Matthew Carr's Blog, page 24

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.

 

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

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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

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

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We the People

There was a time when references to ‘the people’ or the ‘will of the people’ were a rarity in British politics, unless you went on leftist solidarity demos in solidarity with Nicaragua or El Salvador and knew enough Spanish to join in the stirring chant ‘El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido’ (the people, united, will never be defeated).

In the last three years however, ‘the will of the people’ has become a persistent refrain in our ongoing tragic national farce.  It’s usually used by Brexiters in reference to the 2016 referendum result, and in order to question any attempt to transform that result into legislative and political reality.

Leave means Leave, they insist, because the will of the people have decreed it.

Even politicians who are not Leavers tend to genuflect before this mighty abstraction.  They may not use the phrase ‘will of the people’.  They may not describe judges and MPs as enemies of the people for supposedly going against that ‘will’, but their insistence on ‘respecting the result’ and their refusal to contemplate a second or confirmatory vote, suggests that they really believe that referendum was indeed a genuine expression of the popular will that cannot be revisited.

This is a pity, to say the least.  Firstly, because it is really foolish to regard a flawed referendum soaked in dodgy money and social media manipulation with such reverence.   Leave won the referendum by 51.9% to 48.1% on a turnout of 71.8%.  30 million people voted out of an electorate of 46,501,241.  3.6 million EU citizens with a direct interest in the outcome were not allowed to vote.

Scotland backed Remain by 62% to 38%, while 55.8% in Northern Ireland voted Remain and 44.2% Leave.

So that leaves a large section of the people of the UK that did not express its ‘will’ through the referendum.  In addition, the referendum asked only whether the electorate wished to leave or remain in the European Union.  Given the asymmetry between this very simple question and the very complex consequences of leaving – not to mention the variety of ways of leaving – it ought to be entirely logical and entirely democratic to revisit the result in a democratic sign off vote.

Yet again and again Brexiters have invoked the ‘will of the people’ as a rhetorical stick to beat anyone who suggests such a thing.   And they have increasingly used it in an attempt to discredit parliament and present ‘politicians’ as an undemocratic ‘elite’ estranged from and even opposed to the ‘people.’

Far be it from me to suggest that the British parliamentary system is beyond reform or reproach, but we should really look askance at the quasi-insurrectionary rhetoric emanating from the likes of Farage and Arron Banks.

Historically, leftist political movements have often invoked ‘the people’ to confer moral force and legitimacy on the movements they have embraced or supported.  Usually leftists have contrasted ‘the people’ with despotic and  oppressive regimes, as was usually the case in Latin America.

At times such claims have been purely aspirational.  The Russian terrorist group that killed Tsar Alexander II called itself Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), even though it was not the will of anything at all except for a tiny sub-section of the liberal/leftwing Russian intelligentsia.

In rightwing politics, ‘the people’ can mean ‘ the common people’ as opposed to the ‘elite’ or ‘big government.’   Fascist governments once depicted the state as the highest embodiment of the will of the people.

‘The nation and the government in Germany are one thing. The will of the people is the will of the government and vice versa,’ declared Goebbels in a 1933 speech in Geneva.  For Goebbels ‘ The modern structure of the German State is a higher form of democracy [ennobled democracy] in which, by virtue of the people’s mandate, the government is exercised authoritatively while there is no possibility for parliamentary interference, to obliterate and render ineffective the execution of the nation’s will.’

The idea that parliament ‘ interferes’ with the expression of the people’s will is very different from the opening reference to ‘We the People’ in the US constitution, which was intended to confer a moral legitimacy on the type of representative government designed by the founding fathers.  For Thomas Jefferson ‘the will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.’

This sounds good in principle, but the problem is how this ‘will’ is defined and practiced in the business of government.

It’s one thing to claim that any government is the expression of the will of the people; but democratic governments are also faced with the possibility described by John Stuart Mill, in which:

The will of the people…practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power.’

Most democracies recognise this danger, and take steps to prevent or at least mitigate it, for example by regular elections which allow different constituencies to assert their interests, and also by electing representatives who seek to prevent the outcome that Stuart Mill described.

The binary question in the 2016 referendum made such compromises difficult, if not impossible to achieve.   Even if Remain had won by the same margin, the result would not have constituted the ‘will of the people’, but a slim victory that would have required some revisiting, as Farage himself insisted even before the result.

The complete unwillingness of Brexit’s principal architects to recognise the complexities and contradictions inherent in the result are leading UK democracy to a political place where it has never really been – in which populist ideologues are attempting to bully the country’s elected representatives into taking decisions that most MPs recognise are not in the national interest.

Brexiters are now blaming ‘politicians’ and ‘Westminster’ for their inability to produce an exit that is not harmful to the country, and they are using the ‘will of the people’ to browbeat nearly half the electorate into agreeing to their demands, without allowing any possibility to present whatever options parliament may agree on to a public vote.

Clearly they fear that the ‘will of the people’ may not be fixed in stone after all.  They’re absolutely right, and however flawed our democracy may be, we really should ignore Farage, Goddard and the Poundland Jacobins who are now calling its legitimacy into question, and insist on a confirmatory referendum as the only possible way out of the nightmare they have plunged us all into.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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We Need to Talk About Spiked

There was a time when I thought of Brendan O’Neill and the Spiked Online crowd as a freakish but curious anomaly in the British media.

Occasionally I wondered how a former leftist sect once known for publishing apologetics for war crimes was able to reinvent itself as a pseudo-contrarian thinktank peddling rightwing strawman arguments in order to build media careers for its leading lights.

