LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, October 24, 2011

On Utoya posted by Richard Seymour

I've written a contribution to a new ebook, 'On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism & Europe', which is now available for purchase:

‘The teenagers who gathered at Utøya that day could not imagine that they would be enrolled in the ranks of those murdered by the Right’

In a challenging new book, a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the left, and its impending destruction through immigration.
Breivik’s beliefs – expressed at length in a manifesto, ‘2083’ – were part of a huge volume of right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman – so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the far Right racist and Islamophobic social and political conditions in which it emerged.
Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is – a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far Right organising.
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze, with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O'Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow and the editors.

You can read editor Tad Tietze's article on right-wing attempts to depoliticise Utoya here.

Labels: breivik, edl, europe, fascism, islamophobia, norway, racism, utoya

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Breivikism in the Daily Mail posted by Richard Seymour

This is an example of an aspect of Breivikite ideology in the Daily Mail:

Most of us may not realise this but the ideological Left certainly does, for it has long been part of its grand plan to destroy Western civilisation from within. The plan's prime instigator was the influential German Marxist thinker ('the father of the New Left') Herbert Marcuse. A Jewish academic who fled Germany for the US in the Thirties, he became the darling of the Sixties and Seventies 'radical chic' set.

He deliberately set out to dismantle every last pillar of society – tradition, hierarchy, order – and key to victory, he argued, would be a Leftist takeover of the language, including 'the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care etc'.

In other words, those of us who believe in smaller government or other 'Right-wing' heresies should be for ever silenced.

I recently finished writing a chapter on Anders Breivik's manifesto, '2083: A European Declaration of Independence'. It is a document that is notable for many things, among them its extensive plagiarism, copypasta, and sprawling, barely structured polemics on a bewildering variety of subjects. It draws together a number of elements in contemporary reaction into a prospectus for a very contemporary fascism. The core of it is a fabulation concerning attempt by "cultural Marxists", whose influence extends from Gramsci and Lukacs to Marcuse and Adorno, through 'deconstruction' and 'political correctness', to take control of culture, thought and language and thus 'silence' conservatives and patriots. This theory is what mandates the war against "category A and B traitors". Now, this is not typical mainstream media fare, albeit the gripes about political correctness and left-wing domination of culture are commonplace. As far as I know, Delingpole is the first to bring this Breivikite conspiracy theory right from the margins into the mainstream press - not long after the blood has dried in Utoya, at that.

Labels: breivik, culture wars, fascism, islamophobia, marxism, norway, political correctness, racism

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

After Oslo: Europe, Islam and the mainstreaming of racism posted by Richard Seymour

Miriyam Aouragh and yours truly:

An hour before Anders Breivik embarked on his massacre of the innocents, he distributed his manifesto online. In 1500 pages, this urgent message identified “cultural Marxists”, “multiculturalists”, anti-Zionists and leftists as “traitors” allowing Christian Europe to be overtaken by Muslims. He subsequently murdered dozens of these ‘traitors’, the majority of them children, at a Labour Party youth camp. His inspiration, according to this manifesto, were those pathfinders of the Islamophobic right who have profited immensely from the framing and prosecution of the “war on terror,” including Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and Bat Ye’or.
Yet, almost before the attacks were concluded, a ‘line’ was developing in the mass media: it was jihadists and certainly an ‘Al Qaeda style’ attack. Peter Beaumont of The Guardian was among the first to develop this narrative, but it was rapidly taken up across the media. Glenn Greenwald describes how on the day of the attack “the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.” Meanwhile, “the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible”. A hoax claim of ‘responsibility’ for the attack from an unknown group, disseminated by a dubious ‘expert’, was used to spin this line well beyond the point of credibility...

Labels: anti-fascism, europe, fascism, islam, islamophobia, norway, racism, terror

Mainstreaming fascism, again posted by Richard Seymour

Forget, for a second, the arguments about the 'no platform' policy. We can return to those. This is not an argument about 'no platform'. Nor is this an argument about that much misunderstood idea, 'free speech'. On Monday's BBC Newsnight, the programme hosted the EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a former BNP member and convicted violent offender. This was shortly after the EDL's major funder had described the attack as 'chickens coming home to roost', and just as there were serious allegations of major organisational connections between the EDL and Anders Behring Breivik.

