The BBC is promoting the BNP posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: bbc, bnp, bnp scum, fascism, love music hate racism

Anti-fascist videos posted by Richard Seymour

There's a couple of interesting videos on the BNP on Youtube. This is an amateur undercover investigation by Don't Panic magazine:



And this is Love Music Hate Racism's 'viral' video:

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp scum, fascism, love music hate racism, racism, unite against fascism

Some more terrorism you didn't hear too much about. posted by Richard Seymour

I think we can take it that this chap was serious:

When police raided his flat they found a terrifying arsenal of weapons, including four nail bombs hidden under his bed, bullets and an assortment of bladed weapons including swords, knives and a machete, Leeds Crown Court heard. They also discovered DIY bomb manuals, a guide to how to make your own sub-machine gun and internet instructions on "how to assassinate people and get away with it by using poison".

Strange to relate, however, we have not been treated to Batman and Robin style alarms from the Home Secretary and his protégé over the urgent threat to British lives. No rolling coverage from the Beeb, no queues of 'expert' witnesses apprising viewers of what they already know, not even much attention. Yet, such plots are, unlike the imaginary ricin plot, or the filthy plan to raze the Manchester United football stadium, quite serious, and ominous. I suspect that as the far right gain respectability in the polls, their would-be paramilitary brethren will take heart and try to stimulate 'race war' with calculated atrocities that will surely outdo anything David Copeland accomplished. Cottage and his confederate had, if I remember, the largest cache of weaponisable chemicals ever hauled in the UK. We will be hearing from fascism soon enough.

Labels: bnp scum, fascism, love music hate racism, nazi, unite against fascism

Anti-BNP Protest posted by Richard Seymour

Thousands already present at the anti-BNP protest due to kick-off soon. However, the police have been quite aggressive. A number of individuals spotted at the Bush protest have been arrested. More to come later.

Update: It has turned into a really lively event with thousands thronging the streets. The police are taking pictures of the protesters but the DJ simply advised the crowd to "stick your middle figure up to that camera right there".
Pictures and video footage will come soon.

Well, that was better than I thought it would be. Initially the turnout didn't look great, but it seems to have picked up once we got started. Lots of trade union banners, gay pride people, Muslims, a very mixed crowd and precisely the kind of microcosm of London that one would have hoped for. Whatever pressure was coming from the police at the start seems to have died down as it got underway, unless I missed something. I had to leave before the speeches and performances at the end, so anyone who stayed on can fill me in. Anyway, here's your first batch of pics. The protest started at Tooley Street near the GLA building and marched to Trafalgar Square, with music, speeches and performances going on throughout.







And here's some of the performers who played on the floats:





Here's more of the protest as it proceeded:







And it arrives in Trafalgar Square:

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp scum, love music hate racism, racism, unite against fascism

Politics of Disasters posted by Yoshie

A cyclone devastates Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, and an earthquake strikes China's Sichuan Province, and the empire smells blood, itching to send "aid at the point of a gun," urging the United Nations to invoke the "responsibility to protect": "France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta."¹ Why such an unseemly display of arms? Because a natural disaster can turn into a legitimation crisis, giving foreign powers a shot at regime change.

[N]othing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet -- China and Burma -- struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes -- and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.²

A regime's failure to respond promptly and effectively to suffering caused by a natural disaster, the failure that the opposition can exploit, can indeed become a factor in its downfall. Such was the case with the Shah's regime and the earthquake of 1978 that wiped out Tabas and damaged forty other villages in Iran.

Michel Foucault reported in Corriere della sera on 28 September 1978:

Who will rebuild Tabas today? Who will rebuild Iran after the earthquake of Friday, September 8 [Black Friday, when the army massacred hundreds of protesters in Djaleh Square of Tehran], right under the treads of the tanks? The fragile political edifice has not yet fallen to the ground, but it is irreparably cracked from top to bottom.

