But there is a time and a place for Alex Jones and David Icke, and that time is 3o’clock in the morning, pished, going on you tube – NOT inside movements for real, radical social change in the UK or anywhere else. This isn’t a call that everyone inside these movements must be 100% Marxists or Socialists. Far from it, we need to engage with people who are not already activists. It’s about recognising that the ideas promoted by the groups and individuals outlined in the beginning of this post aren’t just misguided and wrong – they’re actively dangerous to any real success over the economic misrule and capitalism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee1aTPEoaeA

David Icke knows Boyzone will destroy the lizard people

The groups and individuals are quite diverse, ranging from a US Democratic President in the 1800′s, a Republican Congressman standing for President and a former Grandstand presenter who thinks he is Jesus and that the world is run by lizards. What could possibly unite such a disparate group? The answer is that they are all people who have argued against the forces of the wealthy and powerful in society – generally the banks and financial institutions. So how are they any different from socialists?

The difference lies in their analysis of what problems the bankers cause, what should replace them and how they go about trying to enact that change. Their analysis ranges from completely insane to explicitly racist, and their solutions from ineffective to backwards and reactionary. The base of their analysis is that the world economic crisis is a problem inflicted by specific forms of banking (such as fractional reserve banking) and financial management, and that ultimately it is bankers and not capitalism and class society that is to blame.

These individuals obviously don’t agree on everything – Ron Paul’s not mentioned Lizard control over the Royal Family in the GOP debates, at least not yet – but what they basically agree on runs something like this; Banks developed their wealth and power at the expense of hardworking people (typically small businesses and artisans). They now use this wealth and power to enslave governments and control culture, media, politics, and social attitudes in a range of countries, as well as initiating wars for their own benefit. Often the phrase “International Bankers” is used interchangeably with Jews, or “Zionists”, alleging that the world is in the thrall of a gigantic Jewish-Banker conspiracy.

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

Alex Jones rocks out against the globalists

These theories have been able to make some headway on the left because there is a grain of truth in what they say about bankers, if not Jews. Bankers have historically used their economic power to influence society, and have a long history of exploitation of both the developing world and the working class in the West. The problem is that banks are just one part of a system of exploitation called capitalism. In capitalism the work people do to produce commodities is sold on at a profit to the employer. These employers are not just bankers, but range from retailers, oil companies, mines, factories, restaurants and so on. Banks are a fundamental part of that system, as the profit is invested in banks which then use this money to make more money, to invest in other industries and to lend so people can continue to buy products without having to raise wages.

This is the real cause of the economic crisis, and properly identifies what role the bankers played. In the past, if people wanted to buy stuff – like cars, clothes or houses – they either had to save up for it, or get a modest loan that was based on their ability to repay it. This meant working class people had to be paid enough so they could buy the things capitalism produced – whether it was trainers or tellies. Karl Marx identified the problem with this a hundred years ago – the companies which want to sell the working class trainers at £50 a pop are the same companies who want to pay them 10p an hour. Recessions come and go in capitalism because inevitably companies end up producing goods at the same time they try to keep wages down, so the working class cannot buy their goods and the companies end up going bankrupt.

For the past 30 years capitalism thought it had a way out of this problem – make it easier for working class people to borrow lots of money, so that way they can still buy the products without having to increase wages. This kept capitalism booming, even though for the past 30 years wages in the USA have been stagnating. It also meant as well as having money to pay for consumer goods, working class people now had to pay money to banks in interest. This is what the banks have done – lending billions of the profits working people made, so that the same people would keep buying and capitalism would stay afloat. This was not just a system endorsed by the banks, it was in the interests of  capitalism as system – every corporation, company, and business now had a market of indebted workers to sell to, and could continue to depress the wages of their workers safe in the knowledge that they could borrow money to buy their products.

Sensible and accurate version of why capitalism and the banks have collapsed

Eventually this illusion, that people could continue to afford things that were way beyond the wages they earned, came to a dramatic end with the economic crisis in 2008. This crisis began with the collapse of the housing bubble in the USA – where banks like Freddie Mae had offered loans to people with poor credit ratings, so they could own their own houses and keep capitalism afloat. When it became clear that the Emperor had no clothes, and the housing repayments couldn’t be made, banks in the western world collapsed requiring the bailouts we’ve all heard about.  The banks loaned money they couldn’t repay – using a system called fractional reserve banking – where they only had a fraction of the deposits people made to the banks in their accounts, while the rest was loaned out. In order to stop people losing billions of their savings, governments stepped in to guarantee these funds.

So there’s plenty of very real criticism to be made of the banks – the fact they recklessly lent to boost their own profits, and when the shit hit the fan instead of taxing the super-rich to plug the gap, they were bailed out with public money. What should have been done is something similar to what Greg Philo and Glasgow Uni Media Group have argued for – a one off 10% wealth tax on the richest (who made their money predominantly through the financial bubble) to pay for the mess they caused.

Unfortunately this is not what Alex Jones, Ron Paul et al call for. They won’t argue for wealth redistribution, because by their own admission they aren’t Socialists – they are paleo-conservative Republicans. They may be Republicans who oppose the War on Terror, the developing attack on civil liberties in the USA or ongoing funding to Israel, but they all absolutely believe in capitalism – and that the problem with the economic crash of 2008 is not the free market, but bizarrely, “socialism”. Jones says big corporations and big government are the same, in contradiction to everything that the right-wing in the USA and Europe actually rolled back. People like Jones, Ron Paul, Icke etc draw many of their ideas from a very reactionary period of US political history during the 1800′s in which the United States of America was half-feudal and half-industrial – or as Abraham Lincoln described it “half slave and half free”.

The United States was divided in two – the North, in which slavery was abolished and an industrial revolution was starting, and the South where the economy was based on slavery, and was backwards and feudal. In this topsy turvy time it was the Democrat Party which was racist and pro-slavery, and it was the Republican Party that wanted to ultimately abolish the institution of slavery. At that time the Republican Party correctly saw that slavery would keep the United States trapped in a backward, medieval economy. The profits made by keeping slavery going would make an industrial revolution impossible. Slavery stopped the development of a paid working class, that is necessary to consume the products of industrialisation.  The South was at that time a massive producer of cotton on the backs of slave labour, and was in practice a colony of European powers who wanted to buy cotton for use in their Industrial Revolution.

US Civil War

There were many honest Republicans at that time who found slavery morally abhorrent, but the alterior motivation for Republican opposition to slavery was their backing from the new American capitalist class. This class wanted the abolition of slavery so they could compete against the Southern economy, and so white Southern workers could be paid to do the jobs of the slaves. In short they wanted to develop the United States into a modern capitalist country like Britain or France, knowing that the untapped resources of the North American continent would make them a superpower.

