Tommy Robinson using UKIP as a vehicle for fascism

[Monsieur Verdoux]

THE POINT IS THAT I DID FUCKING KNOW BECAUSE IT WAS OBVIOUS, I HAVE SAID THIS MORE THAN ONCE ALREADY

have a nice day

[jobotic]

He knew that you knew. Bad faith, always.

[Hey, Punk!]

At the moment it is far more practical to stick to our guns and call these people fascists. I know there is the idea that we on the left have supposedley stripped the term of all meaning, but in many ways Fascism is a nebulous thing. It is an opportunistic authoritarianism that feeds on whatever prejudices and anxieties a nation happens to have. Just because Yaxley-Lennon is a Zionist and doesn't adhere to the strict racial classifications of Nazi Germany doesn't make labelling him a Fascist innacurate. Islam has simply replaced The Jew for British Fascists, the logic of anti-semitism is still present even if the target is no longer Jews themselves. Although there are of course, those who believe Jews are responsible for immigration, but I don't think YL is one of them. This is splitting hairs though, as most of the more extreme fascists do not yet have mainstream appeal like YL.

[Hey, Punk!]

It's ironic since Hitler is Islam's favourite infidel. The admiration was mutual as he wished Europe had been blessed with Islam since it would make better fighters out of his troops.

Since we're all still on the X is hitler bandwagon, might as well join in with some kindle for the fire...

Just today one of my Islamic collegues heiled Hitler before slicing my throat with a scimitar.

[biggytitbo]

THE POINT IS THAT I DID FUCKING KNOW BECAUSE IT WAS OBVIOUS, I HAVE SAID THIS MORE THAN ONCE ALREADY

have a nice day

This is a bit of an obvious post.

[Satchmo Distel]

Violent, bigoted movements influence each other and overlap but are still distinct, like a Venn Diagram. Iran has "death to Israel" signs in mosques; Israel shoots Palestinian kids; the US right puts kids in detention centres. Putting the blanket term "fascism" over that is unhelpful.

[Hey, Punk!]

Violent, bigoted movements influence each other and overlap but are still distinct, like a Venn Diagram. Iran has "death to Israel" signs in mosques; Israel shoots Palestinian kids; the US right puts kids in detention centres. Putting the blanket term "fascism" over that is unhelpful.

Not really, we are fine calling vastly varient politics 'conservative' or 'socialist'. Fascism is a quite loose singifier, but it conjures definite images in the head, it also in many ways solidifies the potential consequences. Sometimes you have to make cateogries for any kind of analysis, otherwise you're lost in a sea of pheonema. I think it is very helpful to call them fascists, in fact I think holding back usage of the word is unhelpful and allows the slow legitimisation that has been occuring for decades. I, of course do not mean that we call them fascists in a discussion ending way, rather as the beginning of one. These particular fascists have these features as an example.

[biggytitbo]

Violent, bigoted movements influence each other and overlap but are still distinct, like a Venn Diagram. Iran has "death to Israel" signs in mosques; Israel shoots Palestinian kids; the US right puts kids in detention centres. Putting the blanket term "fascism" over that is unhelpful.

I was reading something the other day about how there are a lot of underground alliances forming between the actual Nazis in Ukraine which we support, and far right groups in America. Does that count as blow back?


I also think its a terribly understudied phenomena about how decades of American atrocities abroad informs violence and extremism in America -  all those serial killers that were in Vietnam for instance, Timothy McVey, the links between the far right and veterans etc

[Bhazor]

Even by the standards of the hit and run hurr-durr insert blank are the real victims here posts that seem to be almost the only thing that you post, this is pretty weak.

Really? Because that's the way I see it. Millions voting far right nationalism but the onus is on everyone else. Like the cretins who go "This is why Trump won" nothing to do with millions of people ticking the box next to Trump and instead its blamed on everyone else. Feminists being too uppity, black people making jokes about white people, transsexuals existing.

