Category: Politics

Trouble With Set Containment and Defining Properties

Within a few days I’ve seen the shocking failure of Western education systems even in the basics. From religious nuts to Woke evangelicals there seems to be an inability to grasp the basic containment principle of proper subsets, and of their defining properties.

Define two sets, A and B. If B is a proper subset of A then ALL members of B are also members of A, but not all memebrs of A are members of B.

If A is defined as having property X, then all memebrs of A (and therefore of B) have property X.

If B has a distinguishing property Y that distinguishes its members from other memebrs of A, then all memebrs of A that are not in B do not have property Y.

Islamists are Muslims and are Islamic

This diagram illustrates the principle of containment and defining properties of proper subsets.

Here is an exchange on Twitter that shows that Sara might not know what a proper subset is – or that she really thinks being Islamic and being an Islamist are mutually exclusive:

She either doesn’t know that Islamists are a proper subset of Muslims and are therefore by definition Islamic, or she doesn’t understand the meaning of the terms Islamic and Islamist. It may well be the latter – as a matter of wishful thinking. She wasn’t alone. Between them, Sara and Chris are simply not getting it.

The only way to interpret these responses is:

  • They are just dishonest. They know full well that Islamists are Muslims.
  • They really think there are two mutually exclusive sets of Muslims – Islamic Muslims and non-Islamic Muslims (Islamists) – but they would still have to understand they are both Muslims. You know they know this by rejecting my suggestion they are playing “Nothing to do with Islam”
  • They actually think Islamists are not Muslims at all. But “Islamists are comparable to Christian terrorism … or the violence perpetrated by Christian fundamentalists” indicates that they really do know that Islamists are Muslims. So, what do they think Islamic means? Just ‘Nice Muslims’? That judgement would require them to know something of Islam, which if they did they’d know it’s a nonsensical judgement.

Other respondants show similar misunderstandings.

Ash Sarkar: Tall Men are not Men

Ash seems very confused about the application of descriptions to the various sets. By definition there are biological males and biological women. Not shown on the diagram are some of the nuances of how to classify people that are biologically male or female at the edges – but this is not what Trans identity is about.

If you doubt this last claim search Twitter for #trans and you’ll be inundated with tweets of people who are very clearly biological males engaged in sex acts, and most are obviously male, with male penises and fake boobs – these are not the the people born with ambiguous genitalia.

If you want further evidence of the male nature of many transwomen, look up #sissy on Twitter and you’ll see more men. This time they are projecting – it’s simply a more committed version of men imagining themselves as ‘slutty’ women, which these guys are acting out.

Good luck to them. Each to their own. Back to Ash’s points.

The diagram below illustrates Jenkinson’s point, and includes Ash’s addition of the characteristic of being tall.

Of course Ash does understand the point that Tall Men ARE a subset of Men. That’s why she’s using it, sarcastically.

In fact Tall Transwomen are also a subset of Men, the intersection of Transwomen and Tall Men – we love a bit of intersectionality. Ash’s intention is to try to illustrate what she thinks is Jenkinson’s error. She thinks that saying “Transwomen are not women” is the same kind of error as “Tall men are not men” because she thinks that Transwomen are actually women, as if there is no significant difference.

Ash’s use of “Tall men are not men they are tall men” is specifically trying to point out what she thinks a reduculous claim by Jenkinson, “Transwomen are not women they are transwomen”. But that relies on Ash’s false presupposition that Transwomen are women. Jekinson is right, transwomen are not women (they are not a subset of women), they are transwomen (a subset of men).

So, of course, Ash’s “Tall men are not men they are tall men” is false, as she knows, but “Transwomen are not women they are transwomen” is true, because transwomen are a subset of all men.

To think transwomen are women is to confuse innate characteristics with adaptable identities, which becomes a problem every time Ash thinks she’s spotted a White Supremacists – she may well have dead-skinned a Transblack Black Supremacists, to use an adaptation of a favourite notion of Trans ideology.

After so many advances against bigotry the TRA ideologues are not only blurring that issue, but they are engaging in their own bigotry – as you can see by the many abusive TRA messages that appear in the social media of women. This also illustrates the fact that transwomen are not women but men, the misogyny of transwomen TRAs against women is far greater than is the bigotry against men, and is also greater than the abuse from transmen (women) against men or women. The most abuse you see is from TRA transwomen and their ‘allies’, against actual women.

There are innate characteristics, and then there are changeable identities and behaviours:

1 – Man/Woman* – Innate – You don’t get a choice. You can act out as if you can change, but that does not make it innate or real.

2 – Black/White – Innate – You don’t get a choice. You can act out as if you can change, but that does not make it innate or real. The difference here though is that skin colour, and race, are ALL mixes, from pareant to child, within and outside human ‘races’, because all decent from a small number of original humans. Therefore it is far easier for ‘mixed race’ (mixed in the recent past when previously disparate groups began to mix more often) to identify as black or white or neither or both. The problem with race is not the variety of races, but the fact that some people use morphological differences to discriminate against people that don’t “look like us” – i.e. actual racism.

3 – Christian/Muslim – Chanegable identities – You get a choice. Note how committed many Chrisians and Muslims are. They see it as a core aspect of their identity. But many atheists that were believers look back and acknowledge that no matter how committed they felt in their religion they were at the time, it was not the actual biological nature that identified them but their mental attitude to their chosen (or indoctrinated) identity.

4 – Transman/Transwoman – Chanegable identities – You get a choice, whether to be a man, or a trans woman; or to be a woman, or a trans man. Note how committed many Transmen and Transwomen are. They see it as a core aspect of their identity. But many de-transitioners look back and acknowledge that no matter how committed they felt they were at the time, it was not the actual biological nature that identified them but their mental attitude to their chosen (or indoctrinated) identity. So, as in 1, you can act out as if you can change from a man into a woman, but that does not make it innate or real. The innate characteristics are being a man or a woman, the ‘feeling’, the adapted identity, trans woman, trans man, is not innate.

*Don’t let the arguments from ‘intersex’ confuse the issue. Most trans people are not intersex, they are straight forward biological male or female.

The Religious Demonisation of Joe Rogan

“Joe Rogan is dangerous. He’s not a scientist. He’s not qualified to choose the appropriate guests to discuss science.“

Either you haven’t watched Rogan, or you forgot to tell him how dangerous he was when he interviewed these guests, some appearing 2, 3, 4 times:

Steven Pinker, Sean Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Nicholas Christakis, Edward Snowden, Debra Soh, Michael Shermer, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Sir Roger Penrose, Lawrence Krauss, Carl Hart, Jonathan Haidt.

Detractors are annoyed that a guy that isn’t trained to evaluate science isn’t discriminating enough to always pick only those scientists THEY approve of.

They are very much like the religious: “You should listen to scholars, … wait, no, not not those scholars but these scholars.” Which always begs the question: what are YOUR qualifications for judging scholars? To which: “I don’t evaluate the scholars personally, I rely on mainstream scholars.” Which are? And why are they? How do you know?

Tell me you can see the problem here, that we all have, regarding fields in which we are not experts. You think MSM are experts? You think a cardiologists trumps another cardiologist, or a vaccinologist, or an immunologist.

While celebrating the rate with which vaccines have been produce through cooperation, we’re only two years in, and you think the science is done, there’ll be no surprises?

Let me remind you of what we’ve been told, and what we do, ragarding masks, here in the UK:

  • Masks won’t help. This was based on two details: One, the mistaken belief that airborn infection wasn’t the risk it was – there were some ‘non-mainstream’ scientists saying it was from the start, so was this misinformation? Two, the intentional misinformation put out because there was an expectation of shortages of medical masks and they were needed in front line care.
  • Masks, any masks, including simple cloth, do help. This became mainstream once supplies picked up, then became mandatory when it became clear that airborn infection was significant.
  • Masks should be other than simple cloth. They should be surgical or with filtered to some not very consistently publicised specification … but masks with one way filters were dangerous.
  • N95 or similar are what’s best.

Then there’s the implementation:

  • Even now, January 2022, at three hospitals I’ve visited have this in place (whether it’s actual policy or not is unclear – different explanations): You cannot enter some areas with an N95 – you must remove it and put on one of their surgical masks. It’s not just because the new mask is clean, because if you enter with a surgical mask they don’t ask you to change it for a fresh one.
  • Shops may or may not require masks. When they do they may or may not enforce their or the government’s policy. When they enforce it they may or may not call the police to remove you.
  • You may be required to wear a masks in a sparsely populated well ventilated ‘indoor’ space, but not a crowded one if you are seated, eating and talking at a table.

And that’s just regarding masks, in the UK. Add all the other elements of this changing landscape, and it becomes a little challenging. It’s not a shock to see very well educated, well informed people disagreeing on what’s true and what’s not …

In the UK we have the UK government’s SAGE:

But we’ve also had Independent SAGE:

No surprise, they don’t always agree.

Obviously a lot of this variability is because there really is a balancing act to perform – living a life, saving the economic livelihood (often scoffed at, by people that also complain we should have no need for food banks), and dealing with a pandemic in its various phases and variants, where tehre’s changing science data and interpretation.

But even more reason to be a lot more compassionate to those that make mistakes, don’t see the risks as you do, … have the wrong people on their podcasts.

The madness of collectivism and the sacrifice of the individual has played out on ‘both sides’:

  • Collective protectionaism and the demonisation of the unvaxxed is classic Marxism at work. Twitter based Struggle Sessions are being performed daily. The horrific end point is the refusal to offer medial aid to the unvaccinated – not just those that succumb to COVID, but those refused operations because they are unvaxxed, even if they’ve had coviod or not, whether they pass COVID tests or not. The hypocritic oath?
  • The refusal to be caccianted on very slim grounds – sometimes no more than excuses to feed anti-vaxx conspiracy theories.

It’s a moving target, where we all have to balance protecting each other and ourselves from the virus, and protecting our health, mental and physical.

It’s ironic that some of those accusing Rogan of indulging conspiracy theorists on his show are busy concocting a conspiracy theory around Rogan. The demonization has been as insane as any religious denunciation of apostates.

The probability that many accusers have not even listened to the targeted episodes (of which there are only two ‘controversial’ medical scientists: McCullogh and Malone), let alone enough episodes to judge the character or intellectual capability of Rogan – the latter, in an era when we are told you can’t judge intelligence by attained education certificates alone.

I’ve been surprised how many anti-woke, free speech, science realism people have demonised either Rogan or his guests, or both. It’s not great, to be honest.

As someone that’s triple vaxxed, in a vulnerable category, complied with most COVID rules, I think he’s mistaken on some COVID issues, … but I’m not an expert either. I have a lot more respect for him than virtually all his demonising detractors, most of which aren’t experts themselves – and even some of those that are have sometimes failed themselves by joining in this witch hunt.

Anyway, here’s Rogan explaining himself. Decent guy.

Owen Jones – Missing In Action – The Battle of Batley

I can’t imagine the Batley ‘blasphemy’ incident has escaped the notice of ANYONE interested in British politics. In summary, a teacher showed a class a cartoon of Mohammed. From what we know it was a legitimate use of the cartoon. And, we don’t have a blasphemy law in the UK … officially. Yes, we are damned close with our ‘Hate Incidents’, and Scotland now has what is essentially a blasphemy law, introduced by Humza Yousaf, SNP Cabinet Secretary for Health & Social Care. But, as yet, it is not illegal to use a cartoon of any religious figure in a classroom while teaching about religion, or about blasphemy.

Of course, the Islamists of the Batley ‘Muslim community’ want otherwise. They’d like nothing more than a blasphemy law preventing the criticism of Islam. So, when it became known that the teacher had used a cartoon of Mohammed, the Islamists stepped it up a gear and ‘parents’ (i.e. leaders of mosques and a members of a number of Islamist groups) started to demonstrate outside the school.

The teacher was justifiably afraid for his life. A similar incident resulted in the beheading of the teacher Samuel Paty, in France. The Batley teacher went into hiding.

Where were that teacher’s union representatives? Where was the outrage over the Islamist activists attempts to impose blasphemy laws by coercive campaigning? Nowhere.

And, where has Owen Jones been? Perhaps he’s too busy wondering, “Why do they think I support Islamic extremism?”

Here’s why some people might.

Our 21st Century Citizen Smith was out meeting with striking teachers, and even managed to put in an appearance at a photo op for a George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Knowing how fond Owen is of teachers (he has many tweets supporting them), and the persecuted, you might expect him to have a few things to say about the situation at Batley, and the persecuted teacher, no?

No, of course not. At least not the incident at Batley involving Islamists trying, again, to dictate the school curriculum and enforce blasphemy rules.

When Owen suddenly took an interest in Batley, it wasn’t for the persecuted teacher, but for Labour’s potential demise in that constituency. Own was happy to tweet support for Labour.

The video linked in Owen’s tweet only had this to say about Batley …

“Batley … diverse … Muslim community … supporters of the Labour Party”

Since Owen has an interest in the wellbeing of teachers, including the Batley teacher in hiding, and of Labour’s Muslim voters in Batley, why would he miss the opportunity to mention the problem, the conflict, the ‘slight’ difference of points of view on the matter of Mohammed cartoons?

Owen wasn’t going anywhere near this banana skin. There was no way he was going to risk alienating Labour’s Muslim voters (the remaining red wall) by having anything to say about the extremists in their midst If you listen to his video it will become clear that IF Batley is lost to Labour, it will, as usual, have “nothing to do with Islam” and its horrific blasphemy demands, but instead will all be Keir Starmer’s fault. Keir, it seems, is the new Labour patsy for all that’s wrong with Labour.

Both Owen and the Batley teacher’s union that has also gone missing. It seems Batley’s ‘bin men’ have a greater interest in a persecuted teacher than either teaching unions or Owen Jones.

Except that the teachers unions did eventually put in an appearance, or at least ‘a teaching union official’ is reported to have done so, and has told the bin men to shut up.

Where have we seen this sort of intervention before regarding Labour’s reduced red wall in Yorkshire? Remember Naz Shah liking and retweeting this?

Corbyn ally shares message telling Rotherham sex abuse victims to be quiet 'for the good of diversity'

Not only have the teaching unions not come to the aid of a member, but they seem to prefer to support a ‘charity’.

So, Owen Jones, defender of the persecuted, supporter of teachers’ rights … why are you MISSING IN ACTION AT THE BATTLE OF BATLEY

See also: Social Justice Warrior Owen goes AWOL on Iran: Iran – Missing In Action – Owen Jones and help Owen solve the riddle of why some people think he sides with Islamic extremists.

The Antisemitic Blaming of Israel

Questions about Israel always seem to be one sided. Though critics might reply, “Of course, Hamas shouldn’t fire rockets … but …”, it’s always the ‘but’ and ensuing excuses that are so revealing.

There’s a tendency to look back, to the history of the region … but only as far back as suits the anti-Israel narrative.

“Why is Israel bombing Palestinian buildings?”

Maybe if Palestinian terrorist didn’t fire rockets into Israel.

“Apartheid* Israel started it, persecuting Palestinians?”

Maybe if Palestinian terrorists didn’t kill Jews in Israel, coming through terror tunnels, sending incendiary kites over.

“They wouldn’t** if they didn’t have to live in Gaza prison.”

Gaza was walled because Palestinian terrorists attacked Jews so often, Israel refused to put up with it and created a security barrier.

“The West Bank!”

The West Bank was taken by Jordan in one of the several attempts by Muslim neighbours to defeat Israel. Israel took it back in the six day war of 1967. Tough.

“The British and Zionists are to blame! 1948!”

Well, maybe, if Germany, Russia and practically every other country hadn’t persecuted Jews in the diaspora.

The Jews have ONE homeland.

Where was the international condemnation of Pakistan, created as a Muslim state, which persecutes Jews (are there any Jews left there?) There are many Islamic states. Why was there a need for another, if Jews can’t have ONE?

Israel is surrounded immediately by antagonistic Muslim states, that have attacked Israel, some of which indoctrinate their children with a hatred for Jews, in Muslim homes, in Muslim religious schools, on state TV children’s programmes in some cases. There are many liberal Muslims, and man, many ex-Muslims that attest to this teaching.

No wonder, Apartheid* Islam always persecuted Jews, as well as Christians, Atheists. Muslims even persecute the wrong type of Muslim, but critics of Israel don’t seem to mind, so accustomed are they to Islamofascism.

Perhaps many critics of Israel mean well, in defending Muslims, as they see it when they wave Palestinian flags. But there’s a gross ignorance about Islam that these dupes seem blind to. Islam is the second largest religion in the world, has plenty of ‘Muslim lands’ – an Apartheid term used by Muslims, because when Islamic law is implemented as intended, non-Muslims are second class citizens, having to pay differential taxes, and unable to hold various positions in the Islamic state.

It’s sometimes convenient to step back in history to pick a time when the land of Israel wasn’t in the hands of the Jews or their forebears, or when Jews or someone else can be blamed for the driving out of the Jews, other than Muslims.

The British are often to blame. Conveniently. But they ended up controlling the region only after the last Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire, but we’re not supposed to talk about the Islamic conquests, just as it’s reasonable to mention the Atlantic slave trade but not the Islamic, which pre/post dated and supplied the Atlantic.

Though there have been many conquerors of the region of Israel up to the middle of the 20th century, since 1948, when Israel was established as the ONE Jewish homeland, Jews have suffered persecutions in and expulsions from ‘Muslim lands’, so that Israel is the ONLY place for Jews to go.

And yet, after several wars on Israel, still the Muslim nations around them want to drive Israel, and Jews off the map. And their allies, usually left wing fools that mysteriously seem to favour the ultra-conservative, misogynistic, homophobic (i.e. far-right) political religious ideology of Islam.

“No, it’s not Jews, it’s Israel”

Really? The world persecutes Jews wherever they are, drives them into their ONE and legitimate homeland, … and then tries once more to drive them out again.

There’s no end to this, especially from Islamic anti-Jewish hate.

“They wouldn’t** if they didn’t have to live in Gaza prison.”

Of course they would. It’s the stated aim of terrorist Hamas, and of the rogue state of Iran, and it’s only recently that some of the more pragmatic Arab Islamic neighbours have finally figured harassing Israel isn’t working and have acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.

There will remain disputed borders, as there are around the world that don’t attract an irate antisemitic crowd. But Israel stands as a state and has a right to defend itself. If it’s over zealous sometimes, by all means criticise it. But if you keep calling for sanctions, or want Israel prosecuted for human rights violations, or whatever else you can think of, then at least be balanced.

If you want to criticise Israel for ‘killing children’, at least have the decency to thoroughly condemn Hamas for deliberately putting children in harms way. And do the same for all the other examples of Muslims elsewhere that devalue the lives of children: grooming gangs, honour killings, FGM, brutal religious schools, forced marriages, under age marriages. Stop being such hypocrites. …

Israel, then and now

You might think I’m exaggerating about the antisemitic motivated focus on Israel. So, let me give you a couple of examples from the UK. I pick on these two because they are similar in their biases, not that they are the only ones. They are the ones I notice most.:

  • Jeremy Corbyn – A long time ‘friend’ of terrorists, seen at the graveside of IRA and Islamic terrorists, recently Labour Party leader, at a time that saw increasing antisemitism in the party, and Corbyn sharing platforms with known antisemites.
  • Owen Jones – Not an MP, but a Labour Party member, and long time choir boy for the party, and for a time, a strong supporter of Corbyn.

It’s difficult to pin either down as explicit antisemites, but according to the current progressive popular measures of ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘unconscious racism’ this two fit the bill of at least ‘unconscious’ antisemitism.

They tout themselves as champions of the oppressed and persecuted, when Israel is supposedly doing the persecuting, then they go missing in action for other causes. Some examples from their twitter feeds might help make the point, as both of them are not shy when it comes to tweeting about Palestinian rights and Israel’s ‘crimes’.

Who are the subjects of these empty feeds?

Nassir Hussain was a Muslim, in the UK. He converted to Christianity. Leaving Islam is a capital crime in Islam – supposedly not in the UK. As it is, he got away lightly with a beating, using baseball bats, by local Muslims, all being caught on security cameras he had to have installed because he was being persecuted by Muslims.

Corbyn and Jones are not interested.

