the SDL demo on Waterloo Place

There was a definite sense of deja vu in Edinburgh today as the far-right Scottish Defence League attempted to hold their latest ‘demonstration’, with hundreds of anti-fascists gathering to oppose them. But, unlike last time around, the script could’ve been written well in advance for the way in which events would play out today. And indeed, it had been – Lothian and Borders Police saw to that.

Having been turned down on their initial proposal to hold a march through the city centre, the SDL  were forced to make do with a police sanctioned “static protest” outside the Apex Hotel on Waterloo Place, at which they gathered from early on. Anti-fascists were meanwhile meeting at the foot of the Mound, where a rally had been organised by Unite Against Fascism. After hearing from several trade union and political party speakers, a short, five minute march along Princes Street took place. However, upon nearing the pre-arranged spot for a ‘second rally’, it became clear that the march was, in fact, being directed straight into a ‘designated protest area’ surrounded by metal barriers. When a sizeable section of the march stalled and attempted to resist entering this area, and to encourage others not to as well, UAF stewards rapidly intervened. We had to enter the protest area, we were told – and through a mixture of lies, confusion and just following the crowd, most did. Around 40 remained outside, staying mobile and attempting to reach the SDL – both to ensure that they would not be allowed a demonstration publicly, and to let them know that there was an anti-fascist presence in Edinburgh that day.

This was carried out with limited success, a shouting match (from great distance) with the SDL here and dash past police lines there. But with the vast majority of the anti-fascist demo, which had numbered up to 4-500 people, being herded into a pen, there was no scope for the kind of blockade of the SDL that took place last time they visited Edinburgh. With officers from at least four Scottish forces in attendance, the city centre was in a state of virtual occupation, with riot vans, prison buses and dozens of cops on every street in the proximity of the demonstrations. In this context, it wasn’t a victory for anyone but the forces of the state, who gave a textbook performance of flooding the streets with officers, keeping two opposing sides apart, maintaining order and having the whole thing over and done with by 2.30pm.

the fash get escorted away following their demo

Some sections of the anti-fascist movement – namely Unite Against Fascism – are already declaring a massive victory on the streets of Edinburgh today, much as they did in Tower Hamlets last week (where they also succeeded in banning all marches for a 30 day period). The twitter feed of UAF’s Martin Smith is a sight to behold – an utterly delusional portrayal of the day’s events which counts police kettles, the fact that the SDL were “nowhere to be seen” (certainly not from where the UAF demo was situated) and Labour councillors giving grandstanding speeches “evoking the spirit of Cable Street” (lol) as some kind of stunning victory. But in reality, the SDL still numbered around 100+ supporters, were able to have their demonstration on Waterloo Place, and then leave pretty much of their own accord by Calton Hill. Of these 100 or so, though, a sizeable contingent had travelled from England – banners and hoodies were seen from Luton and Newcastle EDL divisions, alongside the EDL splinter group the “North West Infidels”. The SDL are not in a position of strength; whether they were strengthened by today’s demo, though, is difficult to say.

Anti-fascists can claim a success in that the SDL were not able to venture beyond a tightly controlled cordon. The very fact that there was opposition to them in the streets today was key in ensuring that they were unable to come into contact with the general public (with the exception of the unfortunate couple having a wedding inside the same hotel). But the willingness to accept “designated protest areas”, while allowing the police to “do their job” of penning in the fascists in their protest area, is extremely dangerous territory not just in the fight against the far-right, but for the progressive movement as a whole. These very same forces who have spent weeks now fetishising the riots and anti-police sentiment today walked into, accepted and pulled others into a dystopian nightmare-esque vision of “legitimate” protest in “designated” confines. They shall not pass – the police cordons, that is.

This represents the first time the SDL have attempted to demonstrate in a major city since February 2010, when they were outnumbered over 25-1 and left unable to march in Edinburgh, as hundreds of anti-fascists evaded police lines (and UAF megaphones) to ensure the SDL were kettled inside Jenny Ha’s pub at the bottom of the Royal Mile. Although no formal application to march had been made, it’s almost certain that the police would have allowed a demonstration to proceed outside of the nearby Scottish Parliament, had there not been such a large anti-fascist presence.

Since their last Edinburgh outing 19 months ago, which followed a not much more successful first demo in Glasgow in November 2009, the SDL have adopted a strategy of holding demonstrations in near secrecy out with the main cities, making anti-fascist mobilisation more difficult. Now, however, the SDL are venturing back to the big city, with all the subsequent publicity that that has entailed, particularly coming just a week after the much-hyped up EDL demonstration in Tower Hamlets.