I understand it, I really do. We like to think of people as calm rational well informed actors. We don't like to think that millions could be driven to vote by fear and hate mongering unburdened by fact. We don't like to think about how uninformed voters are or about how far right parties can promise anything and they're followers will believe it in a way mainstream parties couldn't dream of. We don't like to think about how many people watch the likes of Infowars and take it seriously. We don't like to fall down the Q rabbit hole. We don't like to think about the millions of Americans who believe one day soon god will descend in a golden beam of light and his chosen people will ascend to heaven leaving the other 90% of the world to an apocalyptic wasteland. So buy our buckets of Cauliflower Cheese today! We don't like to look at images of Unite the Right and see the thousands marching chanting "Jews will not replace us" or the Brexit march with tens of thousands chanting Free Tommy Robinson and carrying "Islam=Deathcult" placards. We want to imagine there are just a handful of proper bad nazis and everyone else there is just misguided or would totally vote for liberals if murmur murmur murmur cough cough.

Whether its immigrants, muslims, the EU or a vague amorphous "deep state" scapegoating is easier than proposing an achievable change and if people at large can be rational about anything its taking the easy option.

[Autopsy Turvey]

At the moment it is far more practical to stick to our guns and call these people fascists.

Rick from The Young Ones is behind you 100%.

I know there is the idea that we on the left have supposedley stripped the term of all meaning,

"Even the people who recklessly fling the word 'Fascist' in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By 'Fascism' they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."
- George Orwell, 1944

but in many ways Fascism is a nebulous thing. It is an opportunistic authoritarianism that feeds on whatever prejudices and anxieties a nation happens to have.

But think about that statement, and how broad it is. What if the opportunistic authoritarians are on the left, and their prejudices and anxieties are directed towards people who oppose the left? Yes it's an "Ahh who are the real fascists ahh" argument, but that's not an argument that can be satisfactorily answered by going "Ahh who are the real fascists ahh" in a mocking tone.

Just because Yaxley-Lennon is a Zionist and doesn't adhere to the strict racial classifications of Nazi Germany doesn't make labelling him a Fascist innacurate. Islam has simply replaced The Jew for British Fascists, the logic of anti-semitism is still present even if the target is no longer Jews themselves.

It's probably not this simple really, criticism of the the religious texts that are used to justify mass murder and child rape and the oppression of women and homosexuals is not the same as shouting "they are a bacillus, it said so in the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion".

most of the more extreme fascists do not yet have mainstream appeal like YL.

And they never will, this is 'blackshirts under the bed' paranoia. How many people in Britain think fascism is a good idea? How many people did you hear saying "That Nick Griffin really showed them what's what on Question Time"? If 'YL' has mainstream appeal, maybe it is because people can see that he's not a fascist and the truth might be more complicated than many are prepared to admit. Which might be why Nick Griffin was allowed on Question Time and Tommy isn't.

[Lemming]

One thing's for sure - if there are social problems in certain Islamic sub-communities, nothing will address those problems and act as a catalyst for positive change better than Tommy Lennon calling absolutely everyone rapist/terrorists and being appointed as UKIP's "rape gang advisor".

[Zetetic]

What's the right response to this, personally?

Usual stuff about helping a bold left Labour towards power.

Make sure your passport is up-to-date (and ideally have spare issued from outside the UK) and that you've got ready access to some cash and bank accounts outside of the UK.

What else?

[biggytitbo]

The two solutions generally are:

- tackle poverty and inequality
- dismantle the racist US and UK empire and its warmongering imperialism.

[Zetetic]

Right, but that's not really a plan that I can personally implement is it?

My personal plan might, after a fashion, contribute to those but that's not what the plan is going to look like.

[biggytitbo]

What's the plan for? You worried you'll be first against the wall when Yaxley and Buster Mottram seize power?

[Paul Calf]

The two solutions generally are:

- tackle poverty and inequality
- dismantle the racist US and UK empire and its warmongering imperialism.

Do you think the US and the UK are the only countries in the world with imperial ambitions?

Do you think the US and the UK are the sole source of racism in the world?

[biggytitbo]

Sorry, I thought we were talking about the UK.

But yes, the US and UK (with a few other usual culprits) are by a million lives the worst offenders.

[Large Noise]

 

Apologist bollocks

TIL Tommy Robinson is a scholar who criticises religious texts. Here I was thinking he was a former football hooligan who liked to match around the streets with skinheads talking about defending their homeland from 'foreign invaders'.

[jobotic]

Autopsy Turvy do you read Spiked? Or write for it? Or edit it?

[Paul Calf]

Sorry, I thought we were talking about the UK.

But yes, the US and UK (with a few other usual culprits) are by a million lives the worst offenders.

