The Right of the Week

It has been a funny old week for the right wing. Here are a few example:

Across the pond in the US, it seems that tonight, the Republican Party has decided it isn’t all that bad an idea for the supremely rich to pay a bit extra tax instead of the entire World falling into bankruptcy. The term “job creators” has been used to defend the mega wealthy and ensure the public see these people as some sort of benevolent overlords who should be spared any financial pain whilst they insist on public sector cuts for the least wealthy. The falsity stands in the fact that the rich do not create jobs. Demand creates jobs. The businessman doesn’t give you a job out of the goodness of his heart; he does so, to ride the wave of demand in a certain sector, thus making himself a small fortune off the back of the labour of those who will now have to endure cuts. So whilst you now have to sell your labour at the lowest possible price just to survive, because the Republicans are actively trying to destroy any sort of safety net, those at the top will make even more money from squeezing you for as little pay as possible, whilst enjoying lovely big tax breaks. Thanks Republicans!

Hopefully the Democrats on the newly created “Super Congress” will push for tax hikes on the wealthiest, despite the Bush tax cuts being off the table.
Overall, the substance of the bill is tipped firmly in favour of Tea Party Republicans. Obama showing again, intense weakness.

Interestingly, the debt ceiling was raising 18 times under the Reagan administration. Over the Obama four years, it has increased by 45%. Under Reagan – 199%.

Back in the UK, the City of Westminster Police showed how much they hate the new Blackburn Rovers Red and black away kit, by announcing:

“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

- Correct me if i’m wrong, but most of the Tory front bench consider the State to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful. Can we report them? The last line, that any information on Anarchists should be reported to the police is worrying. Remember when the entire Right Wing threw a collective tantrum whenever New Labour introduced legislation that the Right considered to be an attack on civil liberties? Where are those protesters now? Surely i’m allowed to hold Anarchist sympathies without the police having to know? Do I need to ring my local police station to inform them that I have a number of Chomsky books and am quite a fan of Bakunin? Am I a danger?

The Tory blogger Guido Fawkes has immersed himself in a plethora of hypocrisy today, having created a campaign to reintroduce the death penalty. So, essentially he doesn’t trust the State to run hospitals, disability services, schools, libraries, museums, and nurseries, but he absolutely trusts them to murder. He, being Tory, is absolutely against Shariah Law and its primitive retributive justice system, but absolutely in favour of a Western primitive retribution justice system. Taxation on the Right, is considered State theft. Murder by the State is perfectly acceptable apparently. There is absolutely no value; moral or otherwise, in State murder. I can envisage people from low socio-economic backgrounds ending up on the “to hang” list, way above anyone else. What a silly campaign they are running over at Guido. They back up their desire to see the restoration of State backed murder, by saying:

When the public are asked about the death penalty the results have consistently shown a majority in favour, when they are asked specifically about child killers, the numbers change dramatically with a range of polls showing two-thirds to three-quarters in in favour. On this issue there is definitely a clear regressive majority in Britain.

- The problem is, as far as I can tell from my research so far, there has only been one poll (a Yougov poll) in the past 15 years, of 2011 people. 50% were for the death penalty. I am not entirely sure we can back a death penalty restoration off the back of 1000 people, from a population of 70,000,000 backing it. Such is the logic of the Right. When the say the “results have consistently shown a majority in favour“, what they mean is, if you read the exact same result from a variety of media outlets, it is surprisingly consistent! Though, there was one other poll, by The Sun, of 100000 people, in which 99% of them said they support the Death Penalty. Not surprisingly, it was the same time as the Sun itself backed a campaign for the restoration of the death penalty.

Yougov quite unequivocally states:

Support for the death penalty has fallen over the decades – it used to be over 70%, these days roughly half of the population support the death penalty for “standard” murder – indeed there was a YouGov poll in 2006 that showed marginally less than half of people in support of it, the first time it had occured. More recently, a YouGov poll in September 2010 found 51% supported the death penalty for murder, 37% opposed. A MORI poll in July 2010 found 51% supported the death penalty for adult murder. An Angus Reid poll in 2008 found people supported the death penalty for murder by 50% to 40%.

One of the MPs supporting the campaign, is Tory Phillip Davis. I have an entire blog entry dedicated to Philip Davis. Not only is he for State sponsored murder, but he also thinks disabled people should agree to work for less than minimum wage. He voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, which state that it is unlawful to discriminate when selling goods or services, education or facilities based on sexuality. He also said of a group of vandals who turned out to be white, British, and not at all muslims:

“if there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who do this sort of thing.”