Asad Shah was an Ahmadi Muslim. Ahmadi Muslims are persecuted in Pakistan, and are prohibited in law from calling themselves Muslims. Their mosques are often attacked in Pakistan. Their HQ is now in the UK. But, since we have a large Pakistani community in the UK they are not entirely free here. The Muslim Council of Britain has a page dedicated to denouncing them – though, of course, in the nicest possible way so as not to infringe British draconian hate speech laws. Well, it was too much for one Muslim, who drove from Bradford, up to Glasgow where Asad Shah lived, in order to kill him. In the aftermath the Ahmadi community attempted to hold an inter-faith peace event, to which Jewish and Christian leaders turned up … but not Sunni or Shia Muslim leaders.

Corbyn and Jones are not interested.

Asia Bibi is a Christian woman who served ten years in prison in Pakistan on some trumped up charge that was entirely about religious sectarianism. When Pakistan’s courts freed here, there were massive religious demonstrations encouraged in Pakistan to have her hanged. To Britain’s shame, we did not offer her sanctuary. To be honest, given the zealotry of some of our Muslims, many of whom were only too keen to join ISIS, it might have been a wise move from our government, “We’d like to offer you a home here, Asia, but you wouldn’t be safe from too many our own Pakistani Muslim community. Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

Corbyn and Jones are not interested.

These are not the only examples of Corbyn and Jones going missing in action in revealing ways.

Here are two very similar posts, about how, outraged at the killing of Iranian tyrant Qasem Soleimani, they both went missing in action when the Iranians shot down an airliner, killing all on board, so reluctant are they to criticise Iran.

Iran – Missing In Action – Jeremy Corbyn

Iran – Missing In Action – Owen Jones

To repeat, these are not the only culprits that focus more than a little suspiciously on Israel, the home of the Jews, but because they are OUR British far left progressive champions of the oppressed, particularly when Jews appear to be doing the oppressing, and hardly ever when Muslims actually and very overtly are, when there are far more examples of the latter.

It’s always Israel. Funny, that.

The Further Enlightenment of Saira Khan

This is a follow up to The Enlightenment of the Brave Saira Khan.

Saira Khan announced she was no longer a practicing Muslim.

The problem for women like me, who have a Muslim name and are of Asian heritage, is that others make assumptions about us before we even open our mouths

It’s common to see this complaint about assumptions being aimed at critics of Islam, as if we are making generalisations about what all Muslims think – which isn’t true, though it can be for those that have never taken the trouble to pay attention to Islam outside terrorist attacks.

However, it’s also true of many Muslims who want to impose their expectations of what a (‘good’) Muslim should be.

This week I received a disgusting message from a troll, which made me think it’s high time I came out of the closet to proclaim that I am not a practising Muslim.

It has taken me till the age of 50 to find the courage to say it.

I’m doing it now for my own wellbeing.

I want to be honest and feel free to live my life by my own rules.

I feel that by saying this as a public figure, I will no longer inadvertently confuse or unintentionally hurt others of the Muslim faith.

I must be clear that I do not represent any Muslim communities – especially Muslim women.

It’s worth emphasising some of the points made here.

If it has taken 50 years to have the courage to say it, and it was true during those 50 years, then it is not merely a matter hiding one’s own identity, but also raises the question of why Saira went to so much trouble to make sure she protected Islam from criticism. From outbursts on TV accusing others of racism towards Muslims, when they are criticising the religion, Saira went on to absolve the religion of criticism and instead put all the ills of, as she calls it, “my community” on being of Pakistani origin, and made much of Pakistan itself and its culture being the source of the problems. That this was as racist as labelling grooming gangs as Asian seems to have slipped Saira’s notice – it was not Pakistani Christians, Jews (are there any left) or even Ahmadi Muslims causing the many problems Saira has described numerous times on her Loose Women appearances.

So, in wanting to be honest it’s not just a matter of being honest about one’s own identity that needs to be established, but a little more honesty about Islam. But no, it seems not hurting ‘others of the Muslim faith’ seems the greater concern, and not the harm done by SOME (too large a number) of the Muslim faith, by action or omission.

And, it’s a pity Saira feels she does not want to represent any Muslim community, or Muslim women, because there are many Muslim women, in places like Iran, Saudi, and, yes, Pakistan, that might appreciate a little more vocal support from Western liberal women, especially those that have suffered the experiences Saira has from some Muslims. But, if Saira needs a break from Islam, as a spokesperson, or a critics, that’s her choice.

People assume that because we have Muslim parents we are practising Muslims, that we have read the Quran, that we fast every Ramadan, that we don’t drink, that we don’t have sex before marriage.

Surely Saira knows that the punishment for sex outside marriage in Islam, as stated clearly in the Quran and implemented in some Islamic countries, is 100 lashes? Perhaps not, if she hasn’t read the Quran. But this raises a genuine problem for many Muslims:

  • They assert that the Quran is the literal perfect word of Allah, valid for all time, a complete guide to life.
  • They ignore the parts of the Quran that are plain for everyone to see, that it prescribes horrendous punishments for acts that should not be considered criminal.
  • They assert only the ‘few’ extremists or fundamentalists take the bad stuff literally (i.e. the ‘nice’ Muslims cherry pick and leave those behind, or wave their hands and magic them away with ‘nuance’.)
  • They then scream ‘Islamophobia’ at those that choose the take the extremist’s and fundamentalist’s word for it.

Imagine the following:

  • Many Nazis declare that to be true to some of the ideas addressed in Mein Kamp it is necessary to exterminate all Jews.
  • Opponents of Nazism point out that this crazy ideology is endorsing genocide.
  • Some ‘nice’ Nazis scream, “Naziphobe! Not all Nazis! Only the extremists. Nazism is an ideology of peace.”

Would you be convinced?

At last, Saira has found the courage to choose for herself how she wants to live, irrespective of what others want for her.

I’ve not dared to share these feelings before because the very few Muslim women who have already made the admission are called sinful and some have even been targeted with death threats.

Saira is a mature adult, not some teenage girl uncertain of what the changes she is undergoing mean and how they fit in to the strict demands of Islam. If it has taken this long for Saira to have dared, how tough is it for so many others, of all ages, to speak out, female or male, in Islamic or any other ‘community’?

Saira’s public persona is both a privilege and a curse. A young unknown girl that wants to break free of strict religious traditions would have little support within the family or community – the dangers would be very local. A celebrity has wider public support, but also attracts the attention of religious lunatics from further afield.

What I am is someone brought up in the Muslim faith, with parents who practised it. So I have an insight into Islam. Most of my values are based on the spiritual aspects of the Muslim faith. But I’m also influenced by other spiritual teachings. I have found a huge relief in being honest. I feel this was the last taboo to overcome before I could live my best, most happy and fulfilled life.

Perhaps this feature comment says it better than most could:

I have to say I admire you Saira. I’m a 42 year old man from an African background, I entirely understand the cultural and family demands. Girl, you have more balls than most men I know. Bravo!!!

shumba78

Perhaps these two comments reflect the worrying aspect of this:

The fact that it’s a problem, is the worrying thing.

Volcano

I am now waiting for a statement from her UK Muslim extended family supporting her personal life choices and can we please have input from a UK Muslim elder on mixed faith (on non-faith) marriages.

jcnotts

Some comments have been deactivated.

Naturally it didn’t end there. From the BBC:

I am puzzled by how seemingly liberal people will make excuses for what, at best, is a conservative religion, and at worst is an ultra-conservative, misogynistic, homophobic political religious ideology – i.e. as far right as you can get.

This is especially puzzling, up to a point, when most victims of Islam are Muslims and ex-Muslims. The ‘point’ at which it ceases to be puzzling is when you hear the stories, some as bad as Saira’s, many far worse – Muslims and ex-Muslims are terrorised into conforming, or at least looking the other way while those that don’t conform are terrorised. Too often this happens within a family, and more so to women whose brothers, male cousins, uncles, even fathers, would kill a girl for dishonouring Islam.

There seems to be as much identity and protectionism in Islam as in any ‘replacement’ conspiracy theorising white racist group. Islam isn’t a race, but it has clearly been hyped as one, simply because the majority of Muslims in western countries are of a non-white heritage. Good luck pulling of ‘Islamophobia = racism’ when ex-Muslims of the same ethnicities as Muslims criticise Islam. And, did nobody notice the white Muslims (‘converts’ or ‘reverts’) joining ISIS? Saira has spoken out against this identity expectation, “I shopped my own cousin”, “it’s not racist to point out these problems”, but has also been the victim of it … for 50 years?

The ‘Muslim community’ is actually anything but, unless Islam is challenged by non-Muslims, and then the ‘unity’ card is played and even liberal Muslims are either coerced or feel obliged to play along, as Saira herself has done in the past. And when Muslims try to break the pattern, as a number of ‘reform’ Muslim groups do around the world, they are treated as apostates.

Sunni Muslims kill Ahmadis in Pakistan, … and the UK. The Muslim Council or Britain denounces Ahmadis on its web site, with the obligatory text to provide plausible deniability of stirring hate. Sunnis and Shias have flash points in the Middle East. The Oscars, of all places, saw this hatred for Ahmadis when it so many Muslims came out to celebrate a film by Muslim producers … until the Muslim Mafia realised they were Ahmadis. Smaller sects are denounced as not being proper Muslims.

Many Muslims denounce ISIS as non-Muslim, despite so many Muslims, and only Muslims, joining ISIS. But, ISIS denounce Muslims that won’t join or affiliate with them.

Islam is a mess. Not unlike Christianity used to be, and still is to a much lesser extent, with even Northern Ireland sectarian violence having cooled.

Christians are to blame too, for the mess of Islam in the west. It’s a bit risky criticising Islam without bringing down their own house of cards.

Woke anti-racism also plays a significant part. There are racists of all skin colours. #Woke #AntiRacism is #EquityRacism: It doesn’t reduce the amount of white racism in a majority white nation, it gives power to racists of all colours, increasing net racism, validating segregation, even dividing ethnicities internally. And Muslims are a very convenient tool for anti-racists.

Western Feminism can take some blame too. Despite the cries for support from ex-Muslims around the world, or from Muslim women in Iran, too many western feminists look the other way. In my previous post on Saira, where I posted the videos from ITV’s Loose Women, Saira’s co-panelists went out of their way to agree with Saira that this was all about culture and “Nothing to do with Islam”.

Oddly, and to the benefit of nobody, many on the non-Muslim far right, when not blaming all Muslims (and Sikhs) for every Islamic terror attack, will not shy from stating more honest facts about some case involving Islam. The problem is we know it’s not just the facts they want but some wider identity agenda of their own.

My agenda?

I’m anti-religion. It does way more harm than good, when the good could be achieved through any number or religions or none. The good that people claim to get from religion isn’t down to what the religion claims, and could be had without all the dreadful baggage that religion brings with it.

Islam currently brings with it the worst baggage because it is the second largest, and probably soon the largest religion in the world, given Christianity’s slow death. And then you only have to read the Quran, the supposed ‘perfect literal word of God, valid for all time’, a book that is easy for all to read, on the one hand, and yet requires great scholarship to understand – though that scholarship only ever seems to apply to excuse the nasty bits.

Decent Muslims have to ignore much of the Quran. We are told the fundamentalists are a minority of Muslims. OK, then how many decent Muslims will come straight out and say people should not be lashed 100 times for having sex outside marriage? Where is this renounced? Dare it be renounced as a bad part of the Quran, even 1400 years ago. Nobody thinks the Atlantic slave trade can be passed off as “Well, for the times …” – though the Islamic slave trade seems to get a pass, when it wasn’t given up in Saudi until 1962, and Mauritania, a key part of the slave trade, until 1981. The Quran, perfect for all time, still endorses slavery today.

While I still think Ahmadis are wrong in their beliefs, they must be given credit for at least attempting to disarm Islam by conveniently having another prophet (one of explanation not revelation, since Mohammed is supposed to the the final revelatory prophet). But they have no chance of catching on.

The same for reformers. What chance do they have when so many ‘decent’ and ‘liberal’ Muslims denounce them?

What a mess.

Iran – Missing In Action – Jeremy Corbyn

A number of ‘lefties’ have gone missing in action. The precise point they went missing is telling.

Jeremy Corbyn, still the leader of HM Opposition, Labour, seems to go missing shortly after the outbreak of ‘WWIII with Iran’, around the time the Iranians shoot down flight PS752.

Here he is on the 3rd, when WWIII supposedly starts.

10:55 AM · Jan 3, 2020 – The US assassination of Qasem Soleimani is an extremely serious and dangerous escalation of conflict with global significance. The UK government should urge restraint on the part of both Iran and the US, and stand up to the belligerent actions and rhetoric coming from the US.

Jeremy Corbyn

This is true to form. Attacks on astonishingly bad regimes are met with Corbyn’s dismay that WWIII is about to start, while these terrible regimes otherwise get little attention from Corbyn … unless they are Marxist Socialist regimes.

Next, Jeremy is miffed that Boris hasn’t included Jezbollah in any briefings on the ‘assasination’ … nobody seems to know why, not even PressTV.

7:02 PM · Jan 3, 2020 – I’ve written to Boris Johnson requesting an urgent Privy Council briefing and answers to questions following the US assassination of Qassem Suleimani. [Letter attached]

Jeremy Corbyn

On the 4th he justifiably and rightly tweets about the murder of a taxi driver in Finsbury.

But nothing on Iran.

On the 5th he retweets his own tweet with a comment. “Two days …”, which will become an ironic tweet as days go by without further comment from Jezbollah on events in Iran.

8:35 AM · Jan 5, 2020 – Two days since I asked Boris Johnson these vital questions about the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani and its consequences. And no answer.

Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy seems not to like anyone being thankful that the Middle East is rid of Soleimani. A pity Jezza thinks more of what the theocratic state’s TV has to say than the persecuted Iranian people who seem to be very grateful the “reckless and lawless” Soleimani is gone.

4:07 PM · Jan 5, 2020 – Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s declaration of ‘sympathy’ for Trump’s reckless and lawless killing of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani is craven and dangerous. Boris Johnson’s government must oppose this escalation towards another devastating war in the Middle East.

Jeremy Corbyn

On the 6th and 7th he has a couple of tweets on other topics, and then …

5:27 PM · Jan 7, 2020 – The government must rule out plunging our country into yet another devastating war. [speech in Parliament attached]

Jeremy Corbyn

This is his most statesmen-like comment that doesn’t come too close to support for Iran, and in Parliament he even manages to mention of British citizen, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. It’s good to know how often he has tweeted support for Nazanin by mentioning her name prior to this … three times.

  • Nov 2017 – Nearly 18 months months since her arrest, and the tweet was a vehicle for having a dig at Johnson for his comments.
  • Jan 2019 – One that appears to have been prompted by Emily Thormberry’s tweet on Nazanin’s hunger strike.
  • Jun 2019 – A photo op with Richard Radcliffe. While it’s great that he brings publicity to the case you might wonder who he thinks the publicity is benefiting, given how little he has publicised the case since Nazanin’s arrest.

True to form, the real reason for mentioning Nazanin is opportunism – a chance to have a go at Boris.

In Iran on the 7th, at the contrived burial procession for Soleimani, the state killed at least 56 people and injured over 200. Nothing from Jeremy? You’d think he’d show sorrow for such a loss of life, as he usually does. However, this is a diplomatic nightmare for Jezbollah, star of Iranian state TV, well wisher of the homecoming of a ‘brother’ terrorist’s return to Iran.

Here’s Jeremy posting comments on Johnson, on the 8th. But nothing on Iran events.

4:15 PM · Jan 8, 2020 – The Prime Minister is unable to stand up to President Trump because he’s hitched his wagon to a trade deal with the United States. #PMQs

Jeremy Corbyn

In the above he talks about the problem of losing out on the Iran nuclear deal – this from a man whose negotiation would simply give up the UK’s nuclear arms unilaterally, and then expect the mad mullahs to reciprocate.

Also on the 8th, the Iranians fire missiles, supposedly at US bases in Iraq, and PS752 goes down, killing all on board. In the end, not quite the glorious day the regime and its supporters hoped for.

Where’s Jeremy? He’s usually out of the trap with a rocket up his own up his ass when there are condolences to be given. Nothing.

On the 10th he manages a retweet on the sorry state of the NHS.

And also on the 10th he emerges from his WWIII war room bunker, to congratulate his mates in NI on … a Labour legacy??? But if it’s a Labour legacy at all, it’s specifically one of Blair’s, and here’s me thinking all all the far left of Labour thought Blair was a war criminal or something. Oh, sorry, Jezza isn’t referring to Blair, he’s referring to all the superb work he did himself for The Cause, when he held the crucial cross party conference, grave side of Bobby Sands.

5:44 PM · Jan 10, 2020 – I congratulate those in Northern Ireland who have worked to reach agreement to allow a return to power sharing at Stormont. The Good Friday Agreement and peace process in Northern Ireland is a proud Labour legacy we are committed to support and protect.

Jeremy Corbyn

On the 11th he retweets an upcoming CND rally to oppose the impending WWIII – nothing but thorough, but it won’t matter that WWIII fizzled out when the Iranians shot down a passenger plane while inflicting zero casualties on the Great Satan’s bases.

5:57 PM · Jan 9, 2020 – We’re delighted to announce that CND vice-president Jeremy Corbyn will be addressing the #NoWarOnIran demonstration this Saturday in London. Gather 12 noon outside the BBC hq on Portland Place.

CND

Where the heck are those words of condolences we’re so used to seeing? Where is he? Waiting for approval or something?

Oh, here it comes …

Finally, he can say something.

2:11 PM · Jan 11, 2020 – My thoughts are with the family and friends of those killed in the Ukrainian plane crash in Tehran, including the three British nationals on board. [Image of his Facebook post]

Jeremy Corbyn

WTF!?? It wasn’t merely a crash??? Even the mullahs are saying they shot down the plane.

And what about the #FreeIran2020 protests now making news everywhere except on ‘lefty’ accounts?

Nothing.

We last hear from Jeremy’s Twitter account on the 12th

11:15 AM · Jan 12, 2020 – The only way forward is peace.

Jeremy Corbyn

It’s the 14th as I write this. So much for his complaints about Johnson’s two days in getting back to YOU, Jezbollah. The man can’t even acknowledge his precious theocratic regime shot down a passenger plane. Where’s his outrage at that? Oh, it was merely an unfortunate crash.

What a despicable toady to mullahs he is.

Iran – Missing In Action – Owen Jones

A number of ‘lefties’ have gone missing in action. The precise point they went missing is telling.

Owen Jones writes articles on a number of issues, but mainly Labour support, and, being gay himself he writes and campaigns on LBGT+ issues.

You’d think Owen would be all over the Iranian regime, given they are well known for hanging gay men. He has occasionally tweeted that Iran’s regime is “vile”, though under the search term ‘Iran’ there’s no explicit tweet about the hanging of gay men, or the protests by Iranian women about the forced hijab.

His comments on Iran focus almost exclusively one of his obsessions: the US potential for starting a war with Iran – not in itself an unrealistic concern, but when he has zero tweets about gay men being hanged by the regime, it makes one a little suspicious of his motivations and his agenda. I’m not suggesting he’s not interested in these issues or in the suffering of people in Iran, but what I am suggesting is that his political biases prevent him being explicit about it … after all, it wouldn’t do to be thought an Islamophobe. And, what would Mehdi Hasan think about it?

This post is about how Owen is quite interested in some events in Iran, such as the killing of Soleimani, and the prospect of US troops going into Iran. Until, that is, flight PS752 is shot down. Then it all goes very quiet. Not unlike other left wing accounts.

We’ll pick up Owen’s tweets and retweets here, on the 3rd, when news broke of the killing of Soleimani. I won’t include all tweets, but I will point out the gaps, and give examples of other tweets he was posting or retweeting.

11:09 AM · Jan 3, 2020 – Donald Trump killing Iran’s second most powerful leader risks a horrific wider war in which many innocent people will die, in a region already long consumed in death. But it could also bolster Trump’s re-election chances by making him a wartime President. Which he knows.

Owen Jones

What? “second most powerful leader” – so no mention of Soleimani’s role in Iran’s support for terrorism?

11:15 AM · Jan 3, 2020 – Britain must not back another US-instigated catastrophic war: discussing that on @LBC at 11.20am.

