Kievsky as guest blogger:

I’ve been waiting for a reason to use this as a blog post title, and this alternet article gave me a priceless quote illustrating exactly this truism.

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Below the fold I am reproducing Tony Lecomber’s interesting and exhaustive overview of British nationalism’s past and clouded future, with a rather confused recommendation for a new party at the end.  It makes a number of good points.  English, not British, nationalism, Tony says, is the wave of the future.  That’s true, and certain, of course, if Alex Salmond wins his referendum on Scottish independence in three years time.  Tony then speculates that as such a victory would deprive the Labour Party of seventy Scottish MPs at Westminster and deliver power to the Tories in perpetuity in the remains of the UK, indiscipline on the right must, in time, set in.  Such indiscipline he sees as a precondition for the rise of nationalism in England.  Perhaps, but nationalism has to make its own future, and can’t rely on charity from its political foes.

Overall, Tony’s message is bleak.  The sense of embattlement on every front is very palpable, culminating in the despairing admission that “the multiracial state is here to stay”.  Well, if that is the case, what’s the point of nationalism?  To slow down our genetic dissolution and demographic replacement to a speed white people won’t find quite so unsettling?  To delay our minoritisation by one generation?  In such an admission is the false assumption that:

(a) the English people think it moral and right for Africans and Asians to continue living in England and to continue displacing, replacing and deracinating them, and will vote for that if ever the issue is forced to the front of electoral debate,

(b) anything and everything must be thrown overboard by nationalists to escape being labelled as “racist”.

This mindset is surely the product of a lifetime of political failure allied to a paucity of creative thinking - not least on the wider political issues, particularly economics, but also on the great, undergirding question of the war of discourse.

Obviously, Tony is right that, short of the state jailing Nick Griffin (and why would it do that), political nationalism must find itself a new vehicle.  He is right about the risks.  I don’t think he is right to be so focussed on the party question.  No nationalist party can effect the vast change in the English public’s values and attitudes necessary for the embrace of such a revolutionary politics.  But perhaps that is work for other kinds of political animal.

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Readers who have followed or been involved in the recent travails of British nationalism will know that, while the “parallel party structure” appears to be moving forward within the BNP, there are indications that the jump to a new party is not far away:

A meeting was held on the 22nd. October, 2011 and attended by over 200 delegates. Please see picture below. The meeting voted to form a New Party by orgainising groups throughout the UK, such as The Brent Group, to recruit members and build a strong membership with which to launch the New Party.

Andrew Moffat together with Arthur Kemp, have been working behind the scenes preparing the foundations for the New Party. The bank account has been completed, a highly complicated and paperwork intensive operation. The Party Name, drawn from members suggestions, have been investigated. Many suggestions, including my own, have previously been registered. We could not launch the Party of course and have a legal problem on our hands over the name. A final shortlist of names will be published and the members will decide the name by democratic simple majority vote.

Such a move, of course, is high in risk.  Here’s someone for whom I have a lot of time explaining why to readers of British Democracy Forum:

It is pointless launching a new political party at this time, although I can see why supporters of Andrew Brons would want to have a replacement to campaign for his re-election when the European elections come round again.

It is pointless for the following reasons;

1. Getting either Andrew Brons and/or Nick Griffin re-elected to the European Parliament will provide no appreciable benefit for British Nationalism as a whole, unless of course the MEPs when re-elected, eschew the work they currently undertake within the European Parliament and instead use the large salaries and funding that they have to finance campaigning and electioneering here in the UK.

The European Parliament is a vast talking shop, largely composed of people who care not one jot what the two BNP MEPs have to say and those two MEPs have been completely ineffectual during their current tenure and will almost certainly continue to be completely ineffectual if re-elected.

2. Thanks to the mis-management of the BNP it it now greatly reduced in terms of membership numbers and more crucially, in terms of capable activists. It is now menaced by a number of new and newly revived rival nationalist parties, all of which have been swelled in terms of their strength by the exodus of disillusioned activists from the BNP. British Nationalism is now composed of several micro-parties (including the BNP, which has now been reduced to micro-party status) and when further elections come along, we will see them fighting against each other and splitting the nationalist vote in every ward or constituency where there is any sizeable amount of nationalist support. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, no British Nationalist party will get any candidates elected and it is therefore futile to launch another new political party at this time.