The level of opposition the SDL will face on Saturday is unclear, although Lothian and Borders Police have issued a statement promising “robust action against any disorder or unlawful actions”. Unite Against Fascism have organised a counter-demo, which will meeting at the foot of the Mound at 11am before marching along the road to the Wellington Statue at the east end of Princes Street, where a rally will hear from various MSPs and local dignitaries. They state that “By holding the area around Wellington statue we will physically prevent the racists from entering our city centre. This area will be within sight of where the SDL intend to assemble, so the size of our protest will demonstrate that that they are a tiny extremist minority.”

Given past experience of SDL demonstrations, the UAF statement amounts to little more than part fantasy, part sheer fallacy. There is no way of knowing where – or indeed when – the SDL will assemble, nor how they will arrive in the city. Given that they will now not be marching, at least officially, it’s highly likely that the police have reached a private arrangement for the SDL to meet elsewhere in the city, under close police supervision. The idea that this will be anywhere near the official UAF demo, let alone that UAF will be able to “physically prevent” the SDL from being able to enter the city centre by being effectively kettled next to a statue, is complete delusion.

Just like last February, anti-fascists need to directly confront the SDL and prevent them from being allowed to have a public assembly in Edinburgh city centre. Then, as now, the police had reached a private arrangement with the fascists for a demonstration spot. Meanwhile, anti-fascists were meant to keep their side of the bargain and not venture outside of a strictly pre-arranged march route, enforced by megaphone-toting UAF officials. Several hundred of us disagreed, and evaded police lines to reach and surround the pub in which the SDL were situated. Throughout, UAF stewards attempted to direct everyone back to Princes Street Gardens, whilst claiming that the SDL were “in Haymarket”, and that the alleged fascists in Jenny Ha’s pub were in fact “Hibs casuals”. It was, of course, a lie – and a dangerous one at that.

The lessons of last February need to be learned from and remembered. We can’t rely on the state to crush the far-right, a failed strategy that has multiple political pitfalls, and ultimately doesn’t work and never has done. And nor can we rely on official marches and rallies, penned in by police miles away from the fascists – we need direct action on a mass basis, to confront and prevent the SDL from spreading their racist bigotry to Edinburgh’s streets.

Hundreds take direct action against the SDL in November 2009, Glasgow

Edinburgh City Council today denied permission to the far-right Scottish Defence League for a proposed march through the city centre next month. This is the first time that the SDL have gone before a local government decision making body, in the past having favoured circumventing official permission and going straight into negotiations with local police.

The march was set to have taken place on Saturday 10 September, reportedly to ‘commemorate’ the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. Following huge political pressure, the council today refused to grant permission for the march, which was to take a route from near the US Embassy to the Wellington monument off Princes Street, on fears that disorder could break out.

Such a move should be welcomed – albeit cautiously. Calling for restrictions and bans on the right to protest is dangerous territory for any progressive organisation to step into, having backfired in the face of the left on countless occasions in the past. However, despite the ban on marching, the SDL are standing defiant and are still calling for a mobilisation of their supporters on the 10th September in central Edinburgh.

And so we’re back to square one: the same situation as November 2009, when the SDL held their first ever demo, in Glasgow, and February 2010, when they attempted to march in Edinburgh. Since then, the rump group of around 50 hardcore supporters have held a number of lower profile demonstrations, generally in smaller towns across Scotland, and most recently in Irvine, to varying levels of success.

But the SDL have struggled to gain anything near the same momentum as their English counterparts, for a number of reasons. High among these is the sheer level of opposition the SDL have faced on the streets in Scotland, which has meant they’ve struggled to ever get off the ground, with thousands of anti-fascists facing them down (and winning) in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in the latter case, maintaining a physical presence which prevented the SDL from being allowed, or able, to march.

With the SDL now gearing up for a static demonstration on the 10th, it’s imperative that anti-fascists once again organise and mobilise to oppose them en masse on the streets. What attitude the police will take to the SDL presence is entirely unpredictable, as previous demonstrations have showed, with the balance of forces on the day likely to be key.

We’ve seen the emergence of an archetypal moral panic: young people, hoodies, anarchy, single parents, PC brigade, thieving, arson, gangs, MODERN COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY, Grand Theft Auto, water cannons, SEND IN THE TROOPS… the list goes on. Fortunately for us, in this time of grave national crisis, help is at hand. A grouping of selfless celebrities, led by Wayne and Coleen Rooney and backed up by a supporting cast including Max Clifford, Simon Cowell and Peter Andre, alongside Big Brother winners, some twat from Kasabian, David Cameron and ‘stars’ of the The Only Way Is Essex, have come together in their noble fight to make Britain be back British, free of the rioting ‘scum and thugs’ that have brought shame on our once great nation. The celeb crusade to ‘Reclaim Our Streets’ was hailed on the frontpage of two national “newspapers” on Saturday, the Daily Star and the Express.