The Democrats position was based on “states rights” – which meant defending the rights of states to uphold slavery. Their arguments were based on racist opposition to the emancipation of slaves, and the desire to keep large parts of the USA in a feudal state. As part of this outlook, many Democrats had a crude, populist opposition to capitalism. They opposed banks and the expansion of big business, believing it would enslave white Americans. Instead they promoted a vision of  the USA as a continent where all whites would be able to own their own farms and businesses as independent artisans, farmers, shop keepers and craftsmen – with slaves to assist them.

Democrats were hostile to the industrial revolution and the development of modern capitalism because they saw (correctly) that capitalism would eliminate this parochial economic system – replacing farmers with agrobusiness, shopowners with department stores, gold whittlers with mines etc. This process was no picnic. Capitalism was ruthless in destroying feudal opposition to it’s development, and the working conditions – most notoriously those of Victorian Britain – are infamous for their depravity.

BUT… capitalism was a massive improvement on what had preceded it, which was the rule of Kings and Queens, and an economy run along the whims of unelected noblemen. Capitalism produced economic growth on a scale unheard of in human history – the development of modern industry, the mass production of consumer goods, the move from the country to the city, and most importantly, the rise of the working class. This is the most important part for socialists as now the group of people who produced clothes, dug the mines, ran the railways etc could be organised, and could eventually become the rulers of a new society – a socialist one.

One Democrat who owned slaves at  this time, President Andrew Jackson, became infamous for his opposition to any central bank for the USA using his veto power to overrule it. Jackson today is heralded by many anti-banking Occupy activists for this stance. But Jacksons opposition to banking was not based on any socialist or even progressive desire for the working class to rule society – it was about defending small businesses and the institution of slavery against this massively powerful and dynamic economic system, that threatened to overpower all religious, nationalist and feudal opposition to it

President Andrew Jackson

Writing at the time Karl Marx identified these kind of “anti-capitalists” as feudal socialists,

“In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history”

Put simply, while many anti-banking forces in the 1800′s had legitimate points about the unaccountability of these financial institutions, their opposition fundamentally came from a desire to maintain an unfair, feudal and backward society. At that time Marx identified Capitalism as a brutal, but progressive force – one of the reasons why he wrote a letter of congratulations to Lincoln during the US Civil War for crushing feudalism and the slave economy of the South.

This radical transformation of society, from feudalism to capitalism terrified and alarmed many people in Europe and the USA. These societies existed during a time when the theories of race were commonly accepted and discussed as a science – to justify both slavery and the imperial exploitation of Africa and other colonies. As well as racist prejudice one other common bigotry was anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews. As capitalism developed, producing transnational, global insitutions many racists alarmed at this transformation identified the enemy behind it – that of the Jew. As part of anti-semitic prejudice throughout Europe, Jews were forced into jobs in the financial sector that Christians deemed immoral – like banking. So when the industrial revolution was financed by and empowered banks with Jewish owners anti-semites saw a conspiracy by the Jewish race to enslave the white Christian race.

So much wrong in just one picture

The most notorious subject of these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was the Rothschild Family. The Rothschilds were an extremely wealthy and powerful banking family during the 1800′s, who exercised massive influence over the developing capitalist economies of Europe and North America. This combination of power and Judaism made them the frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. As a major banking institution there’s no question the Rothschild’s would have been involved in underhand and conspiratorial plans to influence governments and secure their markets – but the accusations labelled at the Rothschilds go way beyond criticism of bankers influence, and into conspiracy nonsense about world Jewish plots to enslave the world. For example, the Rothschilds were accused of both funding American Capitalism and Russian Bolsheviks, a ridiculous allegation that had it’s base in anti-socialist racist sentiment. Many anti-Semites were disturbed at the challenge global capitalism posed to nation states sovereignty and could not understand the power of the economic system they faced, so instead chose to blame it on conspiratorial groups.

These ideas – anti-banking sentiment of small business Democrats, and anti-semitic opposition to the Rothschilds – unfortunately haven’t remained in the past. They continue to be advocated by people like Zeitgeist, Alex Jones and David Icke. This piece by Norfolk Community Action Group criticizes the influence these forces have in the occupy movement,

“The populist narrative is also an integral part of the political views of conspiracy theorists, far right activists, and anti-Semites. For anti-Semites, the elites are the Jews; for David Icke, the elites are the reptilians; for nationalists, they are members of minority ethnic, racial, or religious groups; for others, they are the “globalists,” the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Federal Reserve, etc. All of these various conspiracy theories also tend to blend in and borrow from each other. Additionally, the focus on “Wall Street” also has specific appeal to those who see the elite as represented by finance capital, a particular obsession of the anti-Semites, Larouchites, followers of David Icke, etc. “The Rothschilds” are the favorite stand-in codeword of choice to refer to the supposed Jewish control of the banking system.”

The “Rothschild Zionists” feature in both Alex Jones and Icke’s material – which blame a 200 year old banking institution for conspiratorial involvement in global capitalism. The reality is that the Rothschilds influence declined by the early 1900s – blaming them for the financial crisis is like blaming the British East India company for the ongoing exploitation of Asia. The Rothschilds have been surpassed and overtaken by new financial institutions.

So why do they continue to be prevalent in conspiracy theories related to banking? Because in the USA, when people are discontent and angry at the banks instead of looking to socialism – which has historically been weak in the USA – they go back to the most prominent anti-banking ideas and figures, which unfortunately are anti-semitic. Likewise many bankers are identified as “Rothschild Zionists” by Icke who clearly have no familial connection to the Rothschild family at all – like David Miliband and DSK. But it’s ok, as Icke explains:

“I should also stress that when I say ‘Rothschild’, I don’t only mean those called ‘Rothschild’, nor even all of the people who are known by that name. There are many in the Rothschild family and its offshoots who have no idea what the hierarchy is doing and there are many ‘Rothschilds’ who don’t carry the name itself.

When I say ‘Rothschild’, I am referring to the Rothschild bloodline because, as I have detailed in my books, they have long had breeding programmes that produce offspring that are brought up under other names.”