Owen Jones

I’d suggest not being shy on calling out the Iranian regime or its “second most powerful leader” for their support for terrorism.

11:21 AM · Jan 3, 2020 – You don’t need to try hard to work out what’s going on in Trump’s head. You just need to read his old tweets.

Owen Jones

Mind reading, the uncanny skill that all left wingers seem to be blessed with.


11:37 AM · Jan 3, 2020 – Qassem Soleimani does indeed have blood on his hands. As do many current and former US leaders and senior officials – indeed, from Henry Kissinger to George W Bush, far more. What precedent does Trump think has been established?

Owen Jones

I would agree there are dubious US politicians that are too easily persuaded that war is an answer to some problem, but surely not in the same terrorist league as Soleimani?

6:06 PM · Jan 3, 2020 – The orchestrated right wing pile on against this good tweet underlines that any Labour leader who doesn’t cheerlead for the foreign policy of Donald Trump will be deemed unacceptable and beyond the pale[Quote Tweet of Lisa Nandy on Iraq war as a warning]

Owen Jones

Retweets Mehdi Hasan, fan of Iran, who else:

4:25 PM · Jan 3, 2020 – If the argument is simply that Suleimani was a bad man who has American blood on his hand and therefore deserved to die/be killed/assassinated, then who’s next? Kim Jong-Un? Oh wait, Trump gets “love letters” from Kim. So the Iranians need to brush up on their writing skills.

Mehdi Hasan

Owen continues with retweets of others that posted on the 3rd. He might retweet on the 4th (I’ve not checked time of retweets, only tweets).  

He retweets less frequently, and posts none of his own tweets on Iran – though his tweets continue on a number of other issues.

He manages to retweet the glorification of the support for Soleimani, on Soleimani’s funeral:

2:25 PM · Jan 5, 2020 – A video of the Soleimani funeral. This is the largest crowd I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I’ve never seen Iranians so unified, ever. This is Suleimani’s funeral in Ahvaz, Iran. Trump has no idea what he has done.

Amir Amini

This is outrageous glorification of a despotic terrorist funding warlord, and we soon find out that the funeral was, as expected, staged by busing in people, whether they wanted to be there or not. This is the type of misrepresentation we’d expect from supporters of authoritarian regimes. How is Owen letting the gay hanging regime off so easily?

This is the last retweet on Iran as far as I can see:

11:31 PM · Jan 7, 2020 – TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran state TV says Tehran launches “tens” of surface-to-surface missiles at Iraq’s Ain Assad air base housing US troops

Jon Lemire

On the 8th, the plane was shot down. Of course plenty of reports echo the Iranian state position of engine failure, but I would find it difficult to think anyone but the most naive would not at least suspect the plane had been downed by an Iranian missile.

There are no other tweets from Owen on the subject. None. Not while we awaited the outcome of the initial investigations. Eventually, the regime admitted that the plane had been downed by a missile. Nothing from Owen.

Not ‘nothing’ as in no tweeting, no. The thankful relief of anti-Meghan racism (of which there’s no actual evidence) fills a few tweets from Owen, along with other subjects that would make you think the Iran situation had never happened. I mean, seriously, Owen doesn’t even have anything to say about Trump’s war mongering, nor that the Iranians have shot down a passenger plane.

Surely Owen would eventually come out with a tweet or two in support of the people of Iran as they find their brave voices of opposition to the “vile” regime. After all, in several of his older tweets, while lambasting the Great Satan, he made sure he had virtue signalled the fact that he supports a ‘democratic Iran’ … we’re just not sure which democratic Iran – a really democratic Iran, or the pseudo-democratic Iran of the oppressive regime. This would be a big opportunity for him to speak out and let us know.

But no. … Well, not quite. He does retweet this …

4:58 PM · Jan 11, 2020 – Solidarity to the 100,000s taking to the streets in India led by women marchers to protest the plans of the far right Govt of Modi to strip Muslims of citizenship. Smash fascism

Asad Rehman

Hold on! This isn’t about the Islamofascism of the Iranian theocracy, It’s about the Modi government.

That’s right. From the downing of the plane, through the street protests of the Iranian people, his only tweet of street protests is of events in India – and that’s because in this case the victims are Muslims and the perpetrators are not, which is such a consistent bias seen all over the far left it would be comical if not so tragic a betrayal of liberal principles to the fascism of Islam.

Oh, and he tweets this … on the police labelling XR an extremist group.

5:08 PM · Jan 11, 2020 – Where this is heading is very clear: towards an authoritarian state in which dissent – in this case, trying to stop the destruction of human civilisation – is equated with dangerous extremism. 

Owen Jones

A particularly ironic tweet, given his MIA on Iran. Let’s absorb his words:

“Where this is heading is very clear: towards an authoritarian state in which dissent – in this case, trying to stop the destruction of human civilisation – is equated with dangerous extremism.”

Owen Jones

An authoritarian state? The UK? Well, I too am concerned about the restrictions on free speech … restrictions that Owen Jones seems to have either overlooked or supported. And yet he has nothing to say on Iran and the #FreeIran2020 protests going on there, where an actual authoritarian state is now taking pot shots at protesters, with live rounds, … in the aftermath of having shot down a passenger plane.

This is our freedom loving socialist people of the left: Fuck freedom, if it means we have to criticise Islamic regimes, or heaven forbid, actual Muslims no matter how despotic they are.

John McDonnell, Insurrection and Communism’s Inherent Violence

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn is portrayed as a Nice Man. A significant feature of his leadership campaign was ‘Nicer Politics’. And yet in many appearances throughout his career in politics, and in his interviews since becoming leader, he has been touchy, and sometimes downright angry. Is this the mere frustration of being on the receiving end of press scrutiny, which many other politicians appear to survive with politeness and patience, or is there a deeper truth to Labour, Socialism and its end game of Communism. And why am I starting with Jeremy Corbyn and not the subject of this piece, John McDonnell?

Because Jeremy Corbyn had been presented as the nice face of Labour Communism, the nice old man of Socialism. The dear old uncle Joe that seduces the masses and the gullible young. The good cop to McDonnell’s bad cop … though you might have been deceived by John McDonnell’s transformation as Shadow Chancellor and bearer of free stuff during the 2019 election campaign. Corbyn is a front. He is a front to Labour’s Communists. Corbyn the old man Socialist is a stepping stone to the younger Communist McDonnell, who is the real future of Labour … if the Marxists get their way.

When Jeremy Corbyn became leader, after the party had opened up leadership election to members, a lot of Communists became Labour members.

The Marxist Corbynistas, and the gullible ‘democratic socialists’ make Corbyn sound like a bit of a martyr, and maybe he is. Ideologues play the long game. It’s the long game they’ve played throughout the Cold War, when Harold Wilson’s revival of the “Reds Under The Bed” warning was dismissed as fear mongering … yet, here we are, with Communist John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor, perhaps ready to take over from Corbyn as Prime Minister (though he supposedly refused leadership this time?) , should Labour get into number 10. The reds are thoroughly tucked up in the bed and have not only pulled the blankets off the social democrat moderate Labour MPs, but booted many of them out into the cold.

Of course we can’t read Corbyn’s mind. Is he part of the set-up of Labour’s Communism, ready to step aside for the younger men, or will he become another Trotsky, written out of history by the hard liners like McDonnell and others that will take the party forward? This sounds so conspiratorial. And yet, the guide book for the latest manifestation of Labour has been around for over a century: The Communist Manifesto.

This piece is no mere comedy meme, no cartoon of Corbyn or McDonnell. It takes Communism very seriously, because in many ways Marx was right. In some respects his historical analysis, even his predictions for the future, were accurate enough, as one possible model of changing society. What is horrifying about Marxism is its implementation, it’s prescriptions for the future, that others like Lenin and Mao have implemented faithfully and brutally enough.

Communism’s Inherent Brutality

Communism would be better called Conflictism. Even in the language of Marx the brutality is evident. 

When you take a closer look at Communism you will find you fall into one of two camps, depending entirely on how thoroughly you are seduced, or not, by both it’s accuracy as a description of society, and its cold hearted moralising, that can be used to justify the many horrors we have seen in the USSR and ‘Communist’ China. There are parallels with other brutal ideologies of the modern world, such as Fascism and Islamism, and all three, Communism, Fascism, Islamism differ in brutality only to the extent to which they have the power to enjoy it. None of these ideologies suggest there can be too many eggs broken in the making of their omelettes.

If you are seduced by Communism, then, like many Muslims and Fascists do for their ideologies, you will make excuses for its failures and for your ideology’s horrors. You might admit the terrors, but blame them on other reactionary forces; or you might deny the horrors and re-write history, ready to create yet another Year Zero*. Whichever way you look at it, if you are committed to it, you will not only believe the credible analysis of history, but you will submit yourself to the fantasy outcome that Communism itself accepts will never materialise, because the end game, for Communism, is an asymptotic road to diminishing returns achieved by exponentially increasing brutality. Only the dreamers think the Utopia of perfect Communism is realisable.

*Year Zero – There is a tendency of revolutionaries to re-invent history and define their own ideological coming to power with a new calendar. The the Khmer Rouge chose Year Zero. The French Revolution had a Year 1. Islam has its own calendar. Christianity too (B.C./A.D. became BCE and CE).

Perhaps you will study the theory and the practical attempts and come to admit the horrors and so reject Communism, but tell yourself stories about the half-way house of Socialism. A common retort I often hear to my claim that Labour is run by Communists: “I’m not a Communist, I’m a Socialist [the images on this page suggest otherwise]. You don’t know the difference. Read a book!” Well, they clearly haven’t read the books of Marx. Because Socialism is one of the phases that society goes through on the way to Communism. Perhaps the hapless Socialists thinks Socialism is a suitable end game, as Social Democracy. Unfortunately their fellow party members that are Communists know it’s not, and have no intention of leaving it there. It is a matter of history now how Hitler seduced, then subdued, then crushed the people of Germany that opposed him. Communism hasn’t been so lucky in the West because the West has seen the implementations of Socialism and Communism’s early stages in the USSR and China. But, that hasn’t stopped Britain’s Communists trying to win power by controlling Labour. In what amounts to a two party system under first past the post the only way to achieve a one party system is to control one of those parties.

It is true that the Social Democratic form of Socialism is a tamer version of Stalinist Socialism, but the dividing line isn’t clear when members of one party, such as the UK Labour party, are drawn from the various factions of Socialism and Communism. In the USA McCarthyism, with its own undemocratic purges, made sure Communism didn’t get off the ground, and much of Western Europe had the Spectre of Communists to the East to scare them. In the UK this didn’t stop the Communists using democratic liberal freedoms to keep plugging away. The “Reds Under the Bed” term was revived during Harold Wilson’s premiership, and has dogged Labour since. The term is often ridiculed as exaggerated fear mongering. But, here we are.

Maybe the demise of the USSR, the slight opening up of China and its toying with capitalism has left the current younger generations with little understanding of the history and reality of Communism, being told the ‘progressive’ version in an education system dominated by left leaning illiberal ‘progressives’. We can certainly see the use of propaganda in education, especially in the USA, where old Commie professors have managed to twist the brains of gullible students more than they ever must have hoped for. For evidence of this sorry state of US education, see the case of Bret Weinstein at Evergreen, and in particular his explanation of the problem here: Bret Weinstein.

Marx’s theory explains well enough the history that resulted in the Capitalism of his time. It’s a very binary perspective that is based on “us and them”. Where does Jeremy Corbyn’s nicer politics of ‘unity’ fit in? It’s a front. See later for Mao’s ideas on unity: “One divides into two“.

Marx, in his Communist Manifesto, lists the various stages of history, through feudalism, serfs and lords, merchants, capitalists and workers.

And it’s all phrased in terms of a class struggle where only a violent revolutionary overthrowing of the current ‘bourgeoisie’ will change the system. Note that this isn’t a one-off revolution as Marx sees it, but a repeatable historical inevitability, and a future necessity, a never ending chain of violent struggles of the oppressed to overthrow their oppressors. This is not merely an observation of how things have been, but a prediction of how they will be, and a prescription of how they must be played out. This is such an absolutist part of the doctrine, requiring as much of a commitment as any religious one, that it not only predicts the future, but makes it. It asserts that this is the way it will have to be, and it demands that Communists make it so, by finding the appropriate enemy of the day, the current oppressor, and beating the crap out of them on the streets until the next phase of the Communist programme is complete … and then, on to the next phase.

What Marx implies, where he does not say explicitly though it’s clear enough, is that today’s revolutionaries are tomorrows oppressors. The phrase ‘eating their own’ takes on a significant meaning under Communism that is very much like Takfir in Islam – it’s a risky business whereby if you stick your head above the barricades you’re as likely to have it shot off by one of your comrades as anyone else. In the USSR, yesterday’s heroes of the state became tomorrows occupants of the gulag or the grave.

We have Capitalism as the current enemy. The Capitalist owns the means of production (machinery, factory, land) privately (personally, or through shares), and as such he is the one that takes the excess, the profit, from the business. No matter how much workers contribute, the Capitalist profits while the workers receive a meagre wage. Yes, now we have share options in some companies, and entrepreneurs can start small business where sometimes they are sole employees. But on the whole, the Capitalist system that Marx observed is still intact. Other ameliorating trends, like imposing regulation on companies to treat employees well, to provide a minimum wage, and to protect them and the public from the greed of the Capitalist, have made the current system more acceptable to some people in the hierarchy of a business, but many labouring and low skilled workers are still poorly paid compared to the profits of the company from which the capitalist accrues his personal wealth.

The criticisms are legitimate. It’s the Communist solution and the Communist methods I have a problem with. But Marx was pretty good with his predictions. His millionaries became today’s billionaire villains of Corbyn’s tax targeting (Labour has millionaires, so he can’t attack them the way Marx did). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, … massive corporations, all pretty much predicted by Marx. No wonder it’s easy to buy into the killing, if Marx’s theories are so spot on. What’s next in Marx’s theory, after Capitalism?

Socialism is next. The proletariat must rise up, overthrow the Capitalists and take control of the means of production – through state ownership. Socialism requires that the ownership of the means of production should be collective and democratic, rather than being owned by individuals that are differentiated from the employees by that ownership and power. However, Socialism is temporary. Marx said so, and so, it must be.

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one to the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Karl Marx

Here, the working class rules over the capitalist class, as a collective dictatorship. This was Marx’s vision of society before Communism could be achieved. This is why Socialism is temporary to Communists. And all you Social Democrats? You are just pawns in the Communist vision. Soon enough, they will come for you. That saying you often hear about the appeasement of extremists comes from Martin Niemöller. He wrote it in 1946 about the cowardice of Germans that didn’t resist the Fascists early enough because the Fascists were busy arresting others:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

Just in case you think this only applies to Fascism and not Communism, let me add another line, which has meaning in the context of current China:

Then they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Muslim.

We can also add lines that make it applicable to Islamic states:

Then they came for the Christian, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Christian.

Then they came for the ex-Muslims, and I did not speak out, because I was not a ex-Muslim.

It applies to any ideology that is prepared to use force to attain its goals.

So, socialist democrats of Britain, be warned. Labour under Corbyn and McDonnell isn’t what you think it is. 

The Communists (and Islamists) will come for Jews? Oh, they already are doing: Labour refuse to deal with antisemitism within the party, whether from Muslims or non-Muslims. And, when Muslim votes are no longer needed, even Muslims – the conflict between Islamic homophobia and inclusive education in Birmingham schools is a warning.

Labour supporters are also conflicted over China. For example, there’s an acknowledgement of this problem by Peter Tatchell – long time campaigner for gay rights, supporter of Labour. At the time of writing he has been criticising China for its persecution of Muslims, while at the same time wanting to celebrate the anniversary of Mao’s Communist Revolution. It’s a tricky sell. How does he do it? He declares that current China, with its recent to dipping into small business capitalism, is ‘state capitalism’ and therefore not true Communism. It’s a clever rhetorical move by Peter, until you realise that this ‘state capitalism’ is also part of Marx’s predictions, which means, according to Communism, the Muslims need ‘re-education’. Not such a smart move after all, Peter, to point out that China’s current persecution of Muslims is part of the plan. UK’s Labour Communists still find the Muslim vote useful.

True Socialism is the dictatorship by the proletariat in the form of teh state. And the point here is that according to Marx the purpose of the state is to oppress one class with another. Under Socialism the proletariat, through the state, oppress the capitalists. This is merely a reversal of the recent oppression by capitalists of the workers.

The ‘final’ phase, Communism, is the (never ending) end game. Socialists achieve victory through global Socialists societies, until Capitalism can not get a foothold. Note that this is part of the continuous struggle, because Marx’s understanding and theory includes the probability that not everyone will agree with this movement to Socialism and then Communism, that some people will still want other systems. And such ‘reactionaries’ must be oppressed and crushed, because oppression is an essential part of the dogma. This theme reappears in Maoism.

The end game is that there will no longer be a class based society – there will be no class. The state will no longer be needed other than for pure administrative functions, and it will eventually fade away. 

The next step is the phasing out of money. In a phase called ‘post scarcity’ (a naive idea that there will always be more than enough food and goods produced by a technological productive society) products will be plentiful and everyone can have what the need and want. Yes, really, this is part of the dogma. With an over abundance of cars you don’t need to buy one. If you need one, or yours needs replacing, you can simply ask for another and it shall be given. The idea behind this is a ‘gift economy’, where technology boosts production to such levels that there will always be enough produced.

You might be wondering about a few things at this point. What about the ecosystem and our green credentials? Who decides that my third car wreck this month is a little wasteful so I can’t have one until next month? I mean, there should be no need for quotas from a production point of view, if there’s an abundance. See CPG Grey video  Humans Need Not Apply

Of course you could achieve a state of ‘post scarcity’ if you oppressed the masses to prevent them having too many children, as China did. It’s no coincidence that a one party state with central planning would decide to control so many aspects of a person’s life that it amounts to oppression.

I’m not sure why Communism and its bloody revolutions at each stage is necessary, except that Conflictism seems to incite moral cruelty in Socialists and Communists who always need to find a class enemy. Why can’t society evolve rather than revolt?

The conflict is built into Marxism through the dialectic – the inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions. This is a method of analysis that deals with conflicting, contradictory interests, resolving the contradictions and coming out the other end with a new system, the synthesis. Sounds so reasonable, but when posed in terms of a class struggle, revolution, oppressors that need to be defeated, you can see where the violence comes from. This is not a negotiated synthesis.

It’s not just scary USSR and Chinese Communism. John McDonnell calls for Insurrection, violent opposition, if he can’t get his way democratically.

For Marx it wasn’t simply the basic idea of the dialectic, but it’s use in his Historical Materialism. He describes the steps:

  • In a slave owning system both the land and the slave that works the land are owned.
  • Eventually, this dialectic resolved itself so that the slave can become notionally free and independent, but the land he works is still owned, under a feudalistic system, where the worker paid the land owner rent and a share of the profits of his labours.
  • That contradiction is resolved in turn to become Capitalism.
  • Those contradictions give rise to Socialism, as described above.
  • Then, the contradictions in Socialism will give rise to Communism.

Enter Leninism. Lenin had the advantage of witnessing the actual growth of capitalism that Marx had predicted, and saw it emerge in a way not anticipated by Marx. He saw the imperialist instincts of Capitalism expand into large multi and trans national corporations that acquire land and resources around the world, draining those resources and using their labour for the benefit of the Western Capitalism systems.

And it’s with Lenin that we also see the notion of the Vanguard. This is a group of the proletariat that are conscious of this worldly situation, and their role is to enlighten and waken up the masses that are still under the yoke of Capitalism. The problem is, who is going to form the Vanguard? And how will they (how did they) resolve disputes? By killing rivals, of course. Though the Vanguard is supposed to be a revolutionary tool of the working class, the Vanguard is obviously not that. Tools are usually wielded by the user, so that they can direct it. How can the uneducated masses know better than the Vanguard members? And so how can the masses lead the Vanguard if they are ignorant of the class struggle, and hence ignorant of the need for a Vanguard?

