Norway Is Not Alone - But Nor Is Breivik

As the world rushes to write off Anders Breivik as an isolated, maverick madman, a lone phenomena with no enduring significance beyond the appalling acts of savage murder he carried out in Norway last Friday, British racists have hurried to his defence online. As we see in the post by English Defence League supporter, Michelle Miley, lauds him as a hero on her Twitter.com account above; and her colleagues similarly tweet (such an innocent terms for such violent bastards) in the extract below. Because Breivik's young victims were nearly all members of the Norwegian Labour Party, it seems Michelle and her friends reckon they had it coming to them. (A similar phenomenon errupted in Israel, where many Israelis also suggested the young Labour members got what they deserved because they had had a banner on the island criticising Israeli policy towards the Palestinians - Breivik meanwhile had cited his support for Zionism and Israel.)

English Defence League leader, Stephen Lennon, has rebuffed any suggestions - including Breivik's own claims - of any links between the Nordic terrorist and his supposedly peaceful organisation. And yet, in the next breath, he tells the Daily Mail that "others could be inspired to commit similar atrocities ‘within five years’ if they feel their voice is not being heard."

The worry of course is that, unlike the Norwegians, who have responded to the atrocities with a ringing re-emphasis of their open, multicultural society, British politicians will seek to "listen and learn" from the sympathisers of the EDL and the self-imploding BNP. This we already saw with David Cameron's crass speech about "muscular liberalism" earlier this year.

Cameron, his Communities Secretary Pickles, and a host of other rightwing commentators have dangerously lied and lied again about supposed "political correctness" taking over Britain. Complete fictions are made up about non-existent sharia courts taking over towns like Bradford and Dewsbury, no-go-zones for white people, Asian immunity from criminal prosecution and of course the perennial but complete myth (or lie) about bans on Christmas trees, Nativity plays and even Christmas itself. 

The deranged ravings of newspaper columnists like Melaine Phillips and Jeremy Clarkson could be ignored were it not for the fact that people like Anders Breivik directly quote their rubbish, including in his genocidal manifesto. Smirking Clarkson should perhaps be smiling a bit less if he stops to consider how he has added to the mood music that has provided such fertile ground for the Nordic murderer to create the political narrative to justify his slaughter and carnage. Perhaps he would like to test drive the victims' hearses for them and make some of his stupid remarks as they pull into the graveyards, again and again and again?

The fact is that the rightwing nationalism that is spouted by so many in this country is nothing to do with any real threat to our culture. I have lived in areas with high concentrations of Muslims for nearly a quarter of a century and am in no way proscribed from living my life in precisely the way I wish. The churches still function for those who wish to attend, school lessons are in English, the pubs are open, and young women can walk the streets as scantily dressed as they like. If anything is gradually changing, it is the cultures of Asian communities that, like so very many waves of immigrants before (including the English - once foreigners to these shores themselves), are slowly assimilating into the wider zeitgeist.

Extreme nationalism is very much what it says on the tin: it is exclusive; it sees those outside its genetic definition as The Other and as a threat. It is not about pride or self-worth. Rather it is about insecurity, lack of pride and rank xenophobia. It is propagated by self-serving interests that see it as a very useful means of diverting the grievances of those who are losing out in a society that is increasingly polarised between rich and poor. Instead, it focuses on the idea that poor white people are poor not because they no longer have trade unions and are paid crap wages by exploitative employers, but rather because the local council has built a playground in an Asian area rather than a white one. Divide et impera.

The British media has repeatedly played up the threat from a handful of Islamic fascists over and over again, while largely ignoring the actual and planned attacks by scores of white fascists. Again and again, the police have, to their credit, arrested members of the BNP and EDL for assaults on Asians. Huge caches of bombs, bomb-making equipment and even biological material such as deadly ricin have been found in the homes of active members of fascist groups in the UK, but you wouldn't know it from the press.

Even when attacks are carried out, such as those against the black and gay people targetted by the explosions carried out in the most vicious way by the London Nailbomber, whose shrapnel ripped an unborn baby from its mother's womb, the media dutifully declared him a lunatic loner - ignoring his former activities in the BNP and the other members of that party arrested for planning similar attacks. Leader Nick Griffin's assistant, Tony Lecomber, was even known in the party, for very good reasons, as "Bomber Lecomber", but the media instead concentrated on how the party was supposedly becoming respectable under his leadership.