This is effectively an excuse to link all Jewish people in areas of power together, based on racist ideas of “bloodlines”, and using the code “Zionist” instead of what people really mean, which is Jew. Whatever crimes have been committed in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel against the Palestinians, the idea a country of five million Israelis control international finance is absurd and only makes sense if you believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Last year SSY wrote about how an internet documentary called Zeitgeist played upon many of these conspiracy theories around finance, with reference to the banks. As well as the Zeitgeist movement another video has been doing the rounds – this one was posted by Occupy Glasgow:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJVJ5_4qNSo

The documentary is nowhere near as anti-Semitic as Icke’s rants. But it does have the same disturbing focus on the Rothschilds – along with lizardesque imagery for bankers – and puts slaveowner and Native American killer President Jackson in a good light. It makes its focus the inequities of the banking system – many of its criticisms have a point, such as the fact that the US Federal Reserve isn’t actually publically owned, but controlled by unaccountable and unelected bankers who have the power to control the US currency. However all of it stems from the same Jacksonian fear of big business and banking and not capitalism itself. Taking a look at its website – called “The American Dream” – it identifies the “good guys” as Alex Jones, The Cato Institute, The Drudge Report and other right-wing sites. They also link to Ron Paul, a Libertarian Republican who thinks someone dying from lack of medical care is choosing ‘freedom’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BXTKrbGbZs

The 99% can fuck off and die if they don’t have health insurance

Elsewhere on its website it calls for less government intervention in medicare, social security and federal spending. In short, a demand that the Government’s debt should be cut so we aren’t slaves to evil bankers – regardless of the massive job cuts entailed. They also ask you to be more like your grandfather, and not get into debt – ignoring that consumer debt would not be as  massive if peoples wages went up at the same rate as profits in the USA.  There’s also consideration to reintroduce the gold standard – that is link the value of your currency to the amount of gold you have. It’s very popular amongst the headbanger right, particularly with Glenn Beck fans, who like the idea as if you have gold the bankers can’t control you with their easily printed “fiat” money. But why would you want to organise a society’s currency on the value of a base metal, and have it fluctuate depending on mining rates? And why is it people who are demanding a rush to the gold standard are quite happy to sell you lots of precious gold for your useless fiat money?

The new Shitegeist

Jones, Ron Paul and the libertarian US right don’t call for the debt to be paid by taxing the rich, or for the economy to be restructured on need. This is because they’ve picked anti banking sentiment from a time when small scale traders were trying to survive against the onslaught of capitalism – a hopeless and reactionary struggle. Trying to solve the world economic crisis by trying to resurrect an economic system from 200 years ago is doomed to failure – it couldn’t withstand the force of capitalism then, in its progressive phase and it can’t stand against it now even if it’s clearly dying. What’s neccessary is a movement which organises not in the interests of small businesses vs banks, but workers and the poor vs all strands of capitalism. Only then will the interests of the 99% genuinely be enforced.

Colonel Gaddafi’s death comes as a massive relief to the Libyan rebel National Transitional Council. While it was impossible Gaddafi would ever be able to rule Libya again his continued survival could have provided inspiration and encouragement to Libyan’s opposed to the new council. Only a few days ago a gun battle erupted in Tripoli between the NTC and Gaddafi loyalists. And despite Tripoli falling months ago, Sirte and Bani Walid managed to hold out until today, against both the NTC and NATO bombardment. This suggests Gaddafi has – or at least had – a section of the population still willing to fight for him even when his rule was clearly finished. Neutralising that potential insurgency is probably the top priority of the NTC, especially given that the rebel council itself is not homogeneous and has former Gaddafi ministers and Islamists sitting around the same table.

For NATO the bombing campaign of Libya has been a success – especially when you consider the long weeks of apparent stalemate, and the fact that the bombing campaign was the most unpopular war fought by the United States in recent memory. The push for NATO involvement in Libya was led by the UK and France, who are showing that despite planned defence cuts, they can still wield a big stick to maintain their sphere of influence in North Africa – and at a cost of £1 Billion, can still find the money to do it in a time of austerity. The reality is that despite the language of human rights and democracy, NATO’s involvement in Libya has been motivated by far less noble and more complex factors.

The root cause of NATO intervention in Libya lies with the rebellion itself in early 2011. Following on from the wave of revolution that toppled Ben Ali in Tunisia, and Mubarak and Egypt Gaddafi’s regime was the next to face a popular uprising. This began in the eastern city of Benghazi – a stronghold of the opposition to the Colonel, and a Libya’s second largest city – where Libyan’s took to the streets to protest the pre-emptive arrests of human rights campaigners. What happened next is disputed – Gaddafi’s loyalists claim the rebels stormed the barracks and staged an armed uprising without provocation, while the protesters claim they were fired upon by soldiers first. This uprising therefore started in quite a different way from that of Tunisia or Egypt – instead of demonstrators occupying a square and demanding the resignation of a despot, this was more an armed insurrection with attacks on barracks and police stations to secure guns in cities and towns across the country.

The Libyan uprising took this form because the regime in the country is very different from that of Tunisia or Egypt. In Tunisia and Egypt the two strongmen dictators, Ben Ali and Mubarak, were dependent on their power from many other forces in their societies – that of the army, the business class, western imperialism etc. Ben Ali and Mubarak were the public faces of the regimes – but they were disposable once they became a liability to those forces. Hence why the Egyptian military was unwilling to risk it’s stake in Egyptian society (as a massive business empire) by shooting demonstrators in a Tienanmen Square-style massacre of the demonstrators to keep Mubarak in power. In these countries when the protest movement became unstoppable, the forces in control of Egyptian and Tunisian society had a quiet word with the strongmen leaders and told them to resign – so that the business interests of those countries could be preserved, and stability for western imperialism be consolidated.

Libya – or to give it it’s proper title under Gaddafi, “The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” – was a bit different from those countries as the official name might suggest. If you’ve not heard of the word “Jamahiriya” before it might be because it is a word Colonel Gaddafi made up that means “state of the masses”. Obviously what a country calls itself doesn’t reveal everything about how it is run – but the fact that the official name of the country was invented by Gaddafi himself suggests he had a much bigger role to play in that regime than Mubarak or Ben Ali did. You might also have noticed the different flags the rebels and Gaddafi supporters have used – the rebels use the Libyan independence flag, flown under the monarchy which is red, green and black with a crescent moon, while Gaddafi’s supporters use the official Libyan Jamahiriya flag, which is solid green. The flag was picked by Gaddafi to tie in with his book of mad things he wrote – “The Green Book”.

So when you have a society that’s official organs and symbols are named around the eccentricities of it’s mad ruler, you see how difficult it could be in trying to remove him peacefully. Gaddafi intentionally kept different parts of Libyan society – most importantly the military – weak so that they could not be used to remove him in a coup, or force him to stand down the way the Egyptian army did with Mubarak when his time was up. Instead, Gaddafi was able to use armed forces loyal to himself and the Libyan “Jamahiriya” he created to suppress the rebellion with lethal force.

