POLITICALLY CORRECT RACISM. posted by Richard Seymour

Imagine the inspired delirium if Nick Griffin, psyclops BNP leader, had addressed his victorous councillors in the local council elections and said, "Today Burnley; Tomorrow Wrexham!!"

Yet, just as the BNP have found themselves so far incapable of spreading beyond their gutter in Burnley, they seem to think they might have located another little cesspit to once again raise the 'ire' of the British Empire with a stout heart and a rolled-up copy of the Daily Mail. The wonderful local press in Britain has a reputation for giving more coverage to small parties, particularly if they happen to be racist parties like the BNP touching a very populist note. The Evening Leader in Wrexham is no exception. It now seems that whenever any racially motivated incident of any kind occurs in Britain, the first thing every news outlet does is consult the BNP. In the wake of 'riots' involving 'locals' and 'asylum seekers', the BNP have been in hot demand. The Today programme on Radio Four was at it again, in what must be the umpteenth time, interviewing Nick Griffin with all the pretense of studied contempt while studiously allowing his most dodgy and ominous statements to slip through. (Noone, for instance, seemed to notice that the phrase "we've got people down there, so we know what's going on" might mean something less than innocent).

But you would have thought that the BBC would have learned from its own investigations of the BNP, in which Panorama induced Nick Griffin to say: "We are good at getting publicity on a shoe string. This organisation, you probably worked out, is basically made with shoestring, ceiling wax and bits of orange peel. We do miracles. So yes, we are good at getting publicity." Yes, indeed they are. But how are the media so easily taken in? Why has no interviewer from Jeremy Paxman to John Humphries asked Nick Griffin about his two year suspended sentence for publishing antisemitic and racist material, about his history of holocaust-denial or about his involvement with the most violent extremist organisations, from Combat-18 to the International Third Position? What about the criminality of so many leading members of the BNP? If the Nation of Islam had a record of violence, theft and rape that could match that of leading BNP members, some would be calling for them to be banned. Why are our media watchdogs so swiftly de-fanged? Is it really that the media are taken in? Or is it something else?

For, isn't it clear that at least one strategy of Third Way capitalism, in order to cow into silence genuine radicals, is to scare them with the devil bogey man of a resurgent far right? Unite with the liberals and even the corrupt centre-right as represented by Jaques Chirac, or you will allow the racists to get in. Don't polarise the situation! Don't protest too much, or you'll get the stupid workers all riled up and they might succumb to the serenading of the Nazis! And of course, what better bogey man to make leftists seek the cuddly protection of 'nice' liberals than Captain One Eye and his band of criminals on the march in the industrial north?

But hold on a minute! There is a complicity going on here between the liberals and the far right, not a literal collusion but a much deeper ideological complicity. Consider the following. The BNP magazine is called 'Identity', which during the Eighties could have been the title of any number of pseudo-leftist publications. The BNP has consistently served up a diet of microwave heated 'multiculturalism' to justify even its most blatantly racist agenda. Griffin himself has even boasted in the media that one of his favourite foods is curry. Isn't the logic here that "well, we agree that there are these different cultures that exist, that's why we think there should be a wire fence in Oldham, so the Asians can have their culture, the whites can have theirs..."?

And what about the man Slavoj Zizek calls the odd paradox of "a politically correct rightwing populist", Pim Fortuyn? Fortuyn was personally gay, a sociologist, he claimed some of his best lovers were immigrants etc. etc. His only contention was that as these Muslims have not been through a Reformation, they are intolerant and unenlightened, and therefore pose a threat to gays like him. (In fact, he spouted much worse nonsense than this, but such was his central PR message).

My God! If 'tolerance', 'multiculturalism' and 'respect for the Other' can be used to justify racism in this way, then I must profess that these liberal canards are worse than useless for fighting racism - they are actually helpful to the cause of the far right.

And isn't the growth of the far right the price the Left plays for toning down its message, for playing a game of slow accomodation with the system? It is as if the Left has (or had, until recently) given up the idea of politicisation, of making systemic analyses and demanding ameliatory measures that were not merely watered down reformism . Why is it that Le Pen felt the need to embrace an Algerian on a live platform in 1998, and tell the crowd that "he is no less French than I am", while berating "unpatriotic" multinationals who sell out French workers? Why is it that the BNP claim to be "the only non-Marxist socialist party" in the North, urging people to join the Amicus union, berating the government for selling out manufacturing workers? Why did they run on a platform of alleged anticapitalism, opposition to the World Bank and IMF, opposition to the Iraq War, environmentalism and so on? Isn't it obvious that by discarding the notion of systemic opposition, the Left allowed itself to become merely a reactive force, saying to governments "you mustn't do that!" while rallying only to stop the latest radical right excess? In this way has the far right been able to take such swift advantage of the degeneration and racialisation of politics.

The answer to this must be a complete rejection of the liberal reinvention of BNP policies - "oh, they take it too far, we don't endorse them, but they do raise serious issues that people are concerned about, so we must..." No. New Labour will never be right wing enough for the BNP. And why should voters accede to Blairite soft-racism if they can have the 'real Armani'? If asylum was really the key issue for these voters, all the Third Way reformers would have to do is abolish the right of asylum into Britain and they could presumably get away with any free-marketeering, privatising agenda they wanted. The truth is, the BNP usurp an anticapitalist dynamic to which they give a racist inflection. The task, therefore, of any serious leftist or antiracist is to give open expression to the anticapitalist feeling, to give it an organisational voice and movement, to articulate the resentment of working class and even middle class people in an anti-racist framework. One hopeful expression of this necessary development was the Stop the War Coalition . Opposition to war unites Muslims with Christians, asylum seekers with the unemployed. Because opposition to a distant war involves recognition that there is no race but the human race and that borders are there, in a way, to keep us in as well as to keep others out.

But perhaps, in case anyone thinks I'm a bleeding-heart in these affairs, we SHOULD try to seperate some cultures, simply for the sake of the security and well-being of ordinary people. Why not? In particular, may I recommend that all members of the BNP be surrounded by a wire fence, a very high wall, several armed snipers and rabies-infested dobermans on chains?