Another week, fascism still undefeated

Just a couple of quick links to BNP-related stuff. Might add through the day, so check back. First, Jim J has added to this list, which I already linked to. From Jim J, I also got to Nick Griffin's bad science. Here's Sunny on the right's response. Sunny links to more science from The Enemies of Reason: 1, 2, 3, and from Channel 4. Alex Massie makes the pro-immigration case here.

For some comment on the QT debacle, here's Coatesy, Voltaire's Priest and Jim D. Meanwhile, Flesh found something far better to do.

Update: How did Question Time affect the BNP vote? A YouGov poll given much publicity suggests that it has, a tiny bit. However, Lancaster Unity reveals YouGov were defrauded by the BNP, undermining the results' credibility. (Summary from Edmund S).

One person who benefited from the show is Baroness Warsi. However, Edmund gives reason to pause (although I disagree with him on immigration...)

Update 2: A number of commentators are making the point that, as Richard Seymour puts it, "Just because antifascists watching this thought Griffin came across as a sleazy dishonest windbag doesn't mean that everyone thought the same." That is completely true. There is a disconnect, I think, between how us here in the activist ghetto, or from non-white backgrounds, or in liberal professions, or in cosmopolitan London,view the world and how most people in wider society view the world.

However, it is the wrong inference to draw from that, as Seymour does in the same post, them out there are "racists", or that politicians (like Straw and Warsi) who say they need listening to are pandering to racists. The labeling of people as "racists" is, in my view, utterly unhelpful. What is important is to expose how the things people say or do act in a racist way or have a racist effect. Racism is not something that afflicts people, like a mental condition; it is something that functions in society. Or, as Jim D puts it much more succinctly: "Don't trust the working class: they're too stupid. Us university-educated lefties will tell you proles what you can and can't be exposed to."

Comments

Imposs1904 said…
"Don't trust the working class: they're too stupid. Us university-educated lefties will tell you proles what you can and can't be exposed to."

That's as succinct a definition of Leninism as I've heard in a long time.

Cheers Jimbo!
Andrew Coates said…
Bob, good summary.

There's clearly been so many different Question Times broadcast that we need someone to review them all!
Anonymous said…
I make a point of disagreeing with Richard Seymour but activist ghetto is right and disconnect is right. I was at a local committee meeting for something the other night, somebody said that Nick Griffin had been "quite good" and nobody disagreed. Some felt he'd been done up like a kipper by the BBC. Couldn't have been more different from the scorn of him I read in the Guardian, etc. Out of touch. Perhaps it's because anti-fascists spurn the company of people with racist views and spend too much time responding aggressively to their leaders. Anger about immigration where I live is waxing - activists need to spend more time in pubs and other places where racist views are mulled over and debated and less time vying for power in their anti-fascist vanity projects and then trying to parachute in with the flour and eggs. Basically I wish activists would disappear in their communities where they belong. But I realise that's a matter of strategy. I'm a great admirer of 'romantic' anti-racists because my hunch is that racism itself is an emotional response.
ross said…
"Basically I wish activists would disappear in their communities where they belong"

spot on in relation to 'activists' in general

(although i'd seriously question whether most activists of this type today are anywhere near to 'belonging' to their communities, other than their own cosily wrapped introspective ones which they create for themselves, unsullied by actual material events,conditions and attitudes on the ground that get in the way of their orphaned theory/ideology)
Anonymous said…
Anyway, one very advantageous thing for anybody in any kind of local public face-off with the BNP is to make sure you have worked harder (and ideally achieved more) for your community than they have. Then you can expose them - you are unimpeachable. Another very advantageous thing is to turn up to your community meetings - participate in local politics, not necessarily in an official role, but care about them. Then you can speak in a convincing and in a well-illustrated way as somebody whose life the BNP's policies would affect. And be prepared to deal with ambitious vainglorious machiavellian shits at meetings - seriously, these people are everywhere.
bob said…
Darren - is that Leninism as in Vladimir's original version or Lenny Seymour's revision? Both I guess.

Flesh is G and Ross - completely right.
ross said…
should be of interest to some here - AFA documentary up on youtube

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4
bob said…
Thanks Ross. And thanks Mod for reposting.

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