Britain's moral compass: The Star & Express

Readers of both papers, and other participating media outlets including OK! Magazine and Channel Five, are invited to donate whatever they can towards this cause – via mysteriously monikered charity the ‘RD Crusaders Foundation’ – which has already seen contributions pouring in from the above celebrity figures.  It’s been orchestrated by none other than moral crusader, millionaire pornographer, mad fascist and media baron Richard Desmond, owner of the participating media outlets.

Taken in isolation, the campaign and fundraising drive – apparently for the benefit of families and businesses affected by the riots – seems fairly standard fare for a populist tabloid newspaper. But within the context of the Star and Express’s persistent and vociferous racist populism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria and open support for the English Defence League, it’s a worrying development. Indeed, it was the EDL who were out on the streets of north London last week, attempting to put the rhetoric of ‘reclaiming our streets’ into action (even if they did end up just bottling the police)

The language employed in the Star’s campaign is particularly telling. Much in the same way that the Express Group have sought to dehumanise and demonise Muslims and asylum seekers, the same tactics are now being used against a perceived criminal underclass who exist as non-citizens, apart from ‘the nation’. Hey kids, it’s fascism-lite, this time with some smily celebrity faces behind it! A similar discourse has been created with the social media led ‘riot clean up’, which this article analyses in depth.

Richard Desmond’s states that his fundraising drive is to help the “families burned out of their homes and shopkeepers left penniless”.  But the end result is a bizarre crossover of celeb culture, tabloid populism, patriotism and quasi-fascism that sets a scary precedent as we head into a period of serious struggle against austerity and spending cuts.

STOP PRESS: Finish writing this. Have a look at tomorrow’s front pages. The Sunday Express – banner headline: BRING BACK NATIONAL SERVICE: Riot yobs should be forced to join the army to combat thuggery. Too predictable.

In a conversation on Saturday night down my local, a Scandinavian friend of mine noted that as soon as the identity of the killer behind the bombing in Oslo and the attack on a youth camp in Utoeya had been revealed, words such as ‘terrorist’ – which had been bandied about by various people appearing in the media prior to the discovery of the killer’s identity – ceased to be used.  In light of this conversation, I was intrigued today by Charlie Brooker’s column, in which he notes that the initial Western response to both tragedies was keen to point the finger at Muslim extremists. When it transpired that the killer was in this case white, Christian and right-wing, the language of ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ paled into the background, and in some cases disappeared altogether. This is in spite of the fact that the killer is being charged by Norwegian courts under anti-terrorism laws, which makes sense, since by all definitions of the word ‘terrorist’ he most definitely is one.

Nonetheless, what the sudden drop in frequency of words related to ‘terror’ in regard to the shooting/bombing suggests is that this sort of rhetoric is reserved for particular types of extremism – largely that conducted by extremist Muslim groups such as al-Quaeda. For the western media, the word ‘terrorist’ does not sit well when used to describe a white Christian (with the possible exception of the IRA, but the discourse surrounding them has its own, seperate factors). It is so difficult for the Western media to conceive of a white non-Muslim terrorist that invocations of al-Quaeda and 911 are required in several western tabloids in order to establish some sort of conceivable context: see here for the Guardian’s selected excerpts from the world’s press. In these extracts, taken from a variety of sources in a variety of cultures, there is a clear trend. Western print media constantly feels the need to evoke al-Quaeda and 9/11 when writing about acts of terror.

To continually refer to extremist Muslim terrorism in the same vein as anti-Muslim terrorism has a rhetorical effect which centres the discourse of terrorism around Islam. When Le Figaro prints: ‘it is worrying to see the legacy of Bin Laden taken up by fundamentalism from the opposite end of the spectrum’, it associates terrorism with a ‘spectrum’ which ranges from anti-Muslim extremism to Muslim extremism. The killer’s other motivations, such as his desire to purge Europe of what he calls ‘cultural Marxism’ his hatred of the Norwegian government’s current immigration policy, and his hatred of immigration in general, are downplayed in comparision to his views on Islam (an example of this is today’s Telegraph, with its leading headline ‘Norway Killer: massacre was to save Europe from Islam’, where the only mention of the killer’s anti-Marxist motivations are included as a direct transcription of the judge’s ruling). The language of terror and terrorism has become the language of oppression, used to perpetuate a growing and misfounded association of Islam with extremism. The proof that this misfounded conflation between Islam and fundamentalism exists is manifest in the difficulty found by the Western media in conceiving of a terrrorist attack that is not linked to Muslim extremism.

It is therefore left to eastern news sources to point out the obvious: that extremists and fundamentalists are found in every religion and in none.

What is truly sad is that the constant invocation of 911 and Muslim extremism is now the focus of all self-conscious print-journalism – this article included – which thus continues to focus attention on the killer and his fascist motivations, a focus which is of no help or comfort (and most likely no interest) to those who have been affected by the deaths.

