Liberals and the BNP
Posted on December 1, 2008
Liberal reaction to the hilarious spectacle of shit eating itself — the internal leak of a recent BNP membership list, containing the names of some 12,000 members — is both a measure of the degree to which racist discourse has become mainstream in recent years, and also the laughable inadequacy of the liberal response to fascism. To liberals, the murderous racist ideology of the BNP is an abstraction which remains unrealised in their comfortable — usually — white, male, middle class lives, near the top of the socio-economic ‘food chain’. In the liberal mind, BNP ideology is merely ‘words’. Words which will wither and die the more publicity and exposure they receive, as if ‘bad speech’ in one place is somehow cancelled out by ‘good speech’ in another. Words which remain miraculously unconnected to the violence and intimidation experienced daily by minorities, migrants and asylum seekers. The BNP and other fascists are slightly naughty boys, who should be countered not by excluding them from public life and political discourse, but by occasional tutting and refusing to ‘drink with’ them — or cutting them dead at the ATM queue.
Certainly, the liberals say, fascists must not be excluded from labour organisations, for these are nothing but mutual societies whose sole purpose is to argue for pay and conditions of members. Unions should not concern themselves with anything outside narrow financial self-interest of their members. This is a manifestation of what Lenin called Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei — trade-unions-only-ism or ‘yellow’ unionism — in which unions are subordinated to bourgeois ideology and act as functionaries of the bourgeois state, not as agents of class struggle, which is contrary to the interests of the ruling class. The liberal’s wrinkled-nosed distaste for class war goes hand in hand with support for continuing capitalist exploitation of workers. The presence of fascists and racists in labour organisations, whose values they do not share, diverts the focus of workers from class struggle and the fight against capitalism.
Fascism and its close cousin Nazism are the ugly outriders of capitalism in crisis, ’safety valves’ which vent the anger of the petit bourgeoisie and their tailenders away from the ruling class, towards the vulnerable and those targets of opportunity variously identified as ‘Other’ — whether Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, or other ‘ethnic’, cultural and sexual minorities — to whom are attributed blame for the perceived problems of the majority group. The alien Other is the enemy within, accused of decadence, cosmopolitanism and impurity, of undermining ‘western Christian values’ and waging war against ‘our way of life’. If the ‘Big Lie’ is simple enough and repeated often enough, people will eventually accept it as truth. In the midst of the present shrieking hysteria about the ‘threat’ posed to Britain by Muslims, ‘crypto-Muslims’, foreigners and asylum seekers, we hear nothing about travellers actually being evicted from their own land, or the children actually locked up despite having committed no crime, or the violence and intimidation actually experienced by migrants.
Liberals collude in this process of demonisation and externalisation of blame, supporting racist and discriminatory laws, playing up the ‘threat’ from the Other (sometimes obsessively so), while pretending that the BNP, far from being a criminal organisation, is merely a minor political party with slightly robust views on immigration — which after all, are not so different to their own. Britain, they assure themselves, does not ‘do’ extremism or political violence, without pausing to consider the massacres perpetrated by British imperialism, or the violent suppression of the Chartists, the Peterloo Massacre, the breaking of the General Strike, the violence of putting three million people out of work, or the nazi nail-bomber David Copeland and the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.
Unfortunately, the Littlejohn Left’s bourgeois moralism has been exposed again, with complaints that exposing BNP members isn’t the ‘done thing’, depite years of the Redwatch hate site publishing the names and addresses of socialists and antifascists. Frankly, this calls into question their seriousness about the antifascist struggle.
As Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed:
The motor force of progress is truth and not lies.
The ideology of the racist right is based on lies, lies which history shows us, dressed up in pseudo-respectable language, gather critical mass with repetition. If we do not utterly defeat the lies of the racist right, humanity risks descending into the same barbarism which recently so nearly destroyed it.
No accommodation with fascism. No compromise. ¡No Pasarán!