Gaddafi was also able to stay in power thanks to an additional factor that Mubarak and Ben Ali did not have – a section of support amongst the population. Gaddafi took power in Libya in a bloodless military coup in 1969, with the same program as other Arab nationalist movements like Nasser in Egypt. Under Gaddafi’s rule the oil was nationalised and used to develop the country’s infrastructure, building roads, schools, hospitals – even a massive irrigation project called the Great Man-Made River – which transformed Libya from the poorest country in the world to the richest country in Africa, with a Human Development Index comparable to that of Eastern Europe and Portugal. Gaddafi’s success in these social projects shouldn’t be used to whitewash his regime as a socialist paradise – the unemployment rate in Libya in 2009 was over 20%, and hundreds of thousands still lived in poverty. But the fact that Libya did develop infrastructure and social programs better than most of Africa under Gaddafi allowed him to secure a base for his regime, particularly in the western part of Libya where the rebellion was weaker.

Gaddafi was able to pursue these social policies because despite being no socialist, he took a path independent of western capitalism for most of his reign, able to use oil funds that would have been privatised in other western puppet states to develop the country. While Gaddafi reached an accommodation with the West since dismantling his WMD program and handing over the alleged Lockerbie bomber – notably culimnating in getting off with Tony Blair in a tent in the desert – he still maintained policies independent of western imperialism. Jack Ferguson, formerly an SSY columnist here before he got too old outlines a few of these policies in his excellent blog post here.

Gaddafi maintained an independent state-controlled banking system, with the power to issue it’s own money – different from the other neo-colonies in Africa whose currencies are guaranteed by western powers like France. This meant that the Libyan economy – unlike so many other African countries – did not have massive levels of debt to western powers. As Libya was a country independent of western financial control, it was able to use it’s economic power to assist African development in the construction of telecommunication satellites and even more dangerously for western banks, propose an African currency guaranteed with Libya’s gold reserves. The use of a currency not in hoc to the western powers would undermine the financial enslavement of Africa by the European powers. The last person to try something similar was Saddam Hussein, who started selling oil in Euros instead of dollars before he was toppled by the United States. One of the first thing the rebels did was set up a new central bank, which raises questions about what kind of economic program they want to install in Libya now Gaddafi has been toppled.

Gaddafi also repeatedly used racist attitudes in Europe regarding immigration to his favour, warning western leaders that Europe would “turn black” unless he received the aid he demanded. Gaddafi played a cynical game with the lives of thousands of immigrants to Europe, selectively detaining them or letting them emigrate to Europe depending on what suited his interests. Gaddafi has also historically had a lot of influence in Africa – one of the reasons why the African Union vociferously opposed NATO’s program of regime change in Libya. The nationalized oil wealth has been used in a combination of military assistance and aid packages to bolster the African regimes the Colonel supported.

Libya's influence throughout Africa.

All of these policies – independent currency for Africa, state control of banks, refusal to play ball on immigration, regional power status in the African continent – made working with Gaddafi a grudging necessity for western powers. Despite their rapprochement with him, Gaddafi was never a western puppet in the same way Mubarak or Ben Ali was. This doesn’t make Gaddafi a hero – in fact his response to protests was more brutal than Mubarak or Ali, and his refusal to stand down has brought NATO bombing and civil war to his country – but it does explain why the West intervened in Libya but will not intervene in a variety of other African conflicts or assist other pro-democracy movements in the Arab world. Gaddafi was bombed by NATO because he pursued a path independent of the west to some degree, and because he refused to step down when his time was up. His refusal to resign like Mubarak made Libya an unstable country, unacceptable to the European countries who purchase Libyan oil.

Gaddafi’s already paid the personal price for his rule – his firing on demonstrators, repression of students, prison massacres – with grisly photos of his corpse circulating the internet. But there’s a potentially darker side to the fall of Sirte than just the death of this despot, that may go unreported – the fate of thousands of Black Libyan African men. In the opening days of the uprising in Benghazi there was footage circulated, alongside rumours, that Gaddafi was using foreign African mercenaries to crush the protesters. Whatever Gaddafi did during the opening days of the uprising, human rights organisations have investigated the claim of mercenaries and can find no evidence to support it. Unfortunately these rumours were circulated by tv stations like Al Jazeera and now as the rebels have taken control of most of Libya, Black Libyans are effectively being lynched by racist forces within the uprising.

The siege on the city of Misurata was widely reported, with a spotlight on Gaddafi’s forces shelling the civilian population. Whats not been reported as widely is the fate of a neighbouring town – Tawergha, which was accused by the rebels of being pro-Gaddafi and assisting the siege. When the siege of Misrata was lifted, the rebels advanced on Tawergha and to all intents and purposes cleansed it. As one rebel commander said “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata”. A city of 10,000 Black Africans has effectively been ethnically cleansed, with racist graffiti declaring the rebels are “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin” being daubed across the city. The rebels themselves say the Tawergha will return to their city “over their dead bodies”. Many of these refugees fled to Sirte, a city that may face a similar fate as Tawergha.

The ghost town of Tawergha, ethnically cleansed by the rebels.

This is not the only human rights abuse the rebels have committed. As the western media entered Tripoli after the fall of Gaddafi, they found corpses with their hands bound behind their back and bullets in their heads in Gaddafi’s Bab Al Azziya compound. Naturally the suspicion fell on a massacre committed by Gaddafi. But many of these victims were Black Africans with foreign passports – suggesting they were migrant workers who had been summarily executed by the rebels. These crimes against Black Libyans have been committed across the country as the Libyan civil war became a war not just between the East and West, but between African and Arab.

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

Racist lynching of Black Africans conducted by the rebels in Libya

Not all rebels are motivated by racism – the Libyan Youth Movement for example has been key in supporting the uprising and is inspired by the youth movements in the wider Arab world. Unfortunately, many of those opposing Gaddafi are not so clean cut. The chairman of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil was Colonel Gaddafi’s former Justice Minister. Jalil was happy to act as one of Gaddafi’s lackeys when it suited him – including the torture and rigged trial of Bulgarian nurses accused of giving Libyans HIV. Alongside Jibril are many other former diplomatic and military staff who happily served under Gaddafi. The highest ranking defector was Abdel Fattah Younis, a Major General in the Libyan army. Despite being described as a defector, privately Younis was captured by the rebels when he tried to crush the uprising in Benghazi. Unsurprisingly many of the rebels were not to keen on receiving military commands from someone who was so pivotal in Gaddafi’s regime – particularly those who fought a long guerilla war against him.

