Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo Column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plans by the UK government to not go ahead with making Islamophobia an offence would appear on the surface to be a victory for common sense.

In March 2026 the government put in place a ‘non-statutory definition of anti-Muslim hostility.’ The government is adamant that this is an advisory, not legally binding measure and that free speech remains inviolate.

Internet AI says that this plan covers violence, harassment, and prejudicial stereotyping; it applies to individuals based on their actual or perceived Muslim identity; it will not hinder criticism of religion or beliefs, and a special representative on anti-Muslim hostility will be appointed to support implementation. How this will work out in practice remains to be seen. It will be greeted with relief by those expecting something more draconian but it still provides special measures for a specific religious group.

If you belong to a religion, which is the equivalent of an American Homeowners Association, filled with rules and regulations, then one of the cardinal rules is do not take the head honcho’s name in vain – or else!

Do that and you might find yourself getting stoned, and not in a good way. However, cursing those who follow and support a different honcho is positively encouraged.

‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me’ is a line from a 1964 Carry On film; ‘Blasphemy, blasphemy, they’ve all got it in for me’, doesn’t come within a light year of being as funny, but then blasphemy is certainly no laughing matter. And never has been. Merriam-Webster defines blasphemy as ‘the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God or to something sacred’.

In modern times AI says that ninety-five countries, possibly more, still have laws that regulate blasphemy. In six countries, mainly in West Asia, the penalty for blasphemy is death. It was always thus because to attack the gods a group had brought into being was to try to undermine that society.

Thomas Aikenhead, a seventeenth century Scottish student, articulated the following statement: ‘Theology is a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras’. However, uttering these sentiments, or truths, resulted in his hanging at the year’s end of 1696. Aikenhead was the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Great Britain.

In 1977 a private libel prosecution for blasphemy was brought against Gay News and its editor. It resulted in financial damages being awarded against the defendants. In 1979 an appeal to the House of Lords against its conviction was lost. One of the judges hearing the appeal opined that blasphemy laws ought to cover all religions, not just Christianity, and would no doubt have liked to implement some medieval punishment against those who ‘cause grave offence to the religious feelings of some of their fellow citizens or are such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely to read them.’

DC

Halo, Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is amongst the top ten American capitalist ‘opportunities’ (read scams) for becoming rich in the USA? One in particular is also popular in other parts of the world. Become a preacher. Grow a congregation. Rook them for as much money as you can.

At a Pentecostal Assemblies of the World Convention a preacher said it had cost him $2,000 to renew his ordination and license. Can y’all contribute toward that? Yahoo reported that he ordered the doors locked on the one thousand people there and demanded that they each give twenty dollars. And the same from the online audience. Nice work if you can get it, Rev. He’s quoted in the piece as justifying the action on the following grounds: ‘The truth is, when finances are being received in any worship gathering, it is one of the most vulnerable and exposed times for both the finance and security teams. Movement during this sacred exchange can be distracting and, at times, even risky. My directive was not about control it was about creating a safe, focused, and reverent environment for those choosing to give, and for those handling the resources’.

Chutzpah on a grand scale. Wonder if he had the American equivalent of Securicor waiting outside to safely carry off all the loot? Credit where it’s due, he’s merely following all those who recognised early on that religion offered power over the masses and oodles of boodle.

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The Socialist Party is wholly in favour of free speech, even when religious nonsense is being propagated. That’s because we have a long history of refuting such hokum with empirical evidence. In the USA the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, and free exercise of religion except where it doesn’t.

In Kansas, according to AlterNet, the ‘Satanic Grotto, a group of Kansas religious anarchists’ wanted to hold a ‘black mass’ inside the Statehouse.

In a fine display of sensitivity, the SG noted that ‘The event would not be the full “black mass” the group normally observes because that would involve nudity, drinking and other activities discouraged at the Statehouse. There also wouldn’t be fire or anything used in the ceremony that might pose a physical risk to the public’.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property organised an online petition. It’s described in the piece as a ‘traditionalist Catholic advocacy group’. Private property, eh?

Surprisingly not, the Kansas Governor responded with ‘computer says no’.

The article author points out that encouraging deference to religion can lead to ‘true believers’ resorting to violence to end perceived blasphemy. His example is the attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, who was left blind in one eye.

Jonathon Turley, a US First Amendment lawyer, said: ‘Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has announced that the government will be further cracking down on hate speech with a new working group tasked with defining “Islamophobia”’. The effort to crack down on “Islamophobia” could create a type of blasphemy standard if it encompasses criticism of the faith or its practices’.

DC

Voice From The Back: Polluting for profit (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Polluting for profit

The major problems of pollution are caused by the excessive burning of fossil fuels, everyone except the coal and oil lobby agrees. There are alternatives such as wind and solar power; so why aren’t they being developed at the same rate as fossil fuel usage? Simple really. “At present wind power costs between 1.9 and 3.1p a unit, while solar is more than 20p. Conventional generated power sells for between l.1p and 1.3p.” Observer (25 August). Inside a socialist society we won’t be polluting the earth if we have an alternative, but then we would not be producing wealth to make a handful rich but to satisfy human need.

DIY hanging

Clive Fairweather, the outgoing HM Inspector for prisons in Scotland had some figures on suicides in prison that might cheer the “hang-’em, flog-’em” brigade but should chill any compassionate human being. Think of the despair that lies behind a young man taking his own life. Another indictment of the inhumanity of capitalism. “Mr Fairweather told his audience that in the eight years he had been chief inspector of prisons, 170 prisoners had died, yet between 1900 and 1963, only 35 were executed by hanging. 'Bring back hanging? It’s DIY hanging at eight times the rate these days, for our young in prison', he said.” Herald (4 September).

The close circuit society

In the Guardian of 7 September there was a supplement on surveillance in Britain today. It was pretty scary stuff and shows how capitalism is becoming more and more restrictive . “From the moment a worker logs on in the morning to the moment they shut down at night, corporate information *technology departments can watch each and every action they make — which keys they press, which websites they visit, what emails they receive and send . . . Security procedures such as swipe cards on entrances also allow detailed following of employees — if management wants to — of how much time is spent in which parts of a building and, in some workplaces, with cards required for entry to workplace toilets.”

Exporting destruction

As the US and UK leaders claim an attack on Iraq is justified because that country has stocks of “mass destruction weapons” it is worthwhile noting where Iraq was obtaining these weapons from. Surprise, surprise, from the US and the UK. “Reports by the US Senate’s committee on banking, housing and urban affairs — which oversees American export policy — reveal that the US under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr. sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia . . . Classified US Defence Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxin, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxin can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.” Sunday Herald (8 September).

The Voice of America?