Fascism is a term that comes from the Latin fasces - the bundle of rods for beating and axes for beheading the opponents of the Roman state. They were selected by Mussolini back in the 1920s as the symbol of his movement of nationalists and have been aped by his admirers and ideological brothers ever since. This aggressive symbolism has reinforced the martial rhetoric of nationalist leaders, who have framed their ideologies very much around conflict which deems their political opponents to be traitors and mortal threats to the survival of the national Volk. Consequently, the most extreme response is at least psychologically sanctioned and so whether or not he acted alone, Breivik is not ideologically alone. And however comforting it may be to declare him mad, the only delusions in such circumstances are our own - for these are cold, calculated acts with a clear purpose, however horrifying. We do not dismiss al-Qaeda as illogical mad people; so why do we hurry to excuse white extremists by declaring them to be conveniently mentally ill and so not really responsible for what they have done?

Mainstream politicians across our Continent are failing to address the social and economic inequalities that are at the heart of our crisis. Instead, they play up to the xenophobes by gestures such as the ban on the veil in Belgium and France, the illegal deportation of gypsies by Sarkozy and the stigmatising of the Muslim community as fundamentally hostile in Britain due to the actions of four men in July 2005. They do so at great peril, ultimately, to us all - because by doing so they will never solve the root causes of discontent. Rather, they will simply fuel the anger and desire for more and more scapegoats, greater violence and, in some minds, provide the justification for more massacres like the one we have witnessed.

It falls to those of the Left, the internationalists, the humanistic, to show the different path, to argue incessantly for real solutions, real equality and community. The real stories from Friday should not be the frightening scenarios of ceaseless conflict and division conjured up by Anders Breivik and Melanie Phillips and their twisted fellow travellers. Rather, they should be the stories of the ambitions and hopes of those whose young lives were snuffed out when they were just about to begin. We owe it to them to listen to their voices, which were for democracy, tolerance and humanity rather than the narrow and perverted bigotry that so arrogantly decided to silence them.

Will No One Rid Us of These Meddlesome Messiahs?

Henry Plantagenet, King of England and Normandy in the tumultuous second half of the 12^th century, brooked little dissent. Imprisoning even his own sons and his wife when he suspected them of plotting against him, the only real opposition he faced came from his former friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket.  He had originally appointed him as his placeman, but Becket soon proved far from compliant and Henry was infamously heard to mutter "Is there no one who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

Taking him at his word, four knights rode to Canterbury and dramatically slaughtered the Archbishop at the altar of his cathedral . Henry duly professed his horror and did his penance, even submitting to being scourged by the Pope’s representatives. How could they possibly have thought he meant what he said?

Echoing down through the centuries, the story of Henry and Becket seems very relevant to the last fortnight with first the assassination of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer and then the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, which claimed the lives of six bystanders. Although thousands of miles apart, the two stories have many similarities, not least the atmosphere of fear and loathing in contemporary politics in both increasingly religiously fundamentalist countries.

In Pakistan, Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab province was shot dead by one of his bodyguards who had taken umbrage at his campaign to repeal Pakistan's blasphemy laws. These make any criticism of the Prophet Mohamed an offence punishable by death - leading to a number of exceedingly spurious cases where people have been accused of blasphemy for totally unrelated reasons. In one recent case, a low caste Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who offered water to  higher caste Muslim women was charged with insulting the Prophet and is currently under sentence of death. Taseer took up her case, among others, and has paid for it with his life.

Salman Taseer

His opponents have equivocated - not endorsing the gunman, but not exactly condemning him either. Taseer should have been more careful about what he said, should have considered people's feelings, they suggest. It might be terrible that he had been shot, but, the implication is, perhaps he really brought it on himself. Indeed, the assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, has been lauded by many as a hero, standing up for traditional values and Taseer's friends have been warned not to mourn him.

Thousands of miles away in Arizona, a lone gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, loaded himself up with ammo and strolled down to a local "open day" for the public to meet their elected representatives. Targeting Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he shot her in the head and sprayed his bullets into the crowd. He killed six people, including a 9 year old girl, and wounded 14 more before being overpowered. Remarkably, although a bullet traversed the length of her brain, surgeons hold out the prospect of a good recovery for Gabrielle Giffords. But the health of American politics is another matter entirely.