Younis didn’t escape the attention of these people for long – he was killed after being arrested under mysterious circumstances, which the NTC has not clarified. Gaddafi’s long maintained that the forces fighting him are Al Qaeda – an accusation that’s ridiculous, as this blog has covered that Al Qaeda as an organisation is a fantasy. But there is no doubt that many leading figures in the rebellion, if not Al Qaeda, are certainly Islamist. One such figure is Abdelhakim Belhadj a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Belhaj is commander of the rebel forces in Tripoli and a former victim of CIA rendition. This is not surprising given that the east of Libya – like Benghazi and Darnah – have proportionately sent more Arabs to fight in Jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other part of the Arab world. Alongside these former regime loyalists, ethnic cleansers and Islamist fundamentalists are CIA backed exile groups like the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.

Rebels lynch Black Africans in Libya

The uprising in Libya was not a CIA/Al Qaeda plot to remove an anti-imperialist, before anyone suggests that – it was a genuine popular social movement, taking it’s roots in the poorest cities and towns in Libya, and led by young revolutionaries inspired by the toppling of Arab dictators (that Gaddafi had supported). Who will come out on top is by no means certain. But what is certain is that NATO involvement means that the West now has a massive sway over Libya’s revolution, that they clearly do not have in Egypt or Tunisia, and they are already trying to put their own people in charge. Gaddafi might be dead, but as Iraq shows there is absolutely no guarantee that things will get better when a despot is removed. In fact, they can always get much, much worse.

Don't know if trolling or just stupid

Now a Tory councillor, Bob Frost has fallen victim to the dangers of social networking, with his racist views exposed in another case of the over 40s not understanding how the internet works. Frost – a 56 year old who is a “right wing libertarian” made reference to the looters being  “jungle bunnies” on his facebook. Oh dear. In most cases of public exposure of racist views the individuals concerned put their hands up and apologize, refuse to comment and hope it blows over, or resign in disgrace. There are exceptions to these rules however and Bob Frost’s response has to attract attention for sheer, out and out olympic class fantastical bullshit.

As Bob explains, he was “referring to the urban jungle”, and was originally going to call the rioters animals but picked bunny instead as people might be offended by him “calling fellow humans this so I chose something I thought was innocent and also cuddly.” Later on he received a phone call accusing him of racism, at which point he promptly checked his dictionary which gave him the shocking news that  ”it would appear that the term jungle bunnies is pejorative and is a racist slur relating to African-Americans”.

So you see Bob is just a man who has tried to be too politically correct, but in his efforts to placate the EUSSR Harriet Harperson feminazis has gone through the anti-racist time space continuum and ended up as a bigot due to no fault of his own.

Seriously though Bob, this must rank as the biggest pile of bullshit since Baptist Minister George Rekers claimed he took a male prostitute with him on holiday to carry his bags for him. We would be very interested in hearing Bob’s other crazy excuses in life – “Where have all the biscuits gone Bob? Had to eat them all for a Charity Special of Ant and Dec, you just missed them”, “Bob it’s your round mate? No, you bought a pint for my identical twin Bob Tsorf” or “Bob have you got that fiver I leant you last week? Well I would, but with today’s currency fluctuations I’d need to check what it’d be worth the now”.

We are sure with such a fantastic flair for combining casual racism with an ability to engage in extravagant lying and bullshitting Bob will be back in his old job soon enough, with a Tory cabinet post waiting in the wings for him.

All conflict dies in the brotherhood of flags

After last weeks multiple days of consecutive rioting, there’s a chance now for some calm, measured discussion on the upheaval that saw the capital and several English cities burn, high streets looted and alleged gangster Mark Duggan shot dead – with three others killed defending their property. The key word being “chance”, the same way there’s a chance you’ll win the lottery or Michael Bay will decide to stop making movies – what’s predictably actually happened is talking heads, politicians and newspaper editors have demanded martial law/the death penalty/the return of Maggie Thatcher/Saddam Hussein to crush the thousands of young people who live in the shadows among us waiting to strike again like a Tottenham based Vietcong.

One Newspaper has demanded the return of national service, safe in the knowledge that teaching thousands of young rioters basic firearms skills would have no possible down sides. Other newspaper polls have asked if Blackberry messager should be banned – following in the footsteps of other strongmen leaders who thought cracking down on people communicating would solve all their problems. If the responses on how to stop the riots again have been a bit daft it’s nothing compared to what some folk have blamed the riots on. David Cameron predictably said the riots were down to “sheer criminality” – but why didn’t all these criminals strike earlier if their only motive was theft? Looters obviously took advantage of clashes with the police to go out and get a new telly, but what was it they took advantage of? More on that later. Historian David Starkey has blamed the riots on rap music and black culture in general, saying white folk have become black, like Michael Jackson in reverse with less moonwalking and more firebombing. The BBC have obviously went straight for the insider voices into why urban black youth in London might riot, by asking the 66 year old Royal Family historian from Kendal his views. Continuing this new line of reporting, BBC Four have asked Tinchy Strider to front a 4 part series on the Tudors.

But the BBC didn’t just ask old bigots like Starkey why the riots started – they did ask a black man as well, fulfilling their broadcasting guidelines. Except when they interviewed Darcus Howe about why the riots started, and he gave a response that didn’t blame BBM/Jeremy Kyle/Welfare State/Ali G In Da House, but said people might be angry cos a man was shot dead and the police lied about the circumstances the interviewer didn’t like it too much and accused him of being a rioter. It’s all part of a concerted effort by the press and politicians to make people stop thinking, and instead accept that people rioted because they’re animals – literally “feral youth” as the BBC described them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o

So how did the riots start? On the 5th of August Mark Duggan was followed in a taxi cab by armed members of the Metropolitan Police. After what was claimed to be a shoot out, Duggan was shot dead by the Met. After his death his family and friends started a protest demanding answers about his killing. When a 16 year old girl approached police lines, in accordance with the Met’s community engagement agenda, she was beaten with batons. The combination of Duggan’s killing and police thuggery at the demo sparked an uprising from young people in different parts of London against the police. Outnumbered and caught by surprise, the police were forced to retreat and leave parts of the city in the hands of rioters. Like any spontaneous riot, unlike a planned insurrection once you force the police out people take advantage of having no authority at all. That can range from drinking in the street, to stealing new pairs of trainers, to mugging folk. And if you’ve grown up on the broo with no hope of employment – 54 people chase every job going in Hackney – getting all the consumer kicks you’re supposed to have is much easier to do when there’s no polis around.