Ann Coulter, an American journalist and broadcaster has written a book “Slander” containing outrageous right wing views. It is subtitled “Liberal Lies About The American Right” In her column in the National Review she put forward her solution to the Middle East problem, quoted in the Sunday Herald Magazine (8 September): “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Voice of America?, let’s hope not; though her book does currently top the New York [Times]  bestsellers list.

Oxfam’s solution to famine

Have you ever given money to Oxfam for them to help out by distributing food during some famine? If so, you may well be surprised by the following news item: "British charity Oxfam today launched a 'coffee rescue plan' urging political and business leaders to destroy surplus stocks and guarantee a fair price for farmers" (Guardian, 19 September).

Oxfam's original name was the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief but it later branched out into being a reformist campaigning organisation, working within the context of capitalism. We have always argued that those who set out to reform capitalism end up accepting its logic. This latest episode proves this point up to the hilt. Capitalism periodically produces crises where "too much" food\ has been produced, a crisis of plenty amidst poverty. It solves such crises) not by distributing the plenty to the poor (that would be against its logic and undermine profits), but by destroying the plenty. This has been a classic illustration of the socialist case against capitalism: that it is a system of production for profit rather than to satisfy human needs. Now OXFAM, an organisation set up to try to distribute a bit of the plenty to some of the poor, has come round to the capitalist solution: destroy the food! Remember that next time they shake a collection tin under your nose.

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.” The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million. “It’s a very good country for the rich man. Chauffeurs, servants, big houses. The question is, who is suffering? The common man.” :

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The anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom party (PVV) won 24 seats and third place in the Dutch national election last month, says he is forming international alliances to launch branches of his Islamophobic party across the Western world. Almost 1.5m Dutch people voted for the PVV in June. “The message, ‘stop Islam, defend freedom’, is a message that’s not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world.”

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The United Nations estimates that each year 5,000 mostly Muslim women and girls are shot, stoned, strangled, stabled, burned, or smothered by family members with the intention of cleansing shame from the family’s name. While most of these crimes occur in the Middle East and South Asia, immigration is taking them around the globe.

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Fears are growing for the fate of thousands of young girls in rural Mauritania, where campaigners say the cruel practice of force-feeding young girls for marriage is making a significant comeback since a military junta took over the West African country. Aminetou Mint Ely, a women’s rights campaigner, said girls as young as five were still being subjected to the tradition of leblouh every year. The practice sees them tortured into swallowing gargantuan amounts of food and liquid - and consuming their vomit if they reject it.

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As 14-year-old Nguyen Hoang Anh was being branded with hot irons, had solvents poured in his wounds and had his teeth pulled out with pliers, those who heard him ignored his cries. In most countries, suspicions of any kind of child abuse, let alone such a horrific case, would rouse a small army of social workers and police. Vietnam, however, has no such public system and only loose laws protecting children and other vulnerable people. “We don’t consider beating a child to be violence against children,” concedes Nguyen Hai Huu, director of the Ministry for Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs’ child-protection unit.

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An Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares, reports said Saturday, after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names. Two judges at the Bombay High Court on Friday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha. “Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to Indian newspapers.

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BNP: product of reformism’s failure (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just what is it about the BNP that the vast majority of British workers find so nauseating?  In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from the Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and unions like the CWU who informed members that their “conscience clause” gave postal workers the choice not to deliver BNP material if they found it objectionable. The anti-nazi organisation Searchlight even produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million of them in areas where the BNP were most active.

Many were clearly panicked at the thought of widespread BNP victories and this afforded the BNP media coverage which was out of all proportion to the size of their organisation. An eve of poll message from Nick Griffin, the party’s fuehrer, on the BNP website of 9 June, stated  that they “were on course for a political earthquake”, that the BNP  would be “breaking through with three or four Euro MPs”.  Yorkshire, the BNP claimed, was to be their “jewel in the crown.”  Two days earlier the same website had this to say: “Today in London a Monk came up to us.  He said he had voted for the Conservatives all his life but this year he was voting for the BNP.  He informed us that most of the Monks in his monastery were also voting BNP.”  One wonders whether the fascists of the BNP had been taking tips in humour from their favourite comedian Bernard Manning.

And so it came to pass that the BNP managed to gain four new councillors in Bradford in four wards. This ‘jewel’ was out of a record 101 candidates they fielded across Yorkshire.

Elsewhere, the BNP made a breakthrough in the south of England, taking three seats in Epping Forest in the local elections. And in Burnley, the BNP gained one seat but managed to lose the other seven in which its candidates were standing. In the North East, where the party stood a full slate of 25 candidates in Sunderland, they failed to make any promised gains.

Leader Nick Griffin, who in April had invited over Le Pen, the Nazi leader of the French National Front,  to plan how they could work as a team (or rather comedy duo) when Griffin became MEP for the north west of England, failed to take the seat he hankered after.  No BNP candidate succeeded in getting elected to the European parliament and in the London mayoral elections the BNP ended up in sixth place and failed to secure the votes required to get representation on the London Assembly.

Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, booting out the boneheaded troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate – and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project. This was much evident from their election manifestoes, especially that used for their London Assembly campaign and entitled London Needs the BNP.

The manifesto began with a subject the BNP are famous for – the strange obsession with the colour of human skin. It opened: “Within another generation, without political change, London will not even be recognisable as a European city”. Considering the diversity of cultures existing peacefully side by side in most European cities London, in a generation, would very much be like any normal European city. It asserted that the  “remaining British people in London are faced with progressive marginalisation” because there are too many non-whites, neglecting to mention the way capitalism itself marginalises, atomises and alienates not just individuals but entire communities.

There then followed the usual rant against asylum seekers, “both legal and illegal” and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party were said to be responsible for “this new influx that is about to engulf us.” Here again, no mention of the fact that within the EU alone, the UK was recently ranked 10th in number of asylum applications compared to the country’s population or that the government has recently brought in measures that make it far more difficult for people from a variety of countries to claim asylum in the UK – together with a reduction of appeal rights for a host of countries. Neither does the BNP acknowledge that the Home Office itself has recognised that asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants have made a huge contribution to the economic and cultural life of the UK, bringing with them a wealth of skills and knowledge.

Law and order, another BNP favourite was then tackled. Having informed us that recorded crime has risen by 1000 percent (how they love nice round figures) since the 1950s they go on to cite the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers as claiming that mass immigration had “brought new levels of organised crime, drug dealing, gun crime, prostitution, fraud and kidnapping,” before advocating the reintroduction of the birch and the death penalty and a policy of zero tolerance. Again, no mention that one BNP London Assembly candidate was a reputable soccer thug, that the BNP National Development Officer, Tony Lecomber, has twice been imprisoned or that BNP leader Nick Griffin was given a suspended sentence for incitement to racial hatred. A visit to the Searchlight website will reveal that the BNP has a membership full of unsavoury characters. Moreover, in the year following the first BNP council victory in Milwall in 1993, racial assaults increased by 300 percent. It seems crime will only be tolerated when it is the BNP and their supporters who are carrying it out.