What I mean is, after the collapse of te eveil USUK Empire, what do you think will come next?

[Zetetic]

What's the plan for?

For dealing with the increasing popularity of all sorts of semi-political unpleasantness in the UK.

Both in terms of trying to reduce it, and being prepared for not being able to do so.

Grandiose statements like "dismantle the racist US and UK empire and its warmongering imperialism." are lovely, but they're not really anything you can act on. What do you do to achieve this?

[Zetetic]

Or to "tackle poverty and inequality".

(Rightly or not, that feels more open to my influence. What I do feels fairly paltry, but better than nothing.)

[Bhazor]

The natural first step to dismantling the racist British empire is to destroy all peaceful agreements with our closest neighbors and return to insular 19th century nationalism on a wave of far right xenophobic lies.

[biggytitbo]

Maybe as individuals the best thing we can do on the latter point is resist and challenge media lies everywhere we can? The false reality created by a compliant corporate media is part of the reason they keep getting away with it.

[biggytitbo]

The natural first step to dismantling the racist British empire is to destroy all peaceful agreements with our closest neighbors and return to insular 19th century nationalism on a wave of far right xenophobic lies.

What peaceful agreements? I'm not sure if helping bmw sell more cars is the solution to world peace.

[manticore]

Really? Because that's the way I see it. Millions voting far right nationalism but the onus is on everyone else. Like the cretins who go "This is why Trump won" nothing to do with millions of people ticking the box next to Trump and instead its blamed on everyone else. Feminists being too uppity, black people making jokes about white people, transsexuals existing.

I understand it, I really do. We like to think of people as calm rational well informed actors. We don't like to think that millions could be driven to vote by fear and hate mongering unburdened by fact. We don't like to think about how uninformed voters are or about how far right parties can promise anything and they're followers will believe it in a way mainstream parties couldn't dream of. We don't like to think about how many people watch the likes of Infowars and take it seriously. We don't like to fall down the Q rabbit hole. We don't like to think about the millions of Americans who believe one day soon god will descend in a golden beam of light and his chosen people will ascend to heaven leaving the other 90% of the world to an apocalyptic wasteland. So buy our buckets of Cauliflower Cheese today! We don't like to look at images of Unite the Right and see the thousands marching chanting "Jews will not replace us" or the Brexit march with tens of thousands chanting Free Tommy Robinson and carrying "Islam=Deathcult" placards. We want to imagine there are just a handful of proper bad nazis and everyone else there is just misguided or would totally vote for liberals if murmur murmur murmur cough cough.

Whether its immigrants, muslims, the EU or a vague amorphous "deep state" scapegoating is easier than proposing an achievable change and if people at large can be rational about anything its taking the easy option.

It's good when you actually write posts that have some substance that can be addressed. But none of what you say contradicts that there are complex social, economic and cultural forces that encourage and reinforce the way people are 'driven to vote by fear and hate mongering unburdened by fact', for instance in the American South, or the areas of Britain and the people whose feeling of being 'left behind' has a basis in fact, though they largely misdiagnose the causes behind it, partly for the reasons you set out.

It's not a matter of 'scapegoating' the EU or bankers or saying that 'Geert, Le Pen, the Brotherhood, dear sweet BNP' are 'just the poor victims', and to put it like that as you did is just obfuscating rhetoric. The people of the 'flyover states' and the South know the contempt in which they're held by most sophisticated liberals, embodied in terms like 'redneck', which is absolutely suffused with snobbery and the disdain from people who never have to get their hands dirty for those who do. The fact that there is a genuine and reasonable liberal horror for predudice and bigotry doesn't obviate that. Much of the same applies in the UK.

EU bureaucrats and bankers and corporate-funded liberal Democrats are distant and disdainful, and their policies do hurt those people, and the way those things become conflated and tangled in those people's minds with social liberalism and tolerance is something that needs to be understood. It's a complex matter and reductionism of any kind doesn't help. 

[Funcrusher]

Really? Because that's the way I see it. Millions voting far right nationalism but the onus is on everyone else. Like the cretins who go "This is why Trump won" nothing to do with millions of people ticking the box next to Trump and instead its blamed on everyone else. Feminists being too uppity, black people making jokes about white people, transsexuals existing.