But that’s the point: no one in the press seems to be aware of the imperialist, colonizing implications of this ‘speaking-for’ discourse. While the ‘multiculturalism’ debate rages around us, fueled today by David Cameron’s speech, women’s rights are cited as a foremost reason as to why we should abandon multiculturalism. The plight of Muslim women has been both absent and present throughout multiculturalist arguments. Despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to have occured to the government to take steps to protect Muslim women from the worst behaviours of Muslim men, it continually occurs to them to take steps to protect us indigenous Brits from the worst excesses of Islam. According to Cameron, it’s us, the white Westerners, that need protection much more than anyone else in the UK. Women don’t come into this though, since his cuts have resulted in the removal of funding to women’s charities and his party’s MPs have scrapped schemes to protect women from domestic abuse. And now he has the cheek to use Muslim women’s rights to backup his argument for the regulation and censorship of Muslim organisations in the UK: “Do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law?”

Where is the Muslim woman in this sort of discourse? She peers out from behind a veil of white, Western representation, where no space is granted her to determine her own role in the multiculturalist debate. She is merely a tool which Cameron is using to futher his own agenda, which is the perpetuation of the dominance of allegedly ‘British’ values. If David Cameron really wanted to regulate Muslim organisations in the UK in order that they might treat women better, he might have asked some Muslim women for their opinions (his token consultation with Baroness Warsi notwithstanding, since her status as a peer and Tory co-chairman means she’s not exactly impartial, nor is her situation in any way typical or representative of Muslim women in the UK). He might even have considered making a speech that was actually about them, rather than once-again tarring all Muslims with the Potential Extremist brush, aiming to limit the roles and identities available to Muslim men and women alike, further silencing an already-silenced group.

In this article from 2007, Johan Hari has actually bothered to do some reasearch that isn’t just from the point-of-view of card-carrying right-wingers, therefore anticipating some teasing-out some of the power-relations at work in multiculturalism. In this article he cites the case of Nishal, living in Germany, and her appeal to the courts for protection from her abusive husband. Informed by a judge that she has no right to such protection because, as a Muslim, she should of course expect such treatment, Nishal was sent back to her husband. And this German case isn’t as far from home as we’d like: German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not only a close ally of Cameron’s, but she anticipated his speech with her own public fascism last year.

What this means is that the German courts took it upon themselves to define Nishal’s religion on her behalf: based on a narrow reading of an out-of-context section of the Qur’an, they told this Muslim woman what her role as a Muslim woman should be. Nishal’s attempts to define herself and her own identity as a Muslim woman were thwarted. In a double-whammy, they granted Nishal’s husband the right to continue to determine her life for her. The only person who gets no say in Nishal’s life is Nishal herself. In order to achieve any degree of personal autonomy, Nishal must speak out from under her husband, from under the veil of ignorance through which Western state representatives view Islam, and from under a justice system which – as the verdict made patently obvious – was not made to protect such as her, but to contribute to her oppression. She must speak out from under piled-up layers of Western patriarchy, Eastern patriarchy, Western privilege, white privilege, and the discourse Cameron and Merkel subscribe to, which privileges what they perceive to be ‘native values’ over the rights of immigrants to determine their own lives. All these layers of power conspire to silence her; no one woman can have a voice loud enough to be heard over all that.

Which is why it’s time there was a prominent Muslim Women’s Movement in Western countries . The feminist movement in the West is far from over: it’s an ongoing struggle against the kind of discourse which uses women’s rights as a means to an end, but never sees them as an end in itself. Of course, white western feminism cannot purport to speak on behalf of immigrant women, any more than David Cameron – or indeed, Johan Hari – can. As Helene Cixous writes: ‘Woman must write her self [...] must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.’ When Cameron uses what he sees as the rights of Muslim women to strengthen his position within the multiculturalist debate, he denies them this opportunity. Cixous advocates a fightback against this kind of marginalisation and the act of ‘speaking-for’ (which is really silencing): ‘Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem’ (All Cixous quotes are from her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’).

Arguably it is suspect even for this kind of feminism – written by a female immigrant in 1975 – to determine the path that should be taken by immigrant women in Britain today. Nonetheless, what the work of established feminists does show is that, whenever immigrant women seek to determine their own lives, and subsequently to remake their religions, their communities, their culture, they should find millions of willing allies in their Western sisters. Whenever Nishal or someone like her goes to court, she should have available to her the support of millions of women’s rights activists willing to fight for her rights, because women’s rights don’t cease to be relevant when the woman in question chooses to wear a veil and/or go to mosque. However, these activists ought to be willing to listen, rather than to talk over Muslim women or to use their sufferings as a means to an end that wont benefit them.  David Cameron would deny these women the chance to speak for themselves. Allah forbid we should do the same.

fascism with a feathery face

Times are hard for the English Defence League. As they drift ever further into obscurity and irrelevance – continuing to insist to anyone who’ll listen that the single greatest threat to the British working class right now is the impending arrival of islamofascism – their tactics are becoming increasingly desperate.

