Money and nihilism
Accumulate accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets - Karl Marx
They grab whatever they can – be that cheap headlines or fast money – and then crash out, even while loosening the very foundations of the institutions entrusted to them. Crucially, this is a genre of politics that relies on a strong state even as it bilks it of the necessary tax revenue.
Aditya Chakrabortty - Amoral and venal: Britain’s governing class has lost all sense of duty
George Monbiot: The destruction of the Earth is a crime. It should be prosecuted
Owen Jones: Why we need to talk about the media’s role in far-right radicalisation
When it comes to the threat of Islamist terrorism, no one doubts the role of radicalisation. The internet, hate preachers such as Anjem Choudary and Abu Hamza, and the western-armed, extremism
-exporting state of Saudi Arabia: all play their part in radicalising the impressionable. When it comes to the far right, however, this consensus is absent. The reason for this is as obvious as it is chilling: the hate preachers, recruiting sergeants and useful idiots of rightwing extremism are located in the heart of the British, European and American establishments. They are members of the political and media elite.
Days before the Christchurch atrocity, I interviewed Tore Bekkedal, a young Norwegian socialist. In 2011 he survived a massacre of his friends at the hands of the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik by hiding in a toilet. For 90 minutes, he heard the shots and the screams of 69 people being murdered. “I call it the ‘Hurricane Breivik’,” he told me, “because people are more comfortable treating it as a natural disaster.” The anti-immigration Progressparty (Fremskrittspartiet) is now a junior partner in Norway’s coalition government, he notes. “We’ve failed to have a fair account of the politics propagated by Progress.” As newspapers such as the Telegraph noted at the time, Breivik’s justification for his slaughter was to make “a future Europe safe from the tyranny of cultural Marxism and of Islam”. This week the Tory former Brexit minister Suella Braverman declared: “We are engaged in a war against cultural Marxism.” .. read more:
They grab whatever they can – be that cheap headlines or fast money – and then crash out, even while loosening the very foundations of the institutions entrusted to them. Crucially, this is a genre of politics that relies on a strong state even as it bilks it of the necessary tax revenue.
There is no heroism
here, just moneyed nihilism
Even as doodlebugs
smashed into the surrounding streets, George Orwell consoled himself with this
thought: “One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are
morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get
themselves killed.” Present those who governed us with an existential crisis,
he argued in his essay England Your England, and they would do what they believed
to be right for the country.
Almost eight decades
later, the UK stands on the verge of a calamity as great as any since the war.
Whatever the protestations in parliament, we could within days crash-land into
a world of medicine shortages and food riots. And where are our political
classes? According to the lobby correspondents, Monday’s cabinet meeting was
spent war-gaming general election strategiesand thinking how to
timetable voting so as to “scare” Labour. Wherever the national interest
actually featured, it was buried under a thick dollop of party interest.
Sunday afternoon was
Theresa May’s crisis summit at Chequers, to which Iain Duncan Smith came as
Toad of Toad Hall, complete with open-top vintage sports car and cloth
cap. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s chosen passenger was his 12-year-old son, Peter,
because a national crisis evidently created the perfect occasion for
bring-your-child-to-work day. Boris Johnson rocked up in his Spaffmobile before
chuntering back to London to publish a column dumping all over the woman with whom he’d just
been talking, dubbing her “chicken” and saying she had “bottled it”. (One of
the columns, if it’s not too unseemly to mention, for which the Telegraph pays him £275,000 a year.)
The BBC reports that
these men refer to themselves as the Grand Wizards. Since that is an honorific used by the Ku Klux
Klan, the best can be said is they have put as much thought into their
nicknames as they ever did into the Irish backstop. This is how today’s
governing classes comport themselves, while the country teeters on the edge of
a cliff: they behave with neither care nor caution, let alone concern for the
welfare of the nation. These people are laughing at us, even as they take our
money to go about their daily business... read more:George Monbiot: The destruction of the Earth is a crime. It should be prosecuted
Owen Jones: Why we need to talk about the media’s role in far-right radicalisation
When it comes to the threat of Islamist terrorism, no one doubts the role of radicalisation. The internet, hate preachers such as Anjem Choudary and Abu Hamza, and the western-armed, extremism
-exporting state of Saudi Arabia: all play their part in radicalising the impressionable. When it comes to the far right, however, this consensus is absent. The reason for this is as obvious as it is chilling: the hate preachers, recruiting sergeants and useful idiots of rightwing extremism are located in the heart of the British, European and American establishments. They are members of the political and media elite.
Less than two weeks
ago, dozens of Muslims were murdered in Christchurch. Before the lethal
rampage, the shooter is said to have inscribed “For Rotherham” on one of his
gun magazines – in reference to the English town’s grooming scandal. In
Britain, far-right terrorist attackers have ranged from David
Copeland, who detonated a nail-bomb in a Soho gay pub in 1999 after decades
of media hatemongering against LGBT people, to the murderer of Jo Cox, whose
despicable act was cheered
by 25,000 people online, to Darren Osborne, who ploughed his van into worshippers outside a mosque. As one radicalisation expert, Abdul-Azim Ahmed, of the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at Cardiff University told ITV news, Osborne’s extremism “also came from the mainstream media. It came from mainstream politicians both here and abroad.”
by 25,000 people online, to Darren Osborne, who ploughed his van into worshippers outside a mosque. As one radicalisation expert, Abdul-Azim Ahmed, of the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at Cardiff University told ITV news, Osborne’s extremism “also came from the mainstream media. It came from mainstream politicians both here and abroad.”
Days before the Christchurch atrocity, I interviewed Tore Bekkedal, a young Norwegian socialist. In 2011 he survived a massacre of his friends at the hands of the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik by hiding in a toilet. For 90 minutes, he heard the shots and the screams of 69 people being murdered. “I call it the ‘Hurricane Breivik’,” he told me, “because people are more comfortable treating it as a natural disaster.” The anti-immigration Progressparty (Fremskrittspartiet) is now a junior partner in Norway’s coalition government, he notes. “We’ve failed to have a fair account of the politics propagated by Progress.” As newspapers such as the Telegraph noted at the time, Breivik’s justification for his slaughter was to make “a future Europe safe from the tyranny of cultural Marxism and of Islam”. This week the Tory former Brexit minister Suella Braverman declared: “We are engaged in a war against cultural Marxism.” .. read more:
