Matthew Carr's Blog, page 23

Anthropocene: the Human Epoch

In the last few years scientists have attempted with increasing urgency to draw attention to our impending ecological catastrophe.  But the deliberations of scientists don’t always have the impact they should have, partly because climate change and the degradation of the biosphere are complex subjects in themselves, and also because the careful and cautious language used by scientists often mutes the alarming nature of what they describe.

Art has a crucial role to play in helping us to understand our predicament and perhaps in finding ways out of it, and cinema and photography are essential instruments in showing us what is actually happening on a global scale.   Last night I watched the stunning Canadian documentary Anthropocene: the Human Epoch at the Sheffield Documentary festival.  Directed by Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier, and the photographer Edward Burtynsky, this film has received a lot of plaudits and awards since its release last year, and with good reason.

The concept of the Anthropocene was first coined by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe the present era as new geological epoch as a result of anthropogenic (human) activity, that was distinct from the Holocene that preceded it.

Crutzen and the scientists who accepted this thesis argued that human activity had radically transformed the biosphere and the earth’s surface, through a combination of activities including fuel and mineral extraction; pollution and contamination; agriculture and over-hunting; urbanisation and industrialisation, road construction and the use of pesticides, fertilisers, concrete and plastics.

This hypothesis opened up a range of questions and scientific debates that are still ongoing.  Does this physical transformation really constitute a new and permanent transformation in the earth’s geology?   How do we establish this? When was the geological ‘golden spike’ that ushered in this new epoch?  Is this transformation really due to ‘anthropogenic’ human activity in general or is it the result of the ‘capitalocene’, as Jason Moore and others have argued – a consequence of the peculiarities of capitalist growth.

In 2009 a multidisciplinary group of scientists established the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) to consider whether the concept of the Anthropocene should be formally adopted to describe the present geological time interval.  The AWG’s investigations and deliberations have had a decisive influence on Baichwal and de Pencier’s mesmerising film.

The film travels across continents, looking at different anthropogenic phenomena, from the vast rubbish dump of  Dandora in Nairobi, the closed Siberian city of Norilsk – the most polluted city in the world – the lithium lakes of the Atacama Desert in Chile, and the Hambauch stripmine in Germany, where the titanic Bagger 288 excavator is gouging out massive tracts out of the landscape.

 

 

The Anthropocene lends itself easily to photography, particularly in the new era of drone photography, and the film is filled with startling images of landscapes transformed by ‘terraforming’ – the transformation of the earth’s surface –  and resource extraction, that are both beautiful and also terrifying, such as the Carrara marble mines in Italy, where Michelangelo once got his marble:

 

 

Or the Haumbach stripmine in Germany:

 

 

Such imagery can easily turn the Anthropocene into a kind of morbid aesthetic spectacle, that can leave its audience awed, crushed and mesmerised at the same time by the magnitude and seeming inevitability of the transformation it describes.

It’s to the credit of Baichwal and her team that they don’t do this.  There are certainly some crushing moments.  In one scene, the camera captures the majesty of a forest in British Columbia, closing in on an ancient tree teeming with life – and then a chain saw cuts it down.

The photography of coral reefs in Indonesia similarly captures a breathtaking variety of shimmering colours and life forms that ravish the eye, before giving way to images of bleached coral.  In one of the most poignant images in the film a Kenyan soldier stands guard over a rhino that has become ‘functionally instinct’ – but still needs to be protected from the human predators responsible for this.

Even as Anthropocene invites us to see humanity as an agent of destruction, it also focuses on the men and women at the cutting edge of these new ‘invented’ environments: the Russian miners at Norilsk; the Kenyans scraping out a living at the Dandora landfill; the Hong Kong ivory carver who now carves from mammal tusks instead of elephant ivory.

In doing so the filmmakers ‘humanise’ the species-driven activities they describe and ask their audience to see how humanity has caused this planetary transformation, but also to consider how our position as the dominant species might enable us to take action to prevent it from getting any worse.  This isn’t a ‘political’ film, as such.   It’s not an indictment of any particular economic system, but a philosophical and artistic reflection on the impact of the human species on the planet and the obligations that this impact now imposes.

Like James Balog’s film Chasing Ice on the impact of global warming on the Arctic and Antarctic, it mourns what we are losing and what we have already lost, and urges us to take action to prevent us losing even more.

That’s a message that can’t be repeated enough, and for that reason alone, this magnificent film really needs to be seen by as many people as possible.

 

 

The post Anthropocene: the Human Epoch appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Tory Crackhouse

For the last three years UK politics have become a collective political hallucination that makes Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds seem like a script for a gritty sociorealist documentary.  Instead of rocking horse people eating marshmallow pie, it’s a country stalked by grifters, fascist thugs, unicorns and monsters; where demagogues accuse politicians of treason and politicians who have abandoned any notion of the common good compete with each to offer their impossible or improbable Brexit deals to a startled, bewildered and increasingly bored population.

Even within this dizzying descent into hyper-reality, as we watch the political class fragmenting before us like the girl with kaleidoscope eyes, I did not expect to find Tory leadership contenders queuing up to confess to the drugs they once took in their youth.

We knew that Boris Johnson took coke and smoked dope, because he once said so, even though he later said that he didn’t.  We knew that the Camerons hung out at ‘cocaine-fueled parties’ and that Cameron did things at uni.  Some of us may have seen pics of the future chancellor of the exchequer dancing to Spandau Ballet at his dominatrix’s pad.

 

 

But who would have thought that Andrea Leadsom – Good Housekeeping‘s answer to Boudicca – once smoked weed at uni?  Or that mild-mannered little Rory Stewart of Arabia would have taken opium at a wedding in Iran? Or that Jeremy Hunt would have consumed a ‘cannabis lassie’ when ‘backpacking in India’ like a character from William Sutcliffe’s Are You Experienced?

Well they were, and I have to say I didn’t see any of this coming.  Of course they regret it, so much that it hurts, so much so that you really imagine them waking up in the night thinking ‘why, oh why did I get so wasted all those years ago?’

In Stewart’s case, there was a less hedonistic purpose behind it.  He was apparently in Iran to investigate the ‘damage that opium causes’.  So method reporting then, except that the opium apparently had ‘no effect’ on him because he was walking ’25-30 miles a day.’

Thank God for that, because suppose it had had an effect on him?  And just when you’re trying to imagine Stewart, wandering through the mountains of Iran like some ecstatic Sufi mystic on a vision quest, we find Michael Gove, fessing up to having taken cocaine on ‘several’ occasions.