Britain’s inevitable transformation to an Islamic Republic could, according to the dogma to which the EDL subscribe, come from anywhere. So while the minds of the population have been concentrated on slightly greater issues – namely the path of total destruction of the welfare state that the Tories are currently taking us down with glee – the EDL have spent the past few months running around in chicken suits outside fast food restaurants, in a bid to halt the encroach of halal chicken across Britain. Sharia law is surely only a step away.

And just last week, it was reported that dozens of EDL members have submitted compensation claims after they were involved in a “horrifying” (read: minor paint damage) coach crash en route to a demonstration in Preston in November. With 78 claims submitted, it soon transpired that there was only about 25 EDL supporters on the coach. Although maybe they’re keen to recoup some cash from all the lucrative merchandise money they’ve been losing out on after their transactions list was leaked recently. Understandably, the coach company aren’t amused.

However, while laughing at the English Defence League has become a new national sport, it would be foolish to write the organisation off. The growing sense of political polarisation, which will intensify as the cuts begin to be felt, is not lost on the EDL. Earlier this month, leadership figure “Tommy Robinson” (real name Steven Yaxley-Lennon) gave a flavour of the direction the EDL are moving in. Responding to the student demonstrations which shook the country in November and early December, Robinson told an assembled mob in Peterborough that the EDL are “disgusted with the behaviour of the so called fuckin’ students in London… we support British police, we are their allies…. we never want to see the British police attacked by people of this country”, with no sense of irony.

What followed was a confused mess of misdirected class anger, casual racism and out-and-out jingoism. There’s the references to ‘our boys’ and Britain’s imperial wars abroad,  much more adoration of ‘British police’, the usual digs at ‘the Muzzies’ and then a lot of OUTRAGE at the people who ‘desecrated’ the statue of Churchill in Westminster, a man who represents “every single thing this country is about” and is a “fuckin’ prophet”. He even tells the mob that ”every EDL member should shake the hand of a British policeman”. It’s unclear whether the eleven arrests that took place later in the day were actually just the police overreacting to friendly handshakes.

But beyond this fawning patriotism, his greatest vitriol is reserved for ‘the students’, who “do not understand what it is to be a working class member of this community” and “never ever lived a normal day in their life”. Pretty remarkable given that that the demonstrations have been precisely about access to uni for working class students, battling a government determined to raise fees to a level that will burden all but the richest graduates for life.

Tommy Robinson (far left) at a BNP meeting in 2007 - he's consistently denied any connection to the party

But it’s an identical narrative to the one that the tabloids have been ramming down our throats over the past two months. Within hours of the Millbank demo, journalists were pouring through the facebook pages and backgrounds of so-called ‘ringleaders’, attempting to smear them, and by implication all, students as upper class, undeserving and spoilt. Similar tactics have since been used against UKuncut. The agenda here is clear – to make their predominantly working class readership feel distance from the student and anti-cuts struggles, by painting all those within them as either reckless militants (Bob Crow, Len McLuskey) or upper class kids living out their teenage rebellion. The idea that normal people are out on the streets terrifies the media – which is why they’ll do everything to convince their readers otherwise, and place that distance between them.

The EDL are not a traditional party of the far-right, but the consequence of years of tabloid lies about Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers – their politics more  The Sun than Der Sturmer. But the EDL are adapting to the times and it’s little surprise that they’re now concentrating as much of their ire on ‘students’ and ‘reds’ as ‘the Muzzies’. It also neatly fits in with their bullshit notions of ‘old Albion’ and bizarre view of British history, with the students, allegedly, seeking to destroy everything that makes Britain great – statues of racist Prime Ministers, for instance, while the EDL frame themselves as the valiant last defence against Islamo-Bolshevik takeover.

In a time of crisis, the English Defence League are reverting to fascist type. They claim to be the true voice of the English working class – but it’s clear on which side they really stand. They idolise the Queen and Winston Churchill, who was an admirer of Italian fascism, ordered troops to march on workers during the 1926 General Strike and held a racist and anti-semitic worldview. For all that they claim Britain is a “two tier” system, they crucially fail to see the real dividing line – not their fantasy of a system that favours Muslims above all others, but of the class divide.

Currently, the EDL are content with running around after Anjem Choudary’s equally deranged Jihad4Anglia warriors and scrubbing graffiti off of Churchill’s statue. But is it beyond the realms of possibility that, over the coming twelve months and as class conflict intensifies, the EDL will be turning up at pickets to intimidate striking workers, beating up students protesters or, as in Greece, providing back-up militia to riot police? History tells us it is not – underlining the crucial importance of class-oriented anti-fascist work in the period we’re now in.

