Ten things I’d like to see more of in the 2010s

 

1) Elitism

The use of ‘middle class’ as a term of abuse and ‘working class’ as a term of praise was always extremely annoying, even when it was on the part of people arguing for social justice. It has become doubly objectionable now that every other racist or fascist invariably claims to be speaking on behalf of the ‘working class’ when he or she rails against the ‘liberal elite’, Muslims, immigrants etc. When used in this context, ‘working class’ does not actually mean people who work in steel mills or down mines and have surplus value extracted from their labour, etc. No, ‘working class’ is used by the BNP and their kind as a euphemism for the elements of our society that celebrate ignorance, xenophobia, vulgarity and prejudice. Sometimes, they give the game away by using the term ‘white working-class’, which is short-hand for not very sophisticated white people – irrespective of actual socio-economic background – who don’t want too many foreigners with dark skins or funny accents coming over to their country.

When fascists and racists denounce the ‘liberal elite’ in the name of the ‘working class’ or ‘white working-class’, what they really mean is that being educated and cosmopolitan corrupts while being less educated and more narrow-minded results in greater political wisdom. They want politicians to listen to the least educated and most prejudiced amongst us. They are anti-intellectual philistines who hate books, libraries, teachers, students and universities. They want xenophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia and religious bigotry to be acceptable again.

Via Edmund Standing at Harry’s Place, I also learn that the BNP’s legal director Lee John Barnes has written a poem that contains verses like the following:

Fuck your liberty,
It is just a lie,
For the eternal conflict,
Between equality,
And the ideal of liberty,
Reveals the truth,
Your liberty is the same,
Old whore in a new dress,
Whose cunt is still wet,
From serving the pigs
That ran the old regime.
That ran the old regime.

Barnes claims: ‘The swear words in the poem are designed to produce a ‘bourgeoise’ reflex in the reader.’ Indeed, the belief that disgusting, abusive language is somehow ‘working class’ is, in fact, common to many of the troglodytes that inhabit cyberspace.

To which one can only reply that elitism is a truly wonderful phenomenon; long may it prosper.

2) Mass immigration.

It has been said that the reason liberal elitists support mass immigration is that it lowers the cost of baby-sitters, hedge-trimmers, dog-walkers and others providers of services to the middle classes. Well, I don’t have a baby, a hedge or a dog, but I’m all in favour of cheaper services for the middle classes – why should I pay a British plumber some exorbitant fee if a Polish plumber will do the job for less ? And it’s so nice for me and my middle-class friends to be able to go out in London to interesting ‘ethnic’ restaurants – my favourite is Adulis Eritrean Restaurant, on Brixton Road. It seems to me that the death of so-called ‘white working-class culture’ (i.e. the culture of all-white provincial backwaters that are still living in the 1940s) is a small price to pay for all these benefits.

Sorry, Alf Garnett, but as a middle-class person, I believe that mass immigration is in my class interest. It’s also in my country’s national interest: the US did not grow from a country with a population of under three million at the time of independence to become the world’s richest and most powerful state by pursuing Daily-Mail-style immigration policies.

3) Minarets in Europe.

Go to any city or town in Europe, and it’s likely that a church or a mosque will be the most attractive piece of architecture. There are few buildings as pleasing as the Lisbon Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, the Cordoba Great Mosque, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne or the Hagia Sophia. Well, in the UK and other parts of Europe we thankfully have plenty of lovely churches and cathedrals, but it would be nicer to have more mosques and more minarets. However, I don’t expect this to be appreciated by the sort of barbarians who recently won the referendum in Switzerland, and who are clearly still living in round about the eleventh century.

It’s time to stop the Islamophobification of Europe. Too see the sort of lunacy the new Islamophobic fascist groups go in for, have a look at the website of the SIOE, which wants us to boycott countries like Albania and Turkey on the grounds that they are Muslim, as well as companies like Nestle and Asda that produce or sell halal food.

I’m an atheist, but I find fairy tales about the fellow who lives in the sky and has a big white beard and wears sandals a lot less inherently offensive than fairy tales about how our ordinary Muslim sisters and brothers represent some sort of threat to European civilisation – this is simply the successor to the fairy tale of the interwar period, that our Jewish sisters and brothers were a threat to European civilisation because they were allegedly carriers of communism.

4) Nazi analogies.

Last year, I wrote that ‘Hitler analogies are very tired’. I was wrong. Hitler and Nazi analogies are not tired.

World War II was the greatest struggle of the last two-hundred years. It has defined the political consciousness of the contemporary world. ‘Hitler’ and ‘Nazi’ have become bywords for the absolute worst form of evil. It is inevitable that people today see world politics in part through the prism of this great struggle. It is entirely reasonable that contemporary movements or regimes that engage in totalitarian, racist or genocidal activities should remind us of the Nazis, and that we should point this out when they do. Frankly, I’m getting fed up with people complaining about the over-use of Nazi analogies; they seem to want us to disown our own anti-fascist heritage and treat totalitarian, racist and fascist regimes and movements with respect that they do not deserve. Much better to call a spade a spade. It  is often an exaggeration to label such regimes or movements ‘Nazi’, but it’s better to exaggerate than to treat them with kid gloves.