3. While nationalist policies remain popular with the public, this popularity rarely translates into votes at election time, and this is because, as a movement, we have no resources and no infrastructure of any significance. Therefore, even with a clear run and no nationalist infighting, in the best wards and constituencies in this country, we have only ever managed to get an insignificantly small number of candidates elected, and now under a sustained barrage of attacks from the establishment, virtually everything we formerly gained under the BNP banner is being lost.

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A few weeks ago Luis Suarez, a Uruguayan footballer currently overpaid by Liverpool Football Club, thoughtfully provided anti-white activists everywhere with a golden opportunity to jump up and down about “racism”.  He said the word “black” in his own language to Patrice Evra, an African footballer currently over-paid by Manchester United.  Evra is known for playing the race card from time to time, and he duly obliged.

The result for Suarez, perhaps inevitable given the Football Association’s keen desire to demonstrate its anti-racist credentials to the world, was an 8-game suspension and £40,000 fine.

This was not expected for so slight an incursion of orthodox speech requirements.  There is dissent, particularly from the direction of Liverpool. 

In a hard-hitting statement released in the wake of the ruling by a three-man commission, Liverpool made a set of claims that they believed showed that the judgement of the three-man commission, and conduct of the FA, was flawed. It amounted to one of the most strident attacks on the governing body by a member club in recent years and puts the two organisations at loggerheads.

In a series of criticisms – some aimed at the three-man commission of Paul Goulding QC, Denis Smith and Brian Jones – the club claimed that Suarez’s fate had effectively been decided before he was even first interviewed about the events of the home game against Manchester United on 15 October.

The club said: “The FA was determined to bring charges against Luis Suarez, even before interviewing him at the beginning of November.”

The Telegraph has run a reader poll today.  The current vote total stands at 13,278 of whom 48.72% declare the FA’s verdict “completely wrong” and a further 18.65% “too harsh”.

That’s a good enough sample size to suggest that such sentiment must extend well beyond the “right-wing” Telegraph readers.

Meanwhile, the paper’s editors were forced to close the Suarez-related comment threads as the anti-anti-racist commentary flowed.  They completely disappeared the thread to one new article with just a dozen comments posted, suggesting a certain desperation.  We are at a point where anti-racism holds sway as never before across the Establishment.  But it is also now losing its intimidatory power over the white masses.

The dissonance ought to grow quite naturally.  But, unfortunately, another footballer - the England captain, no less - has transgressed against orthodoxy much more spectacularly than Suarez.  That will certainly set back the prospects for undermining anti-racism in England.  It is difficult, though, to see how the English public - not a stranger to contempt for authority - can be held in check by anti-racism forever.

More or less all my “thinking life” I have wondered at the third component in that little phrase in the American Bill of Rights, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  How, I asked myself, could serious people raise happiness (the pursuit of), a product of many factors and passing circumstances, most of them not within the gift of politicians, to the status of an existential absolute?  If one needed an explanation of how we children of the liberal age, when given the choice of wealth or goodness, choose wealth, choose materialism, hedonism, nihilism, it is pretty much enshined in those four words.

To my mind, happiness as an abstracted and singularised human purpose leads away from itself.  It does it by creating in the mind of the subject a cheap and cheapening, easily met standard for itself.  For example, civic nationalists are satisfied with the lowest-hanging of political fruit - a few gestures in the direction of la patria, a flag, some symbols of military power, a bit of back-slapping with perfect strangers over some feigned shared value ...  It means nothing.  It is nothing compared to the sum at which the true nationalist prices the human meaning and worth found in the familial and in kind, in brotherhood, rootedness, belonging, trust, love, and the good of his people.

These are, in reality, the psychological essentials. But, politically, they belong to another universe, a nationalist universe too discreet for non-nationalists to penetrate.  Even ones who are psychologists.