More information then came out about Duggan’s death – that the bullet in a police radio was in fact “police issue”, and that the IPCC “may have misled” the public about how he was killed, stating there was no evidence he fired a weapon the police claimed they found at the scene. By the time this information came out the riots were in full swing and it probably would not have made much more of a difference – but it did confirm the unaired suspicions of thousands of black and asian youth in London, that the police had lied about the circumstances of Duggan’s death. The bullet in the police radio is especially fishy – while Met police have an itchy trigger finger, they’re just about clever enough to avoid shooting each other. Could the Met have killed Duggan illegally, and then put a bullet into a radio to make it look like he had responded? It’s a very cynical thought, almost like believing they’d be in cahoots with a major newspaper to cover up massive phone hacking scandals.

After three days of consecutive rioting – which had spread from London to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester, Salford – the combined weight of thousands of extra polis/nothing good left to loot brought the riots to an end. After a rather unpleasant shock, the legal system has responded with draconian sentences against rioters – one guy was sent to jail for 6 months, for stealing bottled water. Another woman was sentenced to 5 months for accepting goods that were stolen, not actually stealing them herself (better avoid that guy round the Barras with the new Planet of the Apes DVD eh?). Under any other circumstances these people would be let off with a caution for shoplifting, or at worst a fine. Now they stand to face jail time and a criminal record for petty crimes which did far less damage to society than what the legal system is doing to them and their families. Alongside these sentences for theft others have even got jail time for just for swearing at the police – and one guy’s even been sent down for four years just for a facebook event.

The reason there’s been such a massive crackdown is that the establishment is desperate to ensure a riot on the scale of last week never happens again. But they’re at a permanent disadvantage in that they don’t know why the riots started, and they don’t want to know why – that’s why the media has asked everyone from aging home counties historians to Tory cabinet ministers about why they think people are rioting – people they have about as much knowledge of or link to as they do with martians. Nowhere has the media tried the most simple and obvious way of determining why people rioted – actually asking the young folk in these cities. Where the BBC have done it, it’s been at best a soundbite – but it’s a soundbite that’s worth more than the endless hours of droning from talking heads. Two young girls from London spelled things out pretty clearly – folk rioted because they wanted to show the police and the rich they could do what they want. No one in the media or the political establishment is prepared to engage with that argument because they live in a bubble where they can’t fathom why people would be angry at the rich or the police – so they create lots of alternative explanations like blaming rap or BBM for rioting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6iLggKf1qM

actual reason folk rioted above

There’s plenty of poor areas in the UK that didn’t riot though – Alex Salmond has been at pains to remind the BBC these riots aren’t UK wide, there was no looting anywhere in Scotland despite the Scottish Polis’ efforts to invent some. And some of the poorest constituencies in the whole UK are in Scotland. So are riots just down to poverty? The answer is no, riots don’t just happen when communities are poor – they happen when they’re poor and are under attack, or have suffered an injustice. In Britain and the USA this injustice is generally police brutality motivated by racism – like the Rodney King case, the murder of a grandmother that sparked the 1981 riots and now the police killing of Mark Duggan. This – and not black or “gangster” culture – is why riots have taken off.

These riots are also happening at the biggest pillars of authority in British society are collapsing – the banks have stolen from everyone and are now getting paid off, with the wages of nurses, teachers, carers and the benefit claims of the disabled. Instead of being prosecuted bankers still receive bonuses larger than most young people will earn in their entire lifetime. The MP’s who are calling for strict prosecution of the rioters are thieves that make last weeks looters look like angels in comparison – Tory Minister Michael Gove, who lost his temper when Harriet Harman argued cuts were behind the riots, has stolen £7k from the public purse to do up his house. When he was caught out, he simply repaid the money. Will folk who say they want to riot on facebook get let off if they delete the page? No, they’ll get four years. The forces trying to crush the riots – the Met – have also been exposed as massively corrupt, with backhanders taken from News International in exchange for covering up phone hacking. This is as well as being able to kill with impunity – there’s been over 300 police deaths in custody, but not one single conviction.

That’s the problem with saying all that’s necessary to stop the riots is law and order – there’s virtually no law or order when it comes to regulating the abuses and crimes of those at the top of society. The corrupt political establishment don’t care about the communities that rioted, either because they think they’ll always vote for them no matter what (Labour) or because they’ll never vote for them (Tories). During the boom years of British capitalism, these poor areas of London were left to rot because the rich demanded cheap labour. Now that the same rich have destroyed the economy these areas which have nothing are being asked to pay up with money they don’t have – weeks before the riots, massive cuts to Haringey’s youth budget was announced. People who say the riots are mindless have got it massively wrong – people are now at least talking about why these areas have been abandoned. A few weeks ago they’d never make the headlines. Riots are the one desperate way to grab attention from people who have access to no other means of political power. If you want to avoid riots in the future you can’t keep demanding “order” but have no order in the economy, society, or politics which allows 50% of young people in many parts of London to be unemployed – otherwise people will find their own ways of striking back whether you think it’s healthy or not.

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.

The super-cool mega-amazing singer that is Rihanna released the video for her new (and fucking awesome) single Man Down just the other day. As well as being visually stunning, it tells a compelling story. Shot in Jamaica, the first scene shows Rihanna shooting a man in a train station. A day earlier, the viewers are prompted; Rihanna visited a club and danced with a man. Things became more heated, but she firmly pushed him away, telling him “no”. She left the club sometime later, only for the same man to approach her from behind. After a struggle, it is implied that he raped her. Following the attack, she flees home, where she takes a gun and seeks the ultimate Thelma-&-Louise-style revenge.

The video can be viewed below. Some people may find it upsetting and potentially triggering so viewer discretion is advised.

The video has sparked controversy, mainly for its depiction of violence. I find it unsettling that people are shelving the rape and instead choosing to protest at the shooting; “How dare she condone murder?”; “Promoting violence as a solution to violence is wrong”; “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?”.  I find these analyses quite weak and hysterical. People who watch this video aren’t going to go on to shoot rapists (not that that would be a terrible loss), and it’s not going to increase someone’s capacity for rapist-killing. People won’t take this video literally as no-one is that suggestible. Rihanna is merely cinematising one of the many reactions a rape victim is wholly entitled to feel following their attack.

