Multiculturalism, free speech and the far right. posted by Richard Seymour

Now that David Blunkett has been brought low by the tag team of his former lover and that unctuous berk, Stephen Pollard, it's time to pause and reflect. Nick Griffin, psy-clops leader of the BNP, called David Blunkett, "a fascist monster" yesterday. I like my ironies to be a little more ironic than that, but it is instructive to see what this gesture entails. Griffin told The Guardian some years back that the government's policy and rhetoric toward asylum seekers (then guided by Blunkett's hidden hand) was legitimising what the BNP were doing. What can Blunkett have done to lose such a noble heart and mind?

Politically correct racism

Axiomatically, those who attack multiculturalism and free speech can be placed somewhere on the political Right, inevitably the far right. Yet, these two - dare I say it? - canards are becoming precisely useful fodder for the far right. Griffin notoriously appeared at the election count in Oldham wearing tape over his mouth and a t-shirt that read 'Gagged for telling the truth'. His new party slogan is "Freedom, Security, Identity, Democracy". Those last two signifiers could have come right out of a 1980s 'multiculturalism' seminar. The new party magazine, replacing John Tyndall's proscribed Spearhead magazine, is called Identity. Griffin once explained his liking for curries, which was not merely a gustatory triviality. He notoriously took Paxman apart on a Newsnight interview a couple of years back, using the same 'multiculturalist' logic that Paxman did ("yes, we all have our different cultures, and that's why there must be a wall in Oldham - so the Muslims can have their culture, we can have ours and, oh look, here's a Hindu who supports me").

Griffin is very good at playing this game, which suggests he understands something about ideological hegemony. For example, on the new party slogan, he explained to a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan that it was a carefully crafted new strategy. Speak in code, allude to what cannot be said openly. Define your agenda in terms of freedom, security, identity and democracy - "and no one can touch you for it". He is not the only contemporary leader of the far right to understand that political concepts are not fixed, but floating signifiers. They are fought over and 'captured'. Hence, Pim Fortuyn's complaint that the Muslims were 'intolerant' of his homosexuality. Fortuyn wasn't the classic right-wing populist: not satisfied with being gay, he was also a sociologist, and proclaimed loudly that some of his best lovers were immigrants. Politically correct racism, then.

Multiculturalism is not merely inadequate, it is positively beneficial to the far right. The strategy of the far right in Europe for some time has largely been to win electoral respectability, attain office and prove to the ruling class their ability to efficiently run and maintain a modern state. If they can present their racism in the lingua franca of the dominant discourse of the age, then they are half-way to winning seats. By positing the existence of a series of discrete, autonomous cultures, the discourse of multiculturalism allows Nick Griffin to say, as he did at his court hearing for incitement to racial hatred some six years ago - "I am a white separatist, not a white supremacist". (He received a 9-month sentence which was suspended for two years, on account of his publication of a racist magazine called The Rune which not-too-subtly looked forward to the hanging of black men and also described how Jews controlled the media).

What must displace multiculturalism is universalism; that is, we must replace a discourse which fetishises difference with one that prioritises the rights which we all have.

Freedom to say it...

I have never much cared for the Voltairean dictum on free speech. For one thing, I would never die for a fascist's right to say whatever dippy little thing entered his head. For another, the favour would certainly never be returned.

Stanley Fish tells us that there's no such thing as free speech, "and its a good thing too". I don't like him, but he has a point. All freedoms are, of course, in some sense relative. We relish our autonomy, but only insofar as this respects the autonomy of others. We leftists want the worker to be free from exploitation, which is obviously incommensurable with the capitalist freedom to exploit. We want women to be free to walk the streets at night which, even more obviously, is incompatible with the freedom to rape, rob or murder. And so it is, perhaps, that we have reached the stage where incitement to racial hatred is regarded as a crime under bourgeois law. The freedom of black people to live their lives without being harrassed and abused and their right to be free from fear and intimidation is of course impossible to square with the right of racists and fascists to bully and intimidate them.

So, freedoms are relative, and therefore determinate. At some point, we prioritise the rights of one group over another. The right to live is more important than the right to murder - so much so that killing is the single most prevalent taboo in all human societies. Circumfluent issues such as abortion and the right to die obviously constitute some pretty horrendous grey areas, particularly for those who are obsessed with "the beginning of life and the very end of life" as the fictitious child of Sidney Poitier in Six Degrees of Seperation has it. (He continues: "What about the eighty years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?") Nevertheless, a sense of which freedoms to prioritise is easily intuited by most, presumably based on an understanding of our nature as aliens on this planet, the only creatures on it who are not only interactive, but also interdependent, not only changed by the world, but enforcing change on it.

The consequences of such reasoning are as follows: 1) Freedom of speech is relative, not an absolute, 2) When two freedoms appear to conflict, it is not always possible to reconcile them. 3) The standard prescriptions from postmodern liberals on freedom of speech are therefore inadequate for the purpose of making the necessary distinction to prioritise one freedom over another.

If it is obvious enough that some freedoms of speech could in principle be suspended for the sake of another's well-being, it isn't quite so clear where to draw the aclinic line. One might agree with the ACLU that it is permissible for someone to write revisionist accounts of the Nazi holocaust, but disagree with their defense of far right marches through black or Jewish areas. And this, perhaps, indicates some of the difficulty. Political speech is by its very nature conative. It is a call to action, or it is nothing. It says something about the world, and either calls for its defense or its overthrow, or its fundamental reform. To write a revisionist account of the Nazi holocaust might seem harmless enough, if disreputable and revolting. But I claim there is a limit to this logic. Would we, for instance, think it permissible for a television show to be openly racist in this day and age? We have not come so very far from the Seventies, where comedies depicted white people reacting with fear and loathing to the presence of a black person. The black and white minstrel show isn't so far back in our history. And Jim Davidson still gets stand-up jobs for the BBC even though he isn't really funny and can't do most of his obscene racist material because it would put the BBC in breach of the law. So, the question is by no means an academic one. Could we countenance an openly racist television show? Most of us find it contemptible enough that Hollywood produces torrents of subtly poisoned garbage for us to digest. Should the BBC transmit live broadcasts from Abu Hamza to counter-balance Songs on Sunday?

As I have noted before, those who rally to the defense of free speech for the likes of Griffin and, more commonly, Kilroy, are notably silent when any of the real PC cliches are challenged and confronted (cf Jenny Tonge's comments on becoming a suicice bomber). Freedom of speech is surely a precious thing, provided you use it to bolster any sad old prejudice about foreigners, gippos, pikeys and beggars.

Anticapitalist rhetoric

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, the far right has been able to take such swift advantage of the degeneration and racialisation of politics.

Fortunately recent trends, represented by the antiwar movement and the European Social Forum, suggest a renaissance of radical dissent. This is what is needed. One thing that is certainly not needed is for the left, whether radical or merely anti-fascist, to place itself at the disposal of the Labour Party as Searchlight insists we must . No anti-fascist activist will have any credibility if they appear to be simultaneously the puppets of a party which supplies much of the electoral base for the far right through its betrayals. The strategy of accomodation, and being intimidated by the liberal citation of the far right menace, is over. Real political intervention has begun.