Gove, like the others, ‘regrets’ it.  In fact, as he told Andrew Marr today, he ‘deeply’ and ‘profoundly’ regrets it.

Like his fellow druggies, it’s clear that the only thing that Gove regrets is the fact that someone else knew what he’d done – maybe Johnson’s team – and was about to reveal and therefore shoot down his leadership chances.  So he’s tried to manage the message and engage in damage limitation.

In fact, the whole Tory drugfest is like a variant of ‘I’m Spartacus’ in which each contender suspects that someone else knows that they sniffed, smoked or popped something,  and they better get their confessions in so the conversation can move on from hard and soft drugs to hard and soft Brexit and they can still have a crack – apologies – at the BIG JOB.

So far so transparent.  But Gove is much, much worse than this.  For many people who have been arrested in possession of cocaine, it actually doesn’t matter whether they ‘regret’ it or not.  The punishment for cocaine possession is up to seven years in jail, and/or an unlimited fine.  For supply and production it’s a life sentence.

Not for the former justice secretary it isn’t.   As the Mail revealed today, Gove held a millennium party at his ‘Mayfair flat’ – where else? –  where cocaine was freely available.  Even as Gove and his cool cat guests were hoovering up the white powder, the oleaginous little eel had an article coming out the next day which opposed drug decriminalisation and criticized the ‘middle class professionals’ who were taking cocaine and proposing legalisation.  In it he asked

What institutions, what arguments, still proclaim that we have a duty beyond the slaking of appetites, a responsibility to something beyond our chemical selves?   Who dares point out that the civilisation we enjoy was not built by lotus-eaters, that the self-absorption which is the end of drug use is an exile from others, and imprisonment as real as an incarceration?

So even as Gove and his guests were busily slaking their chemical selves, these stirringly Churchillian words were tumbling off the press.   As George Orwell might have said, all lotus-eaters are equal but some are more equal than others.  In 2011, as part of its campaign for drug decriminalisation, Release produced a report showing the racial disparity in the prosecution and policing of drug offences in England and Wales.

The report found that black people were six times more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs even though they used drugs less than white people; that black people were charged for possession of cannabis at 5 times the rate of white people, and that the Metropolitan Police in 2009/10 charged 78 percent of black people caught in possession of cocaine compared with 44 percent of whites.

Release used this report  to persuade the Coalition government to support decriminalisation – proposals that were supported by the Lib Dems and opposed by the Tories.  In 2014 Gove’s education department introduced a code of conduct that disqualified teachers convicted of possessing Class A drugs.

So ok for the Education Secretary, but not for teachers.   On one level Tory druggate reveals yet again how a ‘war on drugs’ that acts as the lubicrant for racial incarceration, enables more well-off white ‘lotus-eaters’ to slake their chemical selves without any consequences.

But there is also a more specific lesson to be drawn: that Michael Gove is a sanctimonious hypocrite on an epic scale, in this as he is in so much else. No profession of regret will do anything to disguise that.

In Gove’s case it really is true that the ‘drugs don’t work/they just make you worse’.  And just because he once liked to have his coke and eat it, doesn’t mean that we have to let him get away with a phony confession just so that he can get into Downing Street.

And the same could be said of his fellow-contenders, regardless of whether they inhaled or not.

The post Tory Crackhouse appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Vultures in Brexitland

As everyone knows, Donald Trump lies as he breathes.  He lies about big things and small things, and he lies about absurd and ridiculous things.   But despite his almost psychopathic dishonesty,  Trump is also a stupid man, and so there are times when he doesn’t lie about the things that you would expect more intelligent politicians to lie about.

Take his press conference yesterday with Theresa May.

 

 

At one point a journalist asked him whether the NHS would be part of the ‘great trade deal’ that he keeps promising.  At this point a savvy politician would have made some ambiguous or evasive comment and kicked that one down the road.

Because Trump wants Brexit and he wants Boris Johnson to be the next PM, and telling the country that the US has designs on the NHS is not the best way to achieve these outcomes, because even Tory politicians who lie as much as he does still need to profess their residual loyalty to ‘our NHS’ for appearances’ sake.  But Trump doesn’t understand these dynamics, so we got this:

When you’re dealing on trade, everything is on the table. So NHS or anything else. A lot more than that.

To be fair to the president, he was probably composing his tweet to Bette Midler, so he might not have been fully focused, and he also doesn’t seem to have known what the NHS actually was.

Nevertheless the damage was done.  Even May, who has simpered and groveled in Trump’s presence like a courtier in the presence of the Sun King for the last three years, sensed the tumbleweed blowing through the room and hurriedly added ‘the point about making trade deals is that of course both sides negotiate and come to an agreement about what should or should not be in that trade deal.’

Trump did not look particularly impressed by this affirmation of British independence, and we shouldn’t be either.

Because Trump made clear what anyone who wants to look at reality – admittedly a diminishing number of people in the UK these days – can already see; namely, that the relationship between the US and the UK in any future trade negotiations is going to be a relationship between unequal partners, and the US will use its formidable leverage to impose its own terms, in a massive asset-stripping exercise that will involve not only the NHS, but ‘a lot more than that.’

Tory leadership contenders like Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt may insist on their commitment ‘our NHS’ – the better to advance their leadership prospects. But there will be very little they can do in trade negotiations between an aggressive superpower and a mid-ranking country without means or friends.

Today Trump seemed to row back, in an interview with his court sycophant Piers Morgan, for which he had clearly been primed, and said that the NHS would not be up for grabs after all, because the NHS is ‘not trade.’

Trump was back to his default lying position once again.  Because from pharmaceuticals to insurance companies, the NHS certainly will be ‘trade’, and US companies will be looking to profit from it, and Tory politicians who have been carrying out privatisation by stealth will not be able to do anything about it, and will probably not even try.

Don’t expect much defiance from Boris ‘£350 a week’ Johnson,  or Nigel Farage.

Farage has already made clear that he wants to see the NHS replaced with private insurance.

This is a politician cut from whole Trump cloth, floating on a tide of nationalist demagoguery, fake victimhood and dodgy money.  Farage may or may not have helped his mates get rich by shorting the pound on referendum day, and this is not a man you turn to protect an institution that symbolizes the best hopes of the post-1945 welfare settlement,  against predatory American pharmaceutical or insurance corporations.