Some victims will have feelings of revenge and anger, just as some will have feelings of shame or guilt or shock. I sure as hell would not dispute a rape victim being allowed to have payback fantasies, and wanting to cause their rapist the same harm he’s brought upon them. To go through something so dehumanising as rape is something those of us lucky enough not to be victims of will ever be able to comprehend, and we have no right to tell a rape victim that they are morally deranged or wicked for wanting to see their rapist dead.

The controversy also has underlying racist motives. The media is always quick to demonise music primarily performed by black people (for instance rap, hip-hop, r’n’b and dancehall) for its moral shortcomings, whilst smiling approvingly upon the white musicians who perpetuate the same message. Critics are quick to penalise Odd Future for their misogynistic lyrics (and rightly so), but will turn a blind eye to the rampant sexism in, say, rock music; where groupie culture thrives, and women are categorised in lyrics as either sexy devilish ‘sluts’ or pure and helpless maidens. The same trend applies to violence in lyrics. Was the media up-in-arms following Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues, where he sings about how he ‘shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die’? Was there nationwide outrage following Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (‘mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead’)? No, there was not, despite the facts these lyrics glorify gun culture just as much as any rap song can. Kenny Rogers’ country ballad Coward of the County tells a story almost identical to Rihanna’s; a young boy finds out the girl he loves has been gang-raped, and shoots the perpetrators in an act of vengeance. Yet this song is regarded as a classic, and is not subject to petty complaints from parent councils and reactionary censorship boards. Why? Because the music industry is inherently racist.

The media outrage over the shooting is also distracting people from what should be the real issue in the video, and that is the rape itself. Why are people so quick to scold Rihanna for the shooting, and not the man who rapes her for being a rapist? The shooting is obviously an exaggerated reaction, primarily for theatrical purposes (it’s not as if many rapes end in the rape victim shooting her rapist), but this does not deter from the fact that rape is critically under-punished in society, with conviction rates under 5% in most countries. This is what Rihanna has honourably tried to raise awareness of.

Rihanna - actual feminist icon

Sadly, a lot of the public reaction echoes the media’s out-of-touch attitude. The YouTube comments on the video, for example, are absolutely soul-destroying. There are people trying to make a petty geographical issue out of it; claiming the Jamaican setting is offensive and that Barbados (Rihanna’s home country) sees much more sexual crime. This fickle game of “my country is safer than your country” sorely misses the point. What these people are failing to understand is that rape is endemic in any society and in any culture, and I think this is what Rihanna is trying to say, especially if her Tweets regarding the video are anything to go by:

“Thank you for the amazing response on ManDownVideo I love you guys, and I love that u GOT IT!!! Young girls/women all over the world…we are a lot of things! We’re strong innocent fun flirtatious vulnerable, and sometimes our innocence can cause us to be naïve! We always think it could NEVER be us, but in reality, it can happen to ANY of us! So ladies be careful and #listentoyomama! I love you and I care!”

If you continue amongst the comments, you then arrive at the absolute gutter of victim-blaming; commenters who insist that since Rihanna was “dressed like a slut” and “dancing like a whore”, she has no right to complain when he “merely reacts on impulse” and rapes her. The level of misogyny is really quite outstanding. It makes for a distressing read, and sadly these attitudes are microcosmic of society’s general attitude to rape; blame the victim for getting raped, not the rapist for committing the rape.

Rihanna stuck to her guns, Tweeting: “I’m a 23 year old singer who doesn’t have kids. What’s up with everybody wanting me to be a parent. I’m just a girl, I can only be our voice. We all know it’s difficult and embarrassing to communicate touchy subject matters to anyone, especially our parents. The music industry isn’t “Parent’s ‘R Us.” We have the freedom to make art, let us! It’s your job to make sure your children don’t turn out like us. You can’t hide your kids from society, or they’ll never learn how to adapt. This is the real world!”

When controversy like this arises, it reminds us of why women have far from achieved equality. It reminds us that plenty of people have appalling views regarding rape, and will mock arguments to the contrary because they’re men and they know better. It reminds us why events like Slutwalk and Reclaim the Night are so important to the feminist movement; that attitudes need to be challenged and we cannot suffer in silence any longer. I’d encourage anyone who wants to stand against sexist and apologist bile (like the feedback to this video) to attend a Slutwalk event over the coming months. To find the nearest one to you, check here: http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/satellite.

With that, all I have to say is that Rihanna is a fucking rockstar, and I for one salute her for trying to raise awareness about the nature of rape and sexual violence. Bollocks to the haters.

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.

But they might come across someone posting a Privilege Denying Dude somewhere, and realise what an arsehole he is. Also, a lot of internet memes are hopelessly misogynist, so it’s nice to see a little fightback. Spread it: http://privilegedenyingdude.tumblr.com/

For some theoretical guidance on how not to be a prick, also see: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/

]]> http://ssy.org.uk/2010/11/privilege-denying-dude-is-privileged/feed/ 21 http://ssy.org.uk/2010/11/kanye-west-apologises-for-the-best-thing-hes-ever-done/ http://ssy.org.uk/2010/11/kanye-west-apologises-for-the-best-thing-hes-ever-done/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:41:14 +0000 Jack http://ssy.org.uk/?p=4334 Kanye West yet again has done something inexplicable, by apologising for pretty much the best thing he’s ever done: slagging George W. Bush on live TV.

You might remember from 5 years ago the moment that broke from the script in a televised charity ‘give-money-cos-the-government-can’t-be-arsed-athon’, to declare “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI

But now, he’s felt it necessary to go on US TV to apologise to Bush:

“I would tell George Bush, in my moment of frustration, I didn’t have the grounds to call him a racist. But I believe that in a situation of high emotion like that, we as human beings don’t always choose the right words. And that’s why I’m here.”

In a radio interview he even went further:

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

The comments come after Bush referred West’s comments in 2005 as “the most disgusting moment of my Presidency.”

It’s worth noting that the whole story has become about how Kanye called Bush “a racist” when he actually said no such thing. When this was pointed out to him he said that’s what it had meant to him.

“I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business’. It’s another to say, “This man’s a racist”. I resent it, it’s not true and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency . . . The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Hurricane Katrina represented an all-time low.”

You know what would be way worse than this? Getting slagged on telly

At the time, Kanye’s comments were heard round the world, and he became a hero to many as they saw the outrageous response by the US government to Hurricane Katrina. They were sampled and reused again and again.  The fact that he’s climbed down from the remarks 5 years later will be a big disappointment for the many people who respected him for speaking his mind.

