Jeff Sparrow's Blog, page 9

letter from Oslo

Below's an email from Mike Seltzer in Oslo in response to a piece about the massacre there. I'm republishing it here (with permission, and in a slightly edited version) because of the fascinatingperspective it provides:

Greetings from Oslo.

I hope this reaches you. First I want to thank you for two things in your Counterpunch piece about Breivik which have been absent from all the pieces — many nonsensical — I have read and heard about the  bombing and massacre of the innocents on 22 July.  Firstly, you put Breivik in into a class perspective where he most certainly belongs.

I have been helping Mattias Gardell, a Swedish professor who has little knowledge of Norway but lots of knowledge about Islamaphobia and racist groups in Sweden and the US.  I have pointed out to him the location of Breivik's home, a place many of us call  Vanilla Town in Oslo, owing to the color of almost all of its inhabitants.  His father and step father were both petit bourgeoise, the former middle level bureaucrat in the foreign deparment of Norway and the latter an office in the Norwegian military.  Breivik's address however placed him in the lowest and most shaky level of the petit bourgeois – his mother was a single provider for most of his upbringing yet Breivik went first to a grade school where the current  crown prince and crown princess were also pupils, he then went to a middle school often referred to as THE snob school in Oslo – but again Breivik was simply not financially equipped to compete with the majority of his classmates: designer jeans, vacations trips with mamma and pappa to exotic locations, etc.  As I wrote Mattias when he was putting together this piece: Breivik is right out of Bourdieu who has much to say about the shaking position of the petit bourgeois whose greatest possession is a gigantic set of aspirations to acuqire more economic, social, symbolic and cultural capital. And I added for Mattias, their greatest fear as so eloquently described by Barbara Ehrenreich in her Fear of Falling is namely that of falling into the working class whose party Breivik wished to erase – or at least its future leaders as he tells in the Manifesto.

The second point I wish to thank you for raising is about how members of this strata who like Breivik have more education than the working -class they fear and despise use their writing skills to pour streams of racist consciousness in Islamaphobic manifestos in cyberspace.

I wrote 3 decades ago a long manuscript comparing Vidkun Quisling's National Unity Party of the 1930s  (Nasjonal Samling) with the McCarthyites in the 1950s.  Their membership (until Norway was occupied and Quisling became the puppet leader) was again petit bourgeois from the cities and the relatively  well to do farmers from rural areas.  And their ideology was a simple one: a return to a pure Norwegian culture by throwing out Jews and other foreigner, purging Norway of foreign cultural influences such as "Nigger" music (as they termed jazz) and Jugend architecture and of course Bolshevistic ideas, and a return to partriarchy with women in the kitchen, nursery and bedroom.

I now have read BReivik's Manifesto twice – something I would wish on my worst enemy – but what strikes me is how his perfect Norway is almost a resurrection of the National Unity program.  And of course,  Tailgunner Joe and his much less organized followers in the US wanted a return to the Old West where men were men and women were kitchen, nursery and bedroom – but interestingly, an Old West where the upper class (bourgeois) traitors born with silver spoons in their mouth were no more.

Finally re your writings about the atmosphere in the racist blogosphere: Andreas Malm, who in some ways carries on Stieg Larsson's battle against the racist and neo-Nazi right in Sweden, wrote a few days ago about this toxic blogosphere cited hundreds of time in Breivik's manifesto a very astute observation which I translate for you here.  Malm wrote:  Breivik and thousands of others have created a special atmosphere in this space which they all breathe in, but Breivik was the one who exhaled!!

[…]

Many thanks for bring class back into the discussion at a time when the lone nutter theory is being pushed by the liberal pundits and neo-Nazis,

In solidarity,

Mike Seltzer in Oslo at Oslo University College

 

 

Libya: who could have predicted?

