I am still reeling from much of the rubbish Douglas Murray spouted at yesterday’s One Law for All seminar entitled ‘Enemies not Allies.’ I couldn’t respond to him as I would have liked because there just wasn’t enough time and as spokesperson of One Law for All I had to try to keep to the subject at hand.
But that is what personal blogs are for.
Video footage of the excellent event and discussion will be made available soon but I want to make sure that I address some of the things he said particularly on immigration, the pope and paedophilia in the church, and of course the absurd portrayal of communism as being one and the same with fascism.
Anyway let me begin with the issue of immigration.
Murray says that the call for limiting immigration is not a racist one.
I say it is – whether in the context of Sharia law, which was the discussion of the evening, or any other context.
A call for limits on immigration when discussing Sharia law implies that immigrants are responsible for the bleak state of affairs.
Have a problem with cut-backs in the health care system? Let’s limit immigration. Schools too full and not up to par? Let’s limit immigration. You don’t like Sharia? Let’s limit immigration.
Immigrants and asylum seekers (‘cockroaches’ according to the British Nationalist Party) are just easy scapegoats for problems that are caused elsewhere.
Take the issue of Sharia law. Immigrants haven’t brought Sharia law. Many of the Islamists here are British-born. And anyway the rise in Sharia is a result of the rise of Islamism. Islamism was encouraged and brought to centre stage by Western governments as a green belt against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. And even today with their ‘war on terror’ Islamists are some of the US and British government’s closest allies. Iraq has more become more Islamic since their ‘intervention;’ British troops are setting up Sharia courts in Afghanistan, the Government keeps funding and appeasing Islamists, and encouraging religion’s role in society and immigrants are to blame?
Murray says he prefers the pope and a religion that discriminates against him for being gay than one that will push him off a building. But he is not at risk of being pushed off a building. Yet quite a few of the immigrants and asylum seekers who have escaped Islamism and Sharia law are.
It is absurd how the Right will profess to care about people’s rights when opposing Sharia law and Islamism but will never support the victims and survivors of Islamism or US-led militarism who dare to demand a better life.
If we do need limits – and I agree that we do – rather than limiting immigration, why not limit the far-Right, the bankers, the war industry and NeoCons for that matter. It wouldn’t change everything but I know I for one would be a lot happier. And I think most people would too.
In reverse order,
Yes, yes, yes, a left leaning revolution that, somehow, magically, who-could-have-guessed unleashed hell on earth. Never heard that before.
Re: the connection between the Commies and the Nazis, who said this?
“Kick down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lampposts and stamp upon them.” Answer: Ruth Fischer, co-founder of the Austrian Communist party.
I stand corrected on the matter of voting. What you have admitted is that they were instrumental in unleashing that horror, just in the same way that they helped the Ayatollah take power in Iran. Further, the Communists and Socialists did a great deal of the spadework to open up the intellectual ground for the Nazis to move into.
Nor has anyone answered my question: what’s so great about replacing an Islamic theocracy with a Communist dictatorship?
Because what I have described is not xenophobia. It’s an attachment to the community they have always lived in. They’d feel just as uncomfortable if a McDonalds and real-estate developers would move in, and no one would term that xenophobic.
For the record, I’m an internationalist and pro-immigration. However, I am not such a damn fool not to know that that is a direct result of the class and privilege I was born into. I know there are many who don’t have that advantage.
You ask about the resurgence of genuinely neo-fascist parties. Well, what do you expect? The center-left ruling class has so spat on and demonized the working-class that they don’t have anywhere else to go. As Shylock says:
“Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause;
But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.”
There’s another decidedly non-racist reason to limit immigration, and that’s environmentalism. I looked around and found this video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4094926727128068265
All of this is debatable. But that’s just the point, it’s debatable. I am sick to death of this attitude by many lefties that they get to dictate what is and is not acceptable discourse and everyone else has to toe the line. Newsflash for Namazie: the Berlin Wall is down, the Cuban revolution has packed up, the Khmer Rouge is history, China is making as many concessions to the free market as it can get away with. Those days are over. You’re going to have to get used to the idea that, given the record of your movement, you’ll have to explain yourself to others.
