally — threatened with rape.

For all their interest in ‘the truth’, Robinson’’s supporters are only interested in the truth that suits them. On the one hand there is nothing new about that.  The far right has always trafficked in lies, paranoia and fantasy. But the range and breadth of the #Free Tommy movement suggests that such qualities have a much wider constituency that is now making serious inroads towards the mainstream.

These developments coincide with the most serious peacetime crisis in modern British history. A cowardly and incompetent political class has brought the country to political chaos, emboldening racists and xenophobes across the country, creating festering and vicious political divisions in which tabloid newspapers call judges and politicians ‘traitors’.

Austerity has left a trail of poverty, bitterness and resentment across the country – much of which is directed at immigrants or people perceived to be immigrants. Islamic State and other jihadist groups routinely carry out mass murder with the precise aim of generating the kind of hatred that the #Free Tommy movement has fastened onto.

All these factors combine to pose a grave and unique threat to the future of British democracy, to social cohesion, tolerance and coexistence, and to the multi-ethnic society that Robinson and his supporters detest. Faced with the very real prospect of a collapsing post-Brexit economy, and the ongoing prospect of more jihadist atrocities, the #FreeTommy movement may yet acquire an audience that the BNP and the National Front could only dream of, when Robinson gets out of jail and starts to receive some serious money from the same people who helped finance Trump and Brexit.

In this Weimar-like atmosphere, the Robinson cult may herald a wider transformation, in which the fringe moves to the mainstream, facts and truth are demolished, and the most grotesque fantasies become credible. This outcome is a failure of successive governments, but it’s also a failure of the left — in the broadest sense of the term — to develop counter-movements and counter-narratives to the toxic fantasies of cultural invasion and exclusionary identities propagated by Robinson’s many supporters.

That needs to change, and quickly. “Pity the nation that has need of heroes”, wrote Brecht, and few heroes are more pitiful, more undeserving and more unlikely than Tommy Robinson, and his canonisation tells us as much about the debased political and social climate in this country as it does about the movement that spawned him.

Matt Carr is a writer, blogger and freelance print and radio journalist. He is the author of My Father’s House, Blood and Faith: the Purging of Muslim Spain, and The Infernal Machine: an Alternative History of Terrorism. His book Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent was published in autumn 2012. He blogs at  www.infernalmachine.co.uk.

We can’t allow Trump’s UK visit to distract us from our own shameful treatment of migrants, writes Matt Carr.

Source: Ceasefire

There is something of this trope in the response of the UK public to the political horror film starring the orange-haired beast known as Donald J. Trump.

Last week a poll revealed that 1 in 10 people would be willing to protest against a putative ‘working visit’ from Donald Trump next year on a date that has yet to be determined. It is still not certain that this visit is even going to take place. Yet already the community networks that helped organise last February’s Stop Trump/Stand Up to Trump protests are bracing themselves for the occasion and putting dates into their diaries.

On one level this response is admirable. It’s a healthy sign that so many people are willing to disregard the grovelling decision by May and her hapless cronies to invite Trump anywhere near these shores. But we should not allow the beast in the White House to distract us from our own political monsters already in our midst. Because like Godot, Trump may not come. And as far as migrants in the UK are concerned, Trump is by no means the most pressing threat that this country faces right now.

On the contrary, for the past eighteen months the lives and futures of 4.4 million people have been placed in limbo as a result of Brexit – and more particularly by the stunningly cynical decision of our own government to use EU citizens as bargaining chips in its cack-handed negotiations with the European Union.

Right now, the UK government is implementing a ‘hostile environment’ policy, which is intended to strip ‘illegal immigrants’ of the basic components of survival in a modern society, from healthcare, driving licenses, bank accounts, to the right to rent a place to live.

Until it was declared illegal by the High Court last week, this policy was extended to include EU citizens — who are not technically ‘illegal’— have become homeless. Last week, a Polish man who reported to the police that he and his wife had been terrorised by their landlord was arrested and placed in detention prior to deportation. Last week the Nigerian boxer Bilal Fawaz, who once boxed for England, was told he would be deported. Two weeks ago, the Home Office told a Jamaican woman who has been living here for fifty years that she would have to return to her “own” country. Every week — indeed, almost every day — the Home Office makes ‘mistakes’ like this.

The UK is unique in Europe in that it has a policy of unlimited detention. According to the Children’s Commissioner for England, some 15,000 children are permanently separated from their parents as members of “Skype families” — as a result of being subjected to the arbitrary income thresholds imposed on married couples by the UK government.

The vicious treatment of migrants by the British state is, to some extent, a product of a more general hostility towards immigrants and immigration that has become powerfully embedded in the British media, the public and the political class, and which reached a dismal apotheosis in the Brexit referendum.

You will have to look a long way to find much condemnation of these developments by British politicians. Even the Labour Party in its current, more leftist, incarnation, has largely kept a distance from the May government’s scandalous refusal to guarantee the rights of EU nationals, fearful as it still is of being seen as ‘soft’ on immigration or unresponsive to those famous ‘concerns’ on which Labour believes its political future will be decided.

Indeed, Corbyn and his circle often appear alarmingly willing to accept arguments from the ‘Lexit’ left, not only in regards to the EU’s supposedly ‘hardwired neoliberalism’, but also in respect to migrants and migration. A significant section of the Labour movement continues to regard EU migrants as a problem, to be dealt with by restricting or even rescinding the free movement of people — one of the great progressive achievements of the European Union — regardless of the fact that labour exploitation of migrant workers is liable to be easier without free movement.

One section of the left — most notably represented by the Communist Party and Trade Unionists Against the EU, an organisation part-funded by Arron Banks — continues to depict migrants as if they were little more than vapid commodities shifted from one country to another by ‘the bosses’ — an argument that in its worst incarnations, dovetails neatly with the UKIP narrative of a culturally beleaguered (white) working class marginalised in its own heartland by the neoliberal bureaucrats in Brussels.

We shouldn’t be entirely surprised by this. Trump and Trumpism are products of many of the same political forces that were instrumental in driving Brexit: ethnonationalism, anti-immigrationism, xenophobia, nostalgia for a vanished ‘greatness’, cultural anxieties about national identity and loss of white status, and outright racism, a populist rage against ‘elites’ that has too easily emboldened and legitimised the exclusion, persecution and ‘othering’ of foreigners – or people who ‘look like’ foreigners.

All these forces were present during the referendum and have continued to course alarmingly through our body politic. It’s not for nothing that Trump and even his failed nominee Judge Roy Moore have praised Brexit, or that Arron Banks and Nigel Farage rushed off to Trump Towers within weeks of Trump’s election, or that Farage has campaigned for Moore and idolizes Steve Bannon. These are all chips off the same old far-right bloc, lubricating fake revolts against the ‘ establishment’ by stoking a steady drip-drip of hatred — whether directed at Muslims. immigrants or foreigners — and we should not need Trump to remind us of their existence.

Many UK opponents of Trump have rightly condemned the violence and the potential for violence in Trump’s rhetoric and in the actions of some of his supporters. But over here, we have had an MP shot dead as a ‘traitor’ by a follower of the same movement whose videos Trump has just retweeted. We have regular death threats directed against any prominent figure who appears to be getting in the way of Brexit — or who even has the temerity to suggest that Brexit should be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. When that person happens to be a woman — and a woman of colour at that, as is the case with Gina Miller — such threats come marinated in a savage mixture of sexism and racism.

Yet when Miller revealed a few months ago that she was thinking of leaving the country because of the threats made against her family, no major political figure saw fit to denounce this state of affairs. Arron Banks, the architect of Leave.eu, even joked about it.

The abuse directed against Miller, high court judges and Tory ‘rebels’ is just the most prominent expression of the rage that burst across the country during the referendum. According to a recent survey by Migrants Rights Network, hate crimes have risen by 29 percent in the last twelve months. Anecdotally, EU citizens and even third- or fourth-generation migrant-heritage UK citizens routinely report verbal and even physical violence, as well as incidents in which they have been told to ‘go back where they came from.’

Such tendencies are not entirely new. Racists may feel emboldened by the referendum, but they were not created by it. Only today, Bristol police and town council were accused by the Safer Bristol Partnership (SBP) of ‘institutional racism’ for the way they responded to the horrific murder of Iranian refugee Bidram Ebrahimi, who was beaten to death in 2013 after being wrongly suspected of paedophilia.

Once again, we should not need a ‘working visit’ from Donald Trump to galvanise us to act in response to these developments. Yet Trump’s grotesque barbarity often seems to eclipse the everyday barbarities that have become part and parcel of the post-referendum UK.

As one of the organisers of the 1 Day Without Us campaign in solidarity with UK migrants, I’ve seen how difficult it is to persuade people to stand up alongside the migrants who are already here. When we organised our first day of action, last February, the Stop Trump campaign  declared its own ‘Day of Action’ on the same day. To their credit, the organisers of the campaign went to great lengths to highlight at their event the issues we were already raising, and to include them within their own anti-Trump message. But it should not have needed Donald Trump to bring this about, and the UK’s shameful treatment of migrants should not be added as an afterthought.

Next year we are planning another day of action around the slogan ‘Proud to be a migrant/Proud to stand with migrants.’ We are asking people to join us – not just to ‘Stop Trump’ but to stand with and for the migrants who live in our communities across the country. We are asking them to help us reclaim the word ‘migrant’ from the debased coinage that it has become in UK political discourse, and turn it into a source of pride.

In the face of ever-more strident demands from the ethnonationalist right for a monocultural, migrant-free UK, we are asking the public to celebrate and embrace the society that the UK has become – diverse, open, multicultural and multi-ethnic.

If Trump is foolish enough to come to the UK, by all means let’s see hundreds of thousands of people in the streets to say that we reject his politics. But it’s worth remembering that when he has gone, this country will be the same as it was before. And, right now, as we scan the horizon for the monster who may or may not come shambling towards us, we ought to bear in mind that we have our own monsters to fight, that many people are threatened by them, and that our solidarity will always be incomplete until we stand with them.