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian:

Britain's half-war against Libya is careering onward from reckless gesture to full-scale fiasco. As it reaches six months' duration, every sensibly pessimistic forecast has turned out true and every jingoistic boast false. Even if the desperate and probably illegal tactic of trying to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi gets lucky, Britain would find itself running a shambles of its own making, with troops having to go in to "keep the peace". Unlike in Basra or Helmand, there will be no Americans on hand to bail them out. It is frightening how deep the imperial gene runs in generations of British politicians.

The Libyan rebels, portrayed by Whitehall propagandists as plucky little democrats, are hardly more sympathetic than Gaddafi's supporters, with those in the east at odds both with each other and with those in the west. While Britain claims to be "protecting" the population, the latest, admittedly unreliable, estimates put the civilian toll from bombing at 1,100 dead and countless injured. Certainly hundreds must have died. The RAF is clearly running out of targets and must justify each new attack in terms more appropriate to a Maoist hysteric. Last week theTripoli television station was destroyed and reporters killed, "to disrupt the broadcast of Gaddafi's murderous rhetoric". What has that to do with the original war aim?

Read the whole thing. What's particularly depressing about this bloody fiasco is how predictable it was. I'm not claiming any great oracular powers (God, Blind Freddy could see where this adventure would end) but here's what I wrote for Counterpunch in March:

Has there ever been a war justified more glibly? One supposes so but it's hard to recall when. Even the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as disastrous as they proved, involved the public articulation of a more-or-less coherent plan, something that's patently lacking from the adventure unfolding in Libya.

The mission will last days rather than weeks, says Obama – and the French immediately warn of a long fight. The Americans say Gaddafi is not a target; the British briefly insist that he is but then almost instantly change their minds. The goal of intervention is – or perhaps isn't – regime change, depending on who you listen to and when they're speaking.

For a particularly grotesque example of where we're now at, one need go no further than the New Republic, where Steven Metz advises the US to prepare both tactics against an insurgency (for use against pro-Gaddafi forces) andtactics for an insurgency (to assist anti-Gaddafi elements).

Would George W Bush, for all his Texas swagger, have dared to cowboy up a military conflict on such a crazy basis? Surely not — and yet across the world, the Libya intervention, a conflict with contradictory aims, no discernable exit strategy, and little public support, has been lauded by progressives.

The rest is on the articles page.

back to the future

I published this in New Matilda in 2009.  Depressingly, it's now more relevant than ever.

If these aren't fascists, they're close enough as to make no difference.

Last week, a shaven-headed gang calling itself the "English Defence League" staged an anti-Muslim rally in Birmingham. On Youtube, EDL supporters had boasted of belonging to "the most organised and ruthless street army in the country"; the scene outside the Birmingham mosque, with football hooligans and skinheads battling local Muslims and anti-racists, seemed to confirm it.

The EDL originated with far-Right bloggers, hallucinogenic types who see evidence of a caliphate in every advertisement for halal kebabs. Its real muscle, however, comes from the soccer hooligan "firms", yobs who combine beery chauvinism with casual ultraviolence and thus have provided recruits for far-Right thugs for the last 30 years or so.

Significantly, the EDL's provocations follow the political breakthroughs of the British National Party. The recent European elections saw major gains for far-Right and neo-Nazi groups across the continent. In Britain, the BNP polled more than a million votes under the leadership of Nick Griffin, a Holocaust-denying, alumnus of the old National Front. An advocate of the "suits-not-boots" school of fascism, Griffin struggles, not always successfully, to keep his more unreconstructed seig-heilers under control, and so the hardcore brawlers from the BNP seem to have gravitated to the EDL (and similar groups like Stop the Islamisation of Europe), where they're at least guaranteed a good ruck.

In the wake of the Birmingham fracas, Communities Minister John Denham drew an analogy with the 1930s, a comparison that seems hyperbolic until you look more closely. You see, he wasn't talking about Hitler's Germany so much as England's own indigenous fascist tradition.

In 1936, Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists launched a campaign along similar lines to the EDL's current caper. Instead of provoking Muslims with attacks on mosques, the BUF picked on Jewish immigrants — most famously, attempting a blackshirted rally through London's East End.