Next was the issue of “security” with the BNP promising to “make London safe from the threat of terrorism”, by deporting “Moslem fundamentalists”. Their TV election broadcast, which was edited, though downloadable later from the BNP website, was similarly Islamophobic, blatantly hinting at a hyped threat of Islamic terrorism. Significantly, the last terrorist bombs to go off in London which killed and injured members of the white working class were set off back in 1999 by one-time BNP activist David Copeland, who, when apprehended , said his aim had been to start a race war which would lead to a BNP government being elected. And the BNP National Organiser has a conviction for setting off a home-made nail bomb and possessing hand-grenades and electronic detonators. Moreover, Griffin’s political mentor is the Italian Nazi terrorist Roberto Fiore; the very same Griffin who once went to Libya to gain support from Colonel Gadaffi  and who was all too ready to share a platform at a Cambridge seminar in July 2002  with Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the despicable Muslim fundamentalist, currently awaiting extradition to the USA for alleged terrorist crimes.

And so the manifesto continues, each statement showing the BNP to be the intolerant, narrow-minded, racist bigots they have always successfully presented themselves as, before closing on a subject covered in the May issue of the Socialist Standard (‘The Beauty Trap’), namely the forthcoming erection of the statue of Alison Lapper: “Just as Ken Livingstone dislikes anything English he equally disapproves of anything British, which is why we are now to have a sad limbless body on the vacant fourth plinth rather than a British statesman or woman. A BNP Mayor would have this dreadful thing removed.”   In this regard the BNP are in keeping with their beliefs on the white master race. Indeed, their National Organiser considers people with learning difficulties to be “sub-human” and those with disabilities to be “genetically inferior”. As true heroes of the white working class they claim to be the BNP have said they will introduce a GM programme to get rid of those they consider “inferior”.

The 800,000 workers who fell for this sort of rubbish across Britain and gave the BNP their votes in the European and Local elections on 10 June are the misinformed products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that one main issue – a total halt on asylum – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than is the hole in the ozone layer. At the end of the day the BNP promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty and tens of thousands wanted it.

Of course, the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism—a tool they can use to great effect when it suits—in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. And neither is their raw brand of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all to ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Furthermore, we can only wonder at the mainstream parties fears of a surge in support for the BNP. Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech springs to mind) and the former’s part in upsetting the Islamic world so much recently, their objections to the BNP do seem a  little hypocritical. They may genuinely abhor the racists of the BNP but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system which they champion and which gives rise to the politics of racism.

If anything the BNP are the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

John Bissett

Friends for Life (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Oneworld £10.99.

The title is a reference to the ‘survival of the fittest’, Charles Darwin’s alternative formulation of the idea of natural selection. This raises the issue of how fitness is measured: it is sometimes seen as a matter of physical strength, intelligence and power, and some racists even regard it as a justification for white supremacy. Here, however, Hare and Woods argue that it is friendliness and co-operation that have led to humans’ evolutionary fitness. The argument is in some ways similar to that of Rutger Bregman in Humankind (discussed in the May 2021 Socialist Standard), though the evidence here is more based on human (pre)history and psychological experiments, rather than discussion of human behaviour in the real world.

The essential concept here is that of self-domestication: ‘natural selection acted on our species in favour of friendlier behavior that enhanced our ability to flexibly cooperate and communicate … we thrived not because we got smarter, but because we got friendlier.’ Female preference for male friendliness is claimed to have caused a friendlier society to evolve. Other human species besides sapiens went extinct since they could not co-operate and communicate in the same way. Friendliness resulted in larger social networks and hence better technology, which meant bigger groups and even better technology, in a positive feedback loop. Human self-domestication happened before eighty thousand years ago. Dogs and bonobos are also ‘built for cooperative communication’, but chimps are not.

However, there is a negative side to the formation of larger groups of people: outsiders can be treated with fear and even aggression. They may even be dehumanised, considered less than fully human, and simianised (looked on as similar to apes). This occurred as part of the justification for the slave trade, and one recent study of Americans found that Muslims were regarded as only 90 percent fully human by the group tested. Dehumanisation seems to be central to explaining why some people do terrible things, along with obedience to authority and a desire to conform (note that all this is in the context of a society that sets people against each other). But contact with other groups reduces conflict, by removing the sense of threat and increasing empathy.

Unfortunately among this presentation is a truly bizarre claim that ‘communists’ (who support ‘extreme forms of egalitarianism’) and anarchists are dehumanisers. Naturally no explanation or justification is offered for this.

On the whole, though, this is a worthwhile account of aspects of human evolution, where co-operation and friendliness have played a crucial role in making modern-day humans such an intelligent and technologically-advanced species, with the potential to live in a world of equality where all needs are met.

Paul Bennett

The BNP advances – what does it mean? (2006)

From the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The BNP gained seats in the May local elections because it put together a better package of lies than the mainstream parties

Despite recent claims to the contrary, the vast majority of British voters find the policies of the BNP nauseating. In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections and again during the 2005 general election, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and trade unions. Back in 2004, Searchlight, the anti-Nazi organisation, produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million copies in areas where the BNP were perceived as posing the biggest threat. Prior to this year’s elections, Searchlight handed out 400,00 copies of their newspaper in 16 versions as well as quarter of a million postcards and again the left and the unions campaigned where the BNP were felt to be most active.

This time round, by all accounts, the panic was just as big as an in 2004. In the wake of a huge election push by the BNP, the anti-racist group Searchlight identified 18 key “battlegrounds” where the neo-Nazis had to be confronted. Other anti-racists groups observed how the BNP, standing 364 candidates, were as strong now than at any time since 1982, when it displaced the National Front as Britain’s favourite bone-head magnet. Ever the pessimists, anti-racist organisations believed BNP pre-election claims could be an underestimate and suggested that a 5 percent swing to the BNP could see them increase their tally of councillors to 70.

A YouGov poll conducted by the Daily Telegraph, prior to the elections, suggested the BNP was set to make “significant gains” in the elections. The poll showed that 7 percent of voters were ready to back the BNP and that some 24 percent had considered voting BNP in the past or were thinking of doing so now.

Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, supposedly booting out the bone-headed troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate – and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project.

For over six months BNP literature had been portraying the coming elections as a “Referendum on Islam”, linking the threat of Islamist terrorism in Britain to the Labour Government’s asylum and immigration policies and the war in Iraq. One BNP leaflet, handed out in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London, declared: “If only they had listened to the BNP.”