Together Against Trump: National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
Details…

Migrants are not intruders, outsiders or interlopers, but valuable and valued members of British society and local communities.

Source:  Infernal Machine

All of us were appalled by the dangerous convergence of  street-level violence towards migrants with the anti-immigrant rhetoric used by too many politicians.  We were disgusted with the cynical references to  3 million EU citizens as bargaining chips, and the persistent denigration and stigmatisation of migrants in sections of the British press.  We did not see migrants as intruders, outsiders or interlopers, but as valuable and valued members of British society and our local communities.

So on February 20  we invited migrants and their supporters to take part in a national day of action celebrating the presence of migrants and the contributions they have made to British society.  For 24 hours, we asked the British public to imagine what a ‘day without immigrants’ might be like.

We were bowled over by the response. Tens of thousands of people held protests, rallies and other events up and down the country.  There were One Day Without Us events in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; fetes in tiny villages, rallies in city centres, stalls in town markets. Members of the public, businesses, trade unions, NGOs, charities, and universities all supported what was in effect the first-ever national day of solidarity with migrants in British history.

It was a fantastic experience for everyone involved.  In providing a platform for migrants and their supporters to make their voices heard,  One Day Without Us presented the UK with a very different vision of migrants and migration that the one that has presented to the public by politicians and the media alike.   Eleven months later the need for this vision remains as urgent as it was then.  And so next year, on 17th February, we’re planning another national day of action.   For twenty-four hours we’re inviting migrants and their supporters to take part, and organise events in their local communities, under the slogan ‘Proud to be a migrant/Proud to stand with migrants.’  We’ve chosen that date to coincide with the week of UN World Day of Social Justice, but this time we’ve chosen to stage it on a weekend, so that everyone can get involved.

Our message is simple: we refuse to accept the divisive ‘us versus them’ political rhetoric that presents migrants as interlopers and outsiders and immigration as burden.  We believe that migration had been broadly positive both for migrants and for UK society, and we want to celebrate that.   We think it is shameful and disturbing that the word migrant has become a dirty word in British politics; that EU citizens living in Britain are still living in limbo or leaving the country because of the hostility directed towards them; that families with non-EU migrant spouses remain permanently separated because they can’t meet arbitrary income thresholds; that migrant workers are described as if they were nothing but economic commodities.

We want to change that.    We do not believe that migrants are intrinsically better or worse than anyone else, but no one should ever have to feel ashamed, vulnerable or under threat because of who they are or where they came from.   It should not even need saying that migrants have the same hopes, dreams, aspirations as  British citizens, but the debased debate about migration too easily ignores this simple truth and prefers to scapegoat migrants and blame them for problems that they did not cause.  Too often migrants are described as if they were nothing but takers and migration is depicted as something unnatural and even sordid.

We want to restore the courage, heroism and dignity, the adventure and discovery that is part of the experience of migration.  As migrants and non-migrants, we want to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions that migrants have made to our country in the past and continue to make today.

We are proud that the UK is a country that people want to come to in order to live, work, study, or seek safety and protection.  We do not want a ‘hostile environment’ that turns doctors and nurses into immigration police and presents deportations of tens of thousands of foreign students on the basis of flawed or inadequate evidence as a badge of honour.  We want a UK that is welcoming, open, and inclusive in its attitude towards migration.

In celebrating migrants and migration we do not only refer to EU nationals.   Though we recognize that migrants who have come to the UK fall under many different legal categories, we do not recognize hierarchical distinctions between worthy and unworthy migrants, between EU citizens and non-EU nationals, between refugees and asylum seekers, between migrants past and presents.

The hostility directed towards migrants in post-referendum UK does not confine itself to any single target. It  can equally be directed against Polish schoolgirls, Muslims of Pakistani heritage, Bulgarians, Romanians, refugees or ‘failed asylum seekers’ .  It might be aimed at EU citizens or it might be directed against people who were born here who simply look or sound like foreigners.

Once confined to the extremist fringe, such hostility has begun to permeate the mainstream to the point when it threatens the very foundations and the character of our society, and drives government policy in ways that are harmful to migrants and to our common future.  One of the reasons why this has happened is because millions of people with a very different view of what UK society could be like have not made their voices heard.

On 17th February this is your opportunity.  We invite migrants and their supporters to join us in a positive affirmation of migrants and migration.  We invite you, whoever you are and whatever your race, religion or nationality, to take part in a day of unity, celebration and protest.  We invite you to join with us and say it loudly ‘ Proud to be a migrant.  Proud to stand with migrants’.

For further information about events and volunteering possibilities, see our website at: http://1daywithoutus.org/

And @1daywithoutus

Source: Infernal Machine

esterday evening I shared a horrific post on Facebook about a tetraplegic woman whose disability benefits have just been cancelled, and has just been summoned to a job interview by her local job centre.  As shocking as it was, this dreadful decision was a fairly typical example of the cruelty and incompetence that has been repeated again and again under the brutal sanctions regime introduced by successive Coalition and Tory governments.  Most of the commenters were as outraged as I was, but there were also messages like this:

No shame when it comes to the white British benefits office. Maybe if she was immigrant that’s might of made a differance (sic).

It’s deeply depressing to know that someone took advantage of such an awful tragedy to express such thoughts.    Once upon a time I might have written off such comments as a occasional freak intervention from some semi-literate racist nurturing their Nazi memorabilia in some dank basement somewhere.   But such interventions are not occasional and they are not from the fringes.

They are all over the place.  You can find them, in below-the-line comments sections on any online forum that has anything to do with immigration – or not.  When a Frenchwoman living in Kent announced last week that she was leaving the UK because of racism and xenophobia, her comments section was sprinkled with racist and xenophobic comments and jeering invitations to go back home if she didn’t like it.

There is a lot more where that came from, and a lot worse too.  Twitter is seething with hatred of this kind, whether directed at foreigners. immigrants, Muslims or people of colour.   Diane Abbott gets hundreds if not thousands of such messages everyday. Gina Miller has been threatened with gang rape, lynching and acid attacks simply because she tried to ensure that Parliament had a say in the Brexit negotiations.

What’s happening on social media is also happening on the streets.  In July this year the Independent reported that incidents of race and faith-based attacks rose by  23 percent in the eleven months since the referendum –  from 40,741 to 49,921.    These incidents included acts of physical violence, acid attacks and verbal insults.  There are undoubtedly many more, since many victims of verbal attacks don’t go to the police.

What is striking about so many of the incidents that are recorded is that – like the comments and tweets on social media – many of their perpetrators clearly feel emboldened, empowered and legitimized by the referendum result.   They feel their time has come, and some of them are clearly dreaming of some kind of ethno-nationalist reckoning in which all the people they don’t like ‘go home’ – even if this country is their home.

Once upon a time some of these people might have felt ashamed to say what they’re thinking; now they don’t.  And why should they?  When Gina Miller said she might have to leave the country, Arron Banks’s Leave.EU – a mainstream lobbying group – merely laughed and tweeted that it hoped other ‘liberals’ would go with her.  Why would people feel any reservation about expressing hostility to immigrants when politicians boast of their ability to turn the UK into a hostile environment?  When ‘commentators’ can tweet about ‘final solutions’ and call refugees ‘cockroaches’ and still get a slot on the Jeremy Vine Show?  Isn’t it all just free speech?

Every week and sometimes everyday, the Home Office – an institution which currently embodies everything that is most malignant about the British state and society – displays how hostile it is by deporting or threatening to deport another immigrant or group of immigrants.

Meanwhile politicians um and ah, or shake their heads about the public’s ‘concerns’.   Some, like the iniquitous and loathsome fraud Boris Johnson, mutter darkly about ‘dual allegiances’.  When they’re caught out deporting tens of thousands of students using false language tests, they don’t bat an eyelid.   When it’s found that their own estimates of students who ‘overstayed’ their visas are wildly over the mark, they just change the conversation and boast of their ability to keep more people out.

Left-of-centre politicians aren’t always much better.   Some talk of the need to exclude immigrants in order to win votes in their constituencies or prevent exploitation or the undercutting of British workers by migrant workers.  Others, like the dreadful Frank Field, celebrate the draconian proposals in the Home Office’s outline document for a post-Brexit immigration policy.

Few pause to wonder where all this is leading us.  It’s a truism to observe that you only stand a chance of curing yourself of an illness if your illness is actually diagnosed and recognised, and right now we are becoming  a sick society – sick with xenophobia, anti-migrant paranoia and unacknowledged racism hidden behind discussions about ‘culture’ and ‘numbers’ and ‘social cohesion.’  We slowly but inexorably poisoning our society with our own fears, prejudices and hatreds.   We are becoming mean, vindictive, callous, bitter and aggressive, constantly whining about what immigrants have supposedly done to us without thinking through what we are doing to them – or to ourselves.

Not only are our politicians ignoring and even pandering to these sentiments, but the government is actually instrumentalising the Home Office to act on them and turn them into policy.   We didn’t get to this situation overnight, and the referendum is by no means uniquely responsible for it.    But there is no doubt that in the last eighteen months, the UK has become a deeply unpleasant and threatening place for many foreigners and immigrants – and for many who simply look or sound foreign – and it may get a lot worse unless we can stop it.

So we need to recognize how serious this is, and we need to act.  The tendencies that have been unleashed these last eighteen months do not express the majority sentiments of the population, but too many of those who don’t share them have not condemned them – or have not argued forcefully against the arguments that foreigners and immigrants are responsible for the social problems of 21st century Britain.  Such arguments aren’t even restricted to the right – I’m constantly coming across them from sections of the left – albeit wrapped up in a veneer of progressive politics and concern for the working class.

We need really major mobilisations to counter these developments.   We need to make the positive case for immigration and diversity and we need to make it loudly.   We can’t pretend that we are too British and too intrinsically decent to descend into a racist and xenophobic swamp.  We can, because any society can.