The enemy in Glasgow last year

As one of the few SSY members who made it to today’s anti-fascist demo in Stirling I’d like to write a bit about what went wrong and where we can go from now. As you may or may not know today was a bit of a setback for the movement against fascism in Scotland. To begin with a small group of us travelled through on the train from Glasgow, being followed and asked various stupid questions by the police (such as “are you going to Stirling?”). Once there some more joined us but the overall turnout was disappointingly small (under 50 people in total) and as a result the police were easily able to put us into a kettle outside Stirling train station as a dozen or so fascists later got off the train. We were held for around half an hour as the fascists walked off towards the town centre, apparently ending up in a park where the police had allowed them to rally. After the police let us go we headed up towards the town centre discussing what to do next. Before getting anywhere close to the park we received news (from spotters I think) that the fash had been joined by a fairly large group of football casuals, some of which were said to be armed with weapons and clearly looking for a fight. With this it was decided, perhaps sensibly given the numbers, that there was little we could do in Stirling and that the safest option was for us to head back to Glasgow. We could have stayed of course and hoped that the police would have protected us from them but do we really want to be in the situation in Scotland where we must rely on the state to prevent anti-fascists from being beaten up or worse?

I absolutely don’t mean to blame any individuals for the low turnout. I understand the announcement was very last minute, many of us only heard that the SDL would be demonstrating in Stirling and not Glasgow (as was originally planned) less than 24 hours before the event. And I’m sure those who didn’t attend will have also sorts of perfectly valid reasons for this. I think our success in Glasgow and Edinburgh had perhaps helped to create a false sense of complacency that contributed to the low turnout today. But the SDL can’t and mustn’t be written off as a threat. Today will I fear have emboldened them, it will have handed them a feeling of victory which, if we had had more of us and had been better organised, would have been denied to them. Personally I don’t think the SDL have that much reason to feel joyful after today. That they felt unable to show their faces in Glasgow and ended up in a park in Stirling instead is itself a sign they are still weak. But the danger is that they will now feel far more comfortable about travelling to smaller towns all over Scotland (preferably after keeping the location a secret as long as possible), relatively secure in the knowledge that not enough of us are going to turn up to show them meaningful resistance. With a lot more of us there today we could obviously have broken through the police kettle and cut the fash off before their football thug friends were able to join them.

So what’s the solution now? As someone who hasn’t really been involved in any organisation work up to now I can’t really answer that sufficiently. But we need to obviously keep on working on intelligence and perhaps on building up a secure mailing list who we can contact if there’s any details we don’t want made available on facebook. We should also, I feel, try not to leave anti-fascist work until only when the SDL have an event planned. To keep up the momentum I think it would perhaps now be good for us to have anti-fascist meetings and discussions more often in order to stay up to date with what’s going on. Ideally we could have a fairly large network of committed anti-fascists who can be contacted quickly through various means, not just facebook. If we’re only going to find out at the last minute then we can’t rely on local anti-fascist groups to emerge and coordinate any form of action in time. As things stand most will likely have to come from Glasgow and Edinburgh where SAFA has a reasonable presence.

I’m sure other people will also have some good ideas and suggestions about where to go now. We can all agree though that fascists on the streets, in a town of any size, is not something we want to see here in Scotland. You only have to look to England and the massive threat posed by the EDL to see what happens when fascists consistently feel comfortable spreading their poison in public. It’s not too late here in Scotland and we can still defeat the scum with a bit of effort. Let Stirling be the last time they’re allowed to show their faces on our streets.

EDIT: Some of the information in this article would now appear to be inaccurate so I stand corrected. There were around equal numbers of fascists and anti-fascists present in Stirling with some of the more sensationalistic information we received being manufactured to create confusion.

No Pasaran! SSP at one of many anti-fascist demos.

 Over the past few months there has been a worrying growth in fascist activity in Aberdeen. The National Front have been distributing their racist propaganda to several secondary schools in Aberdeen in which they blame immigrants and Muslims for all of the country’s problems. As an anti-fascist I find this rather worrying as they are handing out filth to young pupils who are in a vulnerable position. Most secondary schools in Aberdeen are set for a huge overhaul as the cuts are impacting schools in Aberdeen deeply with the proposed move to cut the number of secondary schools in Aberdeen from 12 to 8. This has understandably upset pupils who are disillusioned with the current set of politicians running the country. The National Front has seen this as an opportunity to instill fascist ideologies into secondary school pupils while they can.