Moreover, the BNP’s anti-Islam position has gained in prominence since Nick Griffin was acquitted of racial hatred charges at Leeds Crown Court back in February. It did not help that the judgment came at the same time as the hullabaloo over the anti-Muslim Danish cartoons and the consequent display by a handful of young Muslims dressed as suicide bombers and demonstrating in London, a coincidence that allowed the BNP to pass itself off as the champion of freedom of speech and all things British.

Overnight, the BNP moved further to the right in its anti-Moslem line of attack. Heartened by what they perceive as a lowering of tolerance for Islam, the BNP has become more obsessive. Speaking to the Observer, (24 April), Simon Darby, the man BNP leader Nick Griffin has appointed to take over should an appeal to re-convict him go ahead, said: “We are giving voice to the concerns of ordinary people, Yes, part of it is still about race.” Since 9/11 and 7/7, he says, “things have changed: the new issue is Islam”.

Two years ago the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism – a tool they can use to great effect when it suits – in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. This time round they could count on the nationalism whipped up by the World Cup taking place in Germany as well as the patriotism created by the Queen’s 80th birthday celebrations. And neither is their raw branch of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP and the Conservative Party can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all too ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Recent scandals within the mainstream reformist parties, particularly the Labour Party, and coming in election week, clearly helped boost the BNP vote and resulting in their tally of councillors leaping from 20 to 48. Not least of which was the Home Office fiasco involving the release of foreign prisoners from British prisons, many of whom went on to reoffend, and which played straight into BNP hands. The sleaze turned many would-be voters away from the polling stations too – something the BNP further capitalised on with their supporters making a point of going to the polls. For instance, the BNP claimed a surprising win from Labour in Solihull, when it won the Chelmsley Wood ward by 19 votes, taking its first fascist seat on the council there. But look closely and we see that in Chelmsley Wood 74 percent of the electorate never bothered turning up to vote.

In the borough of Dagenham and Barking, the sitting Labour Party MP, Margaret Hodge, clearly made the BNP look like the party of  the moment when she announced shortly before the election that she had discovered massive support for the BNP, offering that as many as 80 per cent of the electorate would vote for them. She commented: "That's something we have never seen before. They used to be ashamed to vote for the BNP. Now they are not." The media, of course, made much of this, with the BNP thriving on the oxygen of publicity.

Of course there were other factors at play in Dagenham and Barking, such as the government’s refusal to allow the council to build housing and the council’s allocation of housing on a points basis. The areas continuing deindustrialisation, marked by job losses in the docks and at the Ford plant in Dagenham, was also an issue the BNP could mobilise support around. Where the mainstream parties where seen as having let voters down, that was where the BNP found the greatest success.

Lord Tebbit, writing in the Daily Telegraph (21 April), had this to say about the BNP:

“I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies. On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to ‘use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality’, to institute worker ownership, to favour workers’ co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.”

It certainly does sound like left wing reformism – but not Socialist – with the assumption being made that capitalism can be managed for the good of all.

Stuart Jeffries, considering Lord Tebbit’s comments in the Guardian, (28th April), remarked that: “the notion that the BNP might be considered left-wing shows the political vacuum that Labour has created. Not that many of those who will vote BNP next week want to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy. Rather, alienated from their traditional party by its shameless plutocracy and neglect of its core support, some white working-class voters will opt for a party that offers easy lies about their plight.” Suggesting that BNP support is rooted in the failure of mainstream reformism, Jeffries continued: “Blair may not be responsible for populist racism, but he and his party are responsible for putting despair in place of hope from politics for many, and thus making the election of racists likely in several British towns.”

Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum and the former’s part in so overtly upsetting the Islamic world in recent years, their concern for the apparent rising support BNP does seem a mite misplaced. Labour and the Tories may well abhor the policies of the BNP, but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made significant political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system they champion and which gives rise to the politics of race and hate.

The BNP is more the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not really the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating bullshit of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

The hundreds of thousands of misinformed workers who fell for the BNP spiel in May are the products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that neo-nazi solutions to social problems – which they have been led to believe are largely rooted in the colour of a person’s skin – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than, in fact, the mainstream parties who mistakenly believe capitalism can be run in the interests of the workers. At the end of the day the BNP simply put together a better package of lies and, just like the other reformist parties, promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty – and tens of thousands, their minds numbed by the politics of reform fell for the scam.

John Bissett

Putting the Heart into a Heartless World (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists understand why people accept religious ideas. What can be hard to understand though is the irrationality of some of the beliefs, or what they will do to back them up.

The idea of sin for example. As far as Christianity is concerned we are all sinners. By design. We’re born with it, whether we want it or not. We were created, apparently, by a god who wants us to be good, yet programmes us with ‘original sin’ at birth.  It’s all to do with Adam and Eve eating that apple in the Garden of Eden.

(But if god is all-knowing he must have known that Eve was going to eat the bloody apple – even before he created her. Why didn’t he create her with a bit more will-power?)

When it comes to wacky irrationality though, few are more irrational than Terry Jones in Florida. Jones is the Christian pastor, you remember, who put a Koran on trial in his church. After an eight minute hearing he found it guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to be executed – by being burnt. He has announced his plans to put the prophet Mohammed (who died in 632 AD) on trial next.

The outcome of this (at the time of writing) was that after 2 days of rioting in Afghanistan by Moslems who, in protest of Jones antics, decided to take revenge on Westerners, more than 20 innocent people have been killed (2 by beheading) and numerous more injured. Hopefully the Christian and the Islamic gods will be satisfied with the blood sacrifices made to them so far.

On a happier note it’s recently been announced that a thorn from Jesus Christ’s crown held at Stoneyhurst College (a Jesuit Boarding school in Lancashire) whose previous owners include King Louis IX of France and Mary Queen of Scots is to be displayed at the British Museum.

We know it’s a genuine thorn because according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia “two holy thorns are at present venerated, the one at St. Michaels Church in Ghent, the other at Stonyhurst College both professing, upon what seems quite satisfactory evidence, to be the thorn given by Mary Queen of Scots to Thomas Percy Earl of Northumberland”.

“Quite satisfactory evidence” you see. You can’t argue with that.

The thorn from Stoneyhurst College, which is displayed in its own casket, comes complete with a string of pearls (also once owned by Mary Queen of Scots) entwined around it – well you understand, it’s not just any old thorn –  will be on display at the British Museum from 23 June until 9 October.

If you are unable to get there you may like to console yourself by taking advantage of The Socialist Party’s special offer.  Anyone taking out a subscription to the Socialist Standard this month will be entitled to a free whisker from Karl Marx’s beard. Like the Catholics and their thorn, we “profess upon what seems quite satisfactory evidence” that our supply of Charlie’s whiskers are genuine.