Like attracts like, and no one should be surprised at the fact that Mike Greene, the Brexit Party’s millionaire candidate in the Peterborough bye-election, has made a fortune from buying and selling freeholds on new homes.   Greene is also a member of Greybull Capital, a private equity company which has been involved in a series of business failures, including British Steel, which it bought for £1 in 2016.

A former City minister told the BBC ‘ Greybull has a record of owning businesses which fail, but where apparently Greybull does not lose serious money.  In fact, from a number of its failed investments, it’s made money.’

Greene, Farage, Tice, Banks – these are the patriots who are helping us to ‘change politics for good’, and you can bet that, like Trump, all of them will be looking to make money out of Brexit.

To our everlasting shame, we have allowed ourselves to be taken by a gang of spivs.

And if Brexit goes ahead,  ‘our NHS’ will stand as much chance of survival as a dying animal circled by vultures, in a foolish nation that got its sovereignty back only to turn itself into  carrion.

 

 

The post Vultures in Brexitland appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Trump: All Hail to the Chief

I’ve been away from the UK the last week, and made it back just in time for the state visit of the Trump clan.  I’m glad I did, because just to know that Trump and co are now walking on my ancestral soil is oddly bracing, rejuvenating,  and above all educational.

I mean, what patriotic Brit would not want to be here, watching a government whose incompetence has taken the world’s breath away, grovel at the feet of a narcissistic, unstable and dangerous liar who barely knows what he’s thinking or doing from one moment to the next?

Not since Michael Corleone and Hymen Roth turned up in Batista’s Havana have a country’s rulers been so desperate to please.  The ‘special relationship’ has always been overrated as a partnership of equals, by us Brits at least, and most of the time by American leaders and diplomats insofar as it suited them.   How often have we heard that we are united by unique bonds of language, custom and tradition etc.

Occasionally US statesman have expressed a less flattering view of that relationship.  In 1962, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson infuriated our leaders and commentators, when he gave a speech in which he observed

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength — this role is about played out. Great Britain, attempting to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power.

If Acheson thought we were weak then, I wonder what he would make of us now, as we stand on the brink of losing not just an empire but a country, and with no sign of any ‘role’ on the horizon except possibly to be asset-stripped by an American administration whose president, for reasons known only to himself, required a heady dose of British pomp and circumstance to prove to himself that he really is the equal of his predecessors.

The rest of us may need a little more convincing.   Even before touching ground this morning, Trump had interfered in British domestic politics in ways that can only be described as unseemly.

Not only did he tell the country that he wanted Boris Johnson to be the next prime minister, but he also suggested that Nigel Farage – who is not even an MP – should be placed in charge of the ‘negotiations’ with the EU.   Even as his plane descended he took time out to call the mayor of London a ‘stone-cold loser’ on twitter, showing all the gravitas and statesmanship that we have come to expect from him.

None of this matters to Theresa May and her government of clowns.  Right now, if the White House was occupied by Pere Ubu, he could stumble off Air Force One in his underpants ffing and blinding with an empty bottle of Chivas Regal in his hand  and a call girl on his arm and still get a 41-gun salute, a phalanx of Beefeaters, and dinner with the Queen.

Because this government is desperate for a trade deal, and I mean desperate.  And the Tory leadership contenders are desperate too, because they sense that in some obscure way, their destinies are also tied to the orange-haired monstrosity who now stalks the nation with his corrupt clan in tow.

So if Trump doesn’t like Huawei, you can bet we’re going to get rid of it too.  If Jared Kushner – Mr 666 Fifth Avenue himself – wants us to subscribe to his half-witted attempts to humiliate the Palestinians still further in the next round of the ‘peace process’, he can count on us.  If John Bolton want us to impose sanctions on Iran and maybe drop some bombs too, we’ll do it.

Just sign the damn deal. Because that’s what being Global Britain means and that’s what we got our sovereignty back for.

And Trump knows that he can take whatever he wants and make us do whatever the US wants, because without a US trade deal after Brexit, we will be sliding even deeper into the swamp that we have created for ourselves, and the Tory Party might just disappear forever.

We know now, thanks to the interview that the US ambassador to the UK Woody Johnson gave on the Marr show yesterday, what that deal might look like.  According to Johnson its terms and conditions are already being discussed, in preparation for negotiations that will be concluded ‘as expeditiously as any in history’.

 

 

The whole economy will be part of the negotiations, including the NHS or ‘our NHS’ – as Tory politicians like to describe it.  Johnson talked briefly about agriculture and food standards and insisted that US food standards were as safe as they are in Europe.

There is a lot of evidence to the contrary, which Marr did not pick up on.  He could have asked why certain US food and agricultural products are banned or restricted in Europe if standards are the same, and he might also have picked up on Johnson’s suggestion regarding EU restrictions on certain foodstuffs that ‘ if we could put that in reverse then we’d all make a lot of money.’

Johnson made it clear that if a US trade deal goes ahead, previously prohibited US agricultural goods will enter the country and the British people will be given a ‘choice’ over whether to accept them. This choice is a false choice.

When food standards drop, they drop, and many consumers presented with cheaper US products are likely to buy them because they are cheap, regardless of the impact on their health.  That’s what people will generally do when they don’t have much money.

It’s the job of a government seriously interested in protecting the nation’s health to avoid that ‘choice’ by enforcing food standards, not lowering them.  But right now, we have a government that is not interested in anything but itself, and that is why Trump is here.

And that is why I feel lucky, privileged even, to be here at this historic moment, and able to witness the latest chapter in our vertiginous descent.

 

Featured photo by Lorie Shaull.  Wikimedia Commons.

The post Trump: All Hail to the Chief appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Brexit: Don’t Mention the War

Badly-remembered history tends to produce bad politics, and bad politics often results in misremembered or mythologised versions of history.  In the case of Brexit, both tendencies have been borne out repeatedly by the obsessive references to World War 2 to which Leavers are prone.

Suggest that a ‘no deal’ Brexit may be a disaster for the country, or that we might experience food and medicine shortages, and they spring out of the woods, all dressed up in their helmets and home guard uniforms and wearing camouflage, to remind us that World War 2 was worse, and hey! we got through that.