This exposes one of the common issues with Communism, Socialism, and collectivism generally. The Vanguard members become the leaders, and they are going to release you from servitude, whether you like it or not, and if you don’t like it, if you resist, you are part of your own problem and you must be eliminated – killing two birds with one stone, releasing one member of the collective from his servitude and ignorance, and removing a reactionary obstacle, in the killing of one person. The Vanguard is no more than a dictatorship, of an individual, or a ‘committee’.

Does this ring yet another bell? Are we not in the midst of woke culture where a black people like Thomas Sowell refuses to be seen as a victim, where many refuse to play the game, and are ostracised and demonised as a race traitors, a ‘porch monkeys’, by the very people that want to rescue them? How dare you black people be so unappreciative. The Vanguard (Marxist BLM today, Marxist Black Panthers yesterday) is there to help you, but you resist its efforts! You are an enemy of the system, a negative to my positive, and to resolve this conflict you must be re-educated or you must go. Referring again to the Bret Weinstein case, he was and is a progressive, a lefty, but he criticised a flaw in the dogma, and over night became a ‘Nazi’.

Another of Lenin’s ideas was the necessity to smash the state so that a new one can be built. Again, the violence visible throughout Communism is justified by this divisive idea of revolution against oppression. His “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” sounds like a far right Nationalist agenda, doesn’t it? The parallels are not hard to find.

Note that this aggressive nationalism from the left and the right is quite distinct from benign nationalism. Benign nationalism simply sees the democratic state as one level of devolved self-governance of a people that can be used to manage their shared affairs while sustaining individual freedom within it. Co-operating democratic nation states are not xenophobic, since they permit migration, travel, exchange of goods that accounts for the different state economics, and they co-operate in wider enterprises such as trade organisations and the UN. It may be that this isn’t as successful as we’d like it to be, as there will always be conflicts of interest that could, and sometimes do, lead to war. But this isn’t inherent in the system. Democratic states tend to go to war with non-democratic aggressors – and even when the West ‘invades’ states, like Afghanistan or Iraq, though many might not agree with it, there is usually agreement from at least some members of the target states.

Of course Lenin wasn’t in a position to create Communism everywhere, and so the idea of Communism in one country was a necessary beginning. Even so, Russian expansionism was an obvious part of the Soviet system. Their own invasion of Afghanistan was supposed to prop up the Communists there, and so Communist imperialism is just as likely to be oppressive as any Capitalist imperialism.

Next up is Mao. The result is Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) Communism. What did he bring to the killing fields that another Communist would make infamous? Well, his experiences in China were a little different to those in Russia where the Monarchy and feudal system existed. China had its own nationalists and external imperialists running the show. And this experience shaped Mao’s theory.

With Mao we see the theory of The Permanent Feature of Contradiction – his version of the dialectic applied to Communism. The Unity and Struggle of Opposites. And there we see again how fundamental conflict is to Communism, and why, when you see the term ‘struggle’, you should expect violence to be a part of the system.

Incidentally, do you see the narrative of Corbyn’s “working for peace” anywhere in all this? Or does this look more like the narrative of Islamist and IRA terrorism? What do you think is the true position Corbyn held when he had all those meetings with Islamists and IRA, supporting their ‘struggles’ while having no such support for the other side, the Jews or the Protestants? Corbyn and McDonnell see everything in terms of a class struggle. No matter that Catholic Ireland unification dictated the ‘struggle’ against an unwilling Protestant Northern Ireland. No matter that Israel is the only democratic state in a region of awash with antisemitism. No matter that there are minorities within minorities that Corbyn cares little for. If he can identify a class struggle, he seems willing to look the other way as his ‘friends’ commit their violent acts. The Hamas rockets into Israel, the knee capping and bombing of the IRA … Corbyn will only denounce them when pushed into a corner, and he will only denounce the violent acts, not the parties that commit them: “I oppose ALL bombing”.

This inherent conflict in Marxism, the persecution, the oppression, is endless under Communism, and this is why Muslims in China are being ‘re-educated’. Mao’s expression of this was “One divides into two”. This was a statement of the principle that even after resolving a binary contradiction into one resolution, the unity, it will be inevitable that further contradictions will emerge, to create another conflict that must be resolved (through violence, you can be sure).

The reason this is significant to Mao’s Chinese experience is that in his time China had not resolved earlier contradictions, because it never achieved the phase of Capitalism, being under the boot of imperialists exploiters. In this case the nationalist bourgeoisie of the state must cooperate with the proletariat to throw out the imperialists, then some form of State Capitalism can build the economy to a point where the state can be overthrown and the proletariat take control under Communism at last. Mao also saw that other states must move towards Communism in some similar but locally unique way. This move from imperialist control to State Capitalism directly was the New Democracy (as opposed to the Old Democracy of the West). Basically it’s skipping what Marx thought of as a necessary stage of Capitalism that would grow the economy until contradictions forced the revolution into Socialism: State Capitalism.

The New Democracy is symbolised by the flag of China.

“The largest star symbolizes the Communist Party of China’s leadership and the surrounding four smaller stars symbolizing the Bloc of Four Classes: proletarian workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners) and the nationally-based capitalists. This is the coalition of classes for Mao’s New Democratic Revolution as he described it in his works. Mao’s New Democracy explains the Bloc of Four Classes as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of imperialism as described by Lenin.”

New Democracy

This differs from Marx’s description of events in Western Europe, but is not contradictory to the main idea that the road to Communism is through a series of class ‘struggles’. The dialectic of contradictions, the resolution through the overthrow of perceived oppressors, this is still part of the nature of MLM theory and dogma. It is still a conflict based ideology that makes a mockery of Corbyn’s ‘Nicer Politics’, which at best could be attributed to naive wishful thinking, or more in common with regular Communist propaganda, propaganda. Within Mao’s New Democracy were yet other phases, such as the Great Leap Forward. Note again, though, that this is still a stepping stone to actual Communism. 

This is why on the one hand it’s a legitimate claim to say “True Communism has never been tried.” But, on the other hand, it’s a god awful way to get there, because, steeped as it is in conflict, there are going to be potentially many deaths along the way. Is there any Socialist revolution that has been on the path to Communism that hasn’t smashed thousands if not billions of eggs?

Mao and Stalin recognised the fact that Socialism can’t remove all other elements of culture and capitalism overnight. And there are other cultural aspects that will remain and have to be kept in check, including cultural elitism that appears in the party system. They must be on the look out for counter revolutionary elements – another convenient categorisation of inconvenient people and an excuse to get rid of them.

The solution for Mao at this stage is to have another revolution, a Cultural Revolution, that requires mass criticism of the culture, of leadership. It requires a proletarian culture to be created to replace older ones. This leads to the Mass Line:

“consulting the masses, interpreting their suggestions within the framework of Marxism-Leninism, and then enforcing the resulting policies. … to ensure that all cadres and other workers would be “carefully indoctrinated in basic Marxist-Leninist mass line theory and practice” –

Xi Jinping

Xi Jinping is quite keen on this, which could also be part of the justification for the persecution of Muslims.

The methodology in all this is: indoctrination or elimination. Not exactly what most ‘progressive’ liberals think they are buying in to. Communism is an oppressive system that does not cater for the individual. It makes a claim that since the collective is made up of individuals it is for the individual, but it clearly is not. Individual sheep, maybe. But it’s a weak claim. Collectivism is the enemy of the individual.

Defenders of Communism will attempt to deflect attention away from the failures in the USSR, Cuba …

“Communism is a good system.”

“What? Look at all the failed communist states.”

“They are not true communism [ring a bell with ‘not true Islam’, or the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy?]. They are failed Socialist states run by dictators. Real Communism has never been tried.”

Every apologist for Communism

Unfortunately this isn’t a good sales pitch for Communism, because it’s an acknowledgement that you actually have to have such Socialist horror shows in order to make your way to Communism, and they don’t get you to true communism anyway. The route to idyllic Communism is one long hidden mass grave, which, to add insult to injury, is paved with enough visible bodies to make a point to reactionary forces that might oppose the movement.

There’s a funny thing about Communists. They will scream bloody murder when the Capitalists treat workers poorly, by dismissing them in redundancies, or closing unprofitable coal mines. Yet they don’t bat an eye when Socialist Communist states make people disappear, perform mass purges, and force re-education on people as China is doing now with its Muslims.

Reflections of a Red Guard

Teachers were the target of the political campaign. Mao taught us they have to receive political re-education by the workers and the peasants. My female teacher, who I loved … she liked western clothes … this was a criminal accusation. One boy went to her bedroom and led so many people .. I went there too late, her hair had been cut already. She was humiliated and I could not help. … Shame on me.

Still ashamed of my part in Mao’s Cultural Revolution – BBC News

After reports of rioting and beatings up, and even murder, the Red Guards seemed to have gone too far.

Narrator

This is ironic, since the doctrine of Mao’s Communism asserts that the party must listen to the people and do what they ask. Apparently Mao decided that the Vanguard in the party knew better after all. The trouble is, if your doctrine unleashes the violence of the masses, what else can you expect but street violence.

John McDonnell Incites Insurrection

And what has this to do with John McDonnell? Here is John McDonnell inciting violence through insurrection if you can’t win at the ballot box.

Elections aren’t working for us … we’ve got to bring democracy back into the community. And that means the democracy of the streets. So when it comes to coordinated industrial action, we need coordinated street action. And that means, if we have to, close off Parliament square, close off Westminster Bridge, in the form of direct action. There’s more to democracy than just a vote every five years. Democracy is about taking control of your own community. And that means industrial action combined with direct action. We used to call it ‘insurrection’. Now we’re polite and say its ‘direct action’. Let’s get back to calling it what it is. It’s insurrection. [Applause] … to bring this country standstill, let’s start organising for it now. [Applause] It needs absolute determination. It needs courage. Above all else it needs solidarity. 

John McDonnell calling for insurrection

So, screw you if you don’t agree. John McDonnell’s Communism requires absolute determination to inflict insurrection on the people of Britain. No wonder he had his copy of Mao’s Little Red Book to hand for George Osborne.

If you’re still not sure about McDonnell’s Marxist credentials – after all, in TV interviews he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he was a Marxist or not – then listen to his own words, as he gloated over the 2008 crash:

“This is a classic Marxist crisis of the economy, a Capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation. For Christ’s sake don’t waste it. “

John McDonnell

And, if you still think Labour isn’t in danger of becoming another Communist Party, a People’s Popular Front of Islington, or an Islington People’s Popular Front, here is a typical comment section from one of the more popular Facebook groups supporting Corbyn and McDonnell:

The Delusional Demos Director

Before getting round to their director, Polly Mackenzie, let’s start with Demos.

Demos on Wikipedia

Their Twitter Bio

The last bit, “Based in London”, and it’s name, “Demos”, might be the only true parts of that bio line.

Think tank? Well, I’ve a couple of other posts related to their thinking. I’m not impressed. These were about a really sloppy piece on the Victoria Derbyshire, on the BBC News channel, and Carl Miller, of Demos, and their dubious ‘research’ milking the ‘Islamophobia’ craze.

BBC Victoria Derbyshire – Sloppy Islamophobia Journalism

Carl Miller of Demos Still Misfires on ‘Islamophobia’

Britain’s leading independent cross-party think tank? Really? Independent and Cross Party?

Well, they have done work for more than one party, but to say they are cross-party is a bit of a stretch. Independent? Not of thought.

From the Wiki page:

Demos was founded in 1993 by former Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques, and Geoff Mulgan, who became its first director.

In the run-up to the 1997 general election it was seen as being close to the Labour Party, in particular its then leader Tony Blair.

On 9 August 2006, in a speech at a Demos conference, British Home Secretary Dr John Reid stated that Britons ‘may have to modify their notion of freedom’, as a result of his plans, claiming that freedom is ‘misused and abused by terrorists.’

Take a look at their 2018 accounts, here.

Click to access application-pdf.pdf

And, after you’ve tried to work out the flow of money in and out, go to page 30 for some of their funders.

The Open Society Foundation. And who are they? You want to know what George Soros funds? Demos is one of his pets. Independent?

Don’t like the George Soros conspiracy theories? OK, let’s try another.

The Politics and Economics Research Trust. Did you know this report was produced by Charity Commission for England and Wales?

You can read more here: Politics and Economics Research Trust: case report

And here: Charity alleged to have illegally funded Brexit campaign groups – Questions over grants given by the Politics and Economics Research Trust to anti-EU groups, with potential for tax relief.

I can’t pretend to know everything Demos get up to, but to me, and having seen the work of the fabulous Carl Miller, it looks like a bunch of people that can’t get proper jobs so they sell their souls to anyone that will buy them and enjoy playing around in the dubious charity money-go-round, and call the work ‘research’.

So, what about their director, Polly Mackenzie? How much thinking does this head of a think tank do? More to the point, what’s the quality of this thinking?

Polly Mackenzie joined Demos as the new Director in January 2018. She previously worked for Nick Clegg from 2006 to 2015, helping to write the 2010 Coalition Agreement, and served as Director of Policy to the Deputy Prime Minister from 2010-15

Well, that didn’t go too well did it.

Just curious, but did Polly have anything to with forming Nick Clegg’s opinions on the EU. Yes, I know her time with him was up to 2015, before Brexit EU Ref, but, well, ideas aren’t formed over night, are they, and when Nick Clegg laid into Nigel Farage about how saying there would be an EU Army was a dangerous fantasy, Nifty Nick had buggered off to Facebook just before Merkel and significant EU figures started telling us that not only was the EU starting an EU Army, but political and military fusion ought to be a future goal.

Anyway, whatever contribution Polly made towards Nicky Know Nothing’s demise, at least she is able to put her own thoughts down. Sadly, it doesn’t get any better.

Case 1 – Letting Children Vote – And Proxy Parental Votes

This is Polly’s recent piece in Unheard …

What if we gave children a vote? – The electoral system is inherently biased towards the 83% of the population who are over 18

Here are some of Polly’s bright ideas:

  • Children 10 and above should be able to vote. How hard is it for a ten year old to make a cross in the right place on a piece of paper?
  • Children under 10 shouldn’t be able to vote (come on, Polly’s not mad, you know). Instead, their parents should be able to cast a proxy vote on behalf of the infant (I presume only one parent gets to vote for each child, but which one? Not sure Polly has think-tanked this through).

You can read the delusional reasoning yourself. But here, for Polly’s benefit, are some objections.

The notion of a proxy vote is entirely counter to the principle of one-person-one-vote. Large families, religious conservative families, would in fact give multiple votes to the parents, as proxies. To say that such proxy voting parents were casting a vote for the children themselves is delusional. They would be casing a vote for themselves and their of how the world should be.

Childless people will be disenfranchised, because parents get 2 or more times their vote.

As for children themselves voting, there are several reasons why they should not, not least of which are the following.

We have limits on parent power. Parents cannot abuse their children. An anathema to this is the indoctrination of children into political and religious ideologies. We are not raising independently minded adults, but pre-programmed adults. It takes a lot of learning to realise the extent to which you’ve been indoctrinated, and some never get out of it. Jess Phillips, Labour MP, describes how she was taught a visceral hatred of Tories. The indoctrination of children into our main religious cults is a disgrace to civil society. Until both political and religious indoctrination are criminalised, and a rounded education in reason and science becomes the standard, we will not be producing independent minded rational adults, but victims and perpetrators of the tribal party and religious politics we have today.

Young teenagers are naturally rebellious, and are wide open to the political indoctrination by extremists. Labour’s Momentum know this – Corbyn’s Kids is not a neutral educational programme but a mind programming school. Many young people were so easily indoctrinated into extreme Islam, and left home to join ISIS. The Orthodox Jewish communities keep a tight control of their children, as do Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Roman Catholics, and even ‘moderate’ Islam.

Why do you think the Humanists UK and National Secular Society are campaigning to stop and reverse the growth in faith schools.

Read Poly’s article. But just for fun, here’s a sample of Polly’s think-tanking.

“Will you let them drink and smoke, too?” – This is usually the first response I get when I propose enfranchising all citizens under the age of 18. The answer is, obviously, no. We have laws that prevent young people from drinking and smoking because these things are harmful. voting, by contrast, is not harmful; drawing an X on a ballot paper is substantially less dangerous than inhaling toxic smoke into your lungs.”

What? So, coerced voting of ten year olds, indoctrinated ten year olds, isn’t a danger? To society, and the better judgement of those children that have to live in the world they were coerced into voting for?

Polly, putting an unlit cigarette in a child’s hands and to a child’s lips is no more dangerous than putting a pencil in the mouth after drawing a cross on a piece of paper. However, to the child personally, the former could have longer term implications for the individual, if they were coerced to light it; but the latter could cause a far wider danger to themselves and society, if they were coerced to vote a particular way.

There are now many people that were indoctrinated into voting Labour – “I’m a life long Labour supporter.” But many such supporters are overcoming their own indoctrination because they can see before their eyes how Corbyn and Communist McDonnell are changing the party, and they have figured out that in their opinion they don’t like it. The same has been true of may Conservative voters. Many adults learn to change their minds for themselves. 

Children cannot. Do you imagine a ten year old having a conversation about the subtleties of Labour’s Socialism, McDonnell’s Communism, the entryism that’s been going on in the Labour Party for generations? No. They won’t even take an arbitrary lucky dip vote. Their parents will coerce them into voting for the parent’s preference.

And all the above doesn’t even begin to take into account the actual issues of brain development and maturity.

We should be worried about the indoctrinating abuse of children and their use in political vote rigging only somewhat less than psychological child abuse.

No, children should not be allowed to vote, and their parents should definitely NOT get extra votes because they have kids.

This piece by Mackenzie is idiotic. Yet she’s the director of Demos? And Carl Pilkington, sorry, Carl Miller (apologies to Carl Pilkington) is their Research Director, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media? Would you trust ANY of their output?

I can see why conspiracy theorists look to Soros. Throwing money at this bunch of clowns is top rate trolling.

Case 2 – Free Stuff Utopian Dreams

It was at this point I thought I’d have a look at Polly on Twitter. Interesting. Following what was obviously a quick lesson in economics by Labour’s John McDonnell’s free stuff promises, Polly gave it a critical eye.

Tweet – Nationalising Openreach is perfectly plausible. But why should broadband be free and not – for example – water, food, heating, clothes, all of which are rather more essential to the human condition.

You’d think Demos might have a director that have some feel for economics. Apparently not.

But, not to worry, Utopia is within reach for Polly …

Which manifesto? Only given Polly’s eagerness to indoctrinate voting children there are several to choose from.

So, for Polly’s benefit, what’s wrong with free stuff, state control and the removal of wages?

  • Eventually, workers don’t need money because everything is free. 
  • But workers are then dependent on the state alone. 
  • Result: oppression of workers that can have no independent means of survival so must comply with the state.
  • Check out some history. Hint: Soviet Union and its oppressed satellites; Moa’s China. The brutality of the party and the Dear Leader.
  • Political Utopias are no better than religious fantasies – they are used to control people.

Separated at High School – the curious case of Tommy Jones and Owen Robinson

Poor Tommy and Owen are from not too dissimilar backgrounds – at least that’s what Owen says. Tommy’s mother worked in a bakery, and apparently left Tommy with no particular political education or affiliation. Owen’s parents were a shop steward and a lecturer, so basically aspiring middle class with plenty of political awareness. Dead similar.

Tommy went to a local school in Luton, while Owen attended a sixth form college, equal opportunities being what they are. So, let’s hear no more about Owen’s privileged background.

But their paths changed after leaving high school.

Owen received a top education in one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Tommy left school and had various jobs.

Nevertheless, they retain an uncannily similar campaigning style. [Credit to someone else for spotting the similarity – but I’m blocked by Owen and can’t find them now]

OwenJones-TommyRobinson-02

The following is from Owen, here

Every single day, the British media, and the media elsewhere, whips up racism and bigotry against Muslims, against migrants, against refugees, and against other minorities, those people being a particular favourite target right now. Now there are some consequences. It fuels, it drives, it legitimises street level abuse, harassment, bullying, in the playground, the workplace. It fuels overtly racist attacks. It drives violence, and it drives the rise of the far right. After Christchurch, the massacre of dozens of Muslims, there can be no more tolerance, and no more silence within the media industry, about the role of the media, effectively acting like hate preachers, with megaphones that reach tens of millions of people, every single day. Now there are some that get very angry in the media when it’s called out, how dare you call out the media, as though they’re being victimised and attacked and insulted, rather than using their platform to speak out and challenge the racism and the bigotry which has consequences for people. Now the media is an industry which is overwhelmingly dominated by those from those from those privileged backgrounds who do not suffer the consequences of the bigotry and racism that the media fans. But it has to now be called out. And, to fail to use one’s platform, if you have a platform, to speak out against racism and bigotry by the most powerful institutions, or some of them, in the country, is to be complicit. So, enough of people responding in this defensive way, or being silent, or themselves peddling racism and bigotry. Call it out.

