Weggis is annoyed. In fact he is exceedingly grumpy today. It seems that Weggis is not a "decent person". At least according to these people. You see, "decent people do not share platforms or debate with fascists, racists and nazis, whether at universities, during elections or elsewhere."
They are referring to the BNP, but who decides whether the BNP are "fascists, racists and nazis". It seems I am obliged to take their word for it and I am not allowed to engage with them and make up my own mind.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
This bit is even more annoying: "perhaps most shockingly, the Green candidate who has been active in local anti-racist politics took the view that he could win any debate against Evans, which is not the point." Well, excuse me but that is the whole fokking point. It’s not about convincing your opponent, it’s about convincing the audience – the electorate.
That’s what you do if you want to get elected.
What really gets my goat is that these are generally the same people who postulate that criminals are human beings and advocate rehabilitation rather than punishment. Who shy away from discipline in schools and wonder why we have feral children? Criminals and feral children they say are a product of their environment. We should condemn the behaviour but not the person.
Well, the last time I looked the BNP were made up of flesh and blood human beings just like you and me. They are people and just like you and me they are a product of their environment. These are the people who condemn others who refer to criminals and feral children as "Scum". But it’s OK when they call the BNP "Scum".
The way to deal with the BNP is to address the problems they feed of. Problems mostly caused by the party who refused to engage in the Hustings and the likes of those who supported them in that decision.
It is the problems, and not the BNP they should be attacking and their shyness is a product of their own failings.
I’m afraid I do not see any "Hope" here. All I see is Hate. Hate for the BNP.
>When you fight someone, you take on that person's >qualities. You become that person. You become your >enemy. And your enemy wins because now there's >another one of him in the world.
ReplyDeleteSurely that would work both ways?
Probably, but do explain how.
ReplyDeleteWell, for example, if your country is invaded.
ReplyDelete- If you don't fight back they win.
- If you do fight back (according to this saying) they win, although they may well not realise they've won if you've massacred them and driven them out of the country.
I don't think it's true to be honest.
What is true is that sometimes when you play someone at their own game even if you formally win you've been transformed in the process.
The obvious example would be a radical party standing in elections and getting so wrapped up in the Parliamentary way of doing things that even if they become the government the system has changed them so they end up defending instutions they set out to shake.
Quite right Jim. To be fair the author of that statement does go on to address that very point, but I found it rather difficult to express the concept in a generic form which is why I used the quote.
ReplyDeleteYou provide a good example of the real meaning, and Animal Farm also springs to mind. It is also why you often see the term “eco-fascists”.
I suppose the “trap” is when someone becomes obsessed with the conflict itself and loses sight of what victory actually looks like?
"I suppose the “trap” is when someone becomes obsessed with the conflict itself and loses sight of what victory actually looks like?"
ReplyDeleteI think that's a really important point to be honest.
It's something I've had a wrestle with myself because you get so deep in what your doing, at a tactical level, it becomes easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Me too!
ReplyDeleteCheck out this article by Jeremy Seabrook. The following bits are particularly apposite, it seems to me:
ReplyDelete“…. an old arrogance, a belief that only "the left" … stands heroically in the way of the triumphal advance of the far right. Yet New Labour could not wait to repudiate everything the Labour party had ever stood for; and this left its former heartland a political desert, ripe for colonisation by the BNP.
The white working class was seen as an insignificant remnant of the population, since a majority of the British people appeared to have been levitated into a middle class that Labour courted with such assiduity in the 1990s. The rest could be left to their fate in forlorn estates of liquor shops covered with chicken wire, leaky drainpipes, semi-wild dogs and tattered flags of St George – everything that symbolised the last gasp of a disappearing working class …
A Labour party that saw its original constituency erased from the political map readily abandoned the victims of these processes, those it had always taken for granted. "Our own people", they possessively called them, adding that, no matter what Labour did, "they had nowhere else to go" …”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bnp-european-elections-labour
Thanks, apposite indeed!
ReplyDeleteAlso today an article by Rod Liddle; “let the BNP speak – and drown in its own poison”
ReplyDeletehttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article6301507.ece
With this paragraph quite thought-provoking too:
“But even the BNP’s biggest vote-winner in recent years – attacking Islam – is a case of expediency and opportunism. It should not be forgotten that the earliest supporters in this country of radical Islam were the far right, Griffin prominent among them. Back in the 1980s the Ayatollah Khomeini and Nick Griffin shared rather more than a mutual, ideological dislike of Jews. They also shared a dislike of international capitalism, the USA, gender equality, homosexuals and liberal democracy. There is not much in the BNP’s domestic manifesto today with which Hizb ut-Tahrir would find fault.”
It seems very funny / ironic to me that BNP-types and Islamists have actually got so much in common. They should team up together!
It should also make us think, that National Socialist groups received money from various Islamist groupings in the Middle East. Several lines of thought lead off from this, not least the following: a fat lot those Islamist groups must care about their so-called “brethren” in the UK if they were sending money to racist groups here, huh?