This refrain crops up again and again, whether it’s the Question Time audience member  reminding  how merchant ships were once being shot out of the ocean, and we survived that so no deal shouldn’t be a problem. And over their to the right.  Atten-shun! It’s little Darren Grimes, the fashion student-turned-dodgy Leave campaigner, striking an equally patriotic and heroic pose :

A reminder that this country survived Nazi Germany and blockades in the Atlantic, but there are folk out there that genuinely believe not being part of a supranational political bloc will literally destroy us

— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) 23 August 2018

Or Piers Morgan, the overpaid and overfed celebrity loudmouth, telling Gary Lineker:

Britain prevailed over two World Wars during the last century.

I’m sure we can prevail over Brexit, however it unravels. https://t.co/6GWPiSMTma

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) 20 July 2018

With such resilience on display it’s enough to make any patriot choke up, were it not for the stiff upper lip that is part of our national character.   And it’s not just the men waving their ration cards in the air.  Just this month the Brexit Party harridan Ann Widdecombe told Radio 4 that Brexit:

 … is as nothing compared to the sacrifice that we asked a previous generation to make in order to ensure Britain’s freedom.  My granny was bombed out in Plymouth.  People lost sons and husbands and fathers and they did this because they wanted freedom.

The implication of Widdecombe’s comparison is that Brexit is a struggle for ‘freedom’ that demands a comparable ‘sacrifice’ to the one made by her granny.  Other Brexiters have made this comparison more explicit, such as the UKIP and Bruges Group member Max Gammon (yes he really is called that), who described Brexit in the following terms:

Brexit is presented primarily as a matter of economics rather than a struggle for the freedom from bondage! Bondage from a dictatorial continental oligarchy. We have been given a picture of a negotiation between friends, and partners. We are in fact at war! We are incapable of bringing ourselves to understand a deadly threat to our freedom, indeed a threat to our very existence as a nation.

For ex-army colonel Richard Kemp, Brexit isn’t just about us.  Once again we’re saving Europe, but this time we’re saving it from the EU:

(1) Europe is very important to Britain. That is why we made such immense sacrifices to save the continent in two world wars. That is why we must Brexit and again save Europe, this time from the clutches of the EU which also operates against its interests. pic.twitter.com/FgxpZ4fpbV

— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) 29 March 2019

Europe seems curiously ungrateful to us for saving it from those ‘clutches’ – except for the Europeans on the populist and fascist right who are looking to create a ‘Europe of nations’ in the next European Parliamentary elections.

This is definitely the tradition that Aaron Banks, the insurance salesman-cum-spiv who has funded Nigel Farage belongs to, and Banks is another one who never stops talking about the war.  Just this week he was at it again, mocking MEP Seb Dance, whose grandmother lost half her family because one of its members was involved in the plot to kill Hitler:

Added to which , two generations of Brits gave their lives bailing out Europe and your German granny! They didn’t fight two world wars to be a branch office of Brussels & have democracy subverted and ignored. We want to be a free independent democrat nation state & we will be !! https://t.co/RmpBxmdsIb

— Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) 14 May 2019

There is a lot more of this about.  The most charitable thing that could be said about this Brexit war chatter is that it reflects a nostalgic yearning for a more heroic national episode – even if such nostalgia tends to be expressed by people who did not live through the war, and tends to leave out a great deal about how we ‘prevailed’.

For one thing, the Brexit khaki narrative tends to ignore the fact that we survived with the help of others, whether it was the United States with its blood plasma programmes, landlease loans and military aid, or the massive sacrifices made by the Soviet Union.

Contrary to Banks’s observation, we did not ‘bale out’ Europe.  We fought alongside Europeans in a common struggle against Nazism and fascism, in the various resistance and partisan movements which the Special Operations Executive and other organisations worked with across the continent.

We came to this struggle late, having refused to act during the Spanish Civil War, or the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.  When we finally did fight, we did so as part of a European-wide alliance that included communists, Gaullists, Yugoslav monarchists, socialists, republicans, monarchists, conservatives, and social democrats.

Without that alliance we could not have ‘prevailed’.   Without the contribution of the colonial troops who fought in our armies, we could not have ‘prevailed.’   Without the Polish pilots who fought with the RAF we might not have won the Battle of Britain.  It’s true that, for a brief period between June 1940- June 41, we ‘stood alone’,  in Europe at least, and acted  as an inspiration and a facilitator to resistance movements across the continent.

But anyone who reads the accounts of the British SOE agents who fought alongside these movements – and sometimes died in German concentration camps – will be struck by the solidarity and empathy these men and women felt towards the countries they infiltrated and the Europeans they worked with as they attempted to ‘set Europe ablaze.’

The sentiments that moved so many of these agents were entirely different to the smug chauvinism, xenophobia and national exceptionalism that drive the Brexit project.  These men and women saw themselves as Europeans and the movements they worked with as participants in a common struggle against a common enemy.

To invoke the genuine sacrifices that they made, and that millions of people made across the continent,  in the service of Brexit is not just bad history, it is not history at all.  It is simply crude, dishonest propaganda.

To compare our entirely voluntary – and ineptly executed – decision to leave a trade bloc to the military and ideological struggle against one of the most barbaric and tyrannical political formations in history is demented and shameful hyperbole.  Quite simply, anyone who thinks that the European Union is like Nazi Germany does not understand either the past or the present, and most likely has no interest in understanding either.

For these Englanders, ze war really should be over, and their willingness to keep fighting it is not proof of our national resilience, but further evidence of the extent to which nationalist fantasies have reduced us to collective hysteria, idiocy and frothing self-delusion.

The post Brexit: Don’t Mention the War appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Who’s Afraid of George Soros?

There was a time, many years ago, when I knew of George Soros as the billionaire who made a billion from speculating on the Pound during ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992.  Since then I’ve often came across his name as a philantrophist associated with various progressive liberal and pro-democratic causes, and I once applied for a grant from his Open Society to write my book Fortress Europe ( Spoiler alert: I didn’t get it).

In an ideal world, issues such as democratic transparency, the empowering of civil society, migrant rights, developing independent media and social justice should not be dependent on the largesse of billionaire philanthropists, regardless of their intentions.  But we are very far from an ideal world, and I can’t help thinking that a man who is loathed so universally by so many loathsome people and institutions must be doing something right.

Because there is no doubt that George Soros is loathed, across a spectrum that includes mainstream politicians like Trump, Salvini and Nigel Farage, rightwing media outlets and shock jocks like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, and the Nazi Daily Stormer website.

All these groups and individuals have found Soros responsible for a range of evil acts.  Soros has been held responsible for funding Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson protests – an allegation that translates in rightspeak to ‘funding hate’ or ‘funding riots’.