Again, you are completely ignorant of history. You can’t even distinguish between Socialists (or more precisely, Social Democrats) and Communists. In many ways, Social Democrats were the only party in Weimar that were committed to the new democracy. Especially the Prussian state government until July 1932 when it was taken over by conservative parties.
As a Social Democrat myself, I don’t particularly care for communists, in the past or in the present, but I also know that a sizeable portion of the working class is susceptible to xenophobic campaigns.
– Look at the Swedish elections in 2010 and how the Socialdemokraterna lost, and how they lost a lot of voters to the xenophobic Sverigedemokraterna.
– Look at the state elections in Hesse in 1999, when the conservative party was able to win by exploiting xenophobic sentiments, also from voters of the SPD.
You can use euphemisms such as “attachment to the community they have lived in” all that you want, but in my book a rejection of strangers to your community just because they are strangers is xenophobia, it’s that simple.
I imagine it’s one with big letters, and not too many of those, and lots of pictures.
You can drone on and on, repeating the same fallacies over and over again, but that will not change anything. Want the neo-fascist resurgence to get even stronger? Make sure that people like you keep on in this manner.
because not addressing my points at all makes your argument so much more convincing…
it’s also ironic that you accuse me of not making my homework even though you were the one who was too stupid to look up the Weimar Republic election results.
I gave you two examples of how Social Democrats lost voters to xenophobic parties, yet you were unable to address any of that.
Look, you sound like someone who is offended about being called out on their white privilege, or someone who grew up in an environment soaked with white privilege. You’re then grasping for straws, and looking for arguments to make you feel better like “they’re just attached to the place” or some kind of BS like that. I know it’s hard and having this socialisation doesn’t make you a bad person, people can overcome it.
Walton, you are quite wrong:
There’s an interesting book by Julian Baggini who did something a lot more people should do and went out and lived with the British working class. You know, actually listened to them, instead of considering them a tool and cannon-fodder the way that all radical leftwing movements have. What he found was it had to do with a deep attachment to place. Most of the working class live within 4 miles of where they were born; that community is pretty much all they have. While they’d oppose a large number of immigrants moving in, they’d similar oppose a McDonalds and strip mall in their village, or a large population of students. That’s not racism. You can argue about any of those, but to simply cast around aspersions like this is such a typically left wing thing. You can’t beat a modern lefty intellectual for pissing on the working class from a great height.
In all of the developed world we have a welfare state. More people = less to go around. Also, the fact that many government, the British included, have a racialist policy of distribution (there are funds for ‘the black disadvantaged’, not ‘the disadvantaged etc.), makes conflicts inevitable. The matter of sheer numbers means there have to be some restrictions on the number and rate. Or would you like to say that only native-born should have access to these funds?
Incidentally, I did a little digging on the Worker-Communist party of Iran, and found out that it’s progenitor hugely supported the Iranian revolution and then was all shocked that they weren’t the ones bringing down the boot. In the same way that the Communists all lined up to vote for Hitler in Germany, because they wanted to destroy Capitalism first. Nach Hitler kommen wir, was the old slogan. And then there’s the unspeakable horror that the commies unleashed on their own, in Cambodia, in China, in Russia. Forgive me, but I do not see what’s so great about the WCPI’s project to replace the iranian regime of rape-chambers and mass oppression with slave gangs and mass starvation. Yes, yes, yes – heard it all before, you’ll be the first ones who won’t be murderous tyrants, unlike all your predecessors. As the eskimo said to the fridge salesman, I ain’t buying it.
So I sugest that Namazie sees to the huge, festering beam in her own eye before whining about the mote in Murray’s.
Your first mistake: thinking Walton is a communist.
If you’re uncomfortable with accusing some segments of the working class as racist, why not xenophobic? This is a fact in many European countries, see most recently the success of the openly xenophobic Sverigedemokraterna, who got a lot of votes from the traditional working-class voter segment of the Social Democrats.