In the torrid heat, under the only palm trees still standing, the last survivors of Tabas work away at the rubble. The dead are still stretching their arms to hold up walls that no longer exist. Men, their faces turned toward the ground, curse the Shah. The bulldozers have arrived, accompanied by the empress; she was ill received. However, mullahs rush in from the entire region; and young people in Tehran go discreetly from one friendly house to another, collecting funds before leaving for Tabas. "Help your brothers, but nothing through the government, nothing for it," is the call that Ayatollah Khomeini has just issued from exile in Iraq.³

Neither Islamic nor Marxist nor liberal revolutionaries of Iran, however, called upon the West to claim its "right to protect" and send its armies to save them from the Shah. They overthrew the Shah's regime on their own, and Iran's Islamic Revolution has grown into a republic that can survive natural disasters, such as the earthquake of 2003 that destroyed Bam, killing more than 20,000 and injuring many more.

One of the casualties of the Bam earthquake was an American man, Tobb Dell'Oro, who was vacationing with his fiancée Adele Freedman in the city. Freedman, who credits the "kindness of the Iranian people" for her survival,⁴ became the subject of an important documentary film, Bam 6.6: Humanity Has No Borders (Dir. Jahangir Golestan-Parast, 2007), which shows Iranians' solicitude for her wellbeing and gracious hospitality to her parents who initially thought Iran would be a terrible place for Jewish Americans like them to visit but have changed their minds about the Iranian people.

The Bam earthquake also moved many of the normally fractious Iranian diaspora, as well as the populace of Iran, to solidarity, holding benefits and raising funds for their countrymen and women in need back home.

Artists did their part, too. Mohammad Reza Shajarian, the finest musician in Iran, held a concert
همنوا با بم [In Harmony with Bam] with Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor, and Homayoun Shajarian in remembrance of the victims of the earthquake.


Iran's Islamic government, by the way, did not reject international, including American, offers of assistance -- unlike the Bush White House who didn't let Cuba or Iran help Americans after Hurricane Katrina -- and welcomed international NGOs as well, even though well-intentioned outsiders can create as many hindrances as aids they bring:

In a recent lessons-learned meeting on the Bam earthquake in Iran, a polite and respectful colleague from the Iranian Ministry of Health related his frustration at international NGO coordination in the early days of the emergency. He said that, at the same time as he was desperately trying to set up field hospitals and bury the dead, representatives from over 100 international NGOs had individually requested meetings with him. He appreciated their help, he said, but some organisations wanted to ask him about the siting of rural clinics when he was still trying to arrange emergency medical evacuations. Was there no way, he asked, that these agencies could organise themselves better in the early days of a disaster?⁵

But Iran's government, even under President Khatami, would not have accepted international relief if it had been imposed upon it by a show of force.

1 Robert D. Kaplan, "Aid at the Point of a Gun," New York Times, 14 May 2008.

2 Naomi Klein, "Regime-Quakes in Burma and China," The Nation, 15 May 2008.

3 Michel Foucault, "The Army -- When the Earth Quakes," in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, U of Chicago P, 2005, p. 190. An endnote omitted from the quotation and replaced by a parenthetical editorial clarification.

4 Corey Kilgannon, "For One Earthquake Survivor, Joy Is Tempered by Sorrow," New York Times, 10 January 2004.

5 Jenty Wood, "Improving NGO Coordination: Lessons from the Bam Earthquake," Humanitarian Practice Network, 2003.

Labels: burma, china, film review, humanitarian intervention, imperial ideology, imperialism, iran, love music hate racism

Anti-fascism and the left. posted by Richard Seymour

I couldn't make it to the carnival yesterday, otherwise I'd have pics and footage for you, but all reports I've heard indicate two things: 1) it was a massive success, and 2) the Left List rocked. At least 100,000 people turned up for the carnival, some thirty years after the original 'Rock Against Racism'. It is important that this was a success, because it will provide a springboard for the hard anti-fascist campaigning that is going to have to take place, especially given the threat of the BNP getting a seat on the London Assembly. In 2004, the BNP were 6,000 votes short of a representative on the Assembly. This time they may potentially benefit from a lower turnout (thus diminishing the total number of votes they need). A frequent talking point is also the collapse in support for UKIP (after the Kilroy fracas), presumably leading potential UKIP voters to consider the fascists. It looks as if there is little support for other right-wing competition like the 'English Democrats' (a bunch of nobody whiners whose candidate, from 'Fathers 4 Justice', has stepped down) or the 'Christian Choice' (led by a ranting sleazeball who is focusing his campaign against an East London 'mega-mosque'). Suffice to say that with the surge in racism across the UK, particularly against Muslims and Eastern Europeans, it is all too possible that the BNP will end up both with a seat on the Assembly, and with a sizeable new tranch of councillors across the country.