Soros has also been accused of staging the Charlottesville protests as a ‘false flag’ operation; of paying protesters to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanagh; of seeking to destroy America, Europe, western civilisation, and Christianity in order to bring about ‘white genocide.’

In his native Hungary Soros has been the target of a vicious campaign by Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz Party, which has depicted him as the enemy of the Hungarian nation.   In an interview with Austrian television Vladmir Putin denied Russian interference in US elections and told his interviewer to pay more attention to Soros as a ‘man who interferes in countries all over the world’.

Such accusations have made Soros the object of memes like this:

 

 

There is no record that Soros said any such thing.   And if he actually thought such a thing he would have been very stupid indeed to say it in public.  Though some groups connected to the Ferguson protests have received monies from the Open Society, these donations clearly do not correlate with ‘funding riots’ or ‘funding hate’.

Such hatred is partly due to the Open Society’s liberal ethos and the progressive causes it supports, and there is also the fact that Soros is Jewish.   The depiction of Soros as the great puppetmaster, using his vast wealth to orchestrate world events, echoes older and well-established antisemitic tropes.

In polite discourse ‘Soros’ has become a kind of dog whistle code for ‘Jew’.  This is what Viktor Orban’s government did in 2017, when it published posters exhorting Hungarians ‘not to let Soros have the last laugh’.

 

 

Further out on the fringes, the references are clearer.  Far-right social media and websites teem with antisemitic references to Soros’s Jewishness.  Last year posters circulating on US campuses included Soros amongst other Jews supposedly opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court:

 

 

In October last year the main public broadcasting service in the Netherlands NOS NIEWS was forced to apologise after posting an article on its website referring to  ‘The Jew Soros [who] supports organizations openly critical of governments and has tentacles’ in U.S. politics:

 

 

Prominent Jewish supporters of Israel have also referenced these ‘tentacles.’  In 2017, Yair Netanyahu posted the following image on Facebook, depicting Soros as the manipulator pulling the strings on his parents’ critics and political opponents.

 

No one should be entirely surprised that the son of the prime minister of Israel was praised by the KKK and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer for sharing an antisemitic trope. That same year Benjamin Netanyahu himself supported Hungary in its campaign against Soros, and accused him of  ‘continuously undermining Israel’s democratically elected governments,’ through the Open Society’s donations to the human rights group B’Tselem and the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.

Such unlikely interactions are another indication of the convergence between hard Zionism and the far-right in recent years.  As a wealthy liberal philanthropist, Soros embodies everything the right detests.  At the same time,  the depictions of Soros belong to a tradition that Richard Hofstadter once observed in his seminal essay on the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics.

Hofstadter noted how the conservative/hard-right ‘paranoid’ imagination thrives on grand conspiratorial narratives that present historical events as the product of a ‘vast and terrifying enemy’ that was secretly controlling and orchestrating them.  For Hofstadter:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

This is how Jews have often been depicted, and it is also how Soros is routinely depicted.   This is why Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guliani described Soros as the ‘anti-Christ’ last year because he was supposedly paying the protesters who objected to Brett Kavanagh’s nomination.

It’s why the notorious Islamophobic neocon Frank Gaffney  nonsensically observed that ‘The decades-long record of this billionaire financier and philanthropist…is one of such malevolence and destruction that he must at a minimum be considered the Antichrist’s right-hand man.’  It’s why the Center for American Security talks of ‘ George Soros’ truly demonic predations’.

On Sunday, the Observer listed various interviews and speeches from our own rancid national treasure Nigel Farage in a similar vein,  in which Farage told Infowars’ Alex Jones that Soros was ‘in many ways the biggest danger to the western world’ and accused him of wanting ‘ to break down the fundamental values of our society and, in the case of Europe, he doesn’t want Europe to be based on Christianity’.

All this is barking gibberish.   Farage was accused of recycling antisemitic tropes, and given that he once marched alongside the National Front’s Martin Webster in his youth, this would not be a startling discovery.

It would be a mistake however, to attribute such nonsense is an indication of antisemitism alone.   For Farage, and for so many of his contemporaries, Soros has become the iconic ‘globalist’ – a powerful actor in an utterly evil conspiracy, in which powerful Jewish financiers, cultural Marxists, migrants, are all colluding to destroy the nation-state, the white race, Christianity or western civilisation.

Like the Illuminati, Jacobinism, the Jesuits, Freemasonry, Communism – and the Elders of Zion – ‘globalism’ has become a way of understanding world events and world history as the product of a dreadful conspiracy.

In transforming ‘Soros’ into the central character in this narrative, such theories offer a new version of Hofstadter’s ‘vast and terrifying enemy’ to be feared and hated – and a useful  rallying cry for an array of cynical and downright disreputable agendas.

It’s a dirty, reckless and irresponsible game, but that’s the game that people like Farage and Orban are playing, and the sooner we realise it the better, because in the end the demonisation of George Soros tells us far more about the movement responsible for it than it does about Soros himself.

 

 

 

The post Who’s Afraid of George Soros? appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Rapey Jokey Time

Heard any good rape jokes recently guys?  How about this one, which Labour MP Jess Phillips posted on twitter yesterday:

Just leaving Westminster and and man ran down the street along side me asking me about why Carl Benjamin shouldn’t be able to joke about my rape. Shouting “I pay your wages”.

— Jess Phillips (@jessphillips) 7 May 2019

As many people will know, the ‘Carl Benjamin’ referred to in Phillips’s tweet is a far-right ‘comedian’ who goes by the name Sargon of Akkad, and who famously said that he ‘wouldn’t even rape’ Phillips.  There’s a certain kind of guy that loves to make jokes like this, and a certain kind of audience that will always appreciate them, and a certain kind of disingenuous fool who will cry ‘free speech’ if anyone criticises them for doing so.

Since then Benjamin – bravely pushing back the boundaries of political correctness – has doubled down on his joke and on the attention-seeking by saying that maybe he could be induced to rape Phillips if he was drunk enough.

Now there was once a time when if you made jokes like this you definitely could not contemplate a career in politics – except in the dankest of swamps where no one with any sense of decency would enter.  But those times have changed, and over in the US we have a president who allegedly once raped his own wife.   And in Brasil a fascist has just been elected who once told a congresswoman ‘ I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.’

Here in our benighted little island Benjamin is an MEP candidate for UKIP, whose leader Gerard Batten has described his comments as ‘satire’.