Also, your portrayal of German history is in bad need of citations. “Nach Hitler kommen wir” did not mean that Communists were casting votes for Hitler, but it represented the KPD’s inability of differentiating between democratic and fascist parties. For the KPD, ever since the events of 1919/20, they had seen the SPD as socio-fascists and as a consequence never joined hands with them in efforts of creating an “anti-fascist front”.
After the SPD fell from power on the national level in 1930, this meant to the KPD that after socio-fascism, now “real fascism” had come to power, again demonstrating an inability in understanding what the NSDAP was compared to the other right-leaning parties.
They expected the Hitler regime to quickly collapse. But nowhere have I ever seen that they were actually voting for the NSDAP. Have a look at the voting shares. From 1924 to 1932, the voting share of the KPD was steadily rising so there is no sign at all for your claim that they were “lining up to vote” for the NSDAP. For the last Reichstagswahl in on March 5, 1933, the KPD vote fell from 16% to 12%, but the last election was already after Hitler’s ascent to power, with many SPD and KPD functionaries already in “protective custody”.
(In 1944/45, again, the slogan was adopted again from German communists exiled to Moscow, and it finally became reality at least in the Soviet sector.)
Just one note for other readers: many people supported the Iranian revolution. It wasn’t an Islamic revolution but a left-leaning one that was crushed by Islamism. Here’s a good article on it: http://hekmat.public-archive.net/en/0910en.html.
QFT
Maryam is spot-on. Anti-immigration sentiments are grounded in racist bigotry and scapegoating. And immigration laws come at a terrible human cost on both sides of the Atlantic, including lengthy detention of migrants (including children) in appalling conditions at private “immigration detention centres”, deportation of people to countries where they face torture and rape, and deaths in the custody of the State’s hired thugs. Not to mention the arbitrariness of the whole thing: why should the location of a person’s birth or the colour of her passport determine where she is allowed to live, work and raise her family?
There is no non-racist justification for limiting immigration. The hoary old argument – “immigrants are taking our jobs” – is not only probably empirically false, it also rests on the discriminatory assumption that “our people” are more important than “foreigners”, and should have preferential access to the job market. (One could use exactly the same logic to argue, as people did for a long time, that women should be excluded from the workforce to protect jobs for men; yet we would all now recognize that argument as naked bigotry. Why can’t we see the bigotry when it comes to nationality-based restrictions?) And while it might be easy for a rich white Old Etonian like Murray to argue in favour of limiting immigration, I suggest he should try spending a few months working with, say, detained asylum-seekers and refugees, and get to grips with the awful human cost of the policy he supports, before spouting his bullshit.
Maryam is spot-on. Anti-immigration sentiments are grounded in racist bigotry and scapegoating. And immigration laws come at a terrible human cost on both sides of the Atlantic, including child detention in appalling conditions by private “immigration detention centres”, deportation of people to countries where they face torture and rape, and deaths in the custody of the State’s hired thugs. Not to mention the arbitrariness of the whole thing: why should the location of a person’s birth or the colour of her passport determine where she is allowed to live, work and raise her family?
There is no non-racist justification for limiting immigration. The hoary old argument – “immigrants are taking our jobs” – is not only probably empirically false, it also rests on the discriminatory assumption that “our people” are more important than “foreigners”, and should have preferential access to the job market. (One could use exactly the same logic to argue, as people did for a long time, that women should be excluded from the workforce to protect jobs for men; yet we would all now recognize that argument as naked bigotry. Why can’t we see the bigotry when it comes to nationality-based restrictions?) And while it might be easy for a rich white Old Etonian like Murray to argue in favour of limiting immigration, I suggest he should try spending a few months working with, say, detained asylum-seekers and refugees, and get to grips with the awful human cost of the policy he supports, before spouting his bullshit.
Hear! Hear!
Still cute,
The automatic contempt that the left has for anyone who is not on it, and also for the working class, is truly unbelievable.
Call that an argument? I’m sure you’ll say it, and will say it over and over again. That doesn’t make it so.
Murray remains one of the most important thinkers and activists of our time. Given that it is the left – your faction – that is the principle defender of the Islamic ultra-right, maybe you should have a slightly more humble attitude.