NW

Massacre in Norway (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 22 July, the government offices in Oslo, Norway, were blown up, killing eight people. Shortly afterwards the bomber travelled to a Norwegian Labour Party summer camp mainly attended by children and began shooting them. He killed 68.

To begin with, the news media reported this accurately as a terrorist attack, speculating predictably but wrongly that the attacker was muslim. When it emerged that the attacker was not in fact muslim but a self-declared christian, with political views similar to that held by many mainstream news commentators and politicians, and with links to right-wing political parties throughout Europe, suddenly it was decided that Anders Behring Breivik was not a terrorist after all, merely a deranged madman, acting alone.

Then began the usual debate about how to define terrorism, which is held, as Chomsky has pointed out, to be a “vexing and complex problem” – at least, it’s deemed vexing and complex by those whose job it is to provide apologetic cover for the forms of terrorism that are acceptable to the ruling class.

There is just as much confusion about multiculturalism, or what the Norway terrorist called in his political manifesto “Marxist multiculturalism”. The fact is that human societies, and especially modern ones, are almost always multicultural. As Gary Younge pointed out in the Guardian (14 March): “Cultures are dynamic, and emerge organically from communities. None exist in isolation or remain static. So the presence of a range of cultures in Britain or anywhere else is not novel, but the norm.” There’s nothing wrong with that. A diversity of languages, festivals, music and food is something to be welcomed and enjoyed.

But the other kind of multiculturalism – that which advocates liberal, state-led policies for encouraging and supporting cultural differences at the expense of working class unity – has nothing to do with Marxism. It is something to be opposed as much as the alternative policy pursued by some states of inculcating a single “national identity”. Workers should be encouraged to think of themselves as members of a worldwide class with a common interest, not as members of different “nations” or different “ethnic” or “cultural” groups with their own different, competing interests.

We have never had a problem doing that. That’s because we understand that working class people of all cultures need to come together as equals to fight for issues that unite them as a class. And that’s the only way we’ll ever achieve a society where we can work together for things that unite us all as human beings, regardless of skin colour, religious beliefs, cultural or national origin, or individual difference.

Breivik’s Philosophy of Hate (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at mass murderer Anders Breivik’s attempt to imitate Mein Kampf.

On 16 April the trial of the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik started and is scheduled to conclude by the end of June. Breivik has confessed to the bombing in Oslo, killing eight, and the shooting of sixty-nine at the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth camp in Utoya.

Like young, white, male right-wing terrorists before him, such as Timothy McVeigh and David Copeland, Anders Breivik (despite his claims to be part of the Knights Templar) seems to have acted alone. Like McVeigh and Copeland, Breivik became disillusioned with co-operating with anyone in larger far-right organisations preferring a kind of messianic narcissistic individualism.

All grew up under the capitalist system, but with varying provision for welfare. McVeigh became transient after the leaving the army, and ended up in a dead-end job with long hours. Copeland struggled through a series of failed jobs before working on the London Underground. Breivik perhaps enjoyed the best welfare provision growing up, McVeigh quite possibly the most meagre. All were alienated from society and all found familiar scapegoats for their degrees of alienation. McVeigh expressed some of this in writing before the bombing and after in a 1,200 word essay. Only well-educated Breivik, however, seemed well-paid and not precariously employed (traditionally the far right exploit unemployment), and took a language other than his first and wrote a 1,518 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence by Andrew Berwick. This somewhat troubles those keen to label anything outside the political mainstream as “extremist” and medicalise his condition as insane. He wrote that his main motive for committing the atrocities on 22 July was to market this manifesto.

The far-right scapegoat which finds the most traction post-9/11 happens to be Islam. It used to be Jewish immigration or Afro-Caribbean immigration. While Copeland talked of a Zionist conspiracy, the far-right, after 9/11, switched support from Palestine to Israel. In any case, like European efforts of the English Defence League, Breivik is more pan-nationalist than nationalist. He writes:

  “One of the reasons why hardcore anti-Semites (David Duke would be a case in point) are unreliable allies is that they hate Jews so much that it shuts down the rational parts of their brain and they end up making common cause with Muslims, based on mutual hatred. The same logic applies to hardcore anti-Europeans, of which there are many even at ‘conservative’ websites such as LGF. They have an irrational hatred, a dark cloud in their minds which prevents them from seeing the world clearly. In a way, some LGF-ers thus have more in common with David Duke than they’d like to admit. If mindless anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism should be considered a problem then so should mindless anti-Europeanism.”

What matters chiefly is that the group persecuted by fascists is in a position of weakness. Breivik implicitly acknowledged this “If I was a bearded jihadist there would be no question of insanity”.

Only about half of the manifesto was written by Breivik and the rest is compiled from other sources. “I’ve spent a total of 9 years of my life working on this project. The first five years were spent studying and creating a financial base, and the last three years was spent working full time with research, compilation and writing.”

The introductory chapter of the manifesto defining “Cultural Marxism” is reprinted from Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology by the right-wing think tank, Free Congress Foundation. Very early on, the fabrications and leaps of logic jump out. “Political Correctness now looms over Western European society like a colossus.” then “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order, and, ultimately, a totalitarian state.”

By the end of the introduction, Political Correctness and other restrictions of freedom of speech or language are treated as synonymous with Cultural Marxism. The conclusion then is to get rid of both, which somewhat discredits later claims to defend free speech.

It should come as little surprise then that Breivik’s particular bête noire was “Marxists”. He is reported to have repeatedly shouted during the shooting, “You are going to die today, Marxists!” and the badge on the left arm of his diving suit read “Marxist Hunter”.

A lot of what follows is tortuous, wrongly interpreted, one-sided opinion, or just plain invented. Long-term demographic projections, an old favourite of fascists, make an appearance despite being notoriously dubious.

Book 1, entitled “History and Islam” focuses on largely historical disputes about genocides, falsification and apologism.  Islam and its adherents are selectively demonised while religion generally gets a get-out-of-jail free card.  The manifesto states “Negationism in Europe is practised with the most prowess by historians and writers who are under the spell of Marxism. Lenin had wanted to use the Muslims against the French and British colonialists. Modern Leftists with Marxist sympathies see Islam as an ally against Israel and the US.”

Book 2, entitled “Europe Burning” is dull speculation about a conspiracy theory of “Eurabia”, and some reprinted rambling about Feminism. ‘Cultural Marxism’ is also used interchangeably with multiculturalism and becomes a phrase for any bad thing you can think of.