And the following wouldn’t be out of place in a video from Tommy …

Every single day, the British media, and the media elsewhere, whips up hatred and bigotry against those that criticise Islam, those people being a particular favourite target right now. Now there are some consequences. It fuels, it drives, it legitimises street level abuse, harassment, bullying, in the playground, the workplace, of Islamic supremacism. It fuels overtly Islamic attacks. It excuses Islamic violence, and it drives the rise of the far right Islam. After Manchester, the massacre of dozens of victims, or Rotherham and the 1400+ child victims, there can be no more tolerance, and no more silence within the media industry, about the role of the media, acting like cowards, more afraid of being called racist hate preachers themselves, with megaphones that could expose the Islamism to millions of people, every single day. Now there are some that get very angry in the media when it’s called out, how dare you call out the media, as though they’re being victimised and attacked and insulted, rather than using their platform to speak out and challenge the grooming gangs and the consequences for children. Now the media is an industry which is overwhelmingly dominated by those from those from those privileged backgrounds, like Owen Jones, who do not suffer the consequences of the Islamic terrorism and grooming gangs, that the media fans, by screaming ‘Islamophobia’. But it has to now be called out. And, to fail to use one’s platform, if you have a platform, to speak out against grooming gangs, which Andrew Norfolk eventually did. The most powerful institutions, or some of them, like the police, politicians, and media, that say “Nothing to do with Islam” is to be complicit. So, enough of people responding in this defensive way, or being silent, or themselves peddling excuses for Islamic homophobic bigotry. Call it out.

The thing is, there WAS silence in the media, on Muslim grooming gangs, from Owen, and especially from Corbyn, who sacked (sorry, managed to ‘persuade’) Sarah Champion from the opposition front bench for daring to talk about Pakistani Muslim Grooming Gangs. There has been collusion in the silence from press, police and politicians, specifically many Labour councils. 

For over a decade any attempt to raise the issue found the media hunting down those that complained and labelling them as racists – teachers that saw the grooming happening outside the school gates were demonised and hounded out of office if they expressed any concern in too explicit terms.

Maggie Oliver, of the eventually infamous case of Three Girls in Rochdale, which came only after she had been thwarted in her attempts to investigate the problem in Manchester, has been campaigning for more awareness, and for investigations into the neglectful and complicit senior police and social services that shut down anyone trying to expose the problem.

Even Times writer, Andrew Norfolk, admitted he sat on a story of grooming gangs for a couple of years, for fear of being called racist. A self-censoring press! You’d actually think Norfolk would have been sacked for NOT getting the story out sooner. Instead he was honoured as the brave soul that eventually did publish. Let that sink in. The problem is so bad, you’re more of a hero for publishing what should be a straight forward crime story, than a demon for covering it up for a couple of years while who knows how many girls continued to be abused by those eventually prosecuted.

And don’t get me started on the mind boggling utter nonsense of Islamic terrorism being “Nothing to do with Islam”, which we have heard countless times from politicians, when Islamic terrorists tell you explicitly they are doing it FOR Islam, and cite Quran and Hadith in detail as justification.

Hot head Tommy has his issues. He says things that are too close to the edge of anti-Muslim bigotry, but if confronted he’ll generally walk it back. On many occasions he’s been very explicit about how he has no problem with most Muslims – he even talks of a local Muslim who he finds to a better example of a decent person than anyone else he knows. His issue is always with Islamism, Islamic extremism, Muslim grooming gangs, and the attacks on free speech that are targeted at speech against Islam specifically. You may not like the way he goes about things – fine. You may reject him for his criminal record – fine – except let’s not see double standards where other ex-cons are deemed to have been redeemed. But if you dismiss what he has to say in totality for who he is, rather than listening to what he has to say first, then, guess what, you’re a bigot.

Owen has no excuses, other than he’s been indoctrinated into a political class that searches for  victims that they can make their next project … until the victims no longer want to be saved. You won’t see much concern for the working class if they happen not to like one particular religion.

Why has there been a Labour failure to make any criticism of Islam in practice? Where have Corbyn and Owen been on LBGT issues while the Parkfield Islamic homophobia has been going on?

If you want to see the utter hypocrisy of Owen, look no further than this race baiting tweet of his (don’t forget, Islamophobia=racism). [H/T Damo – @Concretemilk for these images]

There is absolutely no chance a newspaper would splash a childhood photo of an Islamic terrorist who murdered 49 Christians in a church as an “angelic boy”. Displacing focus from the victims to oh how could a sweet WHITE boy become a terrorist.

Funnily enough, the Mail and the Sun, had already displayed such a sentiment, using the term “angelic schoolboy”. This is what you get when you’re so biased in your political ideology you refuse to read anything that opposes your views. This is how dogmatic bigoted ideologues like Owen survive. 

OwenJones-AngelicBoys.jpg

Let’s go back a bit further to look at what Owen had to tweet about Jihadi John:

Now there’s a surprise. The guy who complained about someone using Jihadi John as “a pop at Corbyn”, then four years later he’s using a newspaper front page to have a pop at what he perceives ‘Islamophobia’ in the press.

When he’s not throwing a tantrum and stomping off interviews that aren’t going his way, despite his persistent rude and entitled interruptions when it’s time for another guest to speak, and when he’s not spending his day blocking people on Twitter, he’s writing bigoted two faced pieces in The Guardian (“my newspaper”) that exhibit his own bigotry towards the ‘working class’ – no wonder Labour struggles for their support when they have mouth pieces like Owen.

This is where you get to with Grievance Politics that has infested Labour. Not that grievances shouldn’t be exposed, but that bigot Owen will be very selective about which he exposes, erring on the side of not exposing grievances by Islam, and conjuring up grievances even when there are none to be found.

For all Robinson’s antics, his ‘reporting’ actually has more credibility that Owen’s. That is deeply worrying, that an activist like Robinson that shouts about genuine grievances is an outcast that’s driven out of social media, while Owen Jones is, to a vocal yet gullible number on the left, is a heroic voice for the underdog. You won’t find much from Owen Jones on FGM (though he endorses “my newspaper’s campaign” – hardly a campaign, but rather too few articles); and when he writes about homophobia he won’t comment how much more of it there is in Muslim communities – because, of course, that would make him a racist … against a political religious far right homophobic ideology.

The Nation State

The nation state is still the only large scale functional unit of social cohesion that can provide citizens with both rights and freedoms in a manageable manner.

The USA has struggled, mostly successfully, to balance what could have been small nation states as states within a larger federal state. The EU wants to go the same way, but, just as many in the US oppose federal government power, so in the EU some of the nation states (Brexit) object to the lack of accountability of the federalists and the loss of self determination of the individual states.

Globalism, of any kind, is currently worse. There is no functional world democratic government (UN?🤣) so all the global power is in the hands of global corporations and powerful individuals and groups. While Soros may not be the monster he’s portrayed to be, I didn’t get the chance to vote him in as a mover and shaker of EU affairs. Meanwhile, we all know of Putin’s dabbling in the affairs of nation states. Or indeed of nation states interfering with other nation states, of which the US, UK and others have vast experience.

Then we have the dreamers … the anarchists, the socialists, that have some crazy idea that humans can form Goldilocks societies that just happen to work .. in their heads … but which take no account of the variety of human political opinions that are out there. The Utopians look mystified when you tell them you don’t want their particular Utopia. Well, I suppose they think “There’s only one true Utopia!” I’m sure I’ve heard that sentiment in another context.

Even the nation state has its troubles. Who in their right mind thinks Pakistan is a good functioning state? Yet they just had elections. And, good luck bringing socialism to Afghanistan … or secular freedom of belief to anywhere dominated by religion.

Let’s be realistic, and call western states ‘nearly’ functioning, ‘reasonably’ representative of the wishes of the people. Trump and Brexit have exposed the visceral hatred that the nice socialists are capable of towards their fellow citizens. Then there’s the ‘far right’ (the real, not the imagined). The right will grow in response to the craziness of the left. Extremes sustain each other.

Many on the left have shown their colours. Democracy, as long as they win. Secularism, as long as you don’t offend their pet religion.

It’s difficult enough to hold a nation state together. Europeans have been trying to do it in one form or another since Ancient Greece, slowly, often too slowly, extending the franchise to all citizens. Trial and error. Two steps forward one step back. It’s been hard and often bloody work. But nation state democracy is about the best these evolved apes with partially functional brains are capable of.

Thinking you can wreck it and start over, or that revolution *against* a democratic system is even a rational idea, pretty much sums up the capabilities of some human brains. Haven’t we tried ‘day zero’ scenarios a few times and watched the genocide unfold to know that’s probably the worst of all worlds. Isn’t revolution the last desperate attempt to get rid of an oppressive state?

There is no western government that cannot be voted out of office, no matter how bad you currently think they are. None. And while many in the west are looking at destroying democracy, other parts of the world are struggling to implement it.

But, the first sign of a democratic system going down the pan is a loss of free speech. If you can be locked up for speaking on any political matter, then your freedom is on the way out. The ECHR has just approved the protection of Europe’s pet religion. You can go to jail in European states for expressing an opinion … and I don’t mean incitement to violence dressed up as opinion. I mean opinion dressed up as incitement to violence. If you point out the capacity of Islam to be used to incite violence in terms that upset the violent among the Islamic religion, and they threaten or enact violence against you, you are in danger of becoming their victim, or, a victim of the state that is busy eroding your free speech. Madness.

The shock to many liberals has not been the bunch of actual far right loons, or the stupid alt right that think ethnic separation is even a possibility, or the oppressive nature of a conservative, actual far right, political judicial religious ideology. No, the shock has been the willingness of the supposedly secular left to go along with Islam’s far right political agenda while mouthing off about a much smaller fractured far right of perceived fascism. They can spot a good old Nazi, but can’t see an Islamofascist cheer leading them on.

Islam, anarchism, socialism, big business … these contain a variety of globalist agendas that will subvert individual freedom in order to gain ground. Sometimes they are temporary allies in localised regions. Each contains ideologues that think their way will inevitably win. If they could only stop pesky individuals getting in the way with their damned freedoms, they could set everyone free to live in their Utopia on their terms.

Currently, the only safeguard against these varied globalists is secular liberal democratic nation states, cooperating on security, law and policing, but also ensuring the individual freedoms of their citizens as a primary principle … especially freedom of speech.

So, when you hear that nationalists are racist xenophobes, you’ll realise that the target isn’t just the actual real live racist xenophobes. It’s the nation state and its capacity to thwart the various globalist agendas.

We can’t have versions of democracy where every single person gets a say on every single topic – someone always has to compromise. So, representative democracies of one sort or another are the way to go, as the least worse option. They could be improved, with some variety of proportional representation … but even then, someone always fails to get what they want – compromise is inevitable. There is no perfect democratic system.

And to work on local, regional, state, global scales, we need representational democratic systems that are seen to be democratic.

So, I don’t have a problem with federalism in principle, as one of those levels. That includes, in my local case, a federal EU. I’d even back a world federation, if its members were also democratic states (the UN fails in the respect).

The problem with the EU, and one of the reasons Brexit has come about, is that the EU federalisation project has not been democratic, and is still subject to the whims of dominant states like Germany, or rather to dominant parties within the dominant states. And, this made Brexit appeal in another respect: the 2016 UK EURef vote that came after 2014/5 unilateral action by Merkel to not only open the EU’s external borders with no vetting, but to go on to bully other EU states into complying and taking ‘refugees’ (i.e. economic migrants).

Even ex-Muslims and fanatic for  ‘open doors’, Maryam Namazie doesn’t want to avoid proper vetting:

And, just to clarify the related issues of ‘xenophobia’, ‘racism’, ‘Islamophobia’ that raise their ugly heads any time one objects when some SJW suggests un-vetted immigration is OK and “There are no illegals, they are all humans” …

  • Protecting a democracy with law and order and applying it to all citizens, avoiding an undocumented underground that’s rife with black markets and people trafficking seems a pretty rational perspective … and opposing those things seems insane.
  • The term ‘Islamophobia’ is an irrational fear of Islam – and the only true Islamophobes are those press, politicians and police that go out of their way to make excuses for Islam … which is, by the definition of its own texts, an ultra-conservative (i.e. far right) political judicial ideology dressed up as a religion, with strong misogynistic and homophobic tendencies written in, and a mechanism for threatening death for any Muslim that chooses to leave. It’s not compatible with secular liberal democracy, except in so far as many Muslims explicitly (Reformers) or implicitly (“Not MY Islam”) fail to follow the prescriptions in the supposedly ‘inerrant’ Quran. And, just to be clear, Christian lunacy has its own problems, not least in the USA.
  • Actual racism and xenophobia exists, and it doesn’t help the cause against them if everyone that dares talk about immigration is labelled a far right racist xenophobic Nazi from the outset.

Clear up those mostly left wing misrepresentations of reality and we might see some normality and rationality return to western politics.

And so, if we want effective global governance that supports genuine secular liberal freedom, we need a system that looks democratic, behaves democratically, and is respected enough to hold in check the excesses of rogue states … or even our own democracies that get it wrong so often. The UN has been referred to prior to a number of actions (Iraq War), but in the end, western states felt they had sufficient authority to go to war without the full backing of the UN.

And now Trump has shown his disdain for the UN, and a large number of Brits have done the same for the EU. Those organisations are not fit for purpose. Who the heck thinks the UN is up to scratch if Saudi Arabia is on the UN Human Rights Council? Who the heck thinks the European Court of Human Rights is up to scratch if it endorses jailing someone for disrespecting some cult’s fake war mongering child marrying prophet?

In an effort to be ‘nice’, and in order to protect a ‘minority’ (second larges and most violent religion in the world), the left has sold out secular liberal freedoms, and ordinary people can see that. Hence, Trump and Brexit.

Liberal democratic secular nation states are currently the only protection against chaos and corruption – as imperfect as they are, with their own corrupt elements. In fact, if we can’t get nation states right, what chance have we with larger organisations? Nation states will remain valuable until and if similar global systems can be set in place. Tearing them down in some ‘Year Zero’ fantasy will not help. Destroying them slowly by a thousand cuts of erosion to personal freedom and free speech will only make the demise apparent when its too late.

Nick Cohen Finds Cover To Smear Robinson

[Now part of a series on Fallible Heroes]

The recent and undeniably stupid Tommy Robinson walked into jail. And this has given cover to many people that wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Perhaps made uncomfortable by his ‘activist journalism’, as he’s moved away from street protest himself, this last installment has proved too much of a temptation.

So, Nick Cohen jumped aboard.

Tommy Robinson and the rise of the new extremists

This is a thinly disguised hit piece on Robinson. Though disguised as general commentary on ‘extremism’ politics, that talks about the funding of political enterprises, it also throws in a few other individuals, but only in passing, for good measure, to keep up the tone so that it looks less like a hit piece with one target. He mentions Katie Hopkins, for example. But, Robinson gets more paragraphs than anyone else.

Why is Robinson lumped in with extremists? What has been extreme, exactly, about his activism? If you think he has, could you be explicit.

He created a street protest movement, the EDL, which he says himself was beleaguered because it attracted the unsavoury elements. Some of Robinson’s and the EDL’s reported thuggish behaviour was actually throwing those elements out. You’ll also note that in another context, when AntiFa are on the scene there’s often violence, and ‘arrests’ are reported – though what fails to be reported is that it’s usually AntiFa doing the attacking and sustaining most arrests. No matter. Blame Robinson.

So, other than a street protest movement, what extremism?

I don’t think Labour is considered an extreme party even though it has attracted left wing extremists all along, and arguably has them running the show now – but all very mainstream.

It doesn’t take Nick long to get down to trolling the uneducated masses. There’s the usually snobbish hat tip to the working class ‘beer hall’. But I suppose the ‘Doc Martens’  is very much a reference to the Reggae loving skinheads against fascism, isn’t it? Oh, well, may be not. Football thugs? Yes, that must be it.

On the point of football, what’s not covered here is the Football Lads Alliance. Look on Twitter and they are clearly labelled in the same light as Robinson often is: fascists, Nazis, racists. The FLA t might well appear on Nick’s radar when it has smeared so sufficiently to let Nick write a piece on it without seeming to be too obviously anti-working class. British football has undergone a transformation since its skinhead ‘bovver boot’ days. It’s now a family affair, supporting local communities, with female directors and women’s teams becoming stars alongside their male first team counterparts. Watch any FLA march and you’ll see people of all ethnicities, and, gosh, some females. And banners representing elements of supporters of many clubs – it’s serious business if you can unite football ‘thugs’. It turns out their message is pretty much the same as Tommy Robinson’s – it’s just that Tommy Robinson has been louder, and he’s been saying it longer.

Robinson has some issues, there’s no doubt. But, his actual criminality is, when you examine it, far more mundane than many other street activist groups, such as AntiFa, that not only get a pass from the press (if they can keep the violence below the radar) but are actually endorsed as Nazi-punchers. Robinson’s criminality emerges from his over exuberant stupidity more than any criminal intent, and also gets a good helping from conveniently unrelated charges being filed, and even thrown out of court. And what he genuinely does do that is criminal doesn’t remotely compare to the criminality that he protests, both terrorism and grooming gangs.

Yet more people on the ‘progressive left’ hate Robinson with a passion they seem unable to muster for the child killers and child rapists. They’ll happily scream about Robinson, but would be much happier if they could sweep the bomb bits, body parts and broken childhoods under the carpet.

To call (or, as in Nicks piece, to sneakily imply, with sufficient deniability) Robinson an extremist is extremely dishonest.

When Julia Ebner misrepresented Robinson in this way, though a little more explicitly, with less deniability, she did it in the Guardian, but while she worked out of the offices of Quilliam. Haras Rafiq felt it necessary to go on Newsnight with Robinson and actually deny that he, or Quilliam, endorsed what Ebner had written. Ebner didn’t last long after that. She still manages to do what Nick has done here: write a piece ostensibly on extremist politics, but name dropping Robinson with sufficient frequency,  alongside the names of actual extremists, that the inference is near impossible to not to fall for. Throw ‘alt-right’ in a few times, without actually saying Robinson is alt-right, and that will be enough to get retweets* of the article by those that will do the job more explicitly. And, when writing these articles, conveniently avoid an explicit meaning of the term alt-right – because Robinson is obviously not alt-right, since in terms of racism Robinson is as polar opposite of Richard Spencer as Nick Cohen is. But, the ‘racist’ smears will follow on nicely just by making sure ‘Tommy Robinson’ and ‘alt-right’ appear in the same article that avoids saying the former IS NOT the latter.

*Money making click bait that helps Nick’s income? Odd, that Nick, a paid journalist, homes in on Robinson’s earning capacity, as if earning a living from a cause one is passionate about is less moral than other moralising journalism. That’s how the world works. 

Oh, and apparently, Robinson has been raised to the grand position of ‘politician’ or is it lowered – you can never tell with politicians. Anyway, this seems absurd:

Most conservatives steered well clear of Tommy Robinson, even though he was one of the few politicians who can speak well to the racist strain in white working class British culture.

“can speak well to”? Well, if joining with people of various ethnicities, targeting one specific political judicial religious ideology, and being particularly clear that his real targets are Islamists, terrorists and grooming gangs, amounts to racism, then surely criticising the Indian Caste system or FGM is racist too. Yes, I know that some ‘progressive’ numpties think it is, but that’s besides the point. Pointing an accusing finger at the abusers and terrorists that currently over-represent in some (non-Monolithic) ‘communities’ is not racism.

In this context, you should note, though it’s often ignored, that Tommy Robinson targets the genuinely ‘Islamophobic’ politicians, police and press. You know, the ones that have such an irrational fear of Islam they will look the other way as abuse goes on, as Andrew Norfolk did, until he snapped out of his ‘progressive’ mindset and came to his senses.