Secondly, it was important for the Left List to make a good showing, because it is the only radical left-wing vote available for both the mayor and the assembly. Ken Livingstone's weakness, resulting from his embrace of New Labour, has given the Tory press confidence to viciously attack him often in Islamophobic terms. The Evening Standard's obsequious support for Boris Johnson is matched only by the daily helping of ordure about Livingstone and his connections with Muslims, trade unionists and others reviled by the right-wing. The Standard doesn't seem to care that its Islamophobic tirades are helping the far right, but Livingstone is in a weak position to counter this because he is trying to mobilise a voting bloc on the narrowest possible grounds - depoliticised multiculturalism, no mention of the war, not enough for housing, privatization of the East London line, pandering to the interests of the City, unqualified defense of the police etc. Realistically, the biggest immediate concerns facing Londoners are the brewing recession, the collapse in available credit, the lack of affordable housing, obscenely high transport costs, the growing poverty and inequality in the city, long working hours and shit pay. The only mayoral candidate to talk seriously about this is Lindsey German. This radical message went down well at the recent Stonewall hustings. New Labour can't effectively challenge the BNP politically, and not only because they are quite often responsible for giving the BNP their best publicity (ie, Margaret Hodge). The reason they can't challenge the BNP politically is because they rule out in advance even the vocabulary that is needed to express the real problems that their policies do so little to attenuate and so much to aggravate. The sole occasion on which many New Labour MPs can be relied upon to talk about class is in the context of a rebarbative formulation about a supposedly marginalised 'white working class', which of course plays straight into the BNP's hands. You didn't see too many New Labour advocates of last week's national strike action.

Mobilising the anti-fascist vote is essential, but there has always been an argument about what that should mean: should anti-fascists act as vote-catchers for the Labour Party, for example? This strategy of backing the main centre-left party has dogged the French anti-racist organisation, SOS Racisme, and undermined its early militancy. Indeed, its core of activists has often been drawn from the Socialist Party (PS), have always been close to its leadership, and its president from 1999-2003 is a leading PS politician who favours immigration quotas. I doubt the efficacy of such a strategy. Similarly, while it is important to 'bash the fash', it is increasingly obvious that just pointing out that the BNP are a Nazi organisation engaged in various levels of subterfuge ("As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern ... we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness") doesn't do enough to motivate people to vote against the BNP, especially if the mainstream candidates are an unappealing crop with almost identical policies. Any anti-fascist campaign has to unite, as the UAF website puts it, "the broadest possible spectrum of society" against the far right. The main strength for anti-fascists is that at the moment, fascists of the BNP ilk and their more explicitly Third Reich imitating milieu remain a tiny and largely despised minority. As such, there is obviously no question of such a campaign outlining in any detail a political alternative to the far right. So, there is an unmistakable need for a supplementary strategy by the left. Even in terms of just mobilising voters who might otherwise abstain, a radical left candidacy is important in combatting the far right - for example, more overall votes in London makes it harder for the BNP to get the requisite 5%. But in a much broader sense, of course, the fascists are thriving on social distress and alienation that they have no intention of alleviating, and which only a vibrant grassroots left rooted in the labour movement can begin to address.

The Nazi hardcore is minute, and any strength they obtain is a result of their ability to pull around themselves different strata of voters and passive supporters. By no means should we imagine that their current supporters are just stray left-wing voters who are tempted by the racist message, albeit many BNP voters will be former Labour supporters. The 2006 Rowntree Report on the BNP's electoral appeal found that their main strategy has been to appeal to 'lower middle class' voters, and their success has been not among the poorest wards, but in the slightly wealthier wards - those which you can imagine accruing smug epithets like 'respectable'. However, lower middle class voters are hardly privileged. Their precarious position means that they are exposed to potentially catastrophic changes in their life chances given a crisis of the system. Further, the Nazis would inevitably rely on being able to mobilise a substantial tier of working class voters with 'anticapitalist' rhetoric (this is already a crucial part of their strategy in the post-industrial north). Only if the systemic critique is articulated and the working class movement radicalised is it possible to counteract this. Put it another way - more than a decade of New Labour, and the strategies of accomodation hitherto pursued in much of the labour movement, has done nothing to hinder the far right.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp scum, left list, london, love music hate racism, nazi