Bashing the SWP
Two vigorous and well-aimed punches at the Socialist Workers Party.
1. The pro-faith left
Max Dunbar's demolition of SWP intellectual Ian Birchall's defence of the SWP's alliance with religious reactionaries.
2. Countering the SWP's lies in Stoke
AVPS's demolition of an article in Socialist Wanker about Stoke, and the death of Keith Brown. The SWP (and Unite Against Fascism)'s endless parroting of the line "the BNP are Nazis" is one of the most politically infantile propoganda lines out there. First, it plays into British xenophobic patriotism: for many Brits, "Nazi" simply means our WWII enemies, the Germans. ("Two world wars and one World Cup.") Second, because of this, the accusation is meaningless to the Person in the Street, who looks at the BNP in their nice suits, listening patiently at the doorstep, and thinks, "er, they're not like the baddies in Escape from Colditz." The Socialist Party's strategy in Stoke - taking on the politics of the BNP, addressing their electorate's actual concerns - is the correct strategy. [Previous: Hope Not Hate.]
1. The pro-faith left
Max Dunbar's demolition of SWP intellectual Ian Birchall's defence of the SWP's alliance with religious reactionaries.
2. Countering the SWP's lies in Stoke
AVPS's demolition of an article in Socialist Wanker about Stoke, and the death of Keith Brown. The SWP (and Unite Against Fascism)'s endless parroting of the line "the BNP are Nazis" is one of the most politically infantile propoganda lines out there. First, it plays into British xenophobic patriotism: for many Brits, "Nazi" simply means our WWII enemies, the Germans. ("Two world wars and one World Cup.") Second, because of this, the accusation is meaningless to the Person in the Street, who looks at the BNP in their nice suits, listening patiently at the doorstep, and thinks, "er, they're not like the baddies in Escape from Colditz." The Socialist Party's strategy in Stoke - taking on the politics of the BNP, addressing their electorate's actual concerns - is the correct strategy. [Previous: Hope Not Hate.]
Comments
In a recent article, Bernard Henri Levy has clamped down on the clinching twist in the bizarre alliance between the Islamists and the Ultra-Left. He calls it what it is: Islamo-Leftism!
"Cet argument est dénué de sens, enfin, car il laisse supposer qu'un homme de gauche, un progressiste, serait immunisé, par nature, contre le pire : or on sait que, s'il n'avait, ce pire, qu'une vertu, ce serait de brouiller, pulvériser ce type de frontière et de provoquer, de gauche à droite, un chassé-croisé sémantique permanent, vertigineux, terrible (des fameuses "sections beefsteak", brunes dehors, rouges dedans, nées de l'entrisme communiste dans les organisations de masse hitlériennes jusqu'au recyclage, par l'islamo-gauchisme d'aujourd'hui, des scies de l'ultradroite, les exemples, hélas, abondent)..."
http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2008/07/21/de-quoi-sine-est-il-le-nom-par-bernard-henri-levy_1075542_3232_1.html
("This argument is finally stripped of any sense, because it is based on the supposition that a man of the left, a progressive thinker, is for sure inoculated against the evil of this prejudice. It is known, however, that this evil’s one virtue is that it can grind down this boundary and cause, from left to right, a permanent, dizzying, appalling barter (examples abound, from the famous "sections beefsteak" brown on the outside, red inside, born from the communist infiltration into mass Hitlerian organizations to the recycling of the Ultra Left saws in today’s Islamo-Leftism")
One may also be puzzled how the Rancid left has remained all too silent at President Carter's quite fanatic Christian religiosity.
And here is something that Norm recently noted with regards to Obama's visit to the Western wal:
"I'm waiting on all those secular liberals who have been longing for a Democrat to succeed Bush in the White House, and were in the habit of sneering at Tony Blair's acknowledgement of having a relationship with his Maker, to back off from their enthusiasm for the candidacy of the Senator for Illinois. I mean...'make me an instrument of your will'."
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/07/obama-at-the-wall.html
More like, the Tartuff Left...