No one did this more successfully than Spiked’s editor Brendan O’Neill.   O’Neill basically writes from a template that can be adapted for whatever subject he thinks will get him the most attention.  Its gist goes as follows: that there is a conspiracy by the bien pensant liberal ‘elite’ or the politically-correct ‘chattering classes’ to stifle ‘free speech’. These groups do this because they hate ‘the masses’ or ‘the modern world’.

The same messages have been repeated year after year, article after article, tweet after tweet,  and O’Neill has done well out of them.   There was a column in the Spectator and appearances on tv, where O’Neill’s dreary unsmiling face has become a regular fixture, churning out the same shallow  rightwing contrarianism on the issues du jour.

Spiked and its various offshoots have also prospered.  It’s not often that organisations that once preached the dictatorship of the proletariat receive donations from the Charles Koch Foundation.  Such corporate largesse generally comes for a reason.    Despite its occasionally leftist rhetorical flourishes, there is nothing remotely leftwing about Spiked or its editor.

On the contrary, these former revolutionaries have long been fans of Nigel Farage and now officially support Farage’s Brexit Party.  They have defended the likes of Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad,  Tommy Robinson, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones against ‘corporate censorship’ and the ‘community-standards cops’.  When a group of racists were found burning a mock up of the Grenfell Tower and laughing at the victims O’Neill inevitably popped up to criticise those criticising them, just as he always does.

Spiked are always careful to frame these arguments as a defence of free speech, rather than overt support for the politics of the individuals and organisations concerned.  You won’t usually find them using words like ‘snowflakes’ or’social justice warriors’.   Whether attacking the Me Too movement, climate change activists, antiracists, Remainers or those who called for the repatriation of Shamima Begum, O’Neill and his cohorts invariably act as an outlier for alt-right positions without explicitly endorsing them.

Yesterday O’ Neill was at it again, with a hit piece that was vicious and dishonest even by his standards,  on the climate change activist Greta Thunberg, in which he argued:

Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg.

Just to recap: Greta Thunberg is a sixteen year old girl.  In little more than a year, she has become the heart and soul of a global movement that is seeking to prevent an impending ecological catastrophe that the world’s leading scientists have repeatedly warned about.  Her courage and eloquence have inspired children, teenagers and adults across the world to take action – in some cases for the first time in their lives.

So there is nothing ‘pre-modern’ or ‘poor’ about her,  and she does not need fake sympathy from O’ Neill or anyone else.   But Thunberg has been diagnosed with Aspergers, OCD and selective mutism.

O’Neill’s depiction of her as a ‘millenarian weirdo’ and his focus on her voice and her mannerisms was pure dog whistle incitement to mockery and bullying – and some of the tweets that it attracted made it clear that this invitation was accepted.

On one level it’s easy to see why someone like O’Neill should loathe Thunberg.   If you move as effortlessly through the moral and political sewer as he does and adopt alt-right positions for money and attention,  you would naturally resent someone less than half your age who has a genuine passion, empathy and idealism – and has earned genuine admiration from millions of people for these qualities.

If you receive financial donations from big oil because of your own repeated climate change denialism,  it’s also inevitable that you would attack Thunberg and the movement she is part of.

For O’Neill ‘climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies’, and Extinction Rebellion is ‘ the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days.’

Say what you like about Extinction Rebellion and its tactics, but its ‘climate change alarmism’ is based on solid science, not the Bible, and taking action to protect and preserve the planet bears no relation whatsoever to whatever O’Neill imagines ‘old fundamentalist movements’ might once have been.  O’Neill only witnessed ‘a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression’ which he found ‘deeply unnerving.’

Based on what I have seen and heard about the London protests, I can only conclude that you  would have to be blind or a bit of a jerk really, to find the Extinction Rebellion ‘unnerving’, and O’Neill is definitely in the latter category. And being a Brendan O’Neill article, you had to have this:

It struck me that this was a march against people. Most radical protest and direct action is aimed at officialdom or government or people with power. This macabre schlep through London was aimed squarely at ordinary people. Banners and placards made no disguise of the marchers’ contempt for how the masses live. They detest mass society and its inhabitants: the masses.

Got that?  The ‘double-barrelled eco-snobs’ and members of the ‘angry bourgeoisie’ who protested in London are doing this because they are against people and they hate the masses.  Well obvs.

The best that can be said of this analysis is that it lacks empirical rigour.  O’Neill then returns to the movement’s ‘child-like saviour, the messiah of their miserabilist political creed’ and claims that ‘ what they have done to Ms Thunberg is unforgivable.’

So having smeared Thunberg as a ‘weirdo’ he feigns sympathy in order to portray her as a helpless instrument of a movement that has ‘pumped her – and millions of other children – with the politics of fear. They have convinced the next generation that the planet is on the cusp of doom.’

You have to be flying very low indeed to make arguments like this, but O’Neil has yet more pearls to place before his readers:

Don’t do as she says. Instead, refuse to panic, mock the blather about hellfire, and appreciate that mankind’s transformation of the planet has been a glorious thing that has expanded life expectancy, allowed billions to live in cities, and made it possible for even the less well-off to travel the globe.

Well you can see why the Koch brothers like Spiked.  The rest of us would do well to give O’Neill and his gang a very wide berth, and pay more attention to the ‘millenarian weirdo’ who he so disgracefully tried to smear.

 

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