5) Use of the term ‘racist’.

From the days when I used to fight it out with BNP supporters and other bigots and troglodytes in the comments boxes of Harry’s Place, I learned that such people find the term ‘racist’ offensive in the same way that normal, civilised people find words like ‘cunt’ and ‘wanker’ offensive. This is because they usually really are racists and would like to be able to say things like ‘immigration is destroying indigenous British culture’ without being called ‘racist’. Furthermore, they hate the term ‘racist’ because they hate liberals and liberal values in general.

Members of the Decent Left despise liberals when they fail to uphold liberal values vis-a-vis fascists and racists. By contrast, fascists and racists despise liberals when they do uphold liberal values. The term ‘racist’ is an affront for them because it signifies support for the liberal values that they hate.

We should never allow ourselves to be intimidated by the racists and fascists; we should call them ‘racist’ each and every time they spew their poison.

Ditto use of the term ‘anti-Semite’.

Ditto use of the term ‘Islamophobe’.

6) Violations of national sovereignty.

When scratching around for justification for their belief that the perpetrators of genocide and other massive human-rights abuses should be free to do so without outside interference, supporters of dictatorship here in the democratic West will invariably bring up the supposed principle of ‘national sovereignty’. By this, they mean the sovereign right of dictators to carry out genocide and other crimes against their own or neighbouring peoples. They do not mean the actual sovereignty of nations. Thus, in the case of the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, the alleged supporters of ‘national sovereignty’ did not support the national sovereignty of Slovenians, Croatians or Bosnians, never mind Kosovars. They did, however, support the sovereign right of Milosevic’s dictatorship to exterminate Croatians, Bosnians and Kosovars without interference from the democratic West. Subsequently, many of the same people came out in support of the sovereignty of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist dictatorship vis-a-vis the allied coalition, but not of the sovereignty of the Iraqi people to elect their own government.

So long as ‘national sovereignty’ is a euphemism for the right of tyrannies to abuse human rights, it should be violated as often as possible.

7) Newly independent states.

Opponents of the international recognition of Kosova’s independence often allege that it will encourage other secessionist movements worldwide. I wish that it were so, for the achievement of freedom by a previously unfree people is something to be celebrated. There are numerous peoples who deserve the right to independent statehood: Kurds, Palestinians, Chechens, Tibetans, Basques, Catalans, Tamils and many others. Not all of these can realistically achieve national independence, and some would be best advised not to push for it. But all have the right to it, if that is what they want, and if they are denied it but wish to struggle for it nonetheless, the sympathy of all right-thinking people is with them. I hope that, in the years to come, more unfree peoples succeed in seceding and forming their own independent states. Remember: if the Kosovars can achieve it, maybe you can too !

8 ) NATO and EU members.

I hope that within the next two decades, all the remaining states of Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and the Balkans, including and especially Turkey, become members of both the EU and NATO. One of the advantages of this is that it would really offend the regime in Moscow, which can only be a good thing. But I dream of living long enough to see our Euro-Atlantic structures expand to incorporate a free and democratic Russia and a free and democratic Iran. I dream to see them incorporate both Israel and a free and democratic Palestine, allied as closely and as naturally to one another as Germany and France are today.

9) The use of Britain’s libel laws to silence bloggers.

No doubt a blogger is now and again sued unjustly but successfully for libel, but for every one who is unjustly sued, several more deserve everything they get. For the opposite problem is far, far bigger today: the freedom that bloggers and commenters on blogs seem to feel they enjoy to libel other people with impunity. A blogger posts a vicious ad hominem attack on Joe Bloggs MP, then a lynch mob of despicable little anonymous cowards hiding behind ridiculous pseudonyms will sniggeringly post comments on a blog claiming that ‘Joe Bloggs MP is a criminal’, ‘Joe Bloggs MP is a paedophile’, etc. The blogger will refuse to delete them, then when Mr Bloggs sues the blogger, the blogger will whine about ‘freedom of speech’ and claim to be a human rights martyr like Nelson Mandela or Aung San Suu Kyi.

I can think of few groups of people who are less worthy of solidarity than bloggers sued for libel by the people they have defamed. My solidarity, rather, goes to the libel lawyers who make an honest living protecting us, even if only slightly, from this scourge. Britain’s libel laws are a great institution; may they remain in force forever.

10) Rudeness towards the far left.

I am worried that members of the Decent Left are not being sufficiently rude or aggressive toward the far left. It is horrible to think that a political tendency that includes Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and the Socialist Workers Party; that uses ‘Zionist’ as a term of abuse; that supports the Islamofascists in the Middle East and the Chetniks in the Balkans; should ever be treated by us with anything that even remotely resembles gentleness or respect.

Come on comrades, we can do better than this. Let’s really, really go for them in 2010.

Happy New Year to all my readers. Except for the hostile ones.