The official brief, as announced on Twitter, was to investigate those alleged connections between Breivik and the EDL. In fact, what took place was that Yaxley-Lennon was given ample space in which to represent and misrepresent his position. I won't pretend that Yaxley-Lennon was made to look good: he couldn't possibly look good in this context. He looked shifty, sweaty, determined to avoid answering important questions, talking over his interlocutor as much as possible, etc. Yet, this was entirely out of proportion to the intensity of Paxman's questioning, and the EDL leader was permitted to utter, without being seriously challenged, a number of outright falsehoods and misrepresentations. For example, he was permitted to claim that he had no knowledge of Daryl Hobson, the EDL member who apparently liaised with Anders Behring Breivik. This was a lie. Since the television programme was supposedly investigating these connections, the least it could have been expected to do was the bare minimum of research before the programme began. But in fact little research was evident, and Yaxley-Lennon's claims were typically taken at face value. He was permitted to claim that Breivik was hostile to the EDL on the grounds that they are an 'anti-racist' organisation, which is also untrue. He quoted from page 1438 of the manifesto written by Breivik to the following effect:

The EDL are in fact anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi. They have many members and leaders with non-European background (African and Asian)…EDL and KT (Brievik) principles can never be reconciled as we are miles apart ideologically…The EDL harshly condemns any movement that use terror as a tool, such as the KT. This is why, we, the KT, view the EDL as naïve fools.

Paxman allowed him to do this, and did not challenge his account. However, if you read the manifesto, and I have (and you would expect Jeremy Paxman to have read it), you will know this quote (which does appear in some versions of the document) does not exhaust the references to the EDL, and is inconsistent with other segments. In other references, it is clear that Breivik is deeply sympathetic to the EDL and admires their tactics. He is concerned that, in his terms, "conservative intellectuals contribute to help them on the right ideological path. And to ensure that they continue to reject criminal, racist and totalitarian doctrines". In other words, this mass murderer and racial supremacist is worried that the EDL might become a bit too racist and thuggish for his tastes. The thrust of Yaxley-Lennon's lies and misrepresentations was to exonerate the EDL, and Paxman let him do it.

Lastly, he was permitted repeatedly to attack Islam, describe Islam as a "threat" and claim that Muslim leaders shared the ideology of terrorists. And he suggested that within five years there would be similar violence in the UK if nothing was done about the Muslim problem. (This is not the first time he has made this threat. It is the first time has made it after a major European fascist psychopath has gone on the rampage, killing dozens of 'traitor' children). Having thus deflected the blame from the EDL, and planted it squarely on Muslims and Islam, he issued a threat of violence that he denied was a threat of violence. And Paxman accepted his explanation of that threat as a non-threat, and treated this lunatic as if he was a normal human being. Given the circumstances, the EDL was given the easiest possible ride, and came out having put the best possible face on it. This was facilitated by the BBC and by Jeremy Paxman. In fact, there's a history of Paxman being singularly unable to deal with EDL or fascist leaders, despite him having such a mountainous reputation as an intimidating interviewer.

Part of the problem here is context. The media feeds from the media. Interviewers, even braying, horse-faced, upper class pitbulls, essentially work within a consensus defined by the media. They ask questions based on what they think the average pundit would want to see asked. But that in turn is limited by what the average pundit is likely to know. And one would not know from the media's coverage that the vast majority of 'terrorist' attacks in Europe are the fruit of various nationalist struggles, nor that the preponderance of recent preparations for terror in the UK have been coming from the far right. So, Paxman works within a media consensus that has reserved the 'terrorism' label for Muslims, defined Muslims as a major security threat, and repeatedly construed Islam as containing something essentially at variance with 'Western civilization'. Meanwhile, it has depicted multiculturalism as a failure, a source of 'legitimate grievances', and the 'white working class' as an ethnic-cultural entity that ostentatiously inarticulate spokespersons like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon can claim to represent. This at least partially explains Paxman's extraordinary timidity in dealing with racists and thugs.

Which brings me to this: even setting aside the arguments about 'no platform', there is a perfectly excellent reason why the BBC should not host racists and fascists. They're no bloody good at it. They always claim that they're 'exposing' the fascists, showing them up, letting people know what they're really all about. And they never deliver on that promise. Time after time, BNP and EDL members have been brought on television in what are often the most cosy circumstances and permitted to ventilate lies, misrepresentations, slanders and threats without serious challenge. And now, after Yaxley-Lennon's appearance on Newsnight, it turns out he's been doing the daytime television circuit. This thug, this violent racist at the head of a gang of violent racists and Nazis, is being normalised. His ideas are being communicated to mass audiences without serious rebuttal or challenge, and are thus being normalised - and this is happening in a situation where the EDL and the BNP and all the thugs in their periphery should be languishing in utter disgrace.

ps: There's a petition being circulated over this issue, please sign.

Labels: anti-fascism, bbc, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, norway, racism

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Still blaming Muslims posted by Richard Seymour

We understand that the media would rather be talking about Islam. They jumped on the first sign that the killer of dozens of Norwegian children might be a jihadi group, despite its lack of plausibility. They didn't even wait for that sign - the assumptions were already embedded well before then. Long after the rumours had been disproven, and the culprit emerged as a white, right-wing Christian from Norway, many papers still wanted the conversation to be about Islam and 'Al Qaeda'. We understand this, just as we understand the media's discomfort at dealing with an outrage in which the very Islamophobia which they do most to propagate is implicated.