Guido is genuinely happy to have the support of this idiot?
The State is not above the law. What if the State murders someone who it later turns out is innocent? Can we therefore murder Guido Fawkes and all his supporters? It’d be retributive justice after all right? For the sake of sanity, we must ensure our Country is run on the basis of the rule of law, not the rule of the lynch mob. A Nation killing a person to show that killing is wrong, is beyond my comprehension of what is morally acceptable.

Quite amusingly, The English Defence League has gone on a massive defensive campaign since the Oslo murders. Whenever a Far Right organisation gets questioned, or challenged in any way, they insist that those doing the challenging are part of a Left Wing Liberal Media Elite conspiracy to silence them. To paint them as Nazis when all they want to do is protect “our way of life“. They seem unable to accept that perhaps we just don’t like them, nor do we consider our way of life, to be synonymous with the Far Right. Now it has been proven that Right Winged Christians are just as dangerous as any other political or religious grouping, the EDL have sought to go on a huge defensive.
Breivik had posted on EDL forums weeks before he carried out his act of terrorism. Under the pseudonym Sigurd Jorsalfare (the 12th Century King of Norway, whom led the Crusades, Breivik said:

“The biggest problem in norway is that there is no real free press, there is a left-wing angle on all the political topics so most people are going around like idiots. And offcourse with our norwegian labour party beeing in power for most of the last 50 years dont help. but i i think there is an awakening now atleast i hope so. Do some of you know the truth about what happened to the ndl, there was some clames that neo-nazis had hijacked the organisation, but on the ndl site i cant really say i noticed anything like that. So may guess is that there were some kind of police pressure to stop the movement. Anyone here heard anything?”

- A typical response, as I said earlier, is to blame lack of enthusiasm for a wholly Fascist doctrine, on a left wing media.

Breivik claimed he’d been to a meeting of the anti-immigration “Knights Templar” in London, in which he met his British Mentor named “Richard”. Coincidentally, a man called Paul Ray, runs an anti-muslim website on which he calls himself “Richard the Lionheart“, with the logo being Knights Templar. He describes himself as one of the founders of the EDL. The links are pretty clear. On his blog, after denying he is Breivik’s mentor, and after blaming the media AGAIN, he shows his potential insanity by relating his far right views to a Christian goal, a 12th Century Christian goal:

A Knight is chosen by God, and anyone professing to be a Knight not chosen by God is not a Knight. A little group and a secret ceremony does not make a Knight that is just a group of men with ideals and agendas dressed up in the clothes playing a pantomime without the power and authority.

- How does one prove that he is ‘chosen by God’? Mr Ray sounds oddly like the Fascist Islamic militants he claims to be fighting against. They are one in the same.

Breivik on the EDL forum goes on to state, when asked if he was part of the Norweigen Defence League:

“I was but, the site has been put down now. There was to be a demo in Oslo on the 26 of February but after the police security service put us on the “danger-list” the the internet site was sadly shut down.”

- The NDL Facebook Group is administered by a man called Jeff Marsh. Marsh is a convicted football hooligan, and was once in prison for stabbing two Manchester United Fans.
At an NDL rally in Oslo, one of the speakers was Darren Lee Marsh, an EDL activist who is also good friends with the leader of the Youth EDL. The links between the EDL, the NDL, an Breivik are pretty clear, without the need for some sort of Commie media perceived by an entirely irrational and paranoid group of Fascists. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the EDL isn’t exactly the peaceful organisation it claims to be. On July 21st this year, a man called Christopher Payne of the EDL pleaded guilty in Nottingham to sticking the decapitated head of a pig onto a pole, and rammed into the site of a new Mosque being built, with the words “No Mosque here. EDL Notts” sprayed on the pavement. On July 22nd, vandals broke into a Mosque in Luton (a Mosque not connected with extremism) and spray painted “EDL” and a swastika on the walls. Now, for a group that claims to simply be against Militant Islam, one has to wonder why they seem to pick on random Mosques with no connection to Militancy? By their logic, they should not be targeting sites of potential Church’s, because Breivik was a Christian Terrorist. That is the irony in EDL bullshit. They will stigmatise all Muslims as extremists, by breaking into Mosques and vandalising and intimidating Muslim residents who have done nothing wrong, but when people start to equate far right EDL thought with far right terrorism, they go on the defensive and insist there is no link. Irony at its finest.

In his cherished manifesto, Breivik wrote:

“I used to have more than 600 EDL members as Facebook friends and have spoken with tens of EDL members and leaders. In fact; I was one of the individuals who supplied them with processed ideological material (including rhetorical strategies) in the very beginning.”