Others have defended them on grounds of ‘free speech.’  And because such disgraceful lunacy has been allowed to poison our politics, the jokes just keep coming, such as this tweet which was sent to the Buzzfeed journalist Hannah Al-Othman  by one of Benjamin’s supporters:

 

 

Are you laughing yet?  Well you must be some kind of snowflake or virtue signaller or feminazi.   Because this is the manosphere dude.   So man up and laugh out loud.  Like the Spanish ‘wolf pack’ did after they gang-raped a young woman in Pamplona.  Like the Worcestershire cricketer who bragged with his mates about ‘dragging the birds back’ and ‘raping them’ and is now doing five years because he did just that.

Or the ‘pick-up artist’ Roosh Valizadeh – another of the ‘satirists’ who abound in the manosphere, who suggested that women should take responsibility for being raped, and that they often made false charges of rape because they felt ‘ awkward, sad, or guilty after a sexual encounter they didn’t fully remember’.

To prevent such behaviour, Valizadeh proposed ‘that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds.’

This kind of humour is not new.  In the POW protocols recorded by the British and analysed in Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer’s Soldaten (Simon & Schuster, 2016), the following exchange occurs, when a soldier called Muller describes driving through ‘beautiful country’ at the junction of the Don and Donetz rivers in the Soviet Union in the early phase of Operation Barbarrosa:

MULLER: Everywhere we saw women doing compulsory labour service.

FAUST: How frightful!

MULLER: They were employed on road-making – extraordinarily lovely girls; we drove past, simply pulled them into the armoured car, raped them and threw them out again.  And did they curse!

Stalin was also not averse to a good rape-joke.  In Conversations With Stalin, the Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas describes how he brought up the subject of the mass rapes carried out by Soviet soldiers in newly-liberated Yugoslavia – an issue that was causing great resentment amongst the Soviet Union’s communist allies.

According to Djilas, Stalin was not pleased by these protests, responding ‘ Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’

For both German and Soviet soldiers – and also for many American soldiers in liberated France –  rape was not so much a ‘weapon of war’ as the spoils of war.  In the case of the Red Army, the mass rapes of German women were also a form of vengeance, but Soviet soldiers also raped Polish women and women they had liberated from concentration camps.

Considering such behaviour, the historian Anthony Beevor once remarked

Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men are potential rapists, I had to come to the conclusion that if there is a lack of army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three years of war, do become potential rapists.

Beevor noted Russian soldiers in Berlin ‘ were regarding women almost as carnal booty; they felt because they were liberating Europe they could behave as they pleased. That is very frightening, because one starts to realise that civilisation is terribly superficial and the facade can be stripped away in a very short time.’

It can indeed.   And when it comes to rape that facade is routinely violated even in peacetime.

This is why rape constitutes an everyday form of ‘phantom terror’ that is already a part of womens lives across the world.  It’s why women think twice about where they go jogging, about whether to walk home alone at night, about what might be in their drink, or what could happen if they drink too much.

And what is shocking about our 21st century rapey jokey culture is that sexual violence is being legitimised, trivialised and even celebrated, by a political ‘movement’ that includes ‘pick up artists’, manosphere websites, incels, far-right provocateurs, and outright fascists, and which is now reaching towards the mainstream.

This why Carl Benjamin is still a candidate.  It’s why the Spanish far-right party Vox proposes to change laws on gender violence on the (false) basis that most accusations of such violence are made up.

On the one hand the threat of rape is being used as a political weapon to terrorise and intimidate women who appear in public and speak in public or on social media.

At the same time the fact that this threat is now being used so openly and so frequently is a testament to the continual overlap between our toxic, poisoned politics and a certain kind of toxic masculinity, that regards feminism as ‘feminazism’ and women as sexual toys whose attractions can be measured by whether or not they are considered good-looking enough to rape.

Those who propagate such jokes are not transgressors or edgy provocateurs: they are actually creating a context in which women are more likely to be raped.

And behind all the jokes and sniggers, it’s impossible not to detect a certain loathing and resentment towards the whole notion of gender equality, and a longing for the good old days when men could  rape whoever they liked and women just had to shut up about it.

And faced with this torrent of misogynist filth, it’s incumbent on all of us – whatever our gender and sexual orientation – to call time on this rapey jokey culture before it pollutes our politics and our societies even more than it has already

The post Rapey Jokey Time appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Extinctions

For rightwing media commentators steeped in climate change denialism – and let’s face it most of them are -the Extinction Rebellion protests and the involvement of children and young people in the school strikes movement have been an object of scorn and derision.

Some of these esteemed pundits, like Brendan O’Neill from Spooked Online, will tell you that environmental activists are millenarian cultists who ‘hate the modern world’. Others see the presence of adolescents and children in the tv studios as a sign of cultural and intellectual reversion to collective infantilism.

What cynics, these sages ask sadly, have manipulated our young people and filled their adolescent heads with the foolish idea that the future of the planet is in jeopardy, to the point when know-nothing children feel they know more than grown-ups and bunk off school to save the world?

Yesterday, amid the fevered media anticipation of the first ‘sighting’ of the royal baby, a searing report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) gave an answer to this question that should have been on the front pages of every newspaper.

Prepared by 150 international experts from 50 countries,  the first state-of-health report on global biodiversity since 2005 confirmed what scientists and conservationists have been saying for some time; that human activity is responsible for a catastrophic depletion of the biomass that threatens our own survival.

According to the report,  an astounding 1 million of the 8 million estimated plant and animal species (75 percent of which are insects) on earth are threatened by human activity, and humanity in the last fifty years has already resulted in a global rate of species extinction tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years.

The report listed a number of factors responsible for this outcome, from climate change, population growth, and changes in land and sea use, to plastic pollution and invasion of alien species. But its conclusions are clear and unequivocal: humanity is wiping out more species than at any time in  history and only ‘transformative change’ at an international and local level can prevent the continued depletion and devastation of the natural world.

The report tempers these alarming prognoses with policy recommendations that can be taken to mitigate the damage and ensure that ‘ Nature can be conserved, restored and used sustainably while simultaneously meeting other global societal goals through urgent and concerted efforts fostering transformative change.’

It lists a wide range of things that need to be done to safeguard the environment through ‘ commitment to mutually supportive international goals and targets, supporting actions by indigenous peoples and local communities at the local level.’

It is part of the ongoing tragedy of our times that the report’s emphasis on ‘ enhanced international cooperation’ is entirely at odds with the fanatical hostility of ‘populists’ like Farage, Bolsonaro and Trump towards anything that smacks of ‘globalism’ or global governance.

These are politicians for whom the melting Arctic is a commercial opportunity and climate change is a globalist scam or anti capitalist plot.  They embody 21st century late capitalism at its most self-interested, sociopathic and nihilistic, and the same can be said of many of the commentators and pundits who share their views, and have been pouring contempt on the Extinction Rebellion protesters and the school strikers these last few weeks.

The IPBES report should galvanise us to take action and put pressure on our governments to take action,  and to assume the responsibilities that our improbable position as the dominant species on the planet now imposes on us.

It should also remind us that the children who are going on strike and passing through our tv studios are wiser, more responsible and more caring than the adult blowhards who insist there is nothing to be concerned about.

 

 

The post Extinctions appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

The Caliphate According to Saint Matteo

The Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is a busy man.  With less than a month until the European Elections, he has been touring the continent to shore up the troops for the new nationalist/populist bloc that he and his cohorts are seeking to establish in the European Parliament

The far-right has tried this before.  In 2007 various far-right MEPs formed the bloc ‘called ‘Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS), based on a ‘shared commitment to Christian values…and the traditions of European civilization.’

This initiative fell apart within a few months, but these are different times, and Salvini has become the point man in the ongoing attempts by populist/far right parties across the continent to transform the EU into a ‘Europe of nations.’

One minute he’s sending a video message of support to  far-right leaders in gathered in Prague to prepare for the ‘battle of Europe.’  The next he’s schmoozing in Hungary with his pal Viktor Orban, pausing for photo ops at watchtowers and barbed wire fences.

As the elections get closer Salvini has cranked up the rhetoric.   On Sunday he told a regional election rally in Italy ‘Either Europe saves itself now, or it never will. Either we take it back, as we are doing with Italy, or it will become an Islamic caliphate with no hope or future.’

Yesterday, Salvini returned to the ‘caliphate’ theme at a press conference with ‘friend Viktor’.   Salvini urged voters across the continent to ‘leave the left out, who desire evil for Europe’ and warned

If the left continues governing Europe soon we are going to have an Islamic caliphate here.  For our children, to leave behind an Islamic caliphate where cities are governed by sharia law is not something I would like to do, and I am going to do everything in my power to prevent that.

Salvini’s ‘caliphate’ warnings are a variant on a well-established conspiracy theory/fantasy sometimes known as ‘Eurabia’, which has been propagated for many years across a wide spectrum that reaches from the far-right fringes to more mainstream commentators.

Its essential components are as follows: that Europe is committing cultural suicide by allowing the ‘mass immigration’ of Muslims into the continent, all of whom are intent on transforming the continent into an Islamic colony called Eurabia.

Ooh-er, you might say, and you’d be right, because this one zinger of a nutjob Islamophobic conspiracy theory, which has a number of quirks and variants.  Some say that Saudi Arabia or more generally ‘the Arabs’ are behind it.  Others say Eurabia is being orchestrated by a ‘supine’ EU in thrall to Arab money and oil.    Some describe that refugees are operatives in a ‘stealth jihad’ enabled by credulous leftists and do gooders, who aim to outbreed Europe into submission.

There are also those who say that Jews are behind it – don’t ask.

All agree that ‘Europe’ is in mortal danger, and that the Muslim population is inexorably growing while the European ‘Christian’ population is declining.  The numbers don’t bear out these dire prognoses.  According to a 2017 report from the Pew Research Center, there were 25.8 million Muslims in Europe in 2016, making up 4.9 percent of the total population of the continent.

Given that the current European population is just over 743 million, that demographic ‘conquest’ clearly has a lot of catching up to do.   Of course numbers – whether real or imagined – aren’t really the issue here.  In 1933 there were approximately 9.5 million Jews in Europe – a grand total of 1.7 percent of the total European population.  These numbers did nothing to diminish Nazi warnings of a Jewish plot to destroy ‘the Aryan nations of Europe’.

Where contemporary racist murderers like Anders Breivik depict Muslims as cultural barbarians, the Nazis depicted the Jewish ‘plot’ as a danger to ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation.’   Thus in a speech at Nuremburg in 1935, Goebbels described Bolshevism as

a declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself.  It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural.   It means, in the final analysis, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.

Salvini’s ‘caliphate’ fantasies are very much within this rhetorical and political tradition.  His grim predictions are based on the perception of Muslims as malevolent cultural outsiders, intent on cultural and even political domination, aided by a decadent and degenerate left that has encouraged feminism and encouraged women not to have children.   Where the Nazis once depicted Bolshevism as part of a Jewish worldwide conspiracy,  Eurabian conspiracy theorists warn of a dark alliance between ‘cultural marxism’, Arab oil, feminism, and Islam that is leading inexorably towards the downfall of ‘Christian’ Europe.

Creating a far-right ‘populist’ bloc in the European Parliament may not seem quite as heroic as the Frankish troops who formed a ‘block of ice’ against Moorish raiders at Tours/Poitiers, but Salvini would have European voters that it is no less urgent

 

Away from the ‘battle of Europe’, Salvini’s Lega/Five Star coalition presides over a country that has experienced a shocking rise in racist violence since the new government came to power, where black pedestrians and migrant workers are shot at in broad daylight, where a Moroccan man was beaten to death,  a female Nigerian athlete was attacked in the street, and a Romani toddler was shot in her mother’s arms.

It is difficult to separate these developments from the state violence directed against migrants and refugees under the coalition, egged on by Salvini’s vicious invectives against refugees who ‘rape, steal and deal’ and who ‘aren’t fleeing from war but who are bringing war to our country.’  Salvini routinely claims to be defending ‘Christian values’ but last year, the Italian Bishops Conference criticised his government’s policies towards migrants, and noted a ‘climate of distrust, contempt and anger’ since his coalition came to power.

This is what Salvini has been doing to his own country, and now he and his fellow ‘populists’ are seeking to strengthen their movement by changing the balance of power in the European Parliament.  At his press conference Salvini exhorted Europeans to prioritise ‘ a European culture founded on Christian values’ and argued that ‘strong nation states’ were necessary to protect Europe’s borders against ‘the invasion of migrants.’

In fact the European Union and its member states have been doing a great deal to prevent this ‘invasion’, with dire consequences for tens of thousands of migrants who have attempted to cross its borders

But these efforts will never be enough for the Salvinis of this world.  Salvini promised that ‘May 27 will open the door to another kind of history for Europe and the people of Europe’ and that he would do everything to save Europe from the ‘sad end’ of a caliphate in Europe.