Angry America: Tea Party protesting for traditional values

The would-be assassin has turned out to be a loner, but one steeped in the Internet rage of the US Rightwing. Recently coalesced around the informal (but well funded) Tea Party movement headed by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the far Right in the States has a large and growing coalition of the angry. Since the laws on bias in news reporting were removed by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, the sensationalist rightwing "shock jocks" of American radio and cable TV, like Glenn Beck, have surged both in popularity and in brazen lies. They have, among other tactics, demonised swathes of the population - Hispanics, blacks and Muslims especially to tarnish them somehow as un-American fifth columnists. They have insinuated that both Bill and Hilary Clinton were involved in murder and extortion on their rise to the Whitehouse. Apoplexy reigned when Obama won the Presidency in spite of their best efforts to throw everything at him from not being a true American citizen (giving rise to the Birther Movement), to being a secret Muslim and organising concentration camps for imprisoning conservatives.

The bankrupt ignorance of their cause peaked during the health debate with ludicrous monikers used to describe Obama such as "Communist Nazi". Sadly, their strategy worked and in November last year the Republicans won a significant victory in the House of Representatives, though not the landslide some had anticipated.

Palin's cross hairs target map

But worst of all has been Palin and her acolytes - like many on the radical right using a collection of pseudo-religious and military rhetoric to describe the alleged threats to their country and the response they desire. While often not indulging herslef, she has done nothing to temper or rein in her acolytes and associaes as they rail on about "Armageddon America", the End of Days, 30,000 guillotines purchased to behead Obama's opponents, the New World Order Conspiracy, the sinister Black Helicopters, all of course underpinned by Islam's alleged desire to destroy the USA. Breathtakingly, Trent Humphries, one of the Arizona Tea Party's founders, has even described their movement as a co-victim of the shootings, shamefully disrespecting the deaths and injuries of the real victims.

And the response they prescribe? Time to go on crusade; time to fight; time to target opponents, as in the now infamous cross-hair campaign map published by Palin with Giffords' name shown as a through a rifle-sight. And Giffords own local opponent had encouraged voters to join him in firing machine guns to show their determination to "take back" their state:  "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly”.

"Satan" Obama

The BBC in is quaintly impartial way has struggled to emphasise that both sides of the political debate in America are increasingly divided from each other and strident in their rhetoric. Maybe; but there is no doubt that it is the radical right wingers who are taking this to the extreme, cranking up rhetoric and undermining both rational debate and encouraging violence. Again and again, it is the radical Right who are found with people in their ranks with obsessions with guns and a propensity to violence. Even in the UK, while hundreds of thousands of pounds of police money are wasted funding agents provocateurs to spy on climate demonstrators and students, it is extreme right wing BNP members and sympathisers who are letting off nail bombs to kill blacks and gay people, or pouring petrol through letter boxes to burn out asylum seekers. I can't recall the last time a liberal was convicted for shooting an opponent, burning property or planning explosions in public places. 

The Arizona gunman almost certainly worked alone and may indeed have mental health problems - but can his ramblings about the American Government and his violence really be divorced from a political atmosphere where it is acceptable to denigrate the President as a traitor because he wants to extend healthcare to poor people? Was he somehow immune to a culture which stigmatises those who do not agree with Palin and her acolytes as conspirators against the Nation under God? Not only Communist - but blasphemers and heretics to boot?

Henry may have genuinely regretted Becket's death, but it was the atmosphere of violence around his Court, created by him, that made it happen. Similarly, Palin and the Tea Party may equally regret the Arizona massacre, but they too need to reflect on their words and actions, and how these have fostered a bellicose zeitgeist where the bullet is as valid as the ballot. They aspire to lead a movement, and consequently they must shoulder responsibility for it too. Likewise, the leaders of Pakistan's teetering democracy need to make clear that violence has no place in their politics. Clauswitz described war as "the continuation of politics by other means". In the hysterical, conflict-charged culture of contemporary politics, we must not allow those with sinister agendas to turn politics into war by other means.

So how far have we come since Henry's knights rode like Sauron's Orcs to do their Master's dirty deed for him in Canterbury Cathedral that dark evening in 1170?  And in such an atmosphere where well-funded, well-organised populists see democracy as just one of several tools to gain and keep power, how long will it be before they saddle up and once again ride out to do their Masters' (or Mistresses') unholy bidding?

Tea Party serves a Bitter Brew

It has been easy to laugh in recent weeks as Christine O'Donnell has risen to international prominence as the Tea Party-sponsored Republican candidate for Senator for Delaware in this week's mid-term elections for the US Congress. This tub-thumping evangelical  has propounded rather bizarre views on masturbation and genetics; and in seeking to impose her religious values in the name of traditional America, revealed her ignorance of the US Constitution in a toe-curling embarrassing episode. Perhaps needless to say, she is set to be decisively defeated - although current polls do show her standing improving in the closing days.