- Pretty conclusive. His manifesto is worrying for all of us who are not members of groups like EDL. Because it shows the mentality of those that groups like the EDL consider to be enemies. In it, he attacks Muslims, liberals, those he calls “Cultural Marxists” and journalists. He even lists ways in which he could kill journalists, and other targets he considers “traitors“. It is not a leap to describe these groups as Fascists and dangerous. The British flag and the cross of St George have been hijacked by the far right for too long. I no longer want to feel like a fascist if I see an English flag. It needs to be taken back, and the true nature of Britain – diversity, tolerance, respect, cultural understanding and awareness – restored.

In his manifesto, Breivik quoted Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips often. She was criticised but then decided to have a little bit of a typical right winged tantrum in her column claiming that liberals are trying to bully her into silence. Moreover, she provides a sort of defence, a reasoning behind the Oslo attacks, with a nice little disclaimer first:

This shouldn’t need saying, but it does: there can be no excuse, justification or rationale whatsoever for the atrocity perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. The reason it unfortunately needs saying is that I have been reading too many weaselly equivocations about this, along the lines of ‘Yes, it was indeed a most terrible atrocity and one’s heart bleeds for those poor victims; but Norway’s politics towards Israel do stink/Norway’s Labour Party stinks/Quisling’s country, say no more/the Islamisation of Europe stinks/it was only a matter of time before someone was provoked by the railroading of public opinion into doing something like this’.

- So, in essence, she is blaming centrist, centre right, and centre left politics for this. As if she is saying “if we all agreed that Islam is evil, Palestinians do not deserve their own state, and Labour party politics should be criminalised, we’d all be fine now!” I am a leftie Atheist. If a Leftie Atheist suddenly start killing hundreds of people, I wouldn’t say “I know it’s bad blah blah blah, but religion is a right bastard!” She should have stopped talking with “there can be no excuse“. She incessantly needs to remind us that not everyone with a slightly far right view on the World is an evil racist. Unfortunately, she fails to employ this same logic with this:

Muslims not only despise western secular values as decadent, materialistic, corrupt and immoral. They do not accept the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, the division which in Christian societies confines religion to the margins of everyday life. Instead, for Muslims the whole of human life must represent a submission to God.
This means that they feel a duty to Islamicise the values of the surrounding culture.

- All of them? Really?
Everything she says reads more like a Glenn Beck rant, though she is quick becoming his UK counterpart. Attempting to shut her up? The chance would be a fine thing; her excessive and extreme ramblings keep on plaguing journalism as an institution on a regular basis. In an article in the Spectator, Phillips genuinely refers to Obama as a “revolutionary Marxist“. One wonders, after almost a full term, what Obama has achieved that is so revolutionary and Marxist? I’m pretty sure a major bank bail out package cannot be considered Marxist. Perhaps the persistence of the Bush Tax Cuts? I’m sure Guevara would have approved of those! In fact, the enlarging of the State through the stimulus package, could not be considered Marxist either, given that it simply tried to kick start Capitalism after its horrific failure in 2008. I don’t see any workers groups taking control of the means of production? I don’t see Obama referring to private property as a great sin? So short of us liberals wanting to bully her into shutting up, I’d suggest we simply want rational and coherent journalism rather than a mess of poor logic and misrepresentation. Oh, and this extends to her claim that Obama is a secret Muslim having “adopt[ed] the agenda of the Islamists“. Here:

“We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected?”

- She wants to be taken seriously? Stop the hysterical over reactions and outright bullshit. Problem solved. So as well as the Muslim Obama, the bullying Liberal media, and Marxists, who else does Melanie Phillips believe is part of a grand conspiracy to silence people like her?

“For years we have watched helplessly the undermining of the traditional family, which has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers and ‘cultural Marxists’ who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society.”

- Lawyers and gay people. I consider myself pro-gay rights. I am not sure I have ever sat and conspired with gay people, Marxists, Feminists, and lawyers about the easiest way to destroy the West. In short, Melanie Phillips is certifiably insane. A typical paranoid right winger who insists that anyone who doesn’t support her very narrow minded view of what it means to live in a Western Country, is surely conspiring to destory it. Whilst she is correct in her assertation that she is not responsible for the awful terrorist attack committed by Breivik; she is however implicated in promoting a far right discourse because she has the media presence to do so, by basing her articles on absolute nonsense and extreme over reactions to events. She is partly responsible for the hysteria that has infected the West, when it comes to Islam. So yes, for that, she is entirely to blame.

There is an internet forum principle that says whenever someone invokes Hitler during a debate, the debate should end there and then, because it has reached a level of absurdity not worth continuing with. So I will end on a Melanie Phillips quote regarding Climate Change:

“It was no accident that Hitler was a green.”