One chapter is entitled “Why the discipline of Sociology must be completely removed from Academia”. As far as Breivik is concerned, the reason for this is that it is Marxist. He suggests replacing it with ideas from The Bible, Machiavelli, George Orwell, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Ayn Rand and William James. The selective philosophising is tedious and tiresome to read. Perhaps because he knows he is on shaky ground with capitalism and democracy, the chapter on “Globalised Capitalism” gets a mere four pages and in any case is traditionally code on the far-right for anti-Semitism.

In the rest of Book 2 he writes chapters entitled “Discrimination and harassment against cultural conservatives” and “ ANTIFA/Labour Jugend – State sponsored Marxist lynch mobs” where he states, “These brave Leftists or ‘anti-Fascists’ do, for some curious reason, seem to behave pretty much like, well, Fascists, a bit like the Brown Shirts in the 1930s, physically assaulting political opponents to silence them.” Some of this unfortunately can be levelled at SOS Rasisme and Blitz in Norway.

The manifesto concludes in Book 3 with a mixture of practicality and pure fantasy. One of the final chapters oddly reproduces a ‘Marxist’ study course.  Breivik also credits Wikipedia. All in all, the manifesto represents years of wasted time, money and effort and, most important, wasted lives.  It reads as a hotchpotch of prejudices, has little nuance and is full of generalisations, principally about wrong assumptions. As if to remind us where these prejudices come from, U.S. conservative commentator Glenn Beck came out with the most offensive stupid response. He compared the victims to the Hitler Youth before being reminded that groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement and the Beck-founded 9-12 Project also sponsor politically oriented camp programs for children.

The trial continues.

DJW

Proper Gander: Mistaken Identity (2019)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tucked away on BBC3 is a worthy, if a little rushed, drama which aims to explore and explain how people can come to adopt far-right views. The Left Behind follows Gethin, a young man living with his sister, along with her husband and child, in a run-down Welsh community. The family is threatened with eviction from their rented home, and approaches the council for help with finding other accommodation. A new housing development is being planned, but the family realises that a place there won’t be within their financial reach. When they become homeless, the council doesn’t place Gethin with the others in temporary accommodation, as he’s not classed as a ‘priority’. So he ends up sleeping rough, alongside his father who fell into homelessness after losing his job. Gethin works whatever shifts he’s given in a fast food joint, which isn’t enough for him to have either enough money or enough fulfilment in his job. His gang of friends live similarly precarious lives, with little prospect of anything changing for the better. They blame their situation on immigrants and Muslims, who they believe have taken ‘their’ jobs and houses. The gang’s growing nationalist, far-right views push them to extremes against a local family who run a halal butcher shop.

The Left Behind’s writer, Alan Harris, based the script on research by sociology professor Hilary Pilkington, who has studied what motivates people to espouse far-right beliefs. At only an hour long, the drama doesn’t have time to go deeply enough into the reasons, but it tells a sadly plausible story. It’s set in a community where most people have to struggle on a low income with the threat of homelessness, and research suggests that these circumstances can breed support for far-right views. The play’s director Joseph Bullman says that a feeling of ‘hopelessness’ drives people to the far right. ‘Most of those people, when you read the studies, live ultra-insecure lives in ultra-low wage jobs and they can’t have a narrative for their lives. They feel humiliated, excluded and left behind’ he said at the film’s premiere (www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48723274). Someone who feels hopeless is likely to believe that they have no power or influence, especially over their own lives. A misguided way of compensating for this is by trying to get power over other people, shown in the drama through the gang trashing and then burning down the halal butcher shop. The gang, and their real-life equivalents, scapegoat Muslims for their own and society’s problems. Prejudice against Muslims is a common route for people who adopt far-right views, as found by Professor Pilkington’s research. It’s easier to blame another group (especially if they look a bit different) than to understand the economics behind issues like low-paid work or the housing shortage.

It’s a complete myth that Muslims are prioritised for social housing or jobs. Those who hold this misguided belief don’t seem to bother asking themselves why religion would be used as a criterion for shortlisting, whether for a home or a job. Councils and companies just don’t work like that. Right wing falsehoods get stirred up by social media, usually as mis-spelt rants on message threads. People of similar views reflect and reinforce each others’ beliefs, an ‘echo chamber’ based on ignorance.

Islam, and other religions, should be criticised for their tenets and practices, but challenging this ideology in a legitimate way requires evidence and rational arguments, best delivered calmly. The far-right takes a stereotypical, alarmist view of Islam, a false starting point which isn’t likely to lead to a reasonable debate. Threats, abuse and violence are used because their arguments are so weak.

Nationalism goes with far-right views. In the drama, the gang talks of ‘standing up for Britain’, which rests on the wrong assumption that Britain is theirs to defend. It’s a case of mistaken identity. The far right, whether as a group of alienated young people or political organisations, see divisions between people in nationality, culture and ethnicity. The real division in society is between the minority who own and run things and the vast majority, of whatever nation, culture or ethnicity, who have to cope as best they can with their circumstances. Unfortunately, the play only hints at the reasons behind the bigger picture.

Where the research behind the script comes through clearest are the scenes with Gethin arguing and pleading with the council housing officer. Their replies of ‘we have a limited number of properties and we have to prioritise people’ and ‘there’s only so much we can do’ must have been said thousands of times in real-life council offices. The other characters representing some sort of authority tend to hide behind bland, hollow turns of phrase when challenged about the system. For example, the councillor at a public meeting about the out-of-reach housing development uses ‘I understand your frustrations’ and ‘I will be working my hardest to take that forward’. Even the manager of the fast food caff pretends his zero-hours-contract staff are ‘associates’ who ‘facilitate our customers’ needs’.

The scenario shown in The Left Behind shouldn’t make us jump to the conclusion that living in poverty automatically leads to being a right-wing numbskull. And while the drama may describe how some people sink to the far right, it’s certainly not the only route. Abhorrent racist and nationalist views are obviously also found among the rich and the reasonably well-off, with different causes. What anyone in the far right has in common is not seeing the real reasons behind society’s problems, and using this to encourage harmful divisions between people.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Alice Through The Looking Glass (2019)

Alice Levine and Jack Sen.

The Proper Gander column from the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Understanding why people come to have far right views is an important part of fighting against the movement and its sickening ideology. Nationalists and racists aren’t born that way, so their beliefs must come from how they interpret the world around them. Not many of us would want to spend a week living with a far right activist to find out what makes them tick, though. So we should applaud the efforts of broadcaster Alice Levine, who did just that for Channel 4’s Sleeping With The Far Right.

Alice goes to stay with Jack Sen, whose opinions are extreme enough to have got him pushed out of both UKIP and the BNP. He lives with his wife, daughter and mother in a suburban street in Southport, Merseyside, an area Sen likes because it hasn’t changed much over the years. Not long after the cheery greetings, Alice finds out that the household has a 7pm curfew because of supposed death threats against them. And Sen’s opening diatribe about how he wanted to run as Mayor of London with openly racist policies (‘mass immigration should stop … Then you can at least sit down and formulate some sort of policy’) gets interrupted by his mother offering a nice cup of tea.