Anyone can take a look at Murray’s words and see that you are flat out lying about his position:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wlSS61X9eg
Also,as for anti-immigration being 'racist', I'd like to add this…
"More Asians are now opposed to immigration than white Britons, according to a new poll which reveals that opposition to new arrivals now transcends race.
Research commissioned by the Searchlight Educational Trust found that 39 per cent of Asians, 34 per cent of whites and 21 per cent of blacks believed immigration should be halted either permanently or at least until the UK's economy was back on track."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361163/Asians-likely-anti-immigration-white-Britons.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
It's recognition that large scale immigration is causing social problems
Firstly, how can limiting immigration be inherently racist? The British would dearly like the number of blonde, blue-eyed Christian Poles reduced, as well as the others. Immigration control is strongly supported among the NWB population, so please kill the idea that it is white people disliking brown people that's the root of anti-immigration sentiments.
Maryam… this is OUR (British) country. This is our cultural and biological identity that is being tampered with, and from the POV of most white Britons, mass immigration has not done a thing to improve our quality of life. It's caused housing shortages, Islamic terrorism, hate crimes (on all sides) unemploymnent, rioting, and dealing with the masses of asylum claims costs us a fortune. We also have to spend a lot of time and money trying to calm racial and religious tensions.
I can see how the limited immigration of trained indviduals benefits the host country, but how does allowing large scale immigration from impoverished, violent misogynist cultures benefit us at all? It doesn't, we just end up having to deal with BS like Shariah in England. I'd like to add if the British suddenly started settling in the countries where our immigrants are coming from in such huge numbers, the locals of each nation would soon start protesting about us. Could you imagine the reaction to a few hundred thousand Brits taking over a town in Iran or Pakistan?
Humans are primates, and being territorial and disliking 'non-group' members is as natural behaviour for us as it is for chimps. An ethnically mixed population is always going to have some level of internal conflict. Why sign up for that?
Maryam,
The EDL has never blamed everything on immigration.We are fully aware that the Muslims who have called for the Sharia to be implemented have most likely been born in the UK.What we are worried about is a large influx of Muslims who in a couple of decades time could help prop up the vote of an Islamist party that contests an election.That is the reason we wish to limit the amount of Muslim immigrants.
As for the EDL being the same as Al Queda.Well a better comparision would be the the fuel protesters of 2000.Sorry its not so exciting but its far nearer the truth.A single issue protest group that will quickly go away once its objectives are realised.We have no ambition to hold office or enter general politics.
One more thing:
Lest any of the readers of my last post feel inclined to label me as, "far-right,"…
…I am writing from the United States, and am considered, here, to be politically very moderate.
From our perch here in the U.S., we look at Britain and see that immigration is completely destroying the English people, and much of Europe.
When we visit England, it doesn't even look or feel remotely English anymore.
We people here are very sad to watch what is happening to Britain.
That is not to say that all immigrants are bad, or that the situation is all the fault of immigrants.
However, many immigrants and their descendants are, indeed, behaving badly and criminally.
The ridiculously excessive levels of immigration, and the ensuing various "racial harmony" laws and the politically-correct stifling of common free speech, are, indeed, a significant problem.
A desire to impose restrictions or moratoriums on immigration is not a sign of being "far-right."
It's a sign of 'common sense' — a 'common sense' desire to not allow unnecessary social friction into one's country of home.
The persons who are attempting to pervert the laws of nature — which are apparent in studying a variety of living species — are those who try to force people to live together, who do not naturally fit together. Such efforts will inevitably lead to conflict.
Those such persons are radicals, who have been brainwashed with totalitarian ideologies, and their close offspring of excessive libertinism and libertarianism, and anarchy.
Compatible social, ethnic, religious, ideological and ancestral groupings are necessary for a harmonious and stable society.
Due to immigration, Britain has passed the tipping point of stable equilibrium: it will no doubt lead to violent conflict, or even war.
Britain has drifted so far to the left, politically, that it is listing over and sinking into the Atlantic.
Maryam, I encourage you to give great consideration to the likelihood that it is your Marxist-Leninist ideology that is causing so much grief and violence to the entire planet over the past 160 years — ever since Marx put the "method of revolution" into print.
