A Perspective on the Norwegian Massacre and Its Origins
Responsibility for the growth of fascist forces lies with the policies of the entire bourgeoisie. Within this, however, the role of the social democratic and petty-bourgeois ex-left parties—who ultimately become the fascists’ target—is particularly pernicious. As the social democrats dismantled the welfare state, cut wages and deregulated the job market, the petty-bourgeois ex-left and the union bureaucracy suppressed all opposition in the working class. As a result, the rhetoric of protest was ceded to the extreme right.
Norway is no exception in this respect. In his first short (2000-2001) term in office, Jens Stoltenberg oriented to the New Labour of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain, radically cut back the welfare state and privatized key public services. In 2005, he drew his inspiration from Obama and returned to power with the slogan “Jens, we can.” Since then, he has ruled through a social democratic-Green coalition with the Socialist Left Party and the right-wing Farmers Party.
This government has deliberately stirred up anti-foreigner sentiments. For example, in January this year, the Russian-born writer Maria Amelie was demonstratively deported, even though she has lived in Norway for nine years and a broad movement for her defence had been formed. Despite considerable domestic opposition Norway has also participated in the war in Afghanistan and bombing raids on Libya.
These events in Oslo are a warning to the working class throughout Europe. This political soil, poisoned by anti-Islamism and imperialist war, has now produced its first toxic fruit. A great danger is brewing, and the ingredients for a murderous fascist movement are emerging.
The ultra-right forces are still small, however. The main danger arises from the continued subordination of the working class to social democracy, the trade unions and their defenders among the ex-lefts. It is the resulting paralysis of the working class that creates the conditions for the growth of the fascists’ political influence.
To draw the lessons of the massacre in Oslo is to break with the social democrats, the trade unions and their fake-left defenders and establish new, democratic and popular organizations of working class struggle and build a new revolutionary leadership. Workers must cut the ground from beneath the right-wing demagogues by taking up the fight against welfare cuts, unemployment and wage reductions on the basis of a socialist programme.
(via +Tony Collins on Google+)
Nick Griffin…You Cunt
Northwest England MEP and BNP racist Nick Griffin on the aid effort for Haiti:
Mr Griffin, MEP for North West England, responded with another Twitter post, saying: “Individuals should give whatever they feel appropriate, but Britain is bankrupt. Fifty thousands pensioners will die… of cold this winter.
“Boys get blown to bits because we can’t afford to armour their Land Rovers…. Sending aid to rioting ingrates while our own people die is stinking elite hypocrisy.”
Asked about Mr Griffin’s comments, BNP deputy leader Simon Darby criticised the government’s £6m contribution to the aid effort in Haiti.
He said: “I’d rather see that £6m that we spent keeping our own people alive. You look after your own first.
“If they’ve got surplus money to give away to Haiti – how many people have died because we didn’t have the infrastructure to grit the roads?”
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Real danger of far-right terrorism
Nick Griffin
Johann Hari has a piece in today’s Independent warning of a real danger of right-right extremists planting bombs.
The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white “neo-Nazis” who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a “race war”.
They have struck before. Exactly a decade ago, a 22-year-old member of the British National Party called David Copeland planted bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane (where I live), and a gay pub in Old Compton Street. He managed to lodge a nail deep in a baby’s skull, and to murder a pregnant woman, her gay best friend, and his partner. He bragged: “My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There’d be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people would go out and vote BNP.”
Hari says that the police have made a number of arrests recently but this have received virtually no media attention. Bombing methods and encouragement circulate on far-right websites.
What has received attention, of course, is jihardist plots. But those who have taken this attention as a reason to blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny minority are reluctant to apply the same arguments to themselves.
If Martin Amis was consistent, he should now declare: “The white community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from Hampshire or from Surrey … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”
Saying that the BNP should be allowed into forums like BBC Question Time – so “sunlight” can be shone in their face – he suggests that people like Nick Griffin should be forensically challenged over far-right violence because it tolerates it within its ranks.
He claims he is “strongly” opposed to these freelance attacks – yet he has kept violent attackers in his senior team.