We need the famous silent majority to stand up for the kind of society we have begun to build –  a society that is comfortable with diversity and open to the world, where foreigners are welcomed, not considered the enemy.  We need to push the xenophobes and racists back to the fringes and restore the shame that once forced them to keep their bitterness and rage to themselves.

Because if we can’t do this, then we will be complicit, and we will also be trapped perhaps for decades, by the dangerous forces that have been unleashed, and which will leave few people unscathed if things proceed along their present course.

Source: Infernal Machine

This reluctance is often fed by the belief that terrorism is so toxic that it cannot be analysed without its toxicity spreading.  Thus Conor Cruise O’Brien once said that no one should try to understand the IRA, because even trying to understand its motivations was the first step towards legitimisation.  And when the Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem made his remarkable documentary The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone about ETA, he was vilified by the Spanish government and also by the Association for the Victims of Terrorism, which accused him of ideological collusion with terrorism.

Such reactions are on one level entirely ridiculous. Terrorism is a human activity and it should be liable to intellectual scrutiny, like any other activity.   It should also be possible to look at imaginatively, as writers do.  Crime writers do this every day without being accused of intellectual collusion with rape, gangsterism or paedofilia or serial killing.    Armies seek to understand the tactics and strategies of  their opponents and assess their strengths and weaknesses.

So none of this should be rocket science.  Yet it’s amazing how unwilling we are to do this when it comes to terrorism.  Too often we allow governments and dubious ‘terrorism experts’ pushing very specific ideological agendas to interpret terrorist violence for us. They use terms like ‘radicalisation’ when we have no idea what this term really means or how it takes place.   They wage ‘wars against terror’ with no strategic coherence and no clear goals that only make the problem worse.

They use banal tautologies such as ‘the aim of terrorism is to terrorise’, when often it is quite clear that ‘spreading fear’ is only one component – and often quite a minor one – in the strategic intentions behind such violence.   They describe atrocities as wars on ‘our values’ when it is quite obvious that such crimes have a very different motivation and target.

Given this context, Peter Kosminsky has performed a valuable service in writing and directing a drama about the most vilified of all terrorist groups.  I am only two episodes into it, but it’s already clear that The State is a compelling and deeply disturbing journey into the nightmare caliphate created by Daesh/ISIS in Syria and Iraq, which should leave no discerning viewer in any doubt that this ‘state’ is an abomination.

The Islamic State that Kosminsky describes is savage, reactionary, misogynistic, tyrannical, and cruel, fanatical, dishonest and manipulative.   It chops off heads and hands in front of young children and exposes its recruits to high-production atrocity videos in order to condition them to the cruelty that it expects.

All this is depicted from the point of view of four British Muslims who make the journey to Raqqa.  Kosminsky does not  spend much time on the personal back stories that motivated them to leave the UK.  He is more interested in exploring how Islamic State was able to manipulate them into embracing its vision of religious purity, by presenting itself as a defensive jihad on behalf of oppressed Muslims and as a rebellion against a supposedly corrupt and immoral world, that can only be purified through the most fanatical and reductionist version of the Sharia.

In one scene, the cult-like ‘mother superior’ who inducts the women volunteers lectures them on divorce, immorality, and commercialised sex of the world of jahiliya – Sayyid Qutb’s modern reworking of the state of pre-Islamic ignorance.   In another, a military trainer hectors the male volunteers on the evils of women who urinate and bleed.  Even in hospitals, ISIS is so obsessed with female behaviour that the British doctor-volunteer can only treat women and cannot be left alone with a man.

Kosminsky also shows the ‘positive’ appeal of ISIS: the ‘band of brothers’ bonding between the young fighters who receive their kalishnikovs; the yearning for a religiously pure and morally-unambiguous Islamic life; the sense of comradeship that comes from fighting in a meaningful cause; the artful propaganda; the teams of ISIS men who try and seduce women over the Internet into becoming ‘lionesses’; the eschatological and millenarian fantasies of the end of the world and the day of judgment that ISIS seeks to bring about through war.

So this is a serious – and in fact the first – attempt on television to imagine what ISIS is like and why people have been attracted to one of the most horrific political movements in modern times.  Kosminsky and Channel 4 ought to be congratulated for that.   But no one will be surprised that he has been vilified by the Sun, the Daily Express and the Mail.  The Sun  quotes the Zionist neocon and former British army colonel Richard Kemp as a ‘terror expert’, who has called the drama ‘the jihadist equivalent of inspiring war epics such as Band of Brothers or Dunkirk. ‘

The best that can be said about this is that it is not a very intelligent observation, because it ought to be quite clear to anyone with a pair of eyes that Kosminsky’s characters are embarked on a journey to the heart of darkness that is not inspiring at all.  Kemp’s comments are not as dense as the witless Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail,  who has described the series as ‘pure poison – like a Nazi recruiting film from the 1930s.’  Well those films may have worked for the pro-Nazi Daily Mail at the time, but the comparison bears no scrutiny in relation to Kosminsky’s film.

Watson is shocked – shocked I tell you – that one of the characters refers to ISIS as ‘ ” a real supercool club”. There is no irony in her voice.’  Goodness, no irony.   Don’t Daily Mail critics actually learn how to analyse a text or a film?  Apparently not, because the ‘irony’ may not be in the character’s voice, but it is made obvious by the glaring discrepancy between the expectations of Kosminsky’s naive recruit and the horrendous reality all around her.

Stevens has little time for nuance or dramatic subtlety.  He wants his messages served up on a giant platter with a large sign pointing to them, and so he works himself up into the lather of Dacre-suppurating moral indignation that Daily Mail writers just can’t help, and describes  Kosminsky as ‘the epitome of the London media luvvie who is desperate to demonstrate that he is less racist than anyone else at his Hampstead dinner party. He’s been the subject of a South Bank Show profile by Melvyn Bragg. You get the picture.’

In fact we don’t.   And Stevens’s insistence that ISIS is a ‘death cult’ is not enlightening. It is just an insult and a cliché that explains nothing except what Stevens thinks ISIS is. Kosminsky’s drama, on the other hand,  attempts to understand what ISIS itself thinks it is, and any viewer with any serious interest in understanding this malignant phenomenon should pay it serious attention.

The Sun, the Express, and the Mail are  written by people who don’t want to think and clearly don’t want their readers to think either.  But given the magnitude of the mess we’re all in, we need writers who do, and The State is a rare and brave attempt to ask serious questions about something that is really too serious to leave in the hands of the likes of Christopher Stevens or Richard Kemp.

Source: Ceasefire

It’s where you go to shop at the marvellous La Boqueria indoor market, or look at the fruit and vegetable stands laid out with meticulous precision in dazzling displays of colour. More than anything else, it’s a place you go to stroll. Lorca famously described the Ramblas as a street that was so beautiful that you didn’t want it to end, and he wasn’t wrong. Despite the over-priced cafés, the dense thicket of tourists, the traffic running up and down alongside the pedestrian thoroughfare, the Ramblas remains a space of peace and beauty.

On Sundays it was a pleasure to join the families walking up and down the rows of plane trees, past the flower-sellers, bird stalls, and newspaper stands, to check out the dancers, the ridiculously elaborate living statues, musicians, the skinny little guy who used to perform astounding tricks with a football, the silver-painted Columbus I once interviewed for a radio feature.

Sometimes you might let yourself drift dreamily all the way down from the Plaza Catalunya to the Drassanes medieval shipyards; past the rebuilt Liceo opera house; the Miró mosaic where the murderer eventually crashed his van yesterday; past the Poliarama cinematograph where George Orwell spent three days reading detective novels in June 1937 while anarchists and Assault Guard soldiers shot it out in the Café Moka down below; past the seedy side-streets of the Barrio Chino, where Jean Genet had once picked up knife-fighting lovers in sleazy bars; past the former stamping ground of so many characters from Juan Marsé’s Barcelona novels; past doorways that still bore the marks of the high heels of prostitutes waiting for ships to arrive at the harbour.

Every Catalan town or city has its own Ramblas, but none of them compared with this one. Even when the city walls were knocked down and the palatial Passeig de Gracia was built on the lines of a Parisian boulevard, the Ramblas was the street where people came to again and again. Because a walk down the Ramblas wasn’t like an ordinary walk. You nearly always slowed down, partly because there were so many people there; because there was so much life and colour to look at; because it never ceased to be a pleasure to hear the birds or watch the children timidly approach the wild-looking living statues to give them a coin and make them move.

I walked through it in the spring and summer, just as it was yesterday, when the plane trees form a canopy that protects you from the heat and the humming and buzzing of thousands of voices seems louder; and also in the autumn and winter when the blue sky reminds you that even in the coldest months you are living in a great city that is part of Fernand Braudel’s common Mediterranean civilisation.

The Ramblas was not just a street or an ‘artery’ but a forum. It was where Catalans went to celebrate when FC Barcelona won an important match, where George Orwell encountered for the first time a society where ‘the working class was in the saddle’ in 1936, where carnival passes every year, where city festivals and political demonstrations inevitably converge.

None of this mattered to the ‘soldier of Islamic State’ who came to the Ramblas to murder dozens of strangers yesterday. Their lives had no meaning to him, except insofar killing them could advance the political goals of Islamic State and its pitiful caliphate-of-the-dead.

This was not the first time the Ramblas has been visited by terrorism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the street was at the epicentre of a bitterly-divided and unequal city, where aristocrats and businessmen, kings and generals rubbed shoulders with the poorest of the poor while coming and going from the Liceo Opera House. In 1893, the anarchist Santiago Salvador threw two Orsini bombs into the audience during a performance of Rossini’sWilliam Tell, one of which went off and killed twenty members of the audience.

Artist’s impression of the 1893 anarchist bomb attack on Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House. which killed twenty members of the audience.

