fascists

Finally the penny drops

Activism, Democratic (in)action, fascists
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Lance Mannion, the voice of reasonableness, explains why liberals need to be unreasonable sometimes:

I don’t know why six religious nuts are allowed to ruin a holiday for a hundred kids. I don’t know why a relatively small pack of paranoid racists and Right Wing extremists are allowed to prevent everybody’s else’s kids from hearing the President of the United States advise them to work hard and stay in school. But I suspect that part of the reason is that sensible parents who may get mad don’t stay mad. They have other more important things to worry about and they move on to worry about them. The Right Wing nuts get mad, stay mad, and don’t let up. School officials who ignore the complaints of sensible parents know that by the end of the semester the sensible parents will have forgotten about the issue; but the nuts won’t forget, won’t drop it, and won’t let up—run into them anywhere, anytime and they’ll start screaming all over again. It’s just easier and it moves the problem off the desk more quickly to cave to the nuts, knowing you probably won’t hear a peep from the sensible parents.

As the old saying notes, it’s the squeeky wheel that gets the grease and the same goes for political change. You need people to either be afraid of you or think that it’s easier for them to give in to you than to resist you. Yes, this can backfire, but surprisingly less so than is commonly assumed. All great change happened through radicalism, civil disobedience and a refusal to be reasonable.

In a roundabout way, this is also why you don’t want to debate the BNP as much, as to make it socially unacceptable to support them. You can’t argue racist fuckwits into not being racist, you can scare them into not being openly racist.

No platorm for the BNP

BBC Bias, fascists
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You can’t “expose” the BNP on Question Time:

There is also no prospect of such a programme resulting in the BNP’s being ‘exposed’. It is said that since most BNP members can’t put together a coherent argument, they will easily be shown up and ridiculed. But they do not need coherent arguments. Most guests on Question Time do not have coherent arguments. It is a programme, like Have I Got News For You, or Mock the Week, in which the key is to have a good line at the right time. It is carefully choreographed and practised. What the BNP need, therefore, is carefully phrased incitements, presented in a plausible manner. The fascists have demonstrated on the streets and in previous media appearances that they are capable of this much. Even if they were as dumb as an American Idol contestant, there would still be no chance of their being ‘exposed’. The important things that would require exposure – the matter of the BNP’s record, its ideological lineage, the violence and criminality of its members, etc. – are points that require time, patience and evidence to explain. None of those assets are available on a panel quiz show.

Quite

BBC Bias, fascists, UK politics
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Jamie:

The Beeb says any legally constituted political party is entitled to have its ideas discussed. The BNP’s sole idea is that the country should be run entirely on racial lines. So Question Time for the BBC: what the hell are you playing at that this should be entertained as a subject for discussion?

The BNP is not nor ever will be a normal party and the BBC should stop pretending it is. The BNP wants to ethnically cleanse the UK. This is not something that needs to be legitimised. And no, this is no an infringement of their freedom of speech:

The final faulty assumption, the one that is least convincing in my view, is that depriving the BNP of a platform constitutes an abridgment of their ‘free speech’. By no understanding of free speech that I am aware of is any person obliged to share a platform with a fascist organisation, or to offer one to its spokespersons. In fact, in recognition of the demonstrable threat that the far right poses to even minimal democratic norms of free expression, we actually have an obligation to frustrate the BNP, to obstruct their growth, prevent them from organising, and so on. But the ‘No Platform’ policy doesn’t even go that far: it clearly just asks people not to assist the BNP. It is only good manners.

Daily Mail columnist in blackshirt fetishism shock!

fascists
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Shorter Peter Hitchens: on this day of remembrance, seventy years since we made the mistake of declaring war on Hitler, I would like to imagine what would’ve happened had we listened to Rudolf Hess. How cool it would’ve been, a world in which we still have our empire, but no darkies here and no Jews in Europe.

A silly, immature, alcoholic, dysfunctional twit

fascists
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And that’s just what his lawyer called him, as he attempted to save Neil Lewington from a
terrorist conviction. He failed:

Neil Lewington, 43, had been developing a bomb-making factory in his bedroom in Tilehurst, Reading, the trial heard.

He was carrying components for two home-made bombs when arrested last October in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

Sentencing was adjourned until 8 September, but Judge Peter Thornton said a lengthy jail term was likely.

“Neil Lewington clearly set out to make viable devices which could have seriously injured or possibly killed members of the public going about their daily lives,” said Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner John McDowall.

Lewington’s arrest on a train at Lowestoft station was by chance, after he had been abusing a female train conductor.

A search of his bag uncovered the home-made bombs.

The fact that Lewington was such an utter loser shouldn’t obscure the potential danger he represented. He’s the archetypical example of the socalled “lone wolf”, the rightwing extremist unconnected to any terrorist groups, but inspired by the ideology to fight the “race war” on his own. The lone wolf idea was first developed in the United States, where there’s a long tradition of white supremacist terrorism (Ku Klux Klan anyone?), as a counter against increasing police attention to rightwing terrorism. Unlike traditional terrorism where the idea is to put political pressure on a government, this kind of rightwing terrorism is just to kill as many non-whites as possible in the hope of starting the “race war” these people have wet dreams about. While that goal is largely a non-starter, the real danger is the inspiration it gives people like Lewington, as well as the notorious nail bomber David Copeland. Because they operate on their own, they’re much more difficult to detect than traditional terrorist groups: no chatter, no need for meetings, nothing to give them away.