We already know what kind of history his ideological predecessors produced, and the fact that a powerful mainstream politician is openly endorsing the racist conspiracy theories of the far right should galvanise all those who believe in a different kind of Europe to do everything possible to ensure that he and his cohorts do not succeed this month.

Because no matter how bad the EU’s migration policies may be, he and his movements are a far greater threat to our common European home than the ‘caliphate’ ever will be.

 

 

The post The Caliphate According to Saint Matteo appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

In Praise of Political Correctness

There was a time, in the Thatcher years, when the concept of ‘political correctness’ was used to de-legitimize the left and/or bring feminism and particularly antiracism into ridicule and disrepute.

Bliss was it to be alive in those days,  when the British yellow press regaled the nation with mostly invented stories about what ‘loony left’ councils were supposedly doing to combat racism and sexism.

This was a time when the gutter press sniggered at Hackney council for banning the word manhole as sexist; at Haringey council for replacing black dustbin liners with grey ones because the former were racist; at Hackney, Brent and Islington councils for banning Baa Baa Black Sheep or changed the words to Baa Baa Green Sheep or whatever.

It was all a larf, and the fact that all these stories were fabrications did nothing to diminish the humour at the expense of the po-faced leftie/feminist/commie commissars policing the boundaries of free speech and free thought, simply in order to make themselves look good.

Because this is was what ‘politically correct’ essentially defined – a fake ‘virtuous’ left whose single overriding aim was to make itself look good by saying the right thing.   It was a term used mostly by the right with an ironic nudge and wink – look at those silly little feminists and antiracists with their silly little causes and their silly little words.

Through relentless usage the term became a cliché.  Initially used to mock the real or imagined attempts to combat sexism and racism,  it was also used to say things that might actually be racist and sexist.

All you had to do was presage your statements with ‘ This might not seem politically correct but…’ and bingo!  You became a bold proponent of common sense truths, a defender of free speech or just a jolly prankster wanting to have some of the good clean fun that those joyless commissars and ‘social justice warriors’ were seeking to suppress.

Beneath the joshing, the lying and the ironic winks, this was the essential framework: that ‘political correctness’ was being used to hedge in or suppress ‘free speech’, and that ordinary white folk were unable to say what ordinary white folk wanted to say.

What did they want to say?   In the last few years however, it has become depressingly clear, a dismal procession of shock jocks, white nationalists, Nazis, populists, Islamophobes, rapey ‘pick up artists’, homophobes, gamers and ‘incel’ types have used arguments about free speech and political correctness as a battering ram to reinsert racist, misogynistic, sexist messages into mainstream political discourse.

They include ‘comedians’ like the UKIP candidate Mark Meechum aka ‘Count Dankula’, who posted antisemitic jokes on YouTube, and who also jokes about how raping students at uni, and shares racist messages on the white supremacist Internet forum Discord.

Following a conviction for causing ‘gross offence’, Meechum described the verdict as a ‘very very dark day for free speech’. Poor Mark.  And pity the society where you get convicted for teaching your dog to respond to the call ‘gas the Jews’ eh?

Well no.   More recently Meechum’s fellow-UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkon told a press conference that it was ‘acceptable’ to joke about raping an MP.

Elsewhere Benjamin has made homophobic, racist and antisemitic slurs, and used the N-word.   Challenged by Buzzfeed on his use of such language, Benjamin replied with a mock-statement: ‘BREAKING NEWS: Anti-political correctness entertainer has used naughty words for fun.’

Not surprisingly UKIP leader Gerard Batten has described both men as ‘free speech merchants making comedy acts’.

Spiked Online has predictably taken a similar line, and posted favourable pieces on both men.

Those of us who regard the far-right as a threat should not succumb to these facile and disingenuous arguments.   Because there is a very good reason why the language that people use in public should be subject to scrutiny and subject to boundaries.

Contrary to what Lenny Bruce once argued, some words – sexist or racist insults for example – are painful and hateful, and a society that wants to be inclusive and seeks to promote gender and racial equality cannot – and should not – interpret free speech as a license for privileged white men to insult whoever they like simply in order to prove that they can ’cause offence.’

Placing limits on the ability to cause offence has nothing to do with political correctness.  It’s not about making ourselves look good or imposing ‘McCarthyite’ restrictions on what people think.

It’s actually common sense.  It’s a recognition of the essential civility that makes coexistence possible and allows society to go forward.

It’s an attempt to protect the rights and dignity of all members of society, by refusing to allow hatespeech to contaminate the public sphere.  This ought to be obvious, but too many people who should know better appear to be missing the point.

Consider this anonymously-posted mini ‘manifesto’ entitled ‘ An Atmosphere of Fear and Change’ from 8chan’s ‘Politically Incorrect’ page ‘ .  Addressed to the ‘ soldiers of an undeclared civil war, defenders of Europe’, the manifesto was dedicated to the Christchurch shooter – once a frequent poster on 8chan – and cited the Utoya Island massacre as ‘ a black swan event of unique proportions; the first raindrops of a thunderstorm to cleanse Europe. A perfect unity of word and action.’

Such ‘ unity’ was necessary in order to ‘ stop the destruction of ethnic, cultural, social, racial borders’ and ‘stem the bleeding, prevent our ethnic and cultural replacement, prevent the death of our people; REMOVE the invaders.’

So essentially a white supremacist invitation to mass murder, in full public view to anyone who goes onto 8chan.   Such ‘politically incorrect’ messages like this can be found on any given day on 8chan.

Should we regard these anonymous shitposters as ‘comedians’ or ‘free speech activists’ engaging in the legitimate ‘right to cause offense?’  Should messages like these simply take their place in the ‘marketplace of ideas?’ Do their activities benefit society in anyway whatsoever?

As Steely Dan once sang, only a fool would say that.   I think this particular site should be shut down.   It doesn’t matter if its users are forced to inhabit the more obscure corners of the Internet.  Obscure corners are where such people belong.  And the same could be said of the ‘anti-political correctness entertainers’ who use free speech arguments to lower the threshold of acceptability.

It’s not a question of ‘banning’ them – unless they actually break the law.  It’s about raising the threshold of acceptability and keeping it there.  Because the more that threshold is lowered, the more people can step over it.

So if the choice is between these ‘offense merchants’ and ‘political correctness’, I have no doubt which I prefer.

 

The post In Praise of Political Correctness appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.