Too often, we think of 1930s fascists as cartoon characters, sociopaths so obviously villainous as to attract only the consciously genocidal. But in the early 30s, Mosley boasted considerable support. The media tycoon Lord Rothermere, for instance, saw Mosley as a man of destiny, sweeping away Britain's democratic paralysis to get the economy moving again. Hence the tabloid Daily Mail's attempt to drum up fascist recruits with a notorious article entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts".

That's one difference with the situation today. The new fascists have little support for their economic program (insofar as they even have one). On the other hand, where Mosley's respectable backers tended to skate over his antisemitism, today the racial agenda of the EDL circulates remarkably widely.

Consider the following statements: Muslims will not integrate. Muslims are more fertile than Christians and are outbreeding them. Europe is becoming a province, a colony, of Islam. Europe will either be Islamicised or there will be a civil war. Most likely, Muslims will resort to terrorism as part of their takeover. They are already spoiling for violence.

You might think all these come from the EDL or Stop the Islamisation of Europe. They don't. They're actually from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian: each sentence a straight précis of remarks by the American scholar Daniel Pipes at a Quadrant dinner last year. The Herald reported it; the Oz reprinted it.

The circulation of these attitudes invites an interesting historical comparison. Imagine if, in a yellowing newspaper from the 1930s, we found an article about the violent Semitic menace spreading across Europe, talking about how Christians would soon become enslaved to the Judifiacation of Western civilisation, we would peg the author as (at best) an apologist for Mosley-style bigotry. But how are these current attitudes any different?

You might say it's not racism — Islam's a religion, not a race. Leaving aside the question as to definitions of "race" (try providing, for instance, a theory of "race" that is not itself racist), Pipes explicitly talks about Muslim fertility, which only makes sense if you understand Islam in essentialist terms, a eugenic characteristic like skin colour or nose shape.

Nor can Pipes simply be dismissed as some marginal crackpot (he is a crackpot — just not a marginal one). You can find a very similar analysis in the writings of Christopher Caldwell (whose book Reflections On The Revolution In Europe has been respectfully reviewed all around the world), Mark Steyn, the late Oriana Fallaci, Melanie Phillips, as well as a variety of lesser tub thumpers at home and abroad.

The public sphere today tolerates a level of anti-Muslim bigotry comparable to that directed against Jews in English-speaking countries during the 1930s. No, not analgous to that fostered by Hitler in Germany — there's no Muslim Holocaust looming — but akin to what was accepted in countries like Britain and Australia. For instance, there's a famous quote from TW White, the Australian delegate at the conference discussing Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany. White explained that it would "no doubt be appreciated that as we have no racial problem we are not desirous of importing one".

Today, White's comments are widely (and correctly) seen as utterly shameful. But do not exactly the same assumptions underlie talk of Islamification? Back then, the Jews of the racialised imagination were clannish and refused to assimilate. They wore strange clothes, they ate peculiar foods; they harboured dangerous and radical ideas. Aren't differences just like these the reason why, each time some desperate group tries to flee Afghanistan or Iraq, you can confidently expect a shock jock or tabloid columnist to fulminate against letting them in? We have no racial problem; we are not desirous of importing one.

If we need more examples of British fascism against which to measure these new developments, we could leave the 30s and move to the last time there was an upsurge of neo-fascism in Britain. The brief flowering of the National Front during the 1970s is widely seen to have been sparked by Enoch Powell's 1968 warning about the perils of what was then called "coloured" immigration. The West Indians and the Pakistanis came from a different culture; there would, Powell warned, be "rivers of blood" unless immigration ceased.

Go back to Pipes's article, replace the word "Muslim" with "Pakistani" and, voilà, it's 1968 all over again.