Alice’s first morning involves joining in with the family’s exercise routine, then sitting with Sen as he posts online criticisms of Winnie Mandela, signing off with ‘warmest regards’. Next, Alice goes for a walk with his wife Natasha, and they chat about her belief that only non-white men commit rapes. Later in the week, Sen takes Alice to Southport town centre for a meeting of other far right activists, which he says will be ‘good fun’. They’re a bunch of embittered middle aged men who claim they’re not racists because Sen’s ‘foreign’. They’re involved in ‘guerrilla warfare’, which includes writing ‘Labour paedophiles’ on a roadsign and making placards with snappy slogans like ‘Protect our kids by banning Islamic and rainbow flags’. Sen’s politics have a wider and more dangerous reach, however. Among his other cohorts are a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and fellow ex-BNPer Nick Griffin. Alice’s visit turns sour during a video call to Griffin, who is working with Sen on a programme about ‘racism against whites’ for some hate-filled internet radio station. They turn on her and absurdly, and without seeing the irony, accuse her of being a bigoted extremist. After an awkward photo shoot, Alice’s visit is wrapped up.

Sen was a member of UKIP and stood as their candidate for West Lancashire in the 2015 general election. Just before polling day he was expelled from the party for tweeting that the Labour candidate, who was Jewish, would ‘send the £ to Poland / Israel’, although his profile on Amazon states that he left because of ‘his honesty, and attempting to broach the subjects of indigenous displacement in Britain and British cultural suicide’. He was later quoted as saying that UKIP was ‘in the pockets of Jewish special interest groups’. After joining and leaving the BNP (who aren’t right wing enough for him), he went on to set up the fortunately-insignificant British Resistance Party and the British Renaissance Policy Institute. To spread his abhorrent views, he runs over 25 Facebook pages and websites, using cheap tricks to get attention. On his websites he interviewed himself using another name and ‘leaked’ the interview to newspapers when he was running for election. And to try and discredit those who disagree with him, he pays to have his articles criticising them bumped up on Google searches. Alice is worried he’ll do that to her if he doesn’t like her film.

Sen’s background isn’t one which we might expect a fervent nationalist and racist to have. Born in Britain to a half-Indian and half-South African father and English mother, he spent his late childhood in America before returning to Britain and marrying a Ukrainian. His cosmopolitan upbringing didn’t make him more open-minded, though, and instead he says he felt like an outsider in a multi-ethnic society. Sen’s wife Natasha has similar views to him, although she says that her beliefs developed because she grew up somewhere which wasn’t diverse. That they have come to far right ideology from different directions suggests that our background in itself doesn’t dictate our beliefs, but our perception of it is what’s important. Sen grew up feeling like an outsider, and allowed this to shape his blinkered, paranoid view of his identity. Like all on the far right, he fixates on the differences between people, and sees them as a threat. So he tries to find a sense of security by latching on to nationalism and racism, and defining himself by who he hates. In that way, he’s like any fascist. Unlike the stereotype of a far right thug, though, Sen is articulate and media-savvy, hence his 25 websites. He’s got more exposure through Sleeping With The Far Right, of course, although its insights into his repellent mindset presumably wasn’t the kind of publicity he wanted.

Mike Foster

Material World: Taming the Uighur (2019)

The Material World Column from the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back in September 2014, we carried an article on the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs, a Muslim minority.

The Uighur are more akin to the Turkic peoples of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, than to the Han Chinese. Following a policy conducted in Tibet, China has promoted the mass migration of Han Chinese into Xinjiang – the autonomous region in western China, home to approximately 11 million Uighurs, with the effect of trying to reduce Uighurs to a minority on their native land, pre-empting any possibility of independence that many Uighurs seek.

In August 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination voiced ‘deep concern’ over the situation facing Muslims who were being treated as ‘enemies of the state’ and held in secret ‘re-education’ camps. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders reported that a fifth of all 2017 arrests in China were made in Xinjiang. According to a Human Rights Watch report, the detention centres are located in specially-built facilities or converted government buildings where detainees are held, unlawfully and without charge, as a result of religious ‘offences’ such as excessive praying or non-religious acts such as accessing proscribed websites or contacting overseas relatives. Other aspects of the security crackdown include all-encompassing social media surveillance, mass deployment of police and severe regulations against religious practices and dress.

Inmates at those gulags are forced to criticise their own Islamic beliefs and sing Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party. They are compelled to shave their beards and have been forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Former detainees described beatings and deaths despite authorities’ tight control of available information. Likewise, the government also operates orphanages for Uighur children taken from their parents, in a process to disconnect them from their ethnic heritage, a punitive policy targeting indigenous peoples seen all across the world at various times in history.

China is an economic superpower which the world relies on heavily for trade and there are signs that economic factors are the reason deterring diplomatic protest or humanitarian intervention from the rest of the world. Many states including Islamic ones fear the economic consequences and possible retaliation they could receive if they challenged or sanctioned China for this blatant ethnic cleansing of the Uighur people. China has invested $62bn in the construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which will connect Kashgar in Xinjiang to the southern Gwadar port in Pakistan. Despite Pakistan highlighting the plight of Muslim minorities, when it comes to Uighurs, Islamabad protests are muted.

‘It’s quite striking that while Pakistan often laments the plight of Rohingya, Syrian, Kashmiri, and Palestinian Muslims, you rarely hear Islamabad making statements in solidarity with Uighurs’, according to Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia programme at the Wilson Center. He says ‘The Muslim world on the whole, with a few exceptions, has taken a position of studied silence because of a desire not to upset a key global player that offers investments and other useful benefits’.

Particularly revealing were the comments from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who, on his recent visit to China, voiced support for China’s campaign against ‘terrorists’ and its ‘de-extremization’ camps. Did we really think that China or Saudi Arabia would allow some Uighurs to get in the way of Saudi Aramco’s $10 billion deal for a refining and petrochemical complex or the signing of 35 economic cooperation accords worth $28 billion? Chinese-Saudi trade reached $63 billion in 2018. As long as economics matter, the Uighurs will not likely find an ally in Saudi Arabia.

Turkey has been the only majority Muslim country to criticise China, with the Turkish foreign ministry calling China’s treatment of Uighurs ‘a great cause of shame for humanity’.

China is able to disguise anti-Uighur actions under a cloak of the global ‘war against terror’ to counter and de-radicalise Islamic fundamentalism. China is taking advantage of the global trend to weaponise Islamophobia to drive its racist programme of state-sponsored Han dominance.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi justified the ‘re-education camps’, stating, ‘the efforts are completely in line with the direction the international community has taken to combat terrorism … if we can take care of prevention, then it will be impossible for terrorism to spread and take root’.