News flash, Freedom of speech:
in Europe, you’d be regarded a xenophobic right-wing extremist, and rightly so. No-one would be surprised if a politician from one of the Neo-Nazi parties would spout such xenophobic nonsense like you did on this blog.
Embattled as he may be at the moment, even the German president, a conservative party member, is on record saying that “Islam is part of Germany now”.
So if it’s possible (see how I’m not restricting your freedom of movement) please stay at the other side of the pond, thank you very much (and apologies to your fellow Americans)
I’m sorry this seems to be a one year old discussion, I just saw “January” and thought it was current as it got linked from a similar debate on Pharyngula.
Apologies..
Miss Namazie:
The soil you are on is ancestral English soil.
Miss Namazie, you should be exceedingly grateful for the generosity that the over-generous English people have shown you for allowing you into this country at all. You should not be telling the English how to run their country.
What sort of country should give priority to the demands of a *communist* refugee, of all people, from the other side of the planet, while throwing its own native countrymen over a cliff?
Perhaps the English should send you packing. Perhaps you should push your communist agenda on your own people. Or is that why they pushed you out?
An indigenous people is fully within its right to regulate the admission of foreigners into its land, and ought not be targeted by such "conversation-halters" such as the words "racist" and "bigot," etc.
The indigenous people should have the full power to eject you, for attempting to treat their countrymen thusly.
The English are an indigenous people comprised of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Normans. There ancestors have been born, loved, gave birth, fought and died on these lands for millenia.
They belong here. You don't.
There is absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with an indigenous people denying entry to anyone not of that people, for any reason. Even if it is simply that they do not want incompatible people here, whether by ancestry, language, ideology, or a penchant for otherwise changing the culture, ethnicity or rootedness of the persons banging on the door to get in, or for any reason that they choose.
Your presence in England is just as much of a problem here as the Muslims are. This is because your political activities, and those of your similarly-minded leftists, and your general inability to live in English society without feeling the need to verbally or politically lash out at any of them, are preventing the English people from enjoying the freedom to speak and to associate and to govern themselves as they like.
If your presence in England in anyway inhibits the English from being the people they have been for over a millenia, then you have no "right" to be here. They should be able to repatriate you, if you do not assimilate without complaint or by attempting to undermine their society.
I don't think you want One Law for All. I think that what you really want is Communist Law for All, for the Entire Planet.
You belong in Iran. You do not belong in England.
As the people of England have been kind enough to allow you in, as long as they permit you to stay:
You should let the English people decide the course of England; then, you should abide by their decisions. That would be the proper thing for an immigrant to do.
Rabid PC/MC leftism is strangling England and all Europe.
I advise you to wipe all the Marxist-Leninist ideology out of your neurons, and become a free person who can get along with the English people without desiring to cull out those of English blood.
God bless red-blooded Englishmen like Doug Murray, Tommy Robinson, and Nick Griffin, and Ian Stuart Donaldson. I don't care how intensely English or Germanic they might be. This is their land, and the English have a right to defend their right to it to the death.
Support for the EDL and al-Qaeda are not equivalent. You’re not comparing like with like. You’d do better to compare the EDL with the StWC or UAF, and al-Qaeda with Nazism.
Decent people wrongly support the EDL and the StWC. These people should be engaged, and can be argued out of their position (e.g. you can be against a war without siding with Islamists, you can debate secularism or immigration without marching with thugs and neo-fascists).
However, there are members of these groups, particularly in their leadership, who cross the line I mentioned above. These people are to be avoided like the plague.
(The support of movements like al-Qaeda and Nazism is off-topic and complicated, but to your direct question: No. The people who ‘bomb innocent civilians’ are not motivated by legitimate grievances, but by their ideology.)
Adam you ask whether support for groups like the EDL may stem from legitimate concerns, and if so, what are they?
Let me ask you this: Does support for groups like Al Quaeda and the Taliban stem from legitimate concerns, and if so, what are they?
My answer to both is the same. So what even if there are real grievances.
You and I may have many of those very same grievances but we don't bomb innocent civilians or attack immigrants in their neighbourhoods.