From a study published earlier this month in the Association of Psychological Science:

National Pride Brings Happiness—But What You’re Proud of Matters

Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life—and many people take that as good news. But Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium, suspected that the positive findings about nationalism weren’t telling the whole story. “It’s fine to say pride in your country makes you happy,” says Wright. “But what kind of pride are we talking about? That turns out to make a lot of difference.” The intriguing—and politically suggestive—differences they found appear in a commentary in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Reeskens and Wright divided national pride into two species. “Ethnic” nationalism sees ancestry—typically expressed in racial or religious terms—as the key social boundary defining the national “we.” “Civic” nationalism is more inclusive, requiring only respect for a country’s institutions and laws for belonging. Unlike ethnic nationalism, that view is open to minorities or immigrants, at least in principle.

The authors analyzed the responses to four key questions by 40,677 individuals from 31 countries, drawn from the 2008 wave of the cross-national European Values Study. One question assessed “subjective well being,” indicated by general satisfaction with life. Another measured national pride. The other two neatly indicated ethnic and civic national boundaries—asking respondents to rate the importance of respect for laws and institutions, and of ancestry, to being a true . . . fill in the blank . . . German, Swede, Spaniard. The researchers controlled for such factors as gender, work status, urban or rural residence, and the country’s per capita GDP.

Like other researchers, they found that more national pride correlated with greater personal well-being.  But the civic nationalists were on the whole happier, and even the proudest ethnic nationalists’ well-being barely surpassed that of people with the lowest level of civic pride.

The analysis challenges popular feel-good theories about nationalism. “There’s been a renaissance of arguments from political theorists and philosophers that a strong sense of national identity has payoffs in terms of social cohesion, which bolsters support for welfare and other redistributive policies,” says Wright. “We’ve finally gotten around to testing these theories.” The conclusion: “You have to look at how people define their pride.”

The findings, he adds, give a clue to what popular responses we might expect to “broad macro-economic and social trends”—that is, millions of people crossing borders (usually from poorer to wealthier countries) looking for work or seeking refuge from war or political repression. “It’s unclear what the political implications of the happiness measure are—though unhappy citizens could demand many politically dangerous, xenophobic responses. Ethnic nationalists, proud or not, appear relatively less happy to begin with and more likely to lead the charge as their nation diversifies around them.”

The publicity machine for Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, has cranked into gear.  The line is that this love story across the ethnic and religious divide of the Bosnian war is stirring passions among those who lived through its three pitiless years.

Murat Tahirovic, who heads an association of ex-prisoners of war, added: “This film is deeply moving for the victims who experienced all of these things.

“It is completely objective and it really tells the facts of what happened during the war. She succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show… situations that detainees faced - mass executions, rapes, [being used as] human shields and all the other horrors.”

But Branislav Djukic, who heads the Bosnian Serb Association of Camp Prisoners, had a very different reaction after seeing a trailer. He said that the film “is showing lies” as it depicts only Serbs as rapists during the war and called for it to be barred from cinemas in the autonomous Serbian half of Bosnia. “We’ll do our best to ban the film,” he said.

A commenter on the (at present, very short) thread writes:

A Croatian friend said something that made me think when I was over in Zagreb this summer, whilst discussing the conflicts he said “There are no good guys in this region.”

There is a sense in which the appreciation of the Serb role in the conflict as “no-good guys” but also as victims marks the break-down of the Establishment narrative.  Jolie is still telling it, of course, and she will win all the usual plaudits and probably an Oscar or two.  Coincidentally, another false narrative had an airing on BBC2 this evening.  But the “evil Serb” may not prove as enduring as the “evil Nazi”, and one small light on that may be thrown by the Telegraph comment thread.  So far, it’s hearteningly balanced.  I shall watch it with interest.

Well, I didn’t expect it.  Like most people, I think, I had David Cameron down as electable Mr Bland, a wax-work dummy from Madame Tussauds carefully placed in the leadership of the Conservative Party to follow the internationalist, neoliberal script.  And perhaps he would have done so, turning his back on national interest as every other British Prime Minister has, finally, over the last thirty-five years.  But, it seems, Sarko and his mandarins, possessed as they are of a vision for Europe on a Napoleonic scale and a horrible suspicion that Anglo-Saxon skulduggery is undermining it, made it impossible for him, wearing the colours of Arch-Defender of Financial Services, to sign on fiscal Europe’s bottom line.