Other government officials defended the forced detention claim that Islam is an ideological illness, depicting the camps as more like hospitals to ‘cure’ people from the Muslim infliction. China’s ambassador to the USA, Cui Tiankai, stated that the country is trying to turn the Uighurs into ‘normal people’. China is instituting the very same calls made by some Western politicians to criminalise expressions of Muslim identity such as the wearing of hijabs in an effort to heal Muslims of their ‘sickness’.

Maya Wang of the Human Rights Watch campaign explained that while authorities claimed the camps were about combating terrorism and separatism, they were in fact designed to assimilate Uighurs. Amnesty International described the detention centres as comparable to ‘wartime concentration camps’.

The Socialist Party is fully conscious of the sufferings of many of our fellow-workers and we wish to promote a kaleidoscope of cultures but candour compels us to point out that only the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism can put an end to national chauvinism and race prejudice.

ALJO

Pathfinders: Guns, Gays and the NRA (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The appalling murder last month of around 50 people in a gay club in Orlando may have passed from the front pages, but the ramifications are likely to linger on.

In the first place there is the shooting itself. The gun lobby, in a macabre way, continues to do well out of these massacres, and gun sales always spike in the days afterwards. The gun lobby argues that a lone 'whack-job' gunman won't get far shooting at people who are themselves armed and able to shoot back. Of course this is true up to a point, but this then implies that for maximum safety everyone should be armed, even school children. It's not hard to see what's wrong with this logic. The fact that everyone around you is tooled up like an extra from The Wild Bunch is likely to make you feel less safe, not more so. Society would be drunk with anxiety and nervous tension. Massacres could be sparked by cars backfiring. Bar and football fights like the recent Marseille riot would become Tarantino bloodbaths. Divorce would be by nine millimetre. Cities would be war zones which police would patrol in tanks and helicopter gunships. Students would wear Kevlar onesies and their teachers would look like Mad Max. Americans would be climbing the barriers en-masse to get into Mexico. Even the National Rifle Association would have a hard time describing that society as desirable, progressive and free. But hey, this is capitalism, don't complain, buy shares in Smith & Wesson.

Secondly, America is close to an election. This could be the tipping point Donald Trump needs to be tipped into the White House as panicky voters decide he and not Hillary is the man most likely to stick it to the Islamicists. Socialists don't expect much from capitalist puppets of any ilk, and we know that for all their big talk they never really accomplish anything because they have to take their orders from the market. But it's never encouraging when, in times of perceived crisis, populations choose to vote for a bully or an idiot.

Then there is the homophobia. The Orlando slaughter spotlights this egregious feature of Islam which is not confined to extremists but is pretty much endemic. In the days after the shootings some Moslem gays in America did try to speak up in solidarity with the LGBT community, but their problem is that they are despised by their own religion and so are caught between a rock and a hard place, unable to speak up for either religion or gay pride.

Western liberals who draw a discreet veil over Moslem homophobia, sexism and . . . well . . . veils, really deserve to have their cowardly arses kicked. Like Jainist monks determined to cause no harm, they cause harm by proxy, refusing to take any kind of stand or defend those who need defending. At the same time, moderate Moslems need to confront their religion's endemic sexism and homophobia if they want to see any real integration in advanced capitalist societies, which is after all where the money is. Perhaps Orlando is a watershed moment, after which the fire-breathing imams will not dare to open their bilious mouths and pour further scorn on a community which now has 49 bona fide martyrs. But that's a fond hope. No such reservations bothered the 'reverend' Pastor Roger Jimenez of the Westboro Baptist Church, who complained in a sermon that the shooter hadn't killed enough of these 'pedophiles' and expressed the hope that the government would round up the rest and 'blow their brains out'. In many countries you would be arrested for saying such a thing, but apparently it's ok if you say it from a pulpit in the name of the Lord.

Gay people continue to be persecuted, beaten, raped and murdered almost routinely in many parts of the world, sometimes allegedly in order to 'cure' them. Homosexuality remains outlawed in 80 countries and is a capital crime in five of them. Even in western countries, where the gay-bashers of the 1970s have mostly died, retired or rotted away in prison, gays still have reason enough to feel insecure. The law makes 'hate speech' an offence, but it can't legislate homophobia away. Conversely, state tolerance of gays is just about the only reason anyone would want to go and live in North Korea.

Of all the absurd prejudices workers have – many of which actively prevent socialist revolution – homophobia makes possibly the least sense. Why would a heterosexual resent someone whose orientation makes them less of a direct competitive threat? Historically it makes no sense either, since homosexual behaviour has been documented throughout human history and is also known to occur among  dolphins, raccoons, lions, giraffes, cats, dogs, chimps, bison, bears, horses, elephants, marmosets, foxes, koalas… to say nothing of the many bird, fish, reptile, amphibian and insect species.

In short, rather than homosexuality being 'unnatural' as the gay-haters claim, it is homophobia which is unnatural and which needs explaining.

One can speculate how homophobia could have developed and become engrained into the moral and religious codes of many early agricultural societies (China being an interesting exception). If life in the Iron Age tended to be nasty, brutish and short, with high mortality due to warfare, disease and bad diets, there would have been an urgent need to breed new soldiers, farmers and child brides. Those displaying prime breeding attributes would gain high status while homosexual behaviour could be seen as letting the side down. Over time this view could have become encoded into religious teaching and 'sacred' texts which came to global prominence in the Middle Ages, where many people still live.

In modern times, however, we have science. What does the science say?

Nothing definitive. The best guess is that homosexuality is a by-product or side-effect of heterosexuality, caused by wandering ratios of male and female sex hormones. This would explain why many people see themselves not as either/or but somewhere on a 'gay-straight gradient'. What exactly is going on at the genetic level is hard to say, because cause and effect are almost never one-to-one but many-to-many, creating a cascade of complexities whose decipherment proceeds at a glacial pace. Moreover nobody is in much of a hurry to study homosexuality because of the political and ethical concerns, and because real diseases are more pressing.

Even if it's a side-effect, it doesn't matter much. Animals are full of bodges, accidents, redundancies, 'design' flaws and downright mistakes which give die-hard Creationists the night sweats but don't bother biologists. Things don't survive because they are fit and flawless – they survive if their flaws don't matter. Homosexuality doesn't matter to evolution, any more than it matters to socialism.

For socialists, homophobia is like any other irrational hatred that divides the working class so that it is too weak to challenge the dominance of the ruling elite. While the poor tear at each other's throats, the rich are laughing at all of us.

PJS