A couple of weeks ago the SSY were up in Aberdeen and handed out anti fascist leaflets at the train station with a great feedback. There is  broad agreement within the city that we have to oppose these fascists. The Aberdeen Anti Fascist Alliance   held a meeting recently. It was widely agreed that the people that the National Front are targeting have to be educated about fascism and why it is not acceptable. These events will be fun but will also have a strong anti fascist message.

Aberdeen shows what it thinks of fascism!

The rise in fascism is not the first time this has happened to Aberdeen. In the 1920′s the British Union of Fascists were based in Aberdeen however they were chased out of town many times. Never has history been more relevant to anti fascism. Aberdonians  and everyone in the UK should look at the great anti fascist movements in the early 20th century as inspiration. Aberdeen, like all Scottish Cities contributed to anti fascism in the 1920′s and there were many international brigadiers from Aberdeen who fought against the fascist uprising as the UK government stepped back and let a democratically elected government fall to fascism in Spain. Although the National Front do not pose the same threat we cannot under estimate them and we have got to oppose them at all times. More recently Aberdeen has shown that it doesn’t support fascism with the BNP’s disappointing election results and destroyed billboard.

Thanks to Liam Turbett for making the anti-fa leaflet for us!

Blonde hair and blue eyes brings a smile to her chops

Over the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of the youth wing of her Christian Democrat Union (CDU, kind of like the German Tories) party that multiculturalism had “failed, utterly failed” in Germany.

What this amounts to of course is a massive attack on the communities of immigrant descent in Germany, from the top of government.

“They live side by side with us. For a while we lied to ourselves that they won’t stay and they’ll go away one day. But that’s not the reality. To say we are happy about living side by side is wrong.”

Check out how much venom she injects into her voice for taking on “them”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04AHUU_wxVg

After the Second World War, the rapidly expanding economy of capitalist Germany needed workers to take part in the massive reconstruction effort. Over the following decades Germany brought thousands of “guest workers” from poorer countries to their south and east (mainly Turkey, but also later many people from the former Yugoslavia). For a long time, they were treated as just that: guests, not full members of society.

It was extremely hard for immigrants to get citizenship: immigration laws demanded that you have a German parent, irrespective of where you were born. This effectively meant that if you were the child of an immigrant who was born and had lived your whole life in Germany, you were still not regarded as a German citizen. In other words, a system that was systematically biased against people living in Germany but not of a “German” background.

Turkish workers made their home in Germany, and did the dirty work of rebuilding it

After years of doing hard work for crap wages rebuilding Germany, many immigrants who had lived in Germany for decades, and who had families with them, didn’t see why they should be expected to just uproot and go to a country which wouldn’t be the home of their children.

These communities, predominantly originally from Muslim countries, face massive institutionalised racism. They are are largely restricted to ghetto areas of German cities, earn less wages and face regular racist attacks.

Throughout Europe we’ve seen the rise of new right wing movements that are attempting too use the fear of a phantom Muslim “enemy” that’s been created over the last decade because of the ‘War on Terror’, i.e. to justify imperialist attacks and occupation of Muslim countries. As capitalism globally has moved into a massive period of crisis, this has been exploited to make Muslim people living in Europe a scapegoat for the failings of the system.

There’s the BNP, UKIP and EDL in the UK, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and the actions of the governments themselves in Italy and France that have all been part of this trend. Now the fact that the head of the German government has joined this racist crusade shows just how much strength racism has in German society.

Racism, obviously, has a very specific history in Germany as a result of the Nazis. As a result of the history of aggressive German imperialism and violent racism, many people in Germany are very worried about the return of racist ideology to German life. It also makes people uneasy to see how since reunification Germany has returned to being a military power that takes part in imperialist wars, in Yugoslavia and now in Afghanistan.

There are of course the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), who openly call for a return to the fascist past. They have met with some electoral success, have thousands of members and are a major part of the reason Germany is experiencing a record level of racist violence. Then there’s the right wing racist PRO Deutschland party, who hand out stickers with a mosque crossed out.

Getting funny looks: Horst Seehofer

But just like here, it would be a mistake to think that racism, specifically scapegoating Muslims, is confined to those who are explicitly far right. So called “mainstream” politicians are just as responsible for the fact that opinion polls find widespread support for racist ideas.

There’s Horst Seehofer, who’s the Minister President of the German region of Bavaria, where Merkel’s CDU party doesn’t stand, with German Tories being represented instead by the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s sister party. Earlier this year, he called for any further immigration from Muslim countries while Germans “deal with those already here” by “getting tougher on those who refuse to integrate.” Seehofer was quick to welcome the new hardline of his political ally Merkel at the weekend.

But both Merkel and Seehofer are both largely responding to an agenda that’s been set by Thilo Sarrazin, a sharp suited former politician for the Social Democrats (the SPD, the German equivalent of the Labour Party) with a name like a Bond villain.