“racist strain in white working class British culture” – Too easy, Nick. You know full well that for so many, this means ALL working class people. I hear this from people that are, or were working class too, but managed to get a reasonable education, leave their council estates for the suburbs, and now look down on the scum they left behind. The very people that jump down your throat, if, in talking about ISIS, you don’t qualify it with NOT ALL MUSLIMS.

What about the title of the article? “Tommy Robinson and the rise of the new extremists”

Well, it doesn’t actually call Robinson an extremist. And we often see article authors using the get out of jail card, “Well, I didn’t write the headline.”

Many working class people, that lack the sophisticated education enjoyed by many that look down on them, are far more ‘straight talking’ – which obviously means not being as capable of being judicious with their smears as the more literary journalists that thinly disguise their contempt for the likes of Robinson.

For other topics of public concern, what would be called ‘people power’, is extremism when engaging in the thoroughly decent thing of taking a dislike to Islam. Why do religions get such unholy passes to promote such barbaric ideas, and then get away with claiming to be a religion of peace?

It’s typical that the credibility of a call to ‘people power’ very much depends on who is doing the calling. Jeremy Corbyn manages to appear interested in the people, while looking down on the actual people that have no voice. He’s become the leader of the Labour party on the back of his ‘say nothing, commit to nothing‘ skills in this regard (“I abhor all bombing”).

But I’m afraid there’s somebody else shouting now, making the very claims about police and political corruption that allowed grooming gangs to operate in plain sight. Maggie Oliver investigated and brought to justice just a small number of the Rochdale grooming gang members. Her success has given her a voice (and funnily enough, a means of earning a living from her valuable experiences). What’s Maggie Oliver calling for now?

People power.

Tommy Robinson was doing people power when ‘Islamophobia’ (the fear of criticising Islam or Muslims) was well established by Blair’s multiculturalist funding of self declared Muslim representative organisations.

Now, Maggie Oliver is saying what Robinson has been saying:

Remember, Islam is a very conservative political judicial religious ideology. The judicial part is Sharia, that so many Muslims turn to for justice. The politics is written into all religions that make social prescriptions and proscriptions, but it’s even more explicit in Islam, which is anti-secular and has an explicit goal of Islamic domination written into it.

Many traditional liberals like Nick have already commented on how the Left’s alliance with Islamism is characteristic of actual extremes having common goals – rub out the sensible voices in the middle and deal with the final battle of what looks like interchangeable good and evil later.

I won’t bother asking for examples of Robinson’s racism. They never materialise. Some very credible examples would have appeared by now were there any truth in the charge. That failed narrative has moved on.

The ‘far-right’, ‘alt-right’ and ‘extremist’ charges are much easier to make and not support, when you don’t even have to back them up. They are charges that are vague enough that they are far easier to deny you made them.

So, what extremes does Robinson represent? Well, you could actually make the effort to ask him.

To write a piece about extremism, and include Tommy Robinson, who Nick has sort of defended in other contexts, and the only difference then and now is his latest arrest, … well, that seems like outright dishonesty.

Sure, Nick thought Robinson didn’t help himself. But an extremist? Like, comparable to say an Islamic extremist? Seriously? Has Tommy Robinson EVER called for the harming or ANYONE?

If we take Anjem Choudary, who approves of death for apostasy, as the low bar of extremism, and ISIS as the high bar, compared to which even Hitler wins only because of numbers, then ‘extremist’ is already pretty wide. Even then, based on death for apostasy alone, that’s a lot of Muslims you’re calling extremists.

How about AntiFa? Sure. They are extremists. They shut down people they disagree with. Violently. That’s pretty extreme. Has Robinson EVER recommended that?

No. Nick’s piece is pure bullshit, when you look at in that context.

It’s funny, because I’m pretty sure Nick has lamented the tendency for the Left to call everyone Nazis, fascists, and other things they are not. What happened?

I suppose otherwise rational people can go off the rails sometimes.

Our Islamophobic Politicians

The hot trend at the time of writing is the call for the Conservative Party to investigate itself for the amount of ‘Islamophobia’ engaged in, by members or MPs.

Obviously, this is kick-back for the accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party, and it looks like Corbyn is now benefiting from his alliances in the Islamic world, as race baiting CMB and their puppet master Miqdaad Versi push this for all they’re worth.

To Conservatives in particular. You have lost the narrative to Islamic fundamentalists. You bought into the ‘multiculturalism’ narrative of Blair’s Labour, and you have lost. But, as you’ll see, you can start to save your party.

Politicians generally. You are being conned on ‘Islamophobia’.
The people know this.
The people know that YOU know this.
Do you realise the contempt with which you are currently held for this cowardice?

Islamophobia:

  • a) a tool used by Islamists (those politically motivated to further Islam and Sharia)
    to shut down discussion of the worst practices in Islam,
    by conflating criticism of Islam, anti-Muslim bigotry, and racism.
  • b) a fear instilled in Muslims, based on indoctrination into a cultish reverence
    for Mohammed and the Quran,
    such they submit themselves to Islam,
    often above family members,
    so that some would kill their own children or siblings if they left Islam.
  • c) a fear instilled in Muslims by Islamic fundamentalists,
    that to speak out about the bad practices in Islam is
    un-Islamic, treason, blasphemous, heretical,
    even default apostasy by fiat … and threateningly, a death sentence
  • d) the fear of Islam instilled into UK politicians, police and press that shuts them up,
    and even persuades them to collude in the silencing of those that speak out about the worst aspects of Islam.
  • e) the fear of Islam instilled in politicians across Europe,
    that Muslim unrest is more difficult to deal with than any popularist reactionary unrest,
    so that they would rather kow tow to Muslim community demands.

Islamist have succeeded. We realise you just want it all to go away. Your opponents know how to play this game. It’s a rhetorical method that works very well throughout the wider Islamic world. But, you are too scared to do anything about it.

Andrew Norfolk knew of this fear of Islam, when he accepted he’d sat on a report on paedophile Muslim grooming gangs, and let the rapes continue unexposed.

Maggie Oliver knew this, when her GMP seniors deflected her from investigating a case. Only with #threegirls in Rochdale, did she get anywhere.

Maggie Oliver realises you have no stomach to do the right thing. So she now calls for people power.

But we know what you politicians and police have done when people have raised this. We have seen you smear those that speak out, or at best, you have looked the other way.

Labour sacked MP Sarah Champion. They even deselected a Labour councillor.

Decent head teacher, Ray Honeyford, was hounded out, three decades ago, for trying to protect and improve the lot of children, and YOU or your fellow MPs let this happen.

Here’s what you can do.

  • You can start by rejecting the term ‘Islamophobia’.
  • Islam is the set of ideas.
  • Muslims are the people.
  • Oppose actual anti-Muslim bigotry, where individual decent Muslims are persecuted.
  • Oppose racism.

On that last point, I’m sure you’ve been told, but, Islam is not a race. There are many ‘white’ Muslims, and many ‘non-white’ non-Muslims. Make sure you are prosecuting actual racism, and not opinions on what is just another set of ideas.

If you play this ‘Islamophobia’ game, of seeing Muslims as victims while a minority, then you’ll find that you are becoming the minority.

Decent secular Muslims will tell you all this too. Perhaps you don’t want to listen. Perhaps you’ve already submitted to Islam.

 

 

Dishonest James O’Brien Reads Adolf Rudd

This is an extract from an earlier post: Lies, Damned Lies, and .. Political Rhetoric, 2016, post-Brexit, and the lies told for a political agenda.

Here’s James O-Brien on Amber Rudd’s speech at the Conservative party conference: this clip. Have a listen, it’s worth it.

obrienhate

Just a bit of angry rhetoric? Not quite. Here’s the text of what he said. First, the opening from the LBC web page:

This startling observation stopped James O’Brien in his tracks – the eerie similarities between Amber Rudd’s plan to list foreign workers and a passage in Mein Kampf.

The eerie similarities? If that’s so then LBC’s programme listing has eerie similarities to Hitler’s passage in Mein Kampf – at least LBC’s programme list is actually a list, while Rudd’s speech did not.

So, what did O’Brien say? Well, here it is. But bear in mind that Rudd said nothing like this, didn’t say a thing about lists, about a nations existence and greatness, a sharp line of distinction, didn’t give an anecdote about a plasterer, … And yet O’Brien re-reads this in parts, emphasising the meanings from Mein Kampf, with not a jot from Rudd’s speech.

“Very important that firms declare how much of their workforce is foreign because they’re just domiciled in this state simply as earners of their livelihood there. They’re not members of the nation, they’re not members of the foundation and the support of the nation’s existence and greatness.

You have to have a sharp line of distinction between those who are members of the nation and those who are just domiciled here as earners of their livelihoods.”

No, that wasn’t from Amber Rudd’s speech yesterday, I’m really sorry, that’s from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.

A sharp line of distinction between those who as members of the nation are the foundation and support of its existence and those who are domiciled in the state simply as earners of their livelihood here. Do you recognise that need for a sharp distinction? Do you feel it? Do you applaud that today?

Do you cheer it because you’ve heard some meaningless anecdote about plasterer whose wages have gone up by roughly the same percentage over the last ten or fifteen years that almost everybody else in the British workforce has? You see the need for that sharp line of distinction? Are you going to swallow that today?

A sharp line of distinction between those who are the foundation and support of the nation’s existence and greatness. And those, like almost everybody I’ve encountered so far today, who were just domiciled in the states simply as earners of their livelihood here. What do you think will come next?

If you’re going to have a sharp line of distinction between people born here and people who just work here, you’re enacting chapter two of Mein Kempf. Strange times.

“sharp line of distinction” – quoted once from Mein Kampf, and then repeated four more times. Who would come away from this thinking that phrase wasn’t part of Rudd’s speech?

This is like reading Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s speech and presenting it as Malcom-X. No. It’s worse than that. Because despite the differences, at least King and Malcom-X were on the same subject. This Holocaust precursor from Hitler was actually about hate and demonisation. Nowhere did Rudd demonise or even criticise foreign workers in her speech. What criticism she did include was entirely about the current UK methods of managing foreign workers. This is a particular malicious and dishonest clip from O’Brien – and plenty of people have bought it hook line and sinker.

Citing and re-citing phrases from Mein Kampf and playing on those words and meaning as if they are Rudd’s, is a straw man argument clearer than many I’ve seen for a long time.

By all means disagree with the policy, but at least criticise the policy and not some trumped up misrepresentation.

It’s difficult to emphasise how bad this is. His repeat of the “sharp line of distinction” very specifically gives the impression it’s in Rudd’s speech. I’ve seen this clip posted on a Lib Dem Facebook page a few times, and people are buying it, reposting it, and becoming outraged at the ‘fact’ that Rudd is a Nazi.

At this point it’s worth looking at a tweet from O’Brien:

No kidding. I’ve added the twitter ‘exchange’ below as an update. Won’t defend his own misrepresentations but happy to point it out in others.

What Rudd Said

I’m not kidding about this. Some people are seriously claiming the Tories are fascists, and it isn’t being used metaphorically. A UK elected government, that will abide by UK election rules and hand over power if they lose the next election, that have none of the actual features of actual fascist governments.

Let’s have a look at what Rudd actually said in this context of foreign workers.

I believe immigration has brought many benefits to the nation. It has enhanced our economy, our society and our culture.

This is why I want to reduce net migration while continuing to ensure we attract the brightest and the best.

Because it’s only by reducing the numbers back down to sustainable levels that we can change the tide of public opinion … so once again immigration is something we can all welcome.

The test should ensure people coming here are filling gaps in the labour market, not taking jobs British people could do.

But it’s become a tick box exercise, allowing some firms to get away with not training local people. We won’t win in the world if we don’t do more to upskill our own workforce.

  • No xenophobic closing of doors, but a limit on immigration to manageable levels.
  • Actually making a case for immigration, at manageable levels.
  • Acknowledgement of the concerns that caused the Brexit win.
  • This is the only reference to a ‘test’ on immigrants, and it’s not a call for a test but rather a measure of policy effectiveness.
  • She’s actually addressing what many people have wanted addressing, the failure to train British citizens.

Labour and Lib Dems (I’m a member of the latter) have not been shy about demanding better education and training of our young people, and have been quick to complain about the lack of training. The current system sees some employers using foreign workers when they should be training British people. Note that this is necessary for British competitiveness – something Labour and Lib Dems sign up to.

These are not controversial points from Rudd. Prior to Brexit and Syria and Merkel’s cock up, this could have come from any of the major parties, not just UKIP. Labour and Tories have lower immigration targets.

The O’Brien misrepresentation and his responsibility for its spread on social media is the only controversial issue here.

I dropped the above criticism in O’Brien’s Twitter stream once or twice soon after I posted it here and had no reaction from him – O’Brien owes me nothing, fair enough. I’ve posted it elsewhere, but I haven’t trolled O’Brien with it. Then I saw this retweet of an O’Brien tweet …

jamesobrien-hypocrite

I’d like to think his blocking me was out of shame for his own dishonesty, but I doubt it.

UPDATE: Couldn’t resist adding this …

I don’t think it’s the camera, James.

Bursting The White Supremacy Bubble

I was asked what Richard Spencer said that was wrong in the interview with Gary Young.

THE KLAN IS BACK

Where do I start. Well, let’s start right here – and this alone has many things wrong with it:

“Africans have benefited from the experience of white supremacy”

No. On many counts. If this rambles a bit, it’s because there is so much wrong with it and the notions its built on.

Starting with those living at the time of slavery, there were zero benefits and lots of negatives to being a slave, … or do you not think so? Slavery was a system of supreme power and cruelty. Not really something our slave owning ancestors can be proud of. Slavery showed no intrinsic sign of superior intellect. Many working hands on slave ships might have been pressed into service and will have been dumber than many of the slaves they transported. Many slave owners survived by their capacity for cruelty, not because of their intellect. But sure, some cruel and intelligent slavers made a good living. All of which begs the question, is intellectual superiority enough, or even necessary, for power supremacy?

So, let’s have a look at ‘supremacy’ more generally. We know from the way the white supremacy narrative goes that they think the power superiority of Europe derives from a greater intelligence, so I’ll try to focus on power and intelligence first.

Smart People or Dumb Luck

Not all modern self-made millionaires are the brightest people. They make their money by being hard working, persistent, good at making money off the work others put in, or luck.

There are many rich crooks that earn their money by being just clever enough to outwit the competition in their own sphere, and just clever enough to steal from the less clever, and crooks need not be particularly bright in other respects. Crooks can also make money off people far brighter than themselves. All it takes is the capacity to break a trust, to engage in fraudulent and corrupt practices, or to be brutal.

There are some really clever people, with high IQs, that don’t have the capacity for empathy that others have, and are quite able to manipulate their way to power. We call them sociopaths, or psychopaths (clinical details of terminology aside) – they are not all mad killers.

Oddly, the most empathetic people we have can suffer a severe empathy loss, and so we find that many very empathetic people have none to spare for the sociopath. What? You think the sociopath chose to be born with that empathy empty brain? Someone with a high empathy, but without the intellect or interest to think things through, will see these fellow humans as being nothing but non-human monsters.

Conversely, the natural sociopath with an intellect can learn the skill of appearing to have empathy while feeling none.

Some sociopaths might be ruthless and selfish in business, while others might make great contributions to our societies because they are single minded in their focus on what interests them, rather than dedicating time and energy to feeding their feelings towards others.

It’s and odd world.

So, with this, and many other factors that lead to power, in a society as a whole, and members of a particular society, what does it mean to be ‘supreme’, to be a ‘white supremacist’ in particular. This ‘supremacy’ attribute is a pretty complicated thing.

European Supremacy … Wasn’t Your Whiteness

The power superiority of European nations came from fortunate circumstances in Europe.

At one time other parts of the world were way ahead of Europe. There hasn’t been enough time in a few short centuries for evolution to have an impact to make white Europeans suddenly smarter.

And, there’s a certain irony here in that many white supremacists are idiots that reject much of evolutionary theory, yet they think they are able to figure out that ‘something’ made white Europeans smarter, all of a sudden. Round about 1500, maybe? Or 1700? Who knows when we lucky whites became supreme, but I know that for some time, in what we call ‘the dark ages’, we weren’t.

The strange truth is that centuries ago, any bell curve difference on intellectual supremacy was already there when Europe was a dumber civilization. If Europeans got smarter, it wasn’t some sudden genetic brain boost.

If anything history would suggest that it was mixing of cultures made Europe ‘superior’ in power.

A single stable culture that works well in a stable climate setting with sufficient resources has little pressure for technological change.

But warring small nation states with lots of trade, and an exchange of ideas and peoples, stimulates change. The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, science, philosophy, … if they come together they can create massive progress, as they did in Europe.

The introduction of Arabic works, the re-introduction of Greek works, they all boosted a Europe that was awakening in the ruins of Rome, looking back on a civilization that had been way ahead in its prime. Then, once technical progress was under way, it took off quickly – which in itself is a massive story, involving many famous people, most of which were ‘white’ because, as happens with one’s religion, or nationality, they happened to be born where they were. Any bright African, Indian, Asian in Europe at that time, free of any racist persecution, could join in as well as any white person – except that for many of our famous early scientists, privilege gave them the capacity to do the work they did.

That’s why much European science history is ‘white’, not because of any innate white supremacy. This idea of being lucky enough for many factors to come together is the reason that during our European ‘Dark Ages’, Islamic civilisation prospered – not because Islam has some superior message that to hand.

Social change that’s unnecessary in small tribal systems becomes crucial in a more complex mercantile trading and technical societies. Wars and revolutions bring change too, but do much damage. Democracy works better.

But a democracy doesn’t work so well if many of those within it are actual or effective slaves.

Kings and lords ruled Europe. But the barons wanted a greater say. And while aristocratic elites still ruled, the money of mercantile power started to speak. Actual slaves, and the non-elite free men, and women, they all eventually wanted the freedoms the elites enjoyed.

Education spread, increasing the diversity of opportunity with it. With luck, a bright kid from some slum could break out, end up at university, and become a great engineer, while his intelligent counterpart in a South American tribe has no chance of learning any of the mathematics and science his European brother is exposed to. Privilege begets privilege, unless the privileged and powerful are prepared to share what they have.

All this comes together in Europe, and by fortune of circumstances, both dumb and bright white people, far from supreme, living in slums in the cities of the west, start to demand fairer conditions. Social change comes along with the greater voting franchise. A better understanding of biology, health, suffering … all these inspire many bright people to be better towards their fellow humans, to demand change.

What amounts to a supremacy of power, money, technology, science, brings European states into competition, war, and world domination, at the very time social improvements are afoot at home. This contradiction is why we have heroes and villains, often in one and the same person: Churchill, Washington … great leaders when their countries needed them, but not averse to indulging in the less worthy norms of their times.

Not all changes are smooth or balanced. While a good man might be helping the poor in slums back home, his sibling might be in India beating down an uprising of oppressed and starving people. The power supremacy that can bring good continues to bring much harm in parallel. This is the messy world of the reality of Empire, not the simplistic ‘white supremacist’ world that idiots like Richard Spencer have in their minds. There are many dumb, evil and far from supreme people among the supreme European race, and many very bright and genuinely superior intellects among the people oppressed by this European superiority.

Don’t get me wrong. Empires have come and gone in the past. It was mostly shear good or bad fortune that determined whether you were a thicko with power in the supreme echelons of the white European culture, because your aunt was bedded by some duke, or you were a brown genius trying to figure out how to get this white European oppression out of your country, … while still having to deal with cruel idiots in your own culture that made money off the back of the oppressors and helped them maintain the oppression.

This is a very messy history with so many strands that it’s impossible to do them all justice here. But it should be clear enough that ‘white supremacism’ is one of the dumbest notions you could dream up, if only for the fact that so many white supremacists are thick. What the heck is supposed to be supreme about them?

I’m All White Jack

The big joke is that by around the time Europe becomes a supreme power base, we are already mixed race. Apart from some isolated families that protect their ‘blood lines’, whether for race or mere genealogical reasons, we have been screwing our way around the world for several hundred years, and many people that think they are true blood white are not.

How about all white supremacists subject themselves to DNA tests and ANY ‘impure non-white genes’ gets you rejected from the master race. Good luck with that. Many will be rejected.