The high water mark of anarchist terrorism in Barcelona took place in the first decade of the twentieth century, when hundreds of bombs were set off in and around the Ramblas. In September 1905, a nitroglycerine bomb exploded in the Rambla les Flors, killing various female flower sellers and a number of others. ‘What do these people want?’ asked La Vanguardia newspaper at the time. ‘To produce a state of terror and alarm, to remove from life its attractive or at least tolerable normality, to sow the seeds of panic, perhaps in the belief that by acting in this way on an isolated society…they will force the world to surrender and change the universal conditions of life.’

In fact, the motives and perpetrators behind these bombings were often obscure. In 1908, it emerged that many of them were carried out by a police informant named Juan Rull, who worked for the sinister political police unit the Brigada Social. Assisted by his aging mother, who carried many of his devices in a bread basket, Rull set off bombs everywhere, or warned about bombs that he himself had planted. Some said that he did this to keep himself in employment.

Though Rull confessed to these crimes before his execution, it was alleged that he was working on behalf of more obscure powerful political forces intent on undermining Catalan separatism by justifying a state of emergency. Few people who visit the Ramblas are likely to remember this dark and turbulent period in the city’s history. Now the city has been sucked into the 21st century’s own particular darkness, and the ‘motives’ behind yesterday’s monstrous crime almost certainly follow the same savage logic that Daesh and its cohorts have followed thus far.

We can surely place it within the overall context of Daesh’s strategic assault on the ‘grey zone’ of coexistence between Muslims and Western societies; the ongoing collapse of its blood-stained Caliphate in Iraq and Syria; and the brutal reconquest of Mosul that has cost some 2,000 civilian lives.

Once again, war ‘out there’ has brought terror to the streets of an innocent and peaceful city ‘over here’, in an act of barbarism and cruelty that belongs squarely to the fascist tradition of the glorification and exaltation of violence. Once again, Daesh and its adherents have shown that there are no limits whatsoever about who they will kill and where they can kill them. Once again, their adherents have decreed that certain categories of human beings can be murdered without scruple. Daesh and its networks have denounced the victims as ‘Spanish pigs’ and bragged of their ability to kill ‘crusaders’ in ‘ al-Andalus.’

In truth, they murdered thirteen entirely innocent people in one of the greatest streets and one of the greatest cities in the world. All that is bad enough, but as always, the hatred is not limited to them. It’s only a few days since a car drove into anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, a young woman who the Nazi Stormer website called a ‘fat skank’.

Within an hour of yesterday’s massacre, Twitter was teeming with gloating ‘I told you so’ messages attacking ‘leftists’, ‘normies’, ‘liberals’, ‘mass Islamic immigration’ and refugees, and professing to care about the victims. Some of them posted videos of dead and dying people on the Ramblas, so that we can ‘understand the situation we’re in’, and then shrieked about ‘censorship’ when twitter removed these videos.

As you might expect, the sick creature and fascist enabler who calls himself president of the United States weighed in with observations that were obtuse and iniquitous even by his standards, even reviving the debunked myth that the Moro insurgency in the Philippines was stopped when General Pershing shot 49 out of 50 Muslim prisoners with pigs bullets.

Such responses are as much a gift to Daesh as its massacres are to those who express these views. Each side needs the other, even as they increasingly resemble each other. Daesh does not carry out these massacres to be liked. It expects to be despised, but for such hatred to be politically useful, it wants it to be generalised. It wants Europe to become a hell of violence, hatred and intolerance, where Muslims are feared and despised to the point when they can no longer live there.

Fortunately for them, the ‘alt-right’ and so many others are only too pleased to oblige them. They —and Daesh— would like to have a world without bystanders, where there are only two ‘armies’ fighting a ‘clash of civilisations’ that is increasingly becoming infused with undeclared notions of a religious/race war.

If that happened, it would bring about the destruction of our world and the triumph of barbarism, and you would have to be blind, smug or complacent to dismiss such a possibility. That is why, once again, we must mourn this evil act and express our solidarity with the victims, and our contempt for the perpetrators, then resume the difficult search for a society such things cannot happen, where haters, extremists and fascistic reactionaries can have no place.

And to do that, we must also look forward to a time when the Ramblas will come to life again, and people will walk through the plane trees and taste the sweetness of life, and children will once again step forward to place their coins and bring the living statues to life.

And even in these heartless, bitter times, we must let these possibilities galvanise us to believe that a better future is possible.

Matt Carr is a writer, blogger and freelance print and radio journalist. He is the author of My Father’s House, Blood and Faith: the Purging of Muslim Spain, and The Infernal Machine: an Alternative History of Terrorism. His latest book Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent was published in autumn 2012. He has lectured in a number of UK universities, schools and cultural institutions. He blogs at www.infernalmachine.co.uk.

Source: Infernal Machine

In one sense, these arguments were correct.  Those of us who grew up in the 70s did believe that the UK had made significant progress from the days when Tories could campaign with the slogan ‘ If you want a n****r for a neighbour: Vote Labour.’  We thought we were part of a society where overt expressions of racism were no longer acceptable, that accepted and even celebrated diversity.  It wasn’t that we thought we’d ‘won’, or that the UK had become ‘post-racist.’   The struggle against racism, xenophobia and intolerance is never definitively ‘won’ – it’s something that has to be waged by each generation, that requires constant vigilance regarding the complex ways in which racism changes its language and its targets and forms new tributaries.

So complacency was not in order here.  Especially over the last few decades, when ‘Muslims’ have become the new generic alien intruders and existential enemies to the far right and increasingly in mainstream conservative discourse; when words like asylum seeker, migrant and economic migrant have become tabloid codewords containing a range of undeclared and often covertly-racialised negative meanings; when ‘concerns’ about immigration suddenly made it ok to describe the entry of Bulgarians and Romanians as a potential ‘invasion’ by criminals and benefit scroungers.

But now, thanks to David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Aaron Banks, Boris Johnson and all the others who inflicted this grotesque act of self-harm on the nation, the box of monsters has been opened and we’ve found out that the progress we thought we’d made was really rather paper-thin.  Hyper-nationalism and xenophobia has infected the body politic like a virus.  It expresses itself in the streets, in social media, in below-the-line comments in newspapers, in the endless pandering of politicians terrified of losing votes and anxious to sweep up others, in the complete disregard for the millions of EU citizens whose lives have now been placed on hold while an unscrupulous and incompetent government seeks to turn them to its own advantage, in the disgraceful ‘leftist’ arguments that describe migrant workers as ‘scabs’ and commodities.

It’s comforting to tell ourselves that all this is due to a ‘few bad apples’ – an excuse that appeals both to the conservative Leavers and also to leftists who think the referendum result was a rebellion against the elite, or neoliberalism, or something.   But  it is difficult to ignore the fact that the referendum has empowered and legitimised the worst elements in UK society: the angry white men who think it’s ok to rip hijabs off Muslim women; who shout ‘ I voted for you to leave’ at people they’ve never met who simply look or sound different from them; who tell EU nationals ‘ my people have been here a thousand years, you’ve only been here for 10 minutes’; who break windows and scrawl graffiti on the houses of ‘foreigners.’

At the extreme end of this spectrum are  the sweaty keyboard fascists who threaten anyone who opposes ‘their’ Brexit or disagrees with their insanely overblown hatred of the EU, with rape and death.  Such sentiments often overlap with misogyny, because if there is one thing these ‘patriots’ absolutely can’t stand, it’s a woman who has the temerity to say things they don’t like or even to speak in public at all.

Lily Allen, Diane Abbott and Mary Beard have all been targeted by these knuckledragging trolls, and there are few people they hate more than the Guyanese-born Gina Miller.  At a time when politicians on all sides were so pathetically cowed by the ‘will of the people’ that they were prepared to allow Theresa May to drive through the hardest of Brexits without parliamentary scrutiny, Miller initiated  – and won – a court case against the British government to ensure that MPs would actually be able to vote on the outcome.

Throughout this process, Miller insisted on the simple principle – which had until Brexit been taken as an axiomatic component of British democracy – that parliament should have a say in a crucial decision of such unprecedented national importance.  For that she was mocked by the tabloids as the ‘millionaire Remainer’; condescended to by the ghastly Kwasi Kwarteng; subjected to a vicious hit-piece in the Daily Mail which described her as a fake and a self-publicist.

Naturally she has also been threatened with sexual violence and death, because for too many people in this country,  it is unacceptable that an ‘uppity’ woman of colour should stand in the way of ‘the will of the people’ and remind them that the country’s democratic institutions are supposed to act as a check on executive power.   After all, as the racist aristocrat Rhodri Phillips put it, while offering £5,000 to anyone who would run Miller over,  ‘If this is what we should expect from immigrants, send them back to their stinking jungles.’

So Miller has been threatened with gangrape, and lynching, and many other fantasies pulled from the most rancid sewers of white racism.  She has been told that she should be beheaded and burned at the stake.  And now she has been threatened with acid attacks, to the point when she and her family don’t dare go out onto the street, and she is  considering leaving the country.

That is  Miller’s reward for upholding the UK’s democratic institutions, and for showing more courage than the entire political class between them: she and her family must now choose whether to live under 24 hour security in a state of terror or leave the country. Too many people have been silent about this, perhaps because they don’t want to be associated with someone depicted by the Daily Mail as ‘the poster girl of Remain’.

That needs to change, and now.  Politicians and commentators need to speak out loudly and clearly in support of Miller and in loud condemnation of the racists and fascists who have tormented her.  Social media companies need to become more proactive in shutting them down.  We need to do this for Miller’s sake and also for our own.  No one should be subjected to such abuse, and the vileness directed at Miller is only the sharp end of a dangerous trend that poses a direct threat to UK society as a whole.  As Miller wrote last month:

Over the last year, as the hatred flooded into my inbox, I’ve watched as perpetrators have discovered a new boldness. They no longer hide under anonymity but openly sign their name. They no longer linger alone in their rooms, or at the end of some bar in a pub; social media amplify their vile voices and create echo chambers that reinforce their views.

