All you fascists

[sabotabby]

I'm feeling pretty fucked up over the assassination of Jo Cox by fascist scum. I didn't know her, I'm not British, but by all accounts she was the rarest of unicorns, a politician who didn't suck.

But specifically, I'm unnerved because it's brazen. Britain went from silly flotilla battles to actual murder of a person in a heartbeat. Unlike Orlando, the motives are obvious—the killer was a fascist and Cox was killed for opposing fascism. Charles Stross has a harrowing post up about it.

It's a reminder that we're always, always, a heartbeat away from barbarism. Actual, literal fascism—not Godwin's Law-violating disagreements on the intertubes—is an ascendant force in the world right now. It's kind of restrained where I live, at the moment, compared to Europe and the U.S. But I haven't forgotten that everyone was nodding along to Harper's niqab ban bullshit until Trudeau gave a pretty face to opposing it.

We are teetering on the brink of a global economic collapse. And much as the earnest radicals among us seem to believe this will lead to something fun and egalitarian, the far-right is best posed to take over in that kind of scenario, and it won't go well for any of us.

Comments

[hano.livejournal.com]

I'm utterly terrified. I've never seen my country like this, it's utter madness. A very scary, hate filled madness run by the hard right.
Actually I'm calling it for what it is, this is a neo-fascist takeover of the United Kingdom. If they get their way and the Leave vote wins, we get Boris Johnson as PM, Gove as Chancellor and Farage as 'oh my god he's a cabinet minister?' This is a nightmare and this coup is happening right in front of our eyes. I never thought Id see this or see it happen so *fast*.
How's Canada on immigration these days?

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

hasnt this shit been going on there forever? i remember johnny rotten complaining about it in like, the 70s.

[hano.livejournal.com]

the UK has always had a element of knuckle draggers sure. But this is much worse, things have got very toxic very quickly, fanned by an especially mendacious gaggle of hard right politicians.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I think the fanning may be the biggest difference between now and the 70s-80s rhetoric. In those days, it was assumed someone who said these things was a football hooligan or someone at the very least uneducated and unwilling to learn (or Enoch Powell). These days we have Cabinet Ministers saying some pretty stupid, at the very least, or vile, too often, things and not losing their positions over it. Fascism has been normalized across the class and education divides.

I'm certainly not saying the upper crust weren't racist in the 70s and 80s, just that they didn't/wouldn't say it publicly for fear of the papers and the middle classes would be up in arms.

I never thought I'd see the day when the dumber statements by the Examiner and the Mirror would be considered mainstream.

[sabotabby]

One of the things that amazes me about contemporary politics—and not just in Britain—is that it's no longer, "politician says something stupid, has to resign." Now they just dig their heels in more.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

To an extent I agree with you but I think the big difference is time. In the 70s and 80s even the Tory right, virulently racist, and their supporters understood what Fascism was and how dangerous it was. They had lived with its consequences and nobody thought it was trivial or funny to be seen to back the descendants of people they had fought a terrible war against. One had to be football hooligan stupid to openly identify with Fascism. The current generation of "respectable" right wing politicians are too young to have first hand knowledge and are too narcissistic to learn from others experience. They think that they can use the Fascist elements but ultimately control them (as do the Republicans with Trump). I really wonder if the likes of Johnson have even heard of von Papen or Hindenburg.

[sabotabby]

Good point.

I hope we won't need another repeat of WWII to make fascism uncool again.

[sabotabby]

I'm worried for you. Collective you. And it's heartbreaking because for the first time in my adult life there's an actual decent option with Corbyn.

We are still very awful on immigration, though better than we were under Harper. And, as always, it's easiest if you're white.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

over here im wondering, why doesnt this shit work in reverse? noone ever assasinates any of these shitbag conservatives-paul ryan, john mccain, michele bachman, ted cruz..noone even TRIES.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

George Wallace.

I agree it's rarer, but encouragement of violence doesn't help.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

yeah but itd even things up, let them know how it feels.

[sabotabby]

While I would never publicly condone such a thing, I'm hardly going to publicly condemn it.

[sabotabby]

Or even over there.

I mean, the Pigfucker is also in the Remain Camp and would be less of a loss to the world, and possibly a net gain for pigs. But it's only ever the good ones.

[ironed_orchid]

I'm cycling between feeling shattered and feeling numb and feeling like I want to hit something.

I didn't know her, but when she worked for Oxfam in Belgium she was one of the people who developed Oxfam's international policies on global trade reform, which are campaigns that have a direct relation to the work I do. It's like the world seems incredibly small and impossibly fragile.

[sabotabby]

She just seems like the kind of person I'd have wanted in a position of power. She cared about the right things. And I'm just so very livid.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

You make a strong point re: the lack of revolutionary organization among the marxian 'left'. I go past the Bob Akavian revolutionary bookstore/weird cult organ every day and the people there, the people who are really trying to foment revolution - they organize but it's, protest based, they organize to combat the status quo - they came up with BlackLivesMatter after what was done to Tamir, they were at the front of that, and they protest all the time.

When you stand out front with them having a cigarette, they'll talk about the FBI and their Cointelpro bullshit, they'll talk about organizing a protest, informing the public, reading groups & so on - but they have a plan for addressing power and trying to change its course.

Maybe they're tightlipped because of the FBI, maybe they're secretive - I can't say - but talking to them you get the impression that they see the revolution like the rapture or the singularity - an event that's so mythological & fantastic that you don't really need to plan what will happen afterward - since afterward everything will be taken care of.