(Ignore the last question. I've just noticed your latest blog entry, which I'll now read.)
I was explaining my first post, following your challenge.
I’ve written about immigration above, and we simply disagree on that subject.
I’ll add that I think you’re confusing repatriation of people already living in a country with people moving to a country from elsewhere. There is an obvious difference between choosing which people you welcome as guests and potential citizens, and kicking out people you don’t like.
A couple of questions:
Do you agree that support for groups like the EDL may stem from legitimate concerns, and if so, what are they?
The claim that communism and fascism are ‘one and the same’ is indeed false, but do you consider all comparisons between them ‘absurd’? You may as well deal with this now, as it’s bound to come up again.
Adam you are mixing up the issues or you may be explaining things to readers about last night’s seminar so I will stick for now to the issue of immigration as I hadn’t mentioned Stop the war in my post.
Someone can be racist and sexist without being a member of the BNP. Even so, it is possible to say that the targeting of immigrants in any debate – as was done in a debate on Sharia law yesterday – is racism. That is not convicting people or grouping them with the BNP. It is stating an opinion.
Yes many people believe that immigration should be limited but that is also the government’s line on things as that of the entire post Cold-War world. Create enough of a climate against a given population and blame them for the ills of society (obviously not every ill) and you will soon have everyone jumping on the bandwagon. That even a majority says something doesn’t necessarily make it true.
I suppose what I am saying is that if it is legitimate to discuss the quantity and quality of immigrants why not citizens? Aren’t some a bit too old and costing the health care service too much. Aren’t some of the members of far-right groups contemptuous of human values and human decency? If one can debate political issues without targeting groups of people – and again I am distinguishing people from political parties and movements – then it must also be able to be done without targeting immigrants.
I am Muriel Seltman and was at the seminar last night.
Douglas Murray says that we should be willing to be in a form of alliance with the EDL simply because they say other things we disagree with, because lots of people agree with them and we are too small to go it alone.
Does this mean that we could have been in alliance with the Nazis over the need for improvements to the transport system (they built the autobahns) even though these improvements would have taken us to our deaths?
The analogy is not far from the truth!
Alright. I think protesting against Joseph Ratzinger is perfectly legitimate (due to his complicity in institutional child-rape, friendly attitude to Holocaust deniers, etc.), while recognising that on homosexuality, Islamism is a greater threat, and ought to warrant equal if not greater protest by ‘gay rights’ types.
Having investigated SIOE and SIOA, I’m quite certain that they are racist organisations, and believe this would be plain to anyone presented with the evidence.
It is not true (as implied above) that Douglas Murray fails to ‘support the survivors and victims of Islamism’, nor that he holds immigration responsible for all of society’s ills.
I further think that discussing the quantity and quality of immigration is legitimate. A broad rule of thumb : genuine asylum seekers and political dissidents (from Iran, China etc.) and people seeking work or citizenship – Yes; people contemptuous of democracy and liberalism who consider Britain a holiday resort – Not so much. If concern about immigration and integration is racist, that would convict a huge number of people in this country, including most of the Asian people I have spoken to. It is wrong to equate these people with the BNP.
Similarly, it would be unfair to associate all who oppose the Iraq war with the StWC.
Further, one can be a member of a communist party without supporting gulags, show trials and terror famines, just as being a neoconservative does not equate to being a war-loving imperialist.
While alliances can be made between people who differ on certain issues, there is a line that, once crossed, disqualifies a person or group from ally candidacy. What is urgently required is for reasonable people, who mistakenly support such groups, to break from them, and their contemptible leadership, and join the common struggle for equality and liberty.
I fully agree with you, Maryam. People, especially the Right groups, find it very easy to blame everything on immigration.
Free movement of capital should come with free movement of labour and human resources. Free movement of capital, without free movement of labour, leads towards exploitation – which is indeed harmful for the human society as whole.
It's easy to say you disagree without explaining how or why. You need to do that so that one knows where you are coming from and what you mean.
I disagree with both of you, on the issues and on your characterisation of eachother's positions.
However, I think this is a more interesting and productive debate than one is likely to get in Westminster anytime soon.
To be continued!