This is happening because we have allowed it to happen.  It will take a great deal of effort to put these monsters back in the box, but  it’s an effort we have to make.  Today Leave.EU tweeted the following GIF celebrating the fact that Miller may be forced to leave the country because of the threats directed against her:

Gina Miller says she may need to leave the UK. pic.twitter.com/cs1gIFgbRf

— LEAVE.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) August 9, 2017

That is their response, and no one familiar with Arron Banks’s organisation will be remotely surprised by it.  If we are going to prevent the UK from sliding into the same swamp we need a different response.   Last month Miller asked ‘the decent people of Britain to come together in opposition to the hatred poisoning our country’.

That’s an invitation we will refuse to our shame – and also at our own peril.

Source: Infernal Machine

Historically, the self-identification by certain societies and countries as civilised has often acted as a justification for war and conquest, particularly when such wars have been waged against ‘savage’ or ‘barbarian’ peoples.  In such circumstances, even the most extreme violence becomes an altruistic expression of the onward march of civilisation, removing obstacles to human progress and allowing the forces of light to reach those who survive these wars.

This trope has appeared again and again, in the history of European colonial conquests; in the Nazi representation of the invasion of the Soviet Union as a defense of civilisation against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’; in the propaganda of the Confederacy; in the wars of the French colonels in Indochina and Algeria, and on many Cold War battlefronts.  With communism now vanquished, post-9/11 conservatives have attempted to replace communism with ‘Islamofascism’, ‘Islamic radicalism’ or ‘jihadism’ as the main threat to civilisation.  For diplomatic and strategic reasons, the ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative was generally removed from official discourse in the ‘War on Terror’, but it was often present amongst supporters of those wars.

In 2001 Silvio Berlusconi broke protocol when he described 9/11 attacks as ‘attacks not only on the United States but on our civilisation, of which we are proud bearers, conscious of the supremacy of our civilisation, of its discoveries and inventions, which have brought us democratic institutions, respect for the human, civil, religious and political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything.’

The idea that Berlusconi spent much time thinking about the ‘discoveries and inventions’ of ‘our civilisation’ is not one to detain us for long.   And this week, civilisation found an even more improbable defender in the shape of Donald Trump, who sprinkled his Warsaw speech with references to civilisation and the need to defend it. Like most of those who say such things, Trump referenced communism as a vanquished threat, before evoking its replacement’ in the form of ‘another oppressive ideology — one that seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.’

Yep, it’s Islamofascism all over again.  And it’s threatening not just our lives, but our common civilisation – a term Trump helpfully explained by telling his audience ‘ You are the proud nation of Copernicus — think of that.’  Yeah, think of that.   And while you do, think also, that this is a man who has ignored the consensus of most scientists that the planet is in grave danger from global warming, who has stacked his cabinet with climate change deniers and called for deep cuts to government-funded scientific research in his 2018 budget.   As Boris Johnson would say, Copernicus go whistle.

Trump also had a great deal to say about Chopin, our love of symphonies and ‘ works of art that honor God’, about the right to free speech and free expression’ and our respect for the ‘dignity of every human life’ and other ‘priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.’

One of these ‘allies’ is Saudi Arabia, which executed six people yesterday.  According to Amnesty International ‘The rise in death sentences against Saudi Arabian Shia is alarming and suggests that the authorities are using the death penalty to settle scores and crush dissent under the guise of combating ‘terrorism’ and maintaining national security’.   Trump didn’t mention the arrest and flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi, whose ‘crimes’ included a satirical attack on the obscurantism of his country’s religious scholars by reference to the same scientific tradition that he invoked yesterday.

But then no one would expect him to.  Because for politicians like Trump, ‘civilisation’ is only useful insofar as it serves to drum up support for civilisational war and ‘defense’ against its enemies.   No sooner were these wise words spoken, than the Sun stepped in to support them, with an approving editorial from Trevor Kavanagh,  warning that refugees have to be kept out, because the refugee crisis is ‘nothing less than an oil-and-water clash of civilisations.’

How so?  Because many refugees ‘have no ­experience of civil society.  They have mostly known only poverty, repression and corruption — the reason they upped sticks’. Therefore it naturally follows that ‘Some will recreate these ­conditions rather than adopt a Western respect for the rule of law.’  Actually, it’s not just ‘some’, it’s really a lot, because ‘More painfully to the point, almost all [refugees]are Muslim’ and ‘Individually, Muslims are no worse and no better than ­anyone else, but they belong to an exclusive and frequently intolerant faith. They might accept our rule of law, but their first duty is to Allah.’

Is it?  The sneaky bastards.  Even more worrying, these Muslims also ‘believe the entire world belongs to Allah, not the nations in which they happen to reside. No Muslim dares question the Koran, the holy book which sets out these 7th Century teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. Increasingly, in the cowed West, nor does anyone else.’

Call me cowed, but I really don’t believe that Muslim women who were working out in the gym with me today, or the charming Muslim women who gave me directions this morning, or the children of the Asian taxi drivers who I hear playing most days a few houses away are intent on the downfall of ‘our’ civilisation.  And I just can’t swallow this kind of racist tripe coming from anyone, let alone from the Murdoch newspapers which once lied about the Hillsborough disaster, which hacked a murdered schoolgirl’s telephone to sell more papers, and which once called dead refugee children ‘cockroaches.’

If that’s civilisation, you know what to do with it.   In principle, I feel a little closer to the concept invoked by Brexit secretary David Davis yesterday, who told the Commons Select Committee that the issue of EU nationals rights were ‘an issue of civilisation as much as anything else.’  I say in principle, because if you equate civilisation with a moral and ethical concept of human dignity,  then it is indeed uncivilised to take away the rights of EU nationals to have their families live with them, just as it should be an ‘issue of civilisation’ that non-EU migrants married to Britons are prevented from living with their families in the UK just because they can’t meet the £18,000 threshold.

Davis told the committee that he and his team had ‘agonised’ about whether to give EU nationals the rights to family reunion that they currently enjoy, before deciding that it would be unfair to give them rights that British nationals don’t have, because of the UK government’s brutal immigration laws.  And that’s not just a testament to the very shallow conception of morality of David and his team.  It’s also the problem with this civilisational discourse thing.  Too many people like to invoke the idea, and too few of those who do actually want to practice the principles they invoke.

Too often civilisation is just another metaphorical wall to wrap around ourselves and demonise those who don’t – and can’t – belong to it.   Not for nothing was Osama bin Laden a big fan of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis.  It was as useful for him as it now is for the Cheeto millionaire, Steve Bannon and Rupert Murdoch, and that’s why when I hear the word ‘civilisation’ coming from such men, I tend to reach for my metaphorical revolver and a very large pinch of salt.

Source: Infernal Machine

Only a few days ago attacked Trump attacked MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski by informing the world that he had turned her away from his Mar-a-Lago freakshow paradise because ‘ she was bleeding badly from a face-lift.’  Brzezinski is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s former secretary of state, who died in May, and whose Polish roots shaped his own evolution into the hawkish Cold War warrior who set the Afghan ‘Bear Trap’ to ensnare the Soviets back in 1979 by funding the Afghan jihad.

Yesterday Trump’s speechwriter filled his mouth with sonorous words words like ‘soul’, ‘ bled’, ‘spirit’, ‘heroism’,  ‘freedom’, and above all ‘civilisation’,  that were clearly designed to make the hearts of Polish nationalists beat faster.  The Emperor of Mar-a-Lago even had the nerve to invite veterans of the Warsaw Uprising to join him on stage, as he told his audience that Poland’s national survival was not just due to the Polish spirit, but also to God, and that this ‘message’ is equally appropriate today since ‘ The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God”.’

Why do we want God?   Because communism has been ‘vanquished by another oppressive ideology — one that seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.’ We have heard this before, but now we have a president who God favours as much as He once favoured Poland, since:

‘During a historic gathering in Saudi Arabia, I called on the leaders of more than 50 Muslim nations to join together to drive out this menace which threatens all of humanity. We must stand united against these shared enemies to strip them of their territory and their funding, and their networks, and any form of ideological support that they may have.’

This is the same Saudi Arabia that produced most of the 9/11 attackers, that is currently bombing Yemen to starvation, that is intent on promoting and unleashing all-out sectarian war across the Middle East and beyond, and which has just bought $100 billion worth of weapons from Trump’s son-in-law for this purpose.

Such allies are nevertheless essential when faced with really bad states like Russia, who Trump urged ‘ to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran — and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.’

Having referenced the Russian Bear to rouse Polish hearts, Trump drew another lesson from Polish history, warning of another threat to civilisation that ‘is invisible but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.’

So that was why Jews rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto.  That was why the Polish Home Army rose up against the Nazis, why Solidarity went on strike at Gdansk – it was all part of the endless struggle against the ‘paperwork and regulations’ that impede the one percent and Donald Trump’s pursuit of limitless wealth.  In the magic world of Mar-a-Lago land however, Islamic State, paperwork, Iran and Russia are all part of the same Godless anti-civilisational forces ‘ whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.‘

What makes us what we are, according to Trump?

‘We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.’

It’s striking how, like Anders Breivik and so many white nationalists, classical music becomes some kind of exemplar of ‘Western’ civilisation against the barbarian hordes, even for those who never listen to it.   Can you imagine Trump, lying on a gilded sofa listening to Mahler as he meditates on our ‘timeless traditions and customs’?

Me neither.  If Trump’s reference to those ‘brand-new frontiers’ means that imperial conquest and domination, genocide, slavery, and forced depopulation are hallmarks of the outward march of Western civilisation, then he is right, but it shouldn’t be something to boast about. Trump is the living proof that ‘we’ do not always reward brilliance, and that even the trashiest manifestations of inherited wealth can rise to the top in a dysfunctional political system warped by power and money.   As for those ‘inspiring works of art that honor God’, has this bleached loon turned into Philip II of Spain now?

And then there is this priceless gem:

‘ We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.’