The thing is, this definition of ‘white’ that’s supposed confer supremacy is such that a) it doesn’t exist; b) it certainly doesn’t confer supremacy (again, have you seen some of these dumbos).

But, let’s go with one of the tools the white supremacists use. Let’s play ‘Bell Curve’.

Suppose you can categorise of peoples, that are identifiable by ‘race’, and that some bell curves on intelligence show Group A is higher than group B on some measure. What does that mean? …

It means in the overlap there are some seriously unintelligent people in both A and B. And there are some people in Group B that are brighter than most people in group A, the supposedly supreme group. That’s the problem – individuals are not the population they are in: bell curves have tails, in both directions.

So, what do I want, if YOU insist we must split society?

I’ll tell you. I want to be in the group of white, black, brown, yellow, purple, any colour, as long as they are the smart non-racist ones. Those smart Jews that are top of the charts? I want to be in their camp, not stuck with knuckle dragging racist morons of my own race.

The thing is, and this is where much of the controversy lies, statistics can be helpful.

Identify a group and see that there is a group tendency to have some health deficiency, and you can target treatment better. But even here, individuals still count. Not all people in a statistically identifiable genetic group need have the condition your looking at – and that has serious implications if you get the targeted treatment wrong. If group A has a tendency to have the condition more than those in group B, so you target only group A, you leave those in group B with the condition to suffer? Such a statistical difference can only benefit everyone if limited resources are distributed according to the relative number of people in the groups, and the relative occurrence of the conditions. You have to do a lot of Bayesian stuff to be effective. You can’t simply say, “Oh, group A has a high statistical bias for this condition, we’ll target only group A.”

And yet this is what the ‘white supremacists’ don’t get about the bell curves that they rely on for intelligence and supposed ‘supremacy’. It’s more complicated than just ‘race’ – and their racism isn’t even just about ‘actual race’, but apparent race, because, at least until they have prepared the internment camps where they too are forced to endure genetic testing necessary to determine their own racial purity. They can’t tell who’s white and who isn’t, outside a very simple stark difference in colour. You could have a fine blood line going back to mad King George, but if your great gran got too friendly with a slave, you’re out of the master race.

On so many grounds, these ‘white supremacists’ don’t really know what they are talking about.

But, hey, those bright Jews? If it’s genetic, why don’t we dumber white folks want what they have? If some Jews are so bright, how seriously dumb was Hitler. Exterminated or exported a minority people, because he could. And yet they could have helped Germany recover from the devastation that resulted from its previous screw up of WWI.

But those Jews, those philosophers, scientists that survived, helped make America great, not the dumb white supremacists in the south. One of my heroes, Erik Kandel, left Europe in his youth to escape extermination, and went on to contribute to neuroscience of memory. I’m sure most sensible people can happily name their own great Jew. If what the the ‘white supremacists’ think is true, can you give me a genetic injection of Jewish intelligence please. If, as many antisemite will tell you, the Jews are really ruling the world, because they are so good at it, then instead of exterminating them, why don’t we work towards making ourselves that bright? Why make the world dumber, by killing off the intelligent ones?

This ‘white supremacism’ simply doesn’t make sense by their own standards of reckoning.

Getting back to Spencer’s claim. No. Africans Americans didn’t benefit from ‘white’ supremacy. They suffered under white idiocy and cruelty that was coupled with technological supremacy. They suffered at the hands of Christian men and women that failed to live up to the principles that a Jew supposedly taught them. The number of ironies to the ‘white supremacy’ stupidity is astounding.

Thankfully, enough decent Europeans saw things differently, and just as they fought injustice that befell the ‘white inferiors’ at home, they opposed slavery. The African and Middle Eastern world under Islam continued with slavery long after Europe came to its senses. Europe banned slavery. It just took some time and a civil war to convince some thickos in America.

Mixed Race Europe

And, of course, winning a war on slavery and persecution doesn’t end it. It exists everywhere in the world.

But it’s odd that the white supremacists in the USA look to Europe, the place that has done most to end racism, that is the least racist place on earth. This is not an idle claim.

Check out Russia, China, Japan, South Africa, Middle East, India … These are not the mixed race societies you might hope for. These are not non-racist societies.

Why is there still an ethnic cleansing occurring every now and then around the world? Because one ethnic group doesn’t like another – they are racists. Why are there multicultural problems in Europe with Islam? Partly because of Islam’s own version of supremacy – it’s Islam or nothing.

Now, Islam is not a race – in fact one of the few good ideas that both Christianity and Islam encouraged (at least theoretically) was anti-racism.

But that doesn’t prevent Muslims being racist. There is much racism in the Islamic world. There are Arab, Pakistani, Turkish, Indonesian and other Islamic sub-cultures within Europe, and they won’t even intermarry among themselves as Muslims. Pakistanis are well known for keeping their ties with Pakistan. There are Pakistani families in the UK, screaming to high heaven about white racism, and yet they’d kill their daughter if she tried to marry a non-Muslim or non-Pakistani.

Again, we have to be clear, that this is messy. Many white, brown, black people get along fine, and mix socially, and marry, and have children. Europe is the least racist place on earth – even with our racists, of every colour and cultural origin. Has racism been ousted from Europe? No. Too many white Europeans are racist… but I’d hazard a guess that proportionally there are more POC racists in the UK than white racists.

So, what is Richard Spencer thinking when he talks of his superior white European heritage? Well, it’s not the whiteness that’s superior. He’s referring only to the coincidences of history that made Europe powerful, that then allowed it to dominate the rest of the world, for a time.

Politics, Race, Multiculturalism

Political ideas are far more important than skin colour or race – in fact I can’t think of anything that requires differentiation based on race or skin colour other than the beneficial statistics that can help target healing of genetic conditions – and even then, there are genetic differences within what Spencer would think of as a race that are just as important to health. Race is simply a really bad demarcation that mostly leads to great harm. Racism is a bad political idea.

To think in terms or racial superiority is so bad that it has caused a double whammy of hate. First, there are the racists themselves. Second, and more recently, in response to white racism, we have seen a SJW backlash that has become so toxic we have who knows how many white people actually hating their own race. This currently is a dangerous political direction that actually perpetuates racism.

Pause … Let than sink in for a moment: those that campaign vociferously against racism, that declare race isn’t important, see their own race as the only source of racism, and actively want an end to white people, while being quite willing to support other cultures and sub-cultures that are based to some extent on racial division.

But, on the bright side, at least the white SJW racists provide yet more evidence that white people can be as dumb as anyone of any other skin colour.

We should be discriminating – of political and cultural ideas, not race.

“Multiculturalism has failed!”

No. The implementation of multiculturalism has failed, by not being discriminating about what is of value and what is dangerous, in various cultures.

If you think good multiculturalism consists of exchanging recipes from around the world, while turning a blind eye to honour killing, or FGM, or forced marriage, then you are failing at multiculturalism, and failing to uphold the political egalitarianism that Europe was supposed to be famous for.

Living With History

Time to get back to the Richard Spencer quote. Let’s suppose he accepts that white supremacy was cruel and unjustified (I don’t know that he does). What does Richard Spencer mean when he says African Americans have benefited? Maybe Spencer is thinking, hey look ‘shithole’ Africa, compared to great lives African Americans have. He’s wrong there too. Centuries of persecution, with legal persecution stopped only decades ago, and social persecution still active (that’s what Spencer is engaged in) are not benefiting African Americans now, but still hindering them.

Can many African Americans have successful lives, better than many whites? Sure. That’s what equal opportunity should result in. And great lives too, if only they could avoid idiots like Spencer. Again, don’t get me wrong. There are stupid racist black Richard Spencers among groups like BLM – we’ve seen them. We’ve seen the idiots in Africa that think some of their ancient tribal practices are somehow superior to ‘white science’ – as if science is ‘white’. Dumb racism isn’t a white prerogative.

But, to take Spencer’s line of reasoning: that all that suffering in slavery, and post-slavery racist laws, and post-racist law racist persecution, … all that has given current African Americans the great reward of living in the soon to be great again USA.

There’s a trivial ironic truth to this point of view. I was saving this speech for the Oscars, but you get a preview  …

I’d like to thank all the people that made me what I am today. I’d like to thank Hitler, and all the dead Jews in the Holocaust, for bringing my mother and father together, post-WWII, which led to my lucky existence – oh, and thanks to my dead uncle that was killed in the war. And I’d like to thank those that contributed to the Irish famine that drove my recent ancestors, on both sides, to leave Ireland and come to England and marry some English people. A special thanks to the invading Normans that persecuted others in my family tree that were mere serfs … oh, and my other ancestors that were Normans that persecuted them. A great big thank you to Julius Caesar, for without his invasion and killing of so many people we wouldn’t have some of the lovely straight roads that I enjoy today. I don’t know who you are, but thank you Neanderthal woman for being raped by my other early human ancestor. And thank you Africans, for starving and migrating to Europe in search of a better place – twice – you really made the effort form which I now benefit. And thank you, African ape mother of all humans today. Thank you all.

Any history that humans have gone through that has been objectively bad for some people and good for others, in terms of material reward, security, health, social status, self determination, has resulted in the people we are now. So, is a black guy in America now better off because his recent ancestor was brought over in a slave ship?

Trivially, yes. But it’s actually a dumb question, and a dumb point from Richard Spencer.

First, that person would not have been present in Africa today had his ancestor not been a victim of slavery. Any number of things might be different without European slavery. Islamic slavery was present in Africa long after it was stopped in Europe, so maybe his ancestor would have been a slave after all. Or maybe his tribe would have become slavers themselves in turn. Maybe if decent European explorers had brought only benefits of European progress to Africa … but hold on, before we get too far into this, remember that much of the technical and mercantile progress in Europe was made on the back of Africa and other places, by the consumption of the resources found there. Mmmm. Tricky. History is complicated, and the ‘What if?’ games don’t really tell us that much.

White Minority Identity

And now the ironic aspect of the Richard Spencer quote. The problem is that if you play the same game as Richard Spencer, and try to say that African Americans benefit now from the cruelty of past white Europeans, then he could be letting himself in for a whole pile to grief. White people, as defined in the simplistic terms of Richard Spencer, are actually a minority in the world population.

Suppose all non-whites made slaves of whites for a century or so, it wouldn’t be that bad, would it? After all, in a few more centuries there’d be a black Richard Spencer saying, …

“Whites have benefited from the experience of black supremacy”

No. Enough of the ‘white supremacy’ stupidity.

How about Identitarianism, White Separatism, and the other BS terms that mask a white supremacist agenda?

Anti-Racism

It’s simple:

If you want to marry and mate with someone of your own ethnic background, then go for it. Nobody is stopping you. As white separatists point out, there are many self contained ethnic groups that value their heritage, why can’t white people? Yeah, fine, again, go for it.

Here’s the problem – and it’s one I touched on above. What if I, as a white person, don’t want that? What if I am friends with and enjoy the company of people of all backgrounds, all races? What if we want to get together and make mixed race babies? What’s your problem?

Only I can tell you OUR problem is – YOU, Richard Spencer. Not because you want to play with white people only, but because you want to make the rest of us do it too.

And it’s not just the Richard Spencers of this world – and here’s where I depart form the current white hating SJW loons. Many ethnic groups insist on their own ethnic purity, just as Spencer does. Where they insist that applies to all their children, we have a problem, again, and it’s the problem caused by the separatists, of any colour or culture.

There are Muslims and Hindus in India that will kill anyone of the other religion that tries to marry their daughter. There are Pakistani heritage British men (get this, they are actually English by birth) that will kill their sister if she tries to marry outside their race and religion. Many of us are supporting the Kurds, and the Yazidis, and the Christians that have been persecuted by ISIS – and yet there will be some among those groups that will be separatists and will not let their culture die, and will persecute those of their own that try to stray.

It’s not just race. Religion is the other great divisive influence. My Catholic mother married my Protestant father, and she converted. My mother’s Catholic priest damned her children to hell. Well, I am an atheists, so I guess he got his wish. My wife’s Baptist mother, on first hearing my name, asked my future wife, “He’s not Catholic, is he?”

There are those that fear the loss of their race, culture or religion. But I’m afraid they are only entitled to perpetuate those in as much as they can personally, with like minded people.

They are not at liberty to demand that their children should be separatists racists too. They are not at liberty to protect their racial, cultural and religious ideology through separatism.

So, to Richard Spencer specifically, the rest of us don’t want your racist BS.  Tough shit.

Killers for Religion and Atheism?

So, an atheist kills a bunch of religious people, and the religious can now cite an example that shows that their religion isn’t that bad after all.

Not so fast.

Atheism vs Theism

Both Atheism and Theism are simply opposing philosophical positions. Any other system’s metaphysical philosophy is ‘atheistic’ if it rejects theism.

A particular theism might be vary vague – “I believe there is one, and possibly more gods, but I don’t know whether any of the religions are true …”.

Or it might be specific yet still ‘other worldly’ – “I believe that there must have been a creator god, but I have no idea what he intends for us, and I offer no moral guidance based on my belief that there is a god.”

Or it might be committed to the variable claims about the god or gods of a particular religion, which may have many sects.

Atheism is pretty much opposition to these sorts of theism, usually on the grounds that there is no evidence or reason to believe specific claims, or support the level of hopefulness that the ‘spiritual’ seem to be clinging onto. In this respect Atheism is a negative position: it simply rejects the claim that there are gods.

Note that Atheism does not assert that there are definitely no gods.

Some atheists might assert that there are absolutely no gods, but that isn’t much better than asserting absolutely that there are gods. You might call such an atheism a ‘faith’ based atheism. But if you take the trouble to pin atheists down they generally agree that they do not hold such a strong opinion, but merely act as if they do because that’s often easier to express.

But this acting as if there are no gods is a fair position to take. Christians act as if there are no Norse gods. They act as if there are no fairies or Santa. (Note that playing along with such fantasies for the fun they provide for children isn’t acting with true belief.)

Religions

Religions are a subset of Theism …

Atheism-Theism-Religion

[Agnostics may not deny the existence of god, but they don’t positively assert there are gods either.]

Religions take the basic philosophical position of theism, thinking there are some teleological entities that created our universe, and add many more specific claims:

  • Our god is the only god.
  • Our god cares about us.
  • Our god dictates our moral codes.
  • Our god wants us to punish people that don’t follow his codes.
  • Our god wants us to punish people that don’t believe in him.
  • Our god doesn’t want us to eat pig meat and thinks it a moral obligation that we don’t.
  • Our god wants us to punish people that have sex outside the specific type of union sanctioned by our god (monogamy for Christians, up to four wives, but one husband for Muslims)
  • Our god will not remarry divorcees – old school Catholic; god changes his mind sometimes; he’s fickle; or humans decide he changed his mind.

Most religious people are born into, indoctrinated into, their religion. And the religion may provide many social benefits if it’s a large religious community.

But there can also be great costs for those that simply cannot continue to believe. In some more fundamentalist communities, ex-believers can be ostracised, might suffer social and economic hardship if rejected by the community, and might even risk death. If the religion prescribes death for apostates, as is the case for Islam, then even if the religion isn’t the state authority, believers are easily persuaded to take it upon themselves.

The list of additional beliefs on top of basic theism, including the many moral prescriptions and proscriptions, is long. It depends on the religion, the sect within the religion, and the personal willingness of individuals to follow the rules of the religion.

This becomes a little tricky for the religious that try to divert criticism away from their religion, when opinions differ so widely within:

  • God changes his mind often, it seems, judging by how religious opinions change.
  • Individuals make up their own minds what they take from their religion … you’d think the religious would therefore appreciate how atheists make up their own minds about morality.
  • The greatest opponents to a particular religious believer’s views are … other religious people. Islamic terrorism? Many victims are other Muslims, for being the wrong type of Muslim.

The variety of religious belief is often greater than the difference between Atheism and a particular Religion. Modern Anglicans that accept secular liberal democracy, have no problem with homosexuality, even in the church, are for full gender equality, and gender identity. They have much more in common with the social and political leanings of many atheists, than with even their fundamentalist Christian brethren, let alone than with people of other faiths.

And yet, the religious stick together. It only takes the whiff of an atheist with a strong opinion for the ‘interfaith’ community to band together in offended outrage. And let anyone speak out about the Islam of the Islamic extremists and even moderate Muslims will come to Islam’s defence as much as agree with an atheist that there might be a problem with the religion.

[Update 5/12/2017] There was greater outrage that Trump retweeted a lead figure one of Britain First’s outspoken anti-Islam activists than at the content of the videos the activist posted. One was ‘fake news’, but the other two were of Muslims persecuting others. Despite the acts of the Muslims, this was actually seen as anti-Muslim bigotry. Take a moment. Here’s the upshot: every tweet condemning German neo-Nazis is anti-German bigotry; every tweet showing and condemning videos of Britain First are anti-British bigotry, and by extension, anti-Muslim bigotry, since, as  is belaboured painfully, British Muslims are British. This is the state of play in 2017, where any criticism of Islam is interpreted as ‘Islamophobia’, ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’ … and yes, ‘racism’.

Political Ideologies of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, …

Whenever an atheist argues with Christians or Muslims, it’s not long before we get the Hitler, Stalin, Fascism, Nazism, Communism line thrown at us. And no matter how often it’s pointed out that this isn’t a valid argument, it still keeps on coming up. Often from the same people that have had this pointed out before.

Political ideologies can of course cross boundaries of Atheism-Theism. Christians can be socialists. In the 70s it was quite common for Islamists to lean towards socialism … maybe they hadn’t realised how far right Islam really is … or maybe they had.

And, Hitler was not an atheist. He might not have favoured the established churches that opposed his thugs, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t religious. Many Nazi ideas were based on the old Teutonic ideals of religiously motivated knights.

Communism? Don’t think that political ideology stops you believing in a personal god … it just becomes less convenient and maybe a little dangerous to admit to one, but Communism does not preclude theism.

These political ideologies tell us little about the wide variety of atheists. The Atheism that some political ideologies might embrace informs the ideology with nothing other than the fact that there is no evidence for any god.

Religious Political Ideologies

Some political ideologies are religious ones.

And most religious ideologies are political – they are inherently so because they dictate the behaviours of people, and that’s a very political thing to do. And they usually have a lot to say on social issues … not all good. Homophobia, sex outside marriage, modesty, … religions can be obsessed with sex, particularly with regard to women, and if feminism isn’t a political matter I’m not sure what is.

It is possible to believe in a religion and treat it as an entirely personal belief system that determines how you live your own life, without you making any claims about what it implies for anyone else.

But this is rare. Most religions, and especially religious organisations, are very keen on telling: religious believers how they should act; non-believers that they are anything from misguided to evil; the religious what they should do to the non-believers: killing apostates, bombing abortion clinics, punishing people for blasphemy (the modern version is imprisoning people for ‘hate speech’).

Christianity, as supposedly expressed by Jesus, is a “render unto Caesar” kind of religion – a reasonable basis of separation of church and state. However, the Catholic church in Rome put a swift stop to that. Christianity, especially through many bishops and popes, made state business very much church business. The US continues this tradition by distorting the intentions of the founding fathers and making it the godly nation the founding fathers tried to avoid – they’d seen enough of that in Europe.

Islam is very specifically, inherently, by design, a political ideology. Only Muslims can hold certain offices of state. Muslims and non-Muslims are taxed differently.

Many Muslims will try to pull a fast one by telling you that Islam insists that Muslims follow the laws of the the land in which they find themselves … where Muslims are a minority that does not hold power. But Islam also requires Muslims to spread Islam … which means it would eventually become a majority. This is why many opponents of Islam also oppose too much immigration from Muslim countries.

Of course many Muslims don’t want a dominant Islam any more than non-Muslims do. Many escape the domination of Islam of their homelands, and are quite happy to live in secular democracies where they can practice their religion in peace.

But then we also see a lot of duplicitous language from supposedly ‘moderate’ Muslims that think homosexuality should be illegal, and make excuses for their more extreme brothers and sisters (“Nothing to do with Islam”).

In Europe the atheists and secularists have been opposing the power of the church for centuries, letting the humanistic principles take precedence. There’s still plenty of religious protectionism that goes on – a refusal to give up the reigns of power, as diminished as they are. Why the heck do Bishops get seats in the UK House of Lords – and why is there even such an unelected house still?