Planning past the sale, so to speak, aiming ahead and down the road. You might say that the right's really been better at that - but I'm not quite persuaded of that either. Rather, it seems like these causes and plans are more solid investments - the Contras are a better investment than Sandanistas, they can get the money to flow to them, the funding to keep the machines working. You're talking about financial crises and probably rightly so - but I wonder where these organizations end up when there's less corporate backing. Is the field more level then?

[sabotabby]

I think a lot of the left just has no idea what a revolution would entail. I mean, I doubt I would last very long. And we're also terrible at organizing; bunch of little groups that spend more time fighting each other than anyone worth fighting. Admittedly, the Avakian people are actual fucking loons.

Planning past the sale, so to speak, aiming ahead and down the road. You might say that the right's really been better at that - but I'm not quite persuaded of that either. Rather, it seems like these causes and plans are more solid investments - the Contras are a better investment than Sandanistas, they can get the money to flow to them, the funding to keep the machines working. You're talking about financial crises and probably rightly so - but I wonder where these organizations end up when there's less corporate backing. Is the field more level then?

I doubt the wealthy are ever going to stop funding horrible organizations. I mean, they shrivel up and die without it, because no one actually likes them.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

It is getting scary over there.

So now they've found Nazi memorabilia and neo-Nazi pamphlets and stuff at his flat. Don't think we're going to hear the mainstream media using the T word any time soon though.

People tend to ask "How can the left speak to the working class again?", but if you're having to ask that question you've failed already, because it means you think of "the left" as something wholly distinct from the working class. What is needed for the working class, or more of it, to become politicized and organized again? How can the organized left (of which the Labour Party is a key part), which has become so distanced from the working class, be part of this, re-embed itself in the working class?

As a privileged, professional, international jet-setting educated middle-class bubble-dwelling ex-pat, I'm fucked if I know.

But without that, we are heading in a very dangerous direction, because most of the working class (not to mention a large proportion of the 'middle class' wherever one defines that as beginning) have become firmly, consistently convinced that immigrants are the real problem, and if that remains the case then, yeah, the next big economic crisis could have ugly, ugly consequences.

My main hope is that the Tory Party, whoever wins next week, will tear itself apart so badly that it will give Labour an opening despite not having convinced enough people on this.

[sabotabby]

So now they've found Nazi memorabilia and neo-Nazi pamphlets and stuff at his flat. Don't think we're going to hear the mainstream media using the T word any time soon though.

Nah, they'll keep playing the mentally ill card. Which may be true of him, but is probably true of most people who become terrorists. Level-headed types tend not to become suicide bombers.

People tend to ask "How can the left speak to the working class again?", but if you're having to ask that question you've failed already, because it means you think of "the left" as something wholly distinct from the working class. What is needed for the working class, or more of it, to become politicized and organized again? How can the organized left (of which the Labour Party is a key part), which has become so distanced from the working class, be part of this, re-embed itself in the working class?

To give Labour credit, it's trying. It's finally not shit after decades of being abhorrent. As for the actual left, I think possibly not fighting stupid sectarian battles would be a start.

My main hope is that the Tory Party, whoever wins next week, will tear itself apart so badly that it will give Labour an opening despite not having convinced enough people on this.

I could see that happening. That's the other, more cheerful outcome, both in Britain and North America (the Tories here are currently eating each other, and it's not like the Republicans are particularly big tent at the moment).

I could just see things going in bad directions more easily.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

"People tend to ask "How can the left speak to the working class again?", but if you're having to ask that question you've failed already, because it means you think of "the left" as something wholly distinct from the working class. What is needed for the working class, or more of it, to become politicized and organized again? How can the organized left (of which the Labour Party is a key part), which has become so distanced from the working class, be part of this, re-embed itself in the working class?"

But this is a huge problem. What, indeed, for the purposes we are speaking of here is the "working class"? One could come up with all sorts of theoretical stuff about relationships to the means of production and so on but one doesn't end up with a group with which one can engage politically. Most of the time nowadays, given that hardly anyone works in manufacturing or extractive industries anymore, it boils down to the public sector unions but they are so politically "soft" as to be useless. The lumpenproletariat is no more use today than it was in Keir Hardie's. So who, what and where are the workers?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

>>My main hope is that the Tory Party, whoever wins next week, will tear itself apart so badly that it will give Labour an opening despite not having convinced enough people on this.

Is that actually what's likely to happen if the Tory Party splits? I would expect a realignment in which the Tory right and UKIP come together in some sort of nationalist bloc while some sort of realignment of the centre right also takes place; whether that ends up branded as Conservative, Labour or something else is anybody's guess. I would expect under any such scenario the Labour Left would be marginalised either within a New New Labour party or as a post 1931 style rump.

[rdi.livejournal.com]

> What is needed for the working class, or more of it, to become politicized and organized again?

Working class != Labour voter.

My take in the 80s was that Labour missed out on an important point: the working class didn’t want to stay working class, they wanted to become middle class. Thatcherism caught that aspirational note and exploited it.

Thatcherism also basically destroyed the jobs that much of the working class relied on, but the ones who benefited were too busy sitting in front of their big-screen tellys to notice.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

This is the kind of senseless shit we will expect if we leave the EU - i an scared!

[sabotabby]

Me too, and I'm nowhere even close. But if you guys fall to barbarism, what hope do we have?

[rdi.livejournal.com]

We shall have to carry the light of civilization ourselves.