The reason for that is that the way the government handled the destruction of New Orleans was racist. New Orleans at the time was one of the poorest cities in the US, with a 67% black population. When it was clear that a disastrous hurricane (likely to have been made worse by the heating of the ocean’s surface by climate change) was going to hit, the poor majority, who didn’t own cars they could use to leave, were left to fend for themselves. At least 1836 people died as a result, and five years later refugees are dispersed across the US, unable to return. The reason why they haven’t been able to go home is that the wealthy and the their friends in government saw it as an opportunity to transform the city, evict the people that live there, and seize the land where their homes were to make a profit at their expense.

Even worse than their inaction was the action that Bush’s government did take. As they left people to starve or die of thirst, people were forced to fend for themselves to survive. They did this by taking what they needed from abandoned stores. But the US military was deployed to protect private property rather than human life, shooting the “looters” who the media dutifully condemned with made up stories of murder and violence. Vigilantes and cops shot and killed those trying to flee the disaster, under the watch of President Bush.

The truth of the matter is that George Bush doesn’t care about anybody except the wealthy elite that put him in power in the first place. What happened in New Orleans was disaster capitalism in action – using a crisis as an opportunity to transform the face of the city in favour of the rich. Kanye West seemed to get that at one point (see his comments from 3 years ago below), but now he’s backed away. You also can’t deny that part of what happened was racism, that it was a fact that the government, headed by Bush, didn’t care about the black people of New Orleans.

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

It’s even more disappointing that the thing that seems to have prompted Kanye to take this step is the racist abuse he faced as a result of his madcap behaviour at the VMA awards when he interrupted Taylor Swift getting the best video prize. After that, many ignorant white people in the US labeled him a racist, and accusation that’s patently ridiculous. Yes, it was daft and strange what he did, but the fact that some claimed it was motivated by a hatred of white people says more about them than it does about Kanye West.

One infamous Twitter response to the VMA awards

With the US electing its first ever black President to succeed Bush, there is a huge backlash of racial unease underway in the US. Part of the same politics was what motivated the furious backlash against Kanye for something that didn’t really matter. But the idiots saw a classic racist script of innocent white womanhood being violated by a black man, and went berserk, accusing him of racism. Rude, yes. In the words of Obama, a “jackass”, yes. But racist, no.

This continued pressure on him though has pushed Kanye into capitulating, which is sad and disappointing from someone who sometimes shows some flashes of social conscience and is from a family of Black Panthers.

Of course, what all the fuss ignores is the fact that Bush felt getting slagged on telly was the worst moment of his Presidency. Not the hundreds of thousands of people that died as a result of his actions in Iraq. Not the economic crisis which he helped create by allowing finance capital run riot. Not the the thousands that died in New Orleans. All these pale into insignificance compared to a famous rapper giving you some lip on TV.

Bush doesn’t deserve apologies, he deserves to be put on trial for the crimes committed by his regime.

Bonus: There’s obviously a lot more we could go into about why Bush is racist, such as his policies on affirmative action, his party’s approach to racist white southern voters, or the fact that he was only able to seize power in the first place by systematically disenfranchising black voters. But we’ll leave you with these two slightly more banal examples, firstly by him and then by his mum.

Indeed, it didn’t stop there: Woolas decided to centre his whole campaign around the “tough” line he’d taken as immigration minister from 2008-2010. He managed to weave a whole fantasy around this: that “militant Muslims” were waging a war against him in alliance with a local Lib Dem candidate and his party’s crazy plans to circumvent local planning rules to build Mosques in every street, and give an amnesty to “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants”. The special election court’s ruling today means that Woolas will be barred from parliament for three years, and a by-election will now be held in his seat.

Woolas claims to have come into politics as an anti-racist campaigner – he joined the Labour Party in college and ran a “campaign against Paki-bashing”. He was elected in 1997, in one of the most ethnically diverse seats in the country, Oldham East. Phil said in 2008: “It’s had a race riot, it’s had a huge BNP presence and it’s a marginal seat. It’s a complete crucible. But we’ve never had a BNP councillor – I hope I’ve had something to do with that by getting in and getting dirty.”

It’s now fairly evident what Woolas meant by “getting in and getting dirty”.  He didn’t mean confronting the BNP’s ideas, politically and in the streets. He didn’t mean proving the BNP’s politics to be based on lies and hysteria, division and hate. No, it’s now clear that he meant taking the votes of the BNP by seizing the ground of the BNP. And not by talking about real issues that the far-right do occasionally bring up, but by pandering to their obsession with “Islamic extremism”, immigration, and asylum seekers. The Labour Party were so impressed that, after years of scapegoating Muslim women and refugees, he was given the role of Immigration Minister in 2008. He proceeded with glee in his new role of kicking out desperate asylum seekers, attacking charities that offer vital help to them and appeasing the right wing press with his tough talk on “immigration caps” and jobs for the “indigenous population”.

Phil Woolas is a racist fuck, no mistaking that. He made a calculated decision that whipping up racial tension in his area – which as he helpfully reminds us, suffered serious race riots less than a decade ago –  would be a sure-fire vote winner. Much of the commentary surrounding Woolas’ outrageous election material has stated that his leaflets read more like something the BNP or UKIP would produce than a supposed social-democratic party. But Woolas didn’t face victimisation or even official condemnation in his party – in fact his outright Islamophobia was applauded, with “lefty saviour” Ed Miliband appointing him as a shadow Home Office minister, responsible for immigration, in his new opposition cabinet!

They weren’t the leaflets of the BNP or UKIP, they were just the leaflets of a Labour Party beset by racist, anti-immigrant populism. All Woolas did was take twelve years of racist Labour policies to their logical conclusion andstuck it on a leaflet. What he said wasn’t much worse than what the wider party was proclaiming during the election – and then when Labour lost, the leadership became stuck on blaming the fact that their discourse on the issue hadn’t been right-wing enough, that they’d “failed to connect”. With the exception of Diane Abbott (who finished last with 7% of the vote), every candidate in the recent Labour leadership election was united in holding this view. Andy Burnham said of immigration, in a comment surely worthy of the BNP: ”People aren’t racist, but they say it has increased tension, stopped them getting access to housing and lowered their wages”. Go figure.

Burnham is lying – the Labour Party are convinced that most working class people are racist. No one would dispute that racism is a large problem in our society – but the way to get around this is to challenge and confront racist ideas wherever they come from, not pander to it through racist immigration laws and anti-terror legislation that serves little purpose beyond being a useful tool to harass Muslims.

Phil Woolas may have gone through a technicality of electoral law , but the ideas he represents are still every bit ingrained within the Labour Party.