Yet even if the Tea Party doesn't make all the gains it has hoped for, there is little doubt it has led the debate throughout this campaign. Headed up by former Veep candidate Sarah Palin, it has put the Obama Presidency on the defensive with a head-on charge feeding off every conceivable source of bigotry, division and loathing. It has nourished Americans' worries about threats from inside and outside. Although for some of their leaders the focus has been on cutting tax and government, for others political debate has been eschewed in favour of an apocalyptic battle of Good versus Evil in the run up to the End Times. A fervent of fear - of Muslims, of socialism, of "Big Government" - has been whipped up in a well-funded attempt to galvanise a vote for a rather nasty, corporate-friendly right wing coup d'etat. Even the hated BP, culprit of the Gulf oil spill disaster, has got in on the act.

Oil multinational BP sponsors
the TP


It is not new. Nor, for all that we may sneer on this side of the Pond, is it peculiar to America. It is merely the latest of a range of populist phenomena that have risen in the era known, if not quite as the end of days, then as the "End of History" - the supposed final triumph of market capitalism with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Two years later, Italy saw the rise of Berlusconi's Forza Italia movement to win power barely four months after its formation, and Canada saw the Reform Party of Preston Manning wipe out the Conservative Government in a single election. So now in turn the Tea Party harvests the disaffected as capitalism's victory turns sour.

It is a tactic as old as politics itself. Just as ancient Athenian demagogues found individual scapegoats to blame for their policy failures through the ritual of ostracism, now the right wing seeks to shift blame for unemployment, inequality and social disorder onto carefully selected, vulnerable targets. In France, Sarkozy's fumbling regime recently turned its ire on Romanian gypsies, deporting them en masse. In Britain, street movements like the English Defence League, who have made common cause with the Tea Party, drunkenly demonstrate in Muslim areas. Across Europe, a dark stain of xenophobia and Islamophobia is spreading, with the far right rising in elections in Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and throughout eastern Europe.

Underpinning the thump and thud of their jackbooted march on both sides of the Atlantic is the endlessly repeated accusation that any who are not with them are against them. Obama is castigated not merely as being in political error or misguided on the economy. Rather, he is a traitor, a fifth columnist Communist-Nazi,  a secret Muslim, or even some biblical beast heralding the Apocalypse.

Satanic Obama from inquisitr.com

America's last brush with mass populism was the Perot insurgency in the 1992 election. The economic boom subsequently dissipated much of this, but the in the new recession, populism is breeding again, far nastier, far more vicious than Perot's quixotic adventure. The injection of an increasingly hysterical evangelical fundamentalism, with tens of millions of its followers earnestly believing that the world will end in their lifetimes, makes this movement dangerous beyond belief in a nuclear weapons state.

O'Donnell may go down in defeat tomorrow, but the diet of lies that has nurtured an atmosphere of fear will go unabated. The fact is that, just as extremists in the UK like the British National Party have leeched on the genuine grievances of poorer sections of society, mainstream politicians have abandoned them. The Soviet collapse saw politicians across the world rush to not merely expunge "Communism" from their lexicons, but "socialism" and even "social democracy" too.

The old centre-left has failed because of an unholy combination of political cowardice, lack of imagination and rank careerism. A political class quite dislocated from ordinary life has emerged as never before as corporate power has taken over more and more control of western governments, many of which now resemble little other than subsidiaries of multinationals, at the beck and call of unelected businessmen.

Consequently, taken for granted by the parties that once represented them, alienated and devalued by an exploitative system with ever increasing inequality, it is little wonder that many people are angry and looking for an alternative. The mainstream no longer works for ordinary people struggling to make their way in a world where decisions are increasingly taken by remote, faceless and unaccountable bodies and people. Politicians are pastiches of what they claim to be, arrogantly deriding and squeezing out any alternative viewpoints with the once ridiculous claim that there is only one possible poltical system. It is fertile ground for populists and the biggest mistake would be to assume that the grievances the Tea Party and its ilk speak to and exploit are not perfectly genuine, valid ones.
More than ever, the Left, in the USA, in Europe and elsewhere, needs to rise to the challenge - to show that there is a better economics, a sustainable and fairer one. We need to argue that the "free market" has failed comprehensively and won't ever work properly again. We can no longer collude with the status quo. If we don't provide that alternative, the Tea Party and its friends will do so instead, and the future they have in store for us is not a pleasant one. Not pleasant at all.

The last tea party to make any sense...