The same old broken record of identity as found in the hurr durr short versions of this post - 'of course feminists, black and trans people are the real villains here'. As said by no one. And we are still left with the strange fact that probably America would have elected its first Jewish president had he been the candidate.

We don't like to think that millions could be driven to vote by fear and hate mongering unburdened by fact. We don't like to think about how uninformed voters are or about how far right parties can promise anything and they're followers will believe it in a way mainstream parties couldn't dream of. We don't like to think about how many people watch the likes of Infowars and take it seriously. We don't like to fall down the Q rabbit hole. We don't like to think about the millions of Americans who believe one day soon god will descend in a golden beam of light and his chosen people will ascend to heaven leaving the other 90% of the world to an apocalyptic wasteland.

No, I think you love to think this and do it here and elsewhere. What a virtuous fellow you are by comparison.

Whether its immigrants, muslims, the EU or a vague amorphous "deep state" scapegoating is easier than proposing an achievable change and if people at large can be rational about anything its taking the easy option.

But it needs to be understood why at this point scapegoats are necessary and for what. I think that possibly in your strange worldview we are moving towards an egalitarian utopia in which straight white males are deposed from their throne, and this is why Trump. In fact we are moving via off-shoring, automation, corporate control of politics, destruction of unions and the slow collapse of neo-liberal capitalism towards some neo-feudal dystopia, and the sense of instability and fear this is causing is being channelled into blaming ethnic others, as has happened in the past. There wasn't any achievable change available to vote for in the last US election - corporate control of politics saw it off.

[Bhazor]

saying that 'Geert, Le Pen, the Brotherhood, dear sweet BNP' are 'just the poor victims', and to put it like that as you did is just obfuscating rhetoric.

In this very thread we've had someone saying poor Tommy was innocent and had no idea at all about the presence of nazis and far right wackos in the group he founded.

The people of the 'flyover states' and the South know the contempt in which they're held by most sophisticated liberals, embodied in terms like 'redneck', which is absolutely suffused with snobbery and the disdain from people who never have to get their hands dirty for those who do.

You accuse the elite liberals of having patronising views of the flyover states and then invoke the "salt of the earth" "dirty hands sweat on their brow" working classes. Thanklessly toiling the field with their bare hands. When combined farming and industry make up less than a quarter of the employment in those states. With most of the jobs in those sectors being done in an office with ever increasing automation on the factory floor.

If they don't want to be patronised and made fun by those damned aloof coastal liberals they could try and meet them half way. Like by not encouraging this shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezENqnD_yGg

Or not voting for Gianforte a man who not only assaulted a journalist but also gave millions of tax dollars to a creationist museum which includes a diorama of a man reading the bible sat next to a dinosaur.



This is the face of american conservatism no one likes talking about. Nothing to do with salt of the earth calloused hands. This is the single biggest voting block of the republicans and because of the magic of gerrymandering their votes are worth three times more than them thar city folks.

[Autopsy Turvey]

TIL Tommy Robinson is a scholar who criticises religious texts. Here I was thinking he was a former football hooligan who liked to match around the streets with skinheads talking about defending their homeland from 'foreign invaders'.

He's co-written a book on the Koran, that doesn't seem to have been entirely ripped to shreds by people who know about these things, but has rather been entirely ignored. Not so much 'look how much this idiot's got wrong', more 'nothing to see here, move along'. It'd be a stretch to call him a scholar of course, but it's also a stretch to call his support base all skins and thugs.

Autopsy Turvy do you read Spiked? Or write for it? Or edit it?

I've never read it, does it pay? I could certainly do with some money right now so perhaps I'll send along some samples. Although if everyone there is writing in support of 'TR'/'YL' then I'd be more likely to send along an article arguing that he's a hot-headed rabble-rouser who's out of his depth.

There was genuinely a time when my skin would crawl when I heard his name. What I took in via media osmosis was a white supremacist hate preacher with a mob that went round attacking ethnic minorities. Further research proved this to be, at very least, wilfully disingenuous.

In this very thread we've had someone saying poor Tommy was innocent and had no idea at all about the presence of nazis and far right wackos in the group he founded.

Who said this? He obviously did have an idea about the far-right infiltration of the EDL, that's why he left it.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

At this point, I 'd like to completely condone bigtittybro's mentioning of Buster Mottram in this honourable debate.