However, if you want to understand the attitude of the punditocracy to fascist terrorism, consider the query put by BBC News to the former Norwegian Prime Minister yesterday: "Do you think not enough attention was paid to those unhappy re immigration?" Or, consider this New York Times article blaming the failure of multiculturalism. Or, look at this Atlantic article, which describes such racist terrorism as a "mutation of jihad" - that is "the spread of the 'jihad' mentality to anti-immigrant and racist groups". You begin to get the picture. The idea is to find some way in which all of this is still the fault of Muslim immigrants. The logic will be: the fascists express legitimate grievances, but go too far. Or worse, in their natural outrage, they have allowed themselves to become like them.

These memes are replicating across the right-wing blogosphere as well as the news media. By one means or another, what is being avoided here is that Anders Breivik's politics were shaped not by the fact of immigration, nor by jihadism, nor by any actually existing Muslims, but by ideas beginning in the mainstream right and radiating out to the far right. The 1500 page manifesto he has written under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick comprises, alongside a set of instructions for little would-be fascist killers, a distillation of standard right-wing Islamophobic material from Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, as well as a regurgitation of just about every poisonous attack on multiculturalism from the gutter press and politicians.

The core of it is the development of an historical narrative detailing various clashes between 'Western Europe' and 'Islam', the two key protagonists. Like much far right literature these days, it is ostentatiously 'philosemitic', or at least expends a lot of energy charging Islam with antisemitism. It has the standard references - the gates of Vienna, the Lebanon, Moorish Spain, Turkey and the Armenian genocide, etc. - with extended quotes from the aforementioned sources. It is pro-colonial and pro-Israel and is concerned to defend the nation-state against 'multiculti', 'cultural Marxists', 'traitors', Muslims and so on. Of course, the whole document is laced with the usual fascist mysticism and augury, and concludes with the proclamation: "By September 11th, 2083, the third wave of Jihad will have been repelled and the cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist hegemony in Western Europe will be shattered and lying in ruin, exactly 400 years after we won the battle of Vienna on September 11th, 1683. Europe will once again be governed by patriots."

Anders Breivik, though not a Third Reich enthusiast, is obviously a fascist of some description. His manifesto, his activism and his links to the UK far right scene, talked down by the Norwegian police, are evidence that he didn't seek to be simply a lone ranger. He has made it clear that his massacres were an attack on the political system, and he clearly intended that they should be followed by others. But the ideas that led him to fascism are not at all marginal. The Islamophobia that has been energetically disseminated by the belligerents of the 'war on terror', the view seriously entertained by many that Europe's Muslim minority constitutes a threat meriting legal supervision and restriction at the very least, has provided the intellectual and moral basis for the mass murder of Norwegian children. No one who is not prepared to countenance this can have anything morally serious or even creditable to say about this slaughter. And anyone who starts from the idea of blaming Islam is placing themselves in a contemptible affinity with the perpetrator.

Labels: 'war on terror', anti-fascism, bnp, clash of civilisations, edl, fascism, islam, islamophobia, norway, racism

Friday, July 22, 2011

Norway posted by Richard Seymour

Don't, by any means, allow me to tell you what to think. But I would strongly advise the commentariat, especially the media belligerati, against prematurely attributing these attacks to 'jihadis'. Yes, I'm talking to the wised up chin-strokers on Al Jazeera, BBC, Peter Beaumont, and the usual crowd. I especially enjoy the headline: 'suspicion falls on Islamist militants'. Oh does it? And whose suspicion, may we be allowed to know, falls thus? No one specifically, it seems. They are just suspected - they are, if you like, suspect. My own premature speculation on this would be thus: the first guy arrested in connection with this is (say eyewitnesses - police don't appear to be willing to confirm) a tall, blonde, white Norwegian dressed in a policeman's outfit. (For some reason, it is assumed that he is not actually a policeman). He is probably not an Islamist 'militant'. The attack on a Labour camp and a Labour PM who was due to speak at the camp seems quite unlike a typical jihadi target. If this was Islamists motivated by Norway's participation in the imperialist conquest of Afghanistan, one would expect the target to be either security or state apparatuses, or soft targets with no specific party connotation. There is a tiny Islamist presence in Norway, in contrast to the large far right presence. On the basis of this, if I were called upon for instapunditry at this point, I would hypothesise, just off the cuff, and with considerable reservations, that this is the far right in action.

Update: I did warn you. All signs now are that the claim of 'responsibility' from some alleged 'jihadi' group that no one has ever heard of is a hoax. Norwegian police now say they don't believe this attack is 'international' terrorism, but is a 'local' attack on the political system - euphemism, I think, for a fascist attack on democracy and the left. At least The Sun doesn't bother with the euphemisms since, as you can see above, they completely ignore the facts. Who needs phone hacking when you can just make it up?

Labels: 'terrorism', far right, fascism, islamism, labour, norway, terror