I’m sorry. But we’re talking about a man who once called his own daughter ‘ a piece of ass’ and who once said of an object of his affections ‘I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phoney tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.’

Yesterday that man told Poland and the world: ‘ The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?’

There are other ‘fundamental questions’ that are not raised here, such as the threat of climate change to our common survival as a species, let alone as a civilisation – a threat that Trump has intensified through his fanatical and ignorant opposition to even the most tentative attempts to mitigate it.   Others may argue that Trump himself is the symptom of a political disease that threatens our collective freedom and the future of democracy.

And take note of that promise to defend ‘our’ values ‘at any cost’ – words that could not be more chilling coming from this vainglorious, arrogant dolt, especially given the mayhem that has already been unleashed by his supposedly more sophisticated predecessors in defense of those values.  In equating ‘respect for our citizens’ with the desire to ‘protect our borders’, Trump was aligning his ‘Muslim ban’ with Poland’s refusal to allow Muslim refugees into the country – both of which breach the international responsibility to protect refugees that until recently was considered a hallmark of civilisational advancement.

In a final tilt to the Law and Justice Party, Trump warned that ‘ We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. So, together, let us all fight like the Poles — for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.’

So Poland has become the world, and the world has become Poland, and this reactionary, manipulative and warmongering call to arms is further evidence that the Emperor of Mar-a-Lago land deserves our collective contempt as much as he ever did.

Source: Infernal Machine

‘National’ security has more inclusive and democratic connotations than the more fascistic-sounding ‘state security’, which is why governments prefer to talk about it in the first person plural, and invoke the principle of protection in response to acts of political violence. They promise to wage wars, or introduce emergency legislation and ‘Muslim bans’ in response to terrorist attacks or in order to preempt them in order to ‘keep us safe’.

The procession of sinister and shocking events of the last month have made it brutally clear that the British government is failing to keep its citizens safe. The attack on Westminster; the massacre at Manchester; the jihadist stabbing spree at London bridge, and now yesterday’s attack on the Finsbury park mosque – all these events are part of a barbaric cycle of vengeance, fanaticism, and murder that may be paving the way for even worse horrors to come.

These events – though the British government will never acknowledge this – are part of a continuum of violence that reaches back to the Iraq War, and includes a series of reckless and failed neo-imperial military interventions and black ops that have reduced the heart of the Middle East and parts of North Africa to violent chaos. However horrendous the events that we have witnessed these last weeks, they are only the most visible manifestations of the 21st century’s savage world of unwinnable wars and pseudo-wars that have no end in sight.

The governments that set this process in motion may not have intended these consequences, but the idea that their own citizens could somehow remain untouched by these events was never really viable. So if we take the governments that launched these wars at their word, and assume that they really were intended to protect us, then we are looking at monumental policy failure, because what these wars have done is exacerbate every conflict and every threat they were supposed to eliminate. They have created a series of failed states and ungoverned spaces that provide the perfect recruiting ground and battlefield for politico-religious fanatics. They have fueled racism, of the kind we saw last night, and the murders of Muslims that have taken place in the US, and ushered in a cycle of tit-for-tat murders and atrocities that shows no sign of abating.

Presented as humanitarian interventions, they have killed people in huge numbers that barely even feature in the imagination of the West, and made it possible for a succession of terrorist organisations to present their obscene acts of violence as legitimate acts of revenge, however spuriously.

But violence is not the only threat to public safety, and the entirely preventable tragedy at Grenfell is a testament to a different kind of security failure. It has made it brutally clear that there are some sections of the population who are not considered worthy of protection because they are poor, because they are migrants or because they are darker-skinned.

The stench of neglect at Grenfell is overwhelming, from the failure to respond to warnings from the local action group to the utterly inadequate official response that followed. And this neglect is itself the product of a wider failure of governance that reached a pitch of sociopathic delirium in the name of ‘austerity’, with its destructive cuts to vital services, deregulation, corner cutting safety procedures, and the gradual pulling away of safety nets and the essential struts that hold society together.

The result is that insecurity and precarity are now the dominant social forces – except for the minority of the population rich enough to take the future for granted. This is why hospitals and A & Es are closing down across the country, why firemen, police and ambulance drivers are being shed, why patients wait for hours on stretchers in corridors. It’s why the welfare system that was intended to be a safety net has now become a punitive trap and a form of humiliation for some of the most vulnerable men and women in the country. It’s why jobs are becoming temporary, part-time and zero hours. It’s why living longer is increasingly becoming a nightmare to be dreaded rather than a sign of social progress.

We rightly condemn the feckless, callous and grossly inadequate politicians who have presided over this process, but they are only the most visible expressions of a broader social process, which has increasingly ensured that no one is really secure except those who are able to afford it.

That insecurity is global and also national. We now inhabit a country – and a world – that is bracing itself for the next atrocity and the next massacre. It’s a world where no one is secure, where demagogues like Donald Trump promise to keep their populations safe by building walls and issuing blanket bans on Muslim immigrants; where Richard Littlejohn calls us to ‘war’ and Isis attempts to use the Finsbury Park attack as a justification for the ‘war on the UK streets’ that its own provocations have been seeking to promote.

It is not at all clear how we get out of this dystopian situation. It may even be that we can’t. But there is really only one possibility that offers any hope, and that is to acknowledge the failures of the last few decades, both at home and abroad and move beyond the shallow notions of national security that have been invoked too often for the wrong reasons.

We might also imagine a different kind of security, based on the human rather than the national, that goes beyond war, counterterrorism and the imperatives of the state, and places the notion of the common good at its heart, and the possibility of a better future as its primary objective.

Source: Infernal Machine

This reputation was always surprisingly impervious to reality. Throughout the Coalition and Cameron governments, the national debt continued to rise, even though Tory politicians insisted that austerity was the only way to reduce it.   Even when the government’s own advisors argued that austerity had harmed the economy, they still continued with it.  Even when social care floundered and the NHS continued its slow-motion collapse, the Tories still managed to convince the public that the damage they were inflicting on society was for everyone’s good.

Now, as a result of Theresa May’s catastrophic campaign and its unexpected denouement last Thursday, the myth of Tory competence has been well and truly shattered.   It is now clear that these are not politicians who know what they are doing.

First the feckless gambler Cameron inflicted a divisive and unnecessary referendum on the country to resolve a quarrel within the Tory Party. As a result the historic defender of British business is now responsible for an economic slump that has transformed the UK into the worst-performing economy in the industrialised world.  Theresa May then seamlessly and cluelessly transformed herself from quiet Remainer into the hardest of Brexiters, and did everything possible to antagonize and alienate her European negotiators.

After spending ten months promising to achieve the impossible, she then called an election that the country did not need in order to consolidate her party’s power into the next generation, only to lose her majority as a result of one of the most tin-eared and dim-witted campaigns in British history, and she leads a minority government propped up by the DUP

To say that this train-wreck is not competent does not even begin to describe it.  Faced with this self-inflicted calamity, the Tory Party is desperate to save itself. That is why we heard about May’s tears over the weekend.  That is why her MPs are insisting in the same dismal chorus that she showed her ‘human side’ at the 1922 Committee meeting yesterday, and why she is showing contrition – to her party, not to anyone else.  That is why the new Minister for the Environment (you at the back, stop sniggering, this is serious) Michael Gove now says the government is in ‘listening mode.’

Now every Tory MP or minister exudes gravitas,forgiveness and seriousness.  Even Sarah Woolaston – an MP who has at least tried to stand up for the NHS – refused to admit on C4 News yesterday that Brexit might have caused the incredible 96 percent drop in  applications from EU nurses for UK jobs – this at a time when there is a 30-40000 shortfall in British nurses.

Now we hear that austerity is over, that the government will be listening to public sector workers who Corbyn mysteriously ‘tapped into.’  Now there will be school meals again, freedom for foxes, soft Brexit, red carpets for migrants, fluffy unicorns and beautifully-coloured Tory rainbows.   No longer will hard-faced politicians taunt nurses with talk of magic money trees or throw back their shoulders in weird laughing fits. No longer will May seek to exclude parliament from Brexit discussions or threaten to ‘walk out without a deal.’

Now she seeks not to rule the country, but only to serve her party, as she has been doing since she was a 12-year-old girl stuffing envelopes and running through fields of wheat.   All this is a massive victory for Corbyn’s Labour Party, but let no one be fooled by this apparent contrition.  The only reason May & co are contrite is because they failed to achieve their objectives. The only reason they are in listening ‘mode’  is because they have been badly weakened.

But this is not a government that has any more idea about what it is doing than it did before, and it has no more concern for the national interest or the interests of British society than it did last Thursday.  It has driven itself and the country into a hole and it has no idea how to get out. It is now entirely dependent for itself survival on the DUP, whose support it is cultivating regardless of the possibility that it may undermine the Good Friday Agreement.

These arrangements are unlikely to work.   The DUP has apparently ‘parked’ its sectarian demands and its antideluvian social agenda in the negotiations for the time being, and intends to concentrate on financial demands – presumably to make up for the money that Northern Ireland will lose as a result of Brexit.  If the government makes payouts to Northern Ireland, then other regions such as Cornwall and Wales are likely to do the same.

As far as Brexit is concerned, the DUP, like the government – and to some extent like the Labour opposition – wants to have its cake and eat it.  It wants out of the things it doesn’t like and inside the things it does like.  Crucially it wants a ‘soft’ border and free movement with the Irish Republic.   If the government agrees to include this in its negotiating position, then it will have to make concessions that May insisted she would never make, and that the Europhobic wing of the Tory Party will not accept.

Meanwhile, it is difficult to believe that the DUP won’t try to use its position to undermine Sinn Fein, or that Sinn Fein won’t see a DUP-Tory government alliance as a threat to its own constituency.  It remains to be seen whether the DUP continues with its attempt to exclude members of the security forces from investigation for actions carried out during the Troubles – an aspiration that many Tories share – but if it does, and the government agrees, then Northern Ireland may be headed for very choppy waters.