Of course, the Daniel Pipeses and the Mark Steyns and the rest of them don't themselves organise marches against mosques. But you can't warn against looming race wars over the future of civilisation, and not expect the boots-and-braces crowd to launch a preemptive strike. Defend Britain! Stop the Islamisation of Europe! Etc, etc.

Now, one shouldn't telescope events. By 1936, the BUF had a pretty solid organisation, emerging out of a much worse economic climate, and today neither the EDL nor the BNP really comes close (though there are interesting comparisons to be made between Griffin and Mosley). There's no Hitlerite takeover imminent for Britain; today's Nazis are still, for the most part, more interested in beer halls than putsches.

Nonetheless, these are dangerous times, particularly if you belong to a minority. Across Eastern Europe, anti-Roma racism has reached a fever pitch, with the world taking very little notice — Madonna recently drew jeers in Bucharest simply for suggesting her fans refrain from discriminating against "gypsies" (who were also, let us not forget, marked out for genocide by the Hitlerites).

Even in the US, where there's much less of a native fascist tradition, the Tea Party protest movement drew a crowd of perhaps 75,000 to Washington the other day to protest Barack Obama as a fascist, communist Muslim. Slate records one demonstrator carrying a sign reading "Diversity Is A Disease", a slogan that gives a pretty good idea of where these people are coming from.

In the current context, combating the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim bigotry matters. It matters a great deal.

some events

There's a list of events at the Melbourne and Brisbane writers festivals now up at the Overland site.

I've got a piece up at Counterpunch, arguing that the blo...

I've got a piece up at Counterpunch, arguing that the blogosphere is peculiarly well-suited to fostering racial populism and that, indeed, it helps overcome some of the organisational problems that the far right has traditionally faced.

Since I wrote, it's become clear that Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs, the Islamophobic blog cited by Breivik, is going back through her archives, deleting incriminating correspondence with Norwegian right-wingers.

For instance, it seems she once published someone who talked openly about stockpiling weapons to defend himself against Muslims. Elsewhere, she ran a letter from someone in Norway who wanted 'politicians and elites' to be hanged as traitors.

Until the Oslo massacre, Geller saw nothing problematic about either of these posts. And why would she?  If you really expect looming war against Muslims, an intercontinental struggle in which the very survival of civilisation is at stake (and Geller say she does), well, violence is part of war. Breivik just drew the logical conclusion.

frabjous day

So yesterday I achieved a long-cherished goal: denunciation by whichever anonymous wing-nut pens the Australian editorial.

Ms Nixon's quest for victimhood is being backed by old-school feminists such as Anne Summers, who have branded her treatment "despicable". Jesuit magazine Eureka Street deplored her "crucifixion", blaming "ruthless men", and sermonising that "our attitudes to strong women are grievously at fault". Jeff Sparrow, on The Drum, blasted "tabloid moralists" for focusing on women's hair after it was reported she had hers cut on Black Saturday — February 7, 2009 — when she should have been focusing on the job. While Ms Nixon seeks martyrdom, the truth is somewhat more prosaic.

There you have it: I'm a feminist Jesuit who loves the police.

For anyone interested, you can read the offending Drum piece here. Suffice to say that, in the article, I suggested that the scrutiny applied to Nixon should also be levelled at other police — and I gave the example of the officers circulating racialised images of torture. We might now make the same point about this bizarre and sinister story. Do you suppose that there's any chance the death of Michael Atakelt might attract the same coverage as Ms Nixon's new book?

oh, dear

'THIS TREATMENT OF ME IS NOT ON … I AM SURROUNDED BY MUSLIMS!' Australian Defence League leader Martin Brennan, protesting his incarceration in an immigration detention centre.

Islamophobia and Oslo

I've got a piece on the politics of the Oslo tragedy up on Drum at the moment.

in Tasmania

I'm going to Tasmania on the weekend for an event at Fullers Bookshop with James Boyce about his phenomenal book 1835, a history of Melbourne that manages to present the past as fundamentally different to the present, and yet also fundamentally connected. There's details about the gig here.