His chief lieutenant for years was a man called Tony Lecomber, who was jailed for three years in the 1980s for plotting to blow up the offices of a left-wing political party. After he was released, he and a gang then beat a Jewish teacher unconscious. When he was freed after another three years inside, he was swiftly promoted through the BNP ranks. He was only ditched after he approached a Liverpool hitman to discuss how they could “take out” a cabinet minister.
One of the leading figures in the BNP’s online operation, Lambertus Nieuwhof, tried to blow up a mixed-race school in South Africa in 1992. The BNP is happy to have him nonetheless. Nieuwhof says: “Everybody should be allowed to make a mistake.”
The BNP is not directly organising violence, but it has tolerated violent madmen in its midst, and its arguments have encouraged violence. Griffin has demanded “rights for whites with well-directed boots and fists”. He reacted to the Soho nail-bomb by one of his own party’s members by attacking the victims, saying they were “flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s journalists, [and had] showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures disgusting”.
Let Griffin speak his filth to the nation, and sweat under David Dimbleby’s forensic questioning. He will only discredit himself.
Calling for far more attention on this very real threat, Hari says “the next person to bomb Britain might not look like Mohammed Sidiq Khan – he might look like me.”
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Let the BNP Speak
It’s almost sacreligious in some circles to say it, but the BBC was right to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time:
Nick Griffin, the BNP leader who was elected to the European parliament in June, is expected to be on the show in October. The corporation has decided that the far-right party deserves more airtime because it has demonstrated “electoral support at a national level”.
The move has caused consternation among politicians, with some Labour MPs and at least one cabinet minister pledging to boycott Question Time. They fear the BNP will use the publicity to promote a racist agenda.
I can understand why, but freedom of speech surely has to apply to people you don’t like as much as people you do, otherwise it’s pretty meaningless. It’s not as if Nick Griffin doesn’t have a constituency – he does – and part of the reason why has been the refusal of mainstream politics to address that fact. In an age where people see their needs being increasingly met by non-traditional political parties, he’s used his isolation to paint himself as an outsider who knows how to speak for a significant number of people who consider themselves left behind by mainstream politics; to pretend that isn’t the case is to court disaster. But of course just blithely inviting him onto the show and hoping that his arguments get soundly thrashed also courts disaster – those who complain that his presence on the show will legitimise the racists’ agenda do have a point, and why tolerate intolerance anyway? Bart Cammaerts suggests:
that extreme right parties should not be ignored altogether and the societal tensions and conflicts they are the symptom of, even less so. But the media should expose extreme right parties for what they really are and lay barren internal conflicts (just as with other parties) rather then give such parties and their representatives a platform to repeat their discourses of hate and exclusion.
Journalists should furthermore be very aware of the dangers of legitimizing extreme right discourses when reporting on the extreme right and when interviewing their representatives.
Pluralism should be radical in a democracy, but for vibrant multi-cultural and ethnical democracies to be able to survive, a common ground relating to basic values such as equality, respect, solidarity, difference, etc. is crucial as well. Popper’s paradox of tolerance sums it up pretty neatly, up until what point can intolerance be tolerated before it destroys tolerance all together?
(via Charlie Beckett)
I think he has a point – if the BBC are determined to go down this route, then very difficult and contrasting issues will quickly be in tension and need to be kept in check. The BNP should be as free to speak its mind as UKIP, Respect and the Greens, but only on condition that it agrees to use its freedom responsibly – there’s no freedom to incite racial hatred after all, and nor should there be. David Dimbleby and the show’s editors must also be prepared to examine the legitimate social issues which have in part accounted for the nationalists’ rise to greater prominence – doing so will undoubtedly provide an important journalistic insight into forces at play within the BNP (and amongst its constituents), and hopefully begin to expose and explain the gaps in their own support which the parliamentary parties have not yet fully understood. Philip Hensher is right when he says the BBC isn’t obliged, in the way it claims, to represent every political opinion, but I don’t think that’s the issue in play. Not prominently challenging the BNP as it continues to build its mystique as the party of outsiders, while the gap between rich and poor is larger than ever, causing ever more Britons to feel left out and left behind, would be the height of journalistic irresponsibility.