But I’ve seen and heard much more of the stranglehold religion has in some parts of the US, where the mark of a good plumber is whether he’s a good Christian or not. “In God We Trust” – indeed they do.

So, religions are political, and as such are as fair game for criticism and ridicule as any non-religious political ideology.

And being offended when religions are criticised is just one more political tool the religious try to pull. It may be a genuine feeling, and so they try to give it moral weight. Hence, critics of Islam are labelled haters of Muslims.

But, realising that atheists tend not to be impressed by the special pleading for the religion, that atheists aren’t taken in by the piety, the hurt feelings, what are the religious to do? Compare their religion to atheism? They can’t. They are not comparable.

Humanism

So, religious friends, you can’t really compare Atheism with your religion.

You can compare Atheism with Theism, if you’re talking only about the philosophy, reason, evidence, to support either case.

But you can’t compare Atheism as such with Christianity or Islam. Yes, I know that atheists argue against Christianity and Islam, but they do so on two quite separate grounds:

1 – A disagreement with the underlying theistic claims of your religion. If your religion relies on a claim that there is one or more gods, and there isn’t, then 2 is irrelevant. But, we humour you anyway and so …

2 – A disagreement with the moral assertions that you think your imaginary god has prescribed. It’s not like we disagree with all your moral positions, we just hold those we agree on for different reasons, for which we don’t need an imaginary god. But those Humanist atheists also find many of the moral guides of religion to be immoral, barbaric at times, and remnants of ancient codes of conduct prescribed at the time of the religion’s inception.

The thing is, Atheism prescribes no moral position whatsoever. It really is merely the rejection of your unsubstantiated claims about your god.

And this, of course, leads to another failure to understand atheism: “Atheists have no morals. They are nihilists.” Not so.

We have morals. We just don’t think some imaginary friend dictates them; and we very specifically reject many of the immoral codes that gods supposedly do dictate.

But you’re nearly right. it’s not our atheism that determines our morals, it’s something else.

Many atheists find other reasons for their morality – many simply acknowledging that harming others isn’t nice. People and animals don’t like to suffer harm, so we prefer to minimise that. It seems a very simple idea, but it’s amazing how far you can go with just that basic starting point. And it also avoids the need to punish people for daft reasons – such as for having sex outside marriage, for not being heterosexual, for drinking, for working on the Sabbath.

[In the UK the Shops Bill 1986 was defeated; the Sunday Trading Act 1994 eventually introduced limited Sunday trading … so strong was Christianity’s hold over British life. Now we’re finding we have to start again, with Islam.]

Many atheists want to live by their own moral ideals, and many collect these ideas about living a moral life into a set of codes. It’s not that these codes are necessary, but they are helpful in declaring some minimal set of behaviours we agree to abide by.

And one example of such a guide is the Humanist Manifesto. Take a look at it. You’ll find no diktats about women being lesser than men, or how to deal with the evil of homosexuality, or what the best way is to kill apostates. Humanists don’t have to look for ‘nuance’ and ‘scholarship’ to explain away inconvenient passages ‘revealed’ through some desert warlord or hippy.

So, if you want to carry out any comparisons I’d suggest you try these:
– Atheism vs Theism
– Humansim vs Christianity, Islam, …

You might find that many atheists tell you they don’t belong to any Humanist organisation, because they would rather not belong to any group that sets their ethical standards for them, as they can figure it out for themselves. They have a point. We are free to decide our own moral codes, and put them to the test in our societies.

My personal subscription to Humanism is one of convenience, and support for many of the programs of Humanists UK (formerly British Humanist Association).

Other atheists might join other groups of common interest, such as the many secular and skeptical societies around the world. Ex-Muslims have a shared experience that brings them together in various groups – often with the added benefit of providing a safe community to those ex-Muslims that are still at risk from their families.

Let that sink in, and imagine a child of Humanists being ostracised, forced into marriage, threatened with death, killed. I don’t know of any such incident. Has one ever made the news?

The next time you’re arguing with atheists on Twitter, they are unlikely to be Nazis. So when you pull the “What about Hitler, Stalin ..” it’s a Straw Man. If you want to argue for your religion, why don’t you try coming up with good reasons for it, not excusing the bad stuff by dragging in some irrelevant comparison.

And for pities sake, give up on trying to defend the indefensible. Your religious texts are full of ancient stuff that really doesn’t stand up to our moral standards today. Some religious passages are outright contraventions of the human rights that most people would want to sign up to. Stop defending that crap with ‘nuance’ and ‘scholarship’ – it makes you look like damned fools that are fooling no one but themselves.

Atheist Terrorists

And that atheist killer you want to call a terrorist because you’re sick of hearing about Islamic terrorists? Could be they are genuinely crazy, or have some motive other than their hate for religion.

And even if they carried out the heinous act because they hate religion and religious believers, there’s no Atheist Bible, and nothing in the Humanist Manifesto to suggest they should … unlike your religious books. Not even The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, or any of the New Atheist books.

If some killers that are atheists really are killing for atheism, there’s nothing in atheism, or Humanism, that can be removed that would stop them. There are no doctrines we can reject. There’s no “Believers are children of Satan” sermons going on. Pointing out the problems with religion doesn’t automatically create Atheist Killers. Sadly it does all too often create killers of atheists.

But, hey, if someone has a terrorist agenda, against believers, for atheism, then pretty much all humanist atheists will oppose them. I’ll happily denounce any such terrorists. But I won’t be able to point to any atheist texts that has incited them. I can only point to Humanist texts that are very short and very explicit in their opposition to doing harm. There is no Humanist Prophet whose example I should follow that includes his beheading of enemies.

The Humanist Manifesto is so clear in rejecting doing harm to others there’s no way you can mistakenly or otherwise derive some crazy idea that it’s a good idea to kill believers.

This cannot be said of the books of Christianity and Islam. Alongside all the lovely stuff is some seriously dark and immoral doctrine.

Look, if you want to call some atheist killer an atheist terrorist, knock yourself out. Any disagreement from atheists will be on a technicality, not for some fear of having to explain away our inconvenient texts. Let me help you out with A Guide To Terrorists For Idiots.

Left, Right: Marching In Step With Your Enemy

Beware! Nazis!

Nazi Germany was built in part on fantasy propaganda, of an idillic Europe of kings, knights, glory and honour. They turned a grimy bloody history that makes Game of Thrones look glamorous into a Disney fantasy. They rewrote history in order to give meaning and righteousness to their terrible regime.

Along with the imagery created to invoke that past was the dark side of National Socialism. Like all inflexible ideologies it had to resort to violence to achieve its aims – because, of course, not everyone agrees with your ideology, no matter how good it sounds to you. When you’re an ideologue and you insist people must accept your way or the highway, then by any means necessary starts to sound justifiable.

Immediately after WWII, West Germans and their new friends and allies, Western Europe and the USA, conspired to re-write history once again. The spectre of Nazi Germany was obliterated, buildings demolished, had they survived the war, … and, statues toppled. All was good, and West Germany rose to become a civilised western democracy.

Beware! Fascistic Anti-Fascists

In the 1960s West Germany the new generations started to question their nation’s history, and the roles their parents played in it. Naming and shaming – doxxing today – and divisions among families seemed to be necessary. But it didn’t stop there.

As events continued into the 1970s The Red Army Faction arose as a terrorist group.

These far left activists hated of Nazis, naturally. And they noted that many people running the state were of that Nazi generation. This helped convince them that because the state would not do what they wanted them to do, violence to achieve one’s political goals was entirely justifiable – just as it was for the Nazis in their early days.

Punching Nazis was very popular, and before long, when people still refused to listen, they started to blow up and kill people. The political cause is all that matters, the methods, not so much.

Stefan Aust, author of Der Baader Meinhof Komplex:

World War II was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who’d been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60’s. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up.

[my emphasis]

Were all Germans WWII really Nazis? Were Germans, whether Nazis or not, aware of the genocide? What could they have done? The pre-Nazi state was weak. Rule of law was nothing like that of Western Europe today (even as bad as it is today).

Does guilt by association sound familiar? It should do. How many people have you seen labelled as Nazis that are barely right of centre? How many generally left of centre people have you seen labelled ‘far-right’?

The Adam Curtis BBC programme, The Living Dead, 1995 (an almost prescient perspective) [currently here, but may change]:

Screenshot 2017-08-19 14.46.10

 It was complete confrontation. One part of the people against the other. … I had begun to realise, fighting against the state, by armed groups, with this revolutionary strategy in mind, was to bring up the fascistic tendencies, not only of the political class, but the people too. We ourselves became in the same way fascistic as the fascists were. We didn’t realise, our enemies, our opponents, were human beings. This is what is in the heart of fascism. The oppression of other meanings of the political opposition. And oppression means elimination. By killing.

– Horst Mahler, Red Army Faction [Adam Curtis film]

[my emphasis]

Now, remind me again what the limits of violence are for Yvette Felarca and By Any Means Necessary. Tell me where the punching of perceived Nazis stops. With a bike lock? Tell me when you decide to become what you oppose.

You might want to think of someone you know when you read Mahler’s words here. Dan Arel came to my mind.

Fascism is a component in all of us. … We have a picture of ourselves. We want to be good. We want to be human creatures. But we are a contradiction, in ourselves. We don’t know how to handle this contradiction. We don’t know how to live with this evil part in ourselves.

– Horst Mahler, Red Army Faction 

The words of Horst Mahler should be sounding alarm bells particularly when you realise the direction he went in. Here’s the top of the Wiki page about him:

Horst Mahler (born 23 January 1936) is a German former lawyer and political activist. He once was an extreme-left militant and a founding member of the Red Army Faction, but later became a Maoist before switching to Neo-Nazism. Between 2000 and 2003, he was a member of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany. Since 2003, he has repeatedly been convicted of Volksverhetzung (“incitement of popular hatred”) and Holocaust denial and served much of a twelve-year prison sentence.

[my emphasis]

From far left to far right looks incredible like a sprung switch, a flip-flip, with no hanging around in the centre ground to re-think one’s ideology.

Socialist – Fascist Common Ground

This is the path taken by fascist Mussolini: a member of the Italian Socialist Party, who couldn’t get his way, and moved on to use fascistic means to do so, creating the national Fascist Party, coining the term ‘fascism’ in doing so.

While the ‘left’ v ‘right’ is often thought of in terms of in terms of collectivism v individualism, the German Nazis and Italian Fascists were clearly collectivists in their national ‘socialism’ and their national ‘fasci‘ (bundle).

One main distinction between revolutionary left ideologies like Communists, Anarchism and the Fascists and Nazis amounts to how they see their particular struggle, how they perceive the solution to the problems they see, and who are the people causing the problems.

The ‘left’ collectivism is a class war that divides a nation on class, but can still portray itself as nationalistic when defending a Communist state in face of anti-Communist opposition. Appealing to nationalism, Mother Russia for example, is useful when it works, especially when purging the state of enemies and undesirables that threaten the state, and hence the people.

The ‘right’ is a nationalism that uses socialism to unite the people against the state’s enemies, without or within. Appealing to the socialism of the ‘folk’ and their nation, The Fatherland for example, is useful, especially when purging the state of internal enemies and undesirables that threaten the state, and hence the people.

The Socialists/Communists and the Fascists/Nazis ideologies are very similar politically, and in the way they suppress opposition by the use of violence. [here – h/t @SamWhiteTky]

As are theocracies (*cough* Islam).

The internal enemies often turn out to be the Jews (*cough* Islam) and the Intellectuals – and the intellectual Jews are often right out of luck. Other ‘peoples’ like the Poles were a common target too. And anyone else that gets in the way. Because, of course, when your ideology is right and you know it’s right, killing for it doesn’t seem too much of a problem.

Another issue that distinguishes them is racism, at least superficially. The hyper-nationalism of Nazi Germany, when immigrant populations were much smaller, made it easy to identify other races as a problem. But racism is present in most cultures, if not all, so it can’t be ruled out under Socialism, where again the Jews are still targets.

Isn’t it odd that the left tend to support Palestinians, and the terrorist Hamas, with much anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism. For parties like the UK Labour Party, that claim to be egalitarian, where does this racism come from? Perhaps Horst Mahler is right – there’s a bit of the fascist in us all, and even your party’s stated principles can’t erase it in those that can’t help expressing it.

So now, tell me again why you think that the Nazis and AntiFa/BAMN are poles apart. There are simply too many parallels here to dismiss the similarity between the current street violence and the support for the punching of Nazis in the 1960s Germany. The Germans at least had parents who could have been real-deal Nazis.

Berkeley, Charlottesville and Beyond

And here we are. A decade and more of political correct ideological propaganda. The requirement to choose a side, in order to be on the right side of history, is raising its nasty duplicitous head again.

Charlottesville had some neo-Nazis attend a rally, but many of the people there were not genocidal ‘final solution’ people. Or so they say –  but then unless you’re an actual mind reader, you can’t assert they are genocidal: you’re playing rhetorical games, and  you are not in a position to refute their denial of being Nazis, without evidence. And if there are genocidal people there, they aren’t giving you the evidence.

By all means take sides. I certainly do. I’m opposed to all those that marched on the side of the alt-right, even those that don’t consider themselves to be alt-right:

  • Neo-Nazis – Well, obviously. Whatever the political origins of the German Nazis, the Italian Fascists, even if they have similarities with Socialism, they descend into xenophobic hatred that demonises others for who they are, not for what they choose to believe or do.
  • White Supremacists – Well, obviously. White (Black, Brown, …) Supremacy is one of the dumbest ideas still being perpetuated. It’s so stupid it’s on a par with Young Earth Creationism as an intellectually defunct idea. Those that present themselves as White Supremacists are some of the least supreme examples it.
  • White Separatists/Nationalists, Identitarians – This is the supposedly egalitarian version of White Supremacism – though it’s just as dumb. There’s no explicit claim to white supremacy, just some poor reasons for thinking the world would be better if the ‘races’ lived apart. Of course it’s based on the same nonsense as white supremacy, and it’s not clear how many in these groups are not in fact white supremacists looking for an easier ride – but we must avoid mind reading, because we can’t do it … evidence!
  • Poor beleaguered white boys – Yes, I know there’s a current taste for ‘white people’ comments, claims that all white people are racist and non-whites can’t be. This is as dumb as white supremacy and deserves the same treatment: derision, laughter, evidence to the contrary. But come on, do you really need a tiki light vigil?

Yes, alt-right, I know it’s about statues too. But, come on. I get the point. Nobody is tearing down the pyramids because they were built by slaves. But this is closer to home, and the Confederate flag is a bit of a give-away. You’re not doing it for historical reasons.

I’m not on the side of these people when it comes to supporting their ideologies. I oppose them and support criticism of them. I support counter-protests, generally (though more can be said on how to better organise and police that).

What I don’t support is the street violence, of the pre-emptive punching of ‘Nazis’. The AntiFa crowd went to Charlottesville ready for and intent on violence. They, with a little help from the Mayor, provoked the alt-right protesters into violence. Yes, factions of the alt-right came armed too – but what do you expect given AntiFa’s recent history:

Screenshot 2017-08-19 16.12.19

Remember this? At Trump’s inauguration, while other protesters were screaming and crying in over dramatic outrage, the AntiFa thugs were smashing up windows Washington’s businesses, and burning this limo. It was owned by the Nationwide Chauffered Services LLC From Alexandria, VA – run by Muslim Omar Ash. Ooops! AntiFa are racist, by the measure of what they and many others deem to be racism: when a Muslim is a victim of hate or when Islam is criticised.

If you’re still not sure about AntiFa, try this. Not surprisingly they started in Germany.

ANTIFA | Activists or thugs?

Time to Choose

  • “We must choose a side” – If the two sides on offer are in the wrong, then I choose neither of them. I will choose to criticise both.
  • “They are not equivalent – one is worse than the other.” – No, they are not. On the matter of street violence AntiFa have been consistently worse. On political ideas I’m still not in favour of either, but even less so the racist side.

By the way, have you noticed how this comparison of evils is now an OK thing to say, but not when comparing Islam and Christianity?

Watch the Adam Curtis film and consider some of the issues raised there. We may want to choose sides, and we may think we are on the right side. That doesn’t give you licence to engage in the fascistic activities you are claiming to oppose.

Free Speech

The far left don’t want to protect free speech particularly, and the far right only want it for their own purposes.

The problem with Nazi Germany wasn’t the free speech of the Nazis. It was their violent crushing of the free speech of others.

The problem with Stalinist Russia wasn’t the free speech of the Stalinists. It was their violent crushing of the free speech of others.

The ideas that these ideologies are based on are simply dumb. They are easy to challenge. That’s why they have to use violence to defend or promote them,
and attack others that oppose them.

They all employ or employed street violence BY their supporters to crush opposition. Whenever they take power they use the state machine to promote propaganda and crush dissent.

A civil society need not fear free speech, if it upholds the law against violence and terrorism that opposes free speech

 

 

My Problem With Islam

I have been asked by a ‘liberal’ friend, “What’s your problem with Islam?”

I now have to put ‘liberal’ in scare quotes because the word no longer means what one might expect it to mean. I consider myself to be a liberal: a secular liberal democratic atheist Humanist sums up my political persuasion.

That I have to spell this out today is pretty much entirely down to the matter of Islam.

This is about why that is.

Continue reading “My Problem With Islam” →

The White European Culture Fallacy

White supremacism! Eurocentrism! Murticulturalism! Western Values! …

Endorse, deplore, assert, denounce, support any of these, vociferously, emotionally? Want to promote freedom and equality without stumbling over these dilemmas? Read on.

Richard Spencer is an ‘Identitarian’, in his own terms – though not all ‘Identitarians’ are quite like Richard Spencer. He’s a white separatist; white nationalist; whatever he wants to call it; but, it’s about being white. He values ‘White European’ values.

His ideas are based on a fallacy, because what we really value, what Spencer pretends to value, is not whiteness, or anything associated with the rather poor attribution of being white. His is really an ancient tribalism, something that we acknowledge the human race went through naturally, but not something that’s worth hanging on to.

The origins of the ‘Identitarian movement‘ suggest something more specific than just being white, but rather the desire, one which many ethnic groups aspire to, to have an ethnicity and culture remain intact. Other ethnicities cling to their ‘ethnic identity’ without receiving any push back. White Identitarians (and Jews) do seem to take a lot of flack for expressing what other ethnicities do.

I’m not a ‘white Identitarian’. As you’ll see when I get to the thought experiment later. I can understand some of the concerns – they are mostly related to opposition to the political ideology of Islam. Now, that I do oppose.

The problem I have with the ‘White Identitarian’ movement is the specificity of the ‘white’ aspect. I know, it arose arose in opposition to the perceived non-white Islamification of France. However, it erroneously conflates a difference that matters, culture, with one that does not, ethnicity. I doubt very much the ‘White Identitarian’ movement would be much of a thing (outside Richard Spencer’s tiny mind) had it not been for Merkel’s open door policy. But, let’s put that aside, and focus on the fallacy of the ‘whiteness’.

When Spencer uses the qualifier ‘White European’, when referring to culture, he’s doing so to pretend to loftier things, but he’s really about nothing more than base tribalism.

What’s worth valuing is something else other than racist ‘whiteness’; or even anything specifically ‘European’, despite Europe being historically the most localised origin of what we do value … and here I presume ‘we’ value freedom and equality, though I recongnise some do not.

Continue reading “The White European Culture Fallacy” →

Julia Ebner’s Hit Job – Is Everyone Far Right?

This is about a piece from Juila Ebner in the Guardian:

The far right thrives on global networks. They must be fought online and off – Julia Ebner –  Nationalists across the world are sharing knowledge and reinforcing messages of hate. The fightback begins with social media companies, and all of us.

It sounds like (look at the url) it’s about getting the social media companies to tackle hate speech. But that begins to look like a thin disguise for a hit job … or perhaps the person being made example of is an unlucky target. That will depend on your perspective.

It’s also related to the spat between Maajid Nawaz and Tommy Robinson deepening, and Robinson’s attempst to interview Julia about the article, when he ‘stormed’ the Quilliam offices.
Continue reading “Julia Ebner’s Hit Job – Is Everyone Far Right?” →