And now the Brexit negotiations loom and May’s crippled government faces the challenge of getting the ‘best deal’ – an all but impossible task even before this debacle. In short, ladies and gentlemen, this is a monumental political car-crash, like one of those scenes from Die Hard when the roads are strewn with overturned vehicles, and it should never be forgotten or forgiven.  It is absolutely inexcusable.   The Tory Party created it, and they own it,  and no amount of grovelling or fake-contrite messaging should ever conceal the fact.

On one hand, the fact that Labour did not actually win last Thursday may turn out to be a blessing, as May and her hapless team lurch forward with staring eyes and frozen smiles on the road to international ridicule and humiliation, because otherwise a Labour government would have taken all the blame that will now be heaped on these duplicitous buffoons.

But that doesn’t mean that Labour will glide smoothly into power when the last wheels come off the Tory machine.   Faced with the prospect of another election and the possibility of defeat, the Tory Party will close ranks. Some individuals may go – May being the most likely, but others will take their place.   They will obfuscate, lie, and distort, blame the opposition and do whatever it takes to preserve their careers and ensure that the Tory Party survives.

And next time they will do it better.  They will not underestimate Corbyn.  They now understand that they are facing a movement that is not like anything this country has seen before.  They will develop tactics, messages and strategies to deal with it.

Hopefully none of this will be able to save them, but they should not be underrated either.  Because if clowns like these can win more than thirteen million votes, then they cannot be written off, and there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that they get the political punishment they surely deserve.

Source: Infernal Machine

Now the fairweather friends who flocked round her because they thought it would further their own careers are undoubtedly sharpening their knives, and even the Tory tabloid pack of hounds are barking around her tarnished jodhpurs.  Justice has been served, and it has rarely been so richly deserved.  Because ever since May called the election that she had promised seven times that she would never call, she has been grimacing her way across the country, insulting the intelligence of the public with arid meaningless slogans and half-baked platitudes that made a mockery of the English language, not to mention any notion of political transparency or honesty.

It has been disgraceful, shameful, shambolic, contemptuous and contemptible, and now she is reaping the just reward for her epic arrogance and ineptitude.  For once, in these dark dishonest times, a disreputable and dishonest fraud has been comprehensively exposed,  and the satisfaction is only enhanced by the fact that it’s entirely her own fault.

Some might say that  celebrations are premature.  After all, May is still in power and the Tories won the election.  They are about to form a government with (ahem) the DUP. But everything in politics is relative, and the very fact that such an arrangement is even necessary is a testament to May’s failure.   Seven weeks ago, May was twenty points up in the polls.  She had a 17-seat majority.  She was expected to gain some 400-odd seats and put Labour out of power for a generation.   She pretended that she needed a democratic mandate to negotiate when what she really wanted was a huge majority that would have turned parliament into a rubber-stamp machine.

She and all her supporters knew this and expected it and it’s difficult to believe, given the record of the last two years, that many Labour MPs didn’t secretly hope for it too. Contrary to the idea that this was done in the national interest, these calculations were made entirely in May’s own interests and in the interests of the Tory party.  On the eve of some of the most important negotiations in the history of the country, she chose to take a little time out to play political games and take advantage of the Labour Party’s seeming disarray.

Now she knows what disarray looks like and she has knows what it feels like to have your democratic butt kicked.  She has no majority and no mandate.  She is diminished domestically and diminished in Europe.  She might continue to babble about stability but she is damaged goods.  Her government is shipping water,  and even thought the DUP caulking may enable her to limp into Brussels, but it is doubtful that it will bring her back with the deal she supposedly wanted – assuming she ever really knew what she wanted.

Faced with an almost impossible negotiating timetable,  she has shortened it further, and she enters the negotiations with her credibility in shreds.   This is Mission Impossible with Mrs Doubtfire not Tom Cruise lowering herself into the negotiating chamber.   Yet even now, when that reckless and irresponsible gamble has collapsed, she and her minions are still lying, still trying to act as if none of this has happened, still frantically trying to pretend that somehow this is what they wanted all along.  But as the old saying goes, you can’t fool all the people all the time, and this is one pig that won’t fly.

So all this is worth celebrating, but there is a lot more schadenfreude here.  Against all expectations, Corbyn’s Labour party increased its share of the vote to some 43 percent and gained 30-odd seats with the most leftwing manifesto since 1945.  Corbyn achieved this despite the opposition of the majority of his own MPs – including the hideous spectacle  that took place after the referendum, when he, not Cameron,  was booed and heckled by his own party.

He achieved it in the face of an unrelenting campaign of vilification, waged with all the lack of scruple for which our press is famous, supported by many of his own MPs. But throughout this assault he never buckled, never descended to the depths inhabited by his enemies, never abandoned his basic ideas and principles.  In the last week the Tories and the tabloids have dived into the gutter and disgracefully used two savage terrorist massacres,  in an attempt to portray him as a terrorist apologist and sympathiser.

None of this worked.  All water off the electorate’s back.   Millions of people ignored the lies, smears and propaganda and made their own judgments about Corbyn and his politics, and they clearly liked what they saw.  So this is a political and personal triumph and vindication for him that is absolutely deserved.  And it isn’t just a consequence of the catastrophic Tory campaign: it is also a tribute to the great campaign that he and his team fought, and to the movement that believed in him and campaigned for him even when pessimists – including myself- believed that the Corbyn project could not win.

There have been some mutterings from the Labour right that Labour would have won if Corbyn had not been the leader, but this is nonsense.  Does anybody seriously believe that Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper or Owen Smith could have done this – let alone done better?    For the first time, a vote for Labour really was a vote against austerity, and millions of voters saw that and took notice, and all this is entirely due to Corbyn and his team.

No wonder the left feels empowered, thrilled and inspired, and those emotions won’t easily be dissipated, especially now that the Corbyn campaign has connected with the young – the young whose future has so cynically and selfishly been taken away from them, who successive governments have saddled with debt, falling real wages, zero hour contracts, internships, tuition fees and the glorious prospect of working till they are 75.

Yesterday these voters turned out in record numbers to vote Labour.  They discovered that their votes can sometimes make a difference, and it’s difficult to believe this experience will be forgotten. A new political generation has made its voice heard for the first time, and the stale, rancorous reactionary politics of the last few years no longer seem inevitable.  No wonder the tabloids are panicking.  No wonder Nigel Farage is talking of a comeback.   All that is a tribute to Corbyn’s character, his politics and his message, and the movement that he inspired.

Of course there are issues that have yet to be addressed.  Brexit still hangs over the country like a pall, and it remains to be seen how a Corbyn government – let alone a minority government – would deal with the negotiations, or how it could implement its program when the economy nosedives.

The Labour right may have suffered a defeat, but some of them will undoubtedly continue to conspire behind the scenes and undermine the Corbyn project. Labour’s pig-headed antipathy to alliances does not bode well, should Corbyn find himself obliged to form a minority government.  It still seems incredible to me that Labour refused to stand down against Zac Goldsmith,even though it had no chance of winning, and allowed yet another Tory charlatan to scrape through by forty-odd votes.

There will probably have to be another election, and even the Tories may learn from their mistakes.  The attempts to destroy Corbyn will be stepped up.  But for now, it is possible to imagine a different future beyond the dread mantra There Is No Alternative, and the country suddenly feels like a better place to live in than it did yesterday, and I can only say, as Margaret Thatcher did many years ago in very different circumstances, rejoice, rejoice.

Source: Infernal Machine

Like so much that comes from May’s mouth and from the Tory party in general these days,  this was a bare-faced lie.  Labour had accepted the referendum result and allowed May to trigger Article 50 entirely on her own terms. May’s real intentions were more sinister and devious: in seeking a bigger majority and appealing to the ‘will of the people’, she intended to remove the entire Brexit process from parliamentary scrutiny altogether and ensure that the electorate gave her a rubber stamp to enact a ‘plan’ that she was not and is not prepared to reveal to the public, most likely because she doesn’t actually have one.

Instead, showing a gall and an arrogance rarely seen in British politics, she asked the public to vote for her without explaining what they were actually voting for.  All this was supposedly for our own good, but like the referendum itself, it was entirely dictated by the interests of the Tory party.   May clearly calculated that the economic impact of Brexit would be kicking in by 2020, and decided that now would be a good time to destroy a divided Labour Party and ensure that her own party was able to ride out the storms that will certainly ensue over the next three years.

This is what the Tory papers clearly hoped for too when they applauded her Machiavellian brilliance. Like May, they believed that a massive Tory majority was a fait accompli.  All that was required was for May to intone ‘strong and stable’ and ‘coalition of chaos’ before hand-picked audiences and the glassy-eyed voters would stumble towards her with their hands outstretched in front of them.  A good plan – in theory – but now, astonishingly,  it has unravelled to the point when May may not get the massive majority she wants, and there is even a discussion taking place about whether she will actually lose the election.

What explains this incredible turn of events? Firstly, there is the deeply unattractive and unappealing figure of May herself.   When she first put herself forward as a successor to Cameron last year she presented herself as a safe pair of hands, a competent non-ideological technocrat surrounded by buffoons and conniving chancers who ‘ wear her heart on the sleeve’ and ‘got the job done’.

That carefully-cultivated image has now dissolved.   Again and again throughout this campaign May has shown that the reason she doesn’t wear her heart on the sleeve is because she has no heart at all.   The best that can be said of a woman who says that ‘people use foodbanks for complex reasons’ when asked why nurses are using them, or who tells a nurse asking why she hasn’t had a pay rise in years that there is ‘no magic money tree’ is that she has something of an empathy deficit.

The worst is that she is as callous and uncaring as the Tory governments that she has been part of have shown themselves to be these last few years.  Either way it’s not a good look, especially for a politician who has placed herself at the centre of the campaign. Like the Wizard of Oz, May would like the outside world to see what she wants them to see, but she has already shown the public more than even many Tory voters can bear, and the more she has revealed of herself, the more she has shown herself to be a callous, reactionary, dishonest, vacillating, opportunistic, cowardly, conniving control freak.