Strike a racist pose: Massive banker Thilo Sarrazin

As finance minister for Berlin, where he implemented heavy cuts to public services, and became notorious for his comments disparaging the poor. He once claimed that the unemployed should be happy with the benefits they get or less, arguing “sauerkraut and sausage make a good inexpensive dinner” and that in winter people should save on heating by just “wearing a sweater.” He also attacked women who depended on benefits to support their families, saying:

“How can I arrange things so that only those people get children who can manage with them.  Some women get two, three, or more children even though they lack the wherewithal or the personal characteristics to see to their education.  The social system must be altered so people are not able to improve their standard of living simply by having children, as is the case today.”

When he was booted out of being Scrooge in chief of Berlin, he took up another lucrative post at the Federal Bank of Germany. Just before this he took to attacking Muslims as well, saying:

“I don’t have to recognize anyone who lives off this state, but rejects this state, and who doesn’t properly care for the education of his children while constantly producing more little girls to wear headscarves.”

While working as a central wanker, Sarrazin stepped this rhetoric up, claiming “the Turks are conquering Germany. . .with a higher birthrate”, and that: “Since Arab boys can’t make it with their own girls they use easier to get lower class German girls who they despise for being so easy to make out with.”

This was all leading to the release of his bestselling book ‘Germany Does Away with Itself’. The arguments in it are a chilling echo of the way that the Nazis once saw German society: he claims that Muslim children are genetically not as intelligent as white German ones, and that it’s urgent that white parents have more children. He claims that Germany is about to be “overwhelmed” over the next couple of decades.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYgcaTCBXLw

As pointed out in the video above, Sarrazin’s arguments try to use a pseudo-science fake version of genetics to justify racist, Nazi arguments about supposedly inherent characteristics of different groups which have been conclusively proven to be a lie time and again.

But, unsurprisingly, the right wing German press welcomed his book, and some papers, such as Bild, the German equivalent of The Sun, reprinted large extracts, helping make Sarrazin front page news and his book a bestseller.

The Federal Bank did ask him to leave his post finally last month because of what a controversial figure he had become, but the supposedly ‘left wing’ SPD have yet to kick him out of the party. A former SPD Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, expressed his support for his extreme views, saying: “If he had expressed himself a little less crudely I could have agreed with much of what he said.” He found himself in the company of the neo-Nazis in finding an echo of his own ideas in those of Sarrazin.

The success of Sarrazin’s message has helped push politics towards a racist position, as reflected now in the fact that Merkel has felt the need to jump on the Muslim-bashing bandwagon. This is despite the fact that some of her own allies in big business have actually been calling for more immigration, saying that Germany doesn’t have enough workers. However, if increased racism means that immigrants aren’t in a position to fight for their rights from employers, it will suit them down to the ground as well.

The point of all this is to show that there is a desperate need for an anti-racist and anti-fascist movement that can see that it’s not just the far right defined in a narrow sense that are bringing racist and fascist ideas into the heart of European politics. The current wave of scapegoating and attacking Muslims across the whole EU is as much driven by the right wing press and mainstream politicians who may even pretend to be left wing.

Just like New Labour did in government in the UK, many in the SPD have seen the way to undercut rising support for the far right as to steal their ideas and rhetoric and attack immigrants, instead of recognising these ideas as a serious threat to everyone in society to be confronted head on as soon as they rear their head. The people willing to confront this new racism must be prepared to take on whoever perpetuates it.

Fortunately there are reasons to be optimistic. Germany over the past year has seen mass anti-fascist mobilisations that put even our impressive efforts to shame, with over 10,000 anti fascists making a human chain to stop Nazis marching on the streets of Dresden in February for example.

Thousands of anti-fascists blockade the streets of Dresden

And the success of the German socialists in uniting in Die Linke (the Left Party) is another cause for hope. Die Linke members have been among the few politicians to come right out and condemn the views of Sarrazin. “It is unacceptable that a managing member of the Federal Bank spreads such poison which splits society,” said Sevim Dagdalen, a Left member of the German parliament, who is herself from an immigrant background.

The racist politicians claim that their concern is to ensure “integration”, and so propose cracking down on immigrants who have not yet learned German for example. But is it really surprising that after decades of being treated as “guests” (more like second class citizens) in their own homes, they don’t feel like they are a full part of German society?

The racists desire to see one vision of Germany, and a narrow cultural and ethnic definition of what it means to be German are dividing society, are encouraging violence against those who don’t feel part of or conform to their vision. It’s crucial that the left and anti fascists across Europe fight back against these politics, whoever puts them forward.

Bonus: Check out this idiot I found while googling for racism in Germany.

]]> http://ssy.org.uk/2010/10/angela-merkel-another-mainstream-politician-backs-racism/feed/ 12