All this would be bad enough, but it has been compounded by the most arrogant, lazy, and incompetent campaign that I can remember, which offered voters nothing but a back-of-a-fag-packet manifesto, ‘coalition of chaos’ messaging and shameful sarcasm about ‘magic money trees’ in response to every question about the manifold social failures that are unfolding before our eyes and the ongoing collapse of public services.

In contrast to this, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party have exceeded the expectations of many, including myself – and fought a superb campaign, based on a positive message and a return to genuine social-democratic principles. Corbyn, unlike May, is a natural campaigner, with a warmth, humanity and sincerity that neither May nor any of her crew can ever match.   He has shown tremendous courage and good humour, in enduring one of the most vicious onslaughts ever directed against a British politician.

Place someone like that against a woman who sends her bereaved Home Secretary into a tv debate because she hasn’t the guts to appear herself, and voters will take notice, even if May assumed they wouldn’t.   But character isn’t everything. For the first time, Labour have presented the electorate with a genuine alternative to the neoliberal austerity model which has wrought such havoc for the best part of a decade.

The result is that against all the odds, and despite the opposition of the majority of his own MPs, Corbyn has slashed the Tory lead in the polls.  Personally, I have had my reservations about the Corbyn project and the Labour party in general, and still do.  I don’t like the lack of clarity on Brexit.  I think there should be another vote on a final deal.  I also think that a Labour government will struggle to implement its program outside the single market.   I don’t agree with Labour’s position on free movement.

Despite these caveats, I will most definitely be voting Labour tomorrow.  I will do it because this zombie government cannot be allowed to have a majority that will enable it to inflict even more damage on British society than it already has.   I will be doing it because Corbyn has courageously raised the possibility of a different kind of foreign policy to the endless Groundhog Day horror of the ‘war on terror.’

I will do it because if May gets the majority she wants, it will leave the country in the hands of people like Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davies and – offstage – Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks.  The result will be the hardest of Brexits, and a national disaster that will most likely result in the UK crashing out into WTO rules.  A May majority will transform the UK into a corrupt banana republic – a deregulated tax haven flowing with Trump hotels and Saudi money and ruled by men and women without a trace of humanity or concern for anyone except a narrow wealthy clique and the Tory party itself.

If May wins then more schools will be asking parents to pay for their children’s education, as many are already doing.  It will mean the destruction of the NHS and the collapse of social services. It will mean reactionary clampdowns on civil liberties. More stigmatisation and persecution of migrants.   The rolling back of rights for EU nationals.

In short, a Tory majority will accelerate and continue the ongoing transformation of the UK into a dystopia, and I will vote for anyone and anything that can prevent this.  Can Labour prevent it?   Could a Corbyn government cope with the immense challenges of trying to implement a social democratic program and stave off the disaster of a hard Brexit?

I don’t know, but right now it seems a possibility worth voting for, and that’s something I haven’t felt about Labour for a very long time.

Around these central aims other factors may also come into play: simple vengeance for a real or imagined grievance; the desire to demonstrate the power and reach of the terrorist organisation or cause; rage at the real or imagined indifference of the targeted society towards acts of violence and repression for which its government may be responsible.

These components have been replayed again and again in different ways in one terrorist emergency after another, so on one level the horrors that are now unfolding globally are not entirely unprecedented.   What is new is the sustained and calculated barbarity of the attacks that are now unfolding.  In country after country we are witnessing what are essentially crimes against humanity carried out by a variety of ‘jihadist’ groups who have clearly abandoned even paying lip service to rules and customs of war established over thousands of years.

These groups are not constrained by any moral or ethical limits.  Children, women, the elderly, teenage girls at a concert, pregnant women, gays, lesbians, nightclubbers, booksellers, shoppers in markets  – no targets are off-limits.

They call themselves soldiers and walk around in military fatigues but they are more like einsatzgruppen –  petty exterminators drifting out of a druggy haze into the fervor of overnight ‘conversions’ that only seem to have one aim: to give them permission to perpetrate more horrors that disgrace the name of humanity.  They call themselves Muslims, but the only thing that seems to interest them about Islam is its usefulness as a license for violence and killing.

Historically there is nothing uniquely Islamic about such barbarity.  A cursory look back at the conquistadores; the French Wars of Religion; the Thirty Years War; World War II or more recently the wars of the former Yugoslavia should quickly dispel such illusions.   Anders Breivik; the killing of Jo Cox; last month’s murders in Portland – let no one imagine that violence of this kind is due to the special proclivity of any particular race, faith or culture towards cruelty.

But in recent years there has been – and we should not dodge this issue – a proliferation of reactionary, tyrannical and misogynistic groups acting in the name of Islam that are trying to implement the historic strategies of revolutionary terrorism at a global level with exceptional ferocity.  Their essential philosophy was once defined in an epigram in the so-called ‘al-Qaeda training manual’ used by the Afghan mujahideen as they prepared to wage war on the secular tyrannies of the Middle East,  which declared:

‘The confrontation that Islam calls for with these godless and apostate regimes does not know Socratic dialogues, Platonic ideals, nor Aristotelean diplomacy.  But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.’

This is morally-speaking, the language of cavemen coupled with the exaltation of violence that you might once have found in Italian futurism or fascism. In the last two weeks British society has been subjected to two utterly horrendous attacks by groups and individuals that subscribe to this philosophy.

There are many reasons why this has happened: the corruption, violence and tyranny of post-colonial regimes in the Middle East (sometimes with Western support and sometimes not); the wars in which successive British governments have recklessly involved themselves for more than fifteen years; the dirty games that elements of the British state have played with some of the same jihadists who are now carrying out attacks here; problems of identity, integration and alienation amongst second and third generation Muslim immigrants that have led some young Muslims to seek some kind of meaning and purpose in wars that have clearly brutalised them and annihilated any capacity for mercy, decency or empathy they may once have had.

Whatever the individual motivations of their perpetrators, the atrocities and crimes that they have carried out have a clear strategic purpose.   They are a form of social engineering, designed to be as disgusting and cruel as possible, in the hope of paving the way for a future of endless violence and heroic war.

The individuals and groups that carry out such attacks want no spectators or bystanders, particularly amongst Muslims.  They want all Muslims to join in the great confrontation that ‘Islam’ calls for – their version of it anyway – and they are prepared to bring down hell on entire communities in order to ensure this result.  Contrary to the endless rhetoric that they simply hate us because of our ‘values’ or are continuing some ancestral war against the ‘West’, they are also prepared to kill Muslims, and have in fact done so in huge numbers.

Despite the anathema that our government pronounces on such groups, Western governments including our own have sometimes used them for their own ends, for example in Afghanistan and Libya, and sometimes they have been used by them. No government will ever admit to this of course, and so tragically, the public is rarely aware of the ‘blowback’ that can sometimes occur as a result of such linkages.

Instead governments prefer to use ill-defined and nebulous notions of ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ that end up targeting people who may not have done anything wrong or have any intention of carrying a violent act, and which too easily cast suspicion across entire communities.  Or else they invent new legal categories that justify ‘extraordinary rendition’ and indefinite detention that merely bring new recruits driven by bitterness, rancour and revenge.

So we are facing an incredibly dangerous, and in fact critical threat to our ‘way of life’, in terms of its potential longterm political and social consequences.  Not only are these groups a real threat to the ‘soft targets’ who they are using to pursue their objectives, but they have a very real possibility of getting precisely the outcome they are seeking.

However last night’s unholy trio drifted into the moral wasteland in which they found themselves, their actions were ultimately strategic:  they were designed to reach into the fascist underbelly of British society, and promote division, rage and hatred.  These attacks may have been planned long before an election was decided, but it is difficult to believe that two high-profile atrocities were carried out during an election campaign by mere coincidence.

These men know what kind of government they’re dealing with.   They know that UK society is coursing with fear and hatred towards immigrants in general and Muslims in particular.   They want more of it, because hatred and repression to them is the ‘true face’ of the British state and of British society that they want to reveal to their would-be constituency.

And there is no shortage of  hatred about.   Before the blood had even dried last night, social media fora were gushing with hate towards Muslims, Islam, ‘Liberals’,  migrants, Jeremy Corbyn,  Sadiq Khan, ‘political correctness’ or whatever else was supposed to have been responsible for the attacks at London Bridge.  The murderers are dead now, as they no doubt intended to be, but were they alive they would surely have been satisfied to hear the talk of deportations, internment and above all – war, because if there is any one point in which the terrorists and the far-right coincide, it’s in the belief that ‘war’ is some kind of solution or morally-bracing antidote to the flaccid mundanity of peace.

All of which means that we are required once again, to show real resilience in the face of this latest savage provocation.  We should resist talk of internment – a measure which has always acted like pouring oil onto a fire in any previous terrorist emergency – and would certainly have the same effect if it was implemented for this one.  We should not cancel the election.

We should concentrate instead on patient carefully-targeted counterterrorism and law enforcement – a difficult challenge to be sure.  We should expect more attacks, and do what we can to stop them, while knowing that some of them will get through.   We should not allow ourselves to be railroaded or panicked into emergency measures that contradict our best ideals.  We should, as Jeremy Corbyn courageously suggested, look at what there is in our foreign policy that has created the context in which these monstrosities continue to replicate themselves and seek legitimacy, however spurious.

We should mourn together and find ways of working together, with men and women of all faiths and of no faith at all, to face down and marginalise these threats.

Contrary to what some – you know who – have said, that is not weakness, cowardice, surrender or moral decadence, it is simply the only way to avoid giving last night’s murderers what they want, and prevent these dark times from becoming even more catastrophic.

And as bad as things look right now, we should believe that we can get through.  And we should never allow ourselves to descend into the sewer that those who carried out the London Bridge attacks would like us to sink into.