Now we have a situation where seventeen eurozone states and nine EU member but non-eurozone states are going to make lovebird sounds to another, while totally ignoring the will of their respective peoples.  One other state is, as they say, “isolated”, though it is a rather smug and relieved isolation at the moment.  If Cameron calls a snap election now, or if the LibDems collapse the coalition (which they can’t, of course), he would scoot home.  Even with all the austerity.

But ... what does it all mean from a nationalist perspective?  Has anything changed for us?  Well, two things for starters.

First, the definition of a Eurosceptic has been expanded.  Cameron’s veto has made the beast mainstream.  Meanwhile, the ante has been vertiginously upped for supporters of joining the Euro.  The old argument about being at “the heart of Europe” to protect our interests is defunct – we are not going to be at the heart of Europe ever again.  Now Europhiles have to argue that agreeing to German oversight of UK taxation and spending policy and practise would be in the national interest.

Cameron’s veto will have an immediate effect on UKIP and on British nationalism, forcing a focus on the perfect nonsense of belonging to a club of 27 which 26 have left, and the half-life Britain will now increasingly inherit as the 26 develop their union.  The argument for independence therefore becomes one of re-definition and regularisation.  It has lost much of its power.

Second, notwithstanding our signature to the existing EU treaties (including Lisbon which effectively abolishes the nation state) the intergovernmental process of de-sovereignisation has come to a screeching halt for Britain.  The sole remaining interests for the British government in the EU are the preservation of (i) the Single Market and (ii) the unregulated status of the City of London.  The project has now become a neoliberal one, not an internationalist one, and that will require a more nuanced critique from nationalists.

In this respect globalisation presents a particular challenge.  It continues to exercise its baleful influence upon us and to be fully supported by the political mainstream.  But it is nebulous, and the power of corporations does not pack the same punch as a political target as the power of Brussels.

A lot has changed today.  We do not yet know how all the pieces will fall finally.  But nationalism didn’t make much impact when the ideological times were good.  They just got tougher, and I am none too confident that we can rise to the challenge.

From the Daily Mail.  Comments off.

‘Woman on a tram’ to spend Christmas behind bars ‘for her own protection’ after court views video of alleged racist rant

A woman accused of launching a vile racist rant on a tram is to spend Christmas behind bars after she was remanded in custody for her own safety.

Magistrates took the decision to refuse Emma West’s bail application after they heard she had received death threats and that her address had been circulated on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

There were outbursts from supporters of Miss West, who shouted ‘treason’ as she was denied bail at Croydon Magistrates’ Court.

Miss West, a 34-year-old mother from New Addington, appeared before JPs charged with a racially aggravated public order offence in connection with a video that was heavily circulated on YouTube.

The former dental assistant bowed her head and sobbed as three magistrates watched the footage, which has now been seen more than 11 million times online.

When Miss West was arrested her partner told police that had been a number of death threats made against her, Eka Ike, prosecuting, told the court.

Magistrates chairman Ian McNeal said during the hearing: ‘We are told that your address has been widely circulated on Facebook and Twitter and there has been numerous death threats.

‘This case has attracted a high degree of public interest as evidence today. For these reasons we are remanding you in custody for your own protection.’

Miss West’s supporters shouted ‘treason’ and ‘we love you Emma, be strong’ as she was led to the cells.

Earlier, after the foul-mouthed video was played to the packed court, the court clerk asked West how she wanted to plead.

‘Not guilty,’ she said.

Wearing a blue blouse and a black cardigan, she wiped tears from her face during the hearing.

For most of the time the video was played, around two minutes and 20 seconds, she was doubled over, out of sight from the public gallery.

Friends and family gathered to give her support.

The hearing had been adjourned until 2pm to give time for West to prepare reasons for her not guilty plea.

When she returned to the court room, her earlier plea of not guilty was rescinded due to an administrative error. Court records were amended to show she has not yet indicated a plea.

West was arrested on Monday last week for her own safety after the footage was posted on YouTube on Sunday by LadyK89 and viewed more than 10,000 times.

She had been remanded in custody after he first appearance at Croydon Magistrates’ Court last Tuesday.

Miss West has elected to have her case dealt with at the crown court. She will next appear at the same court on January 3 via a video link.

So, we now know that Emma has had some mental issues, and that her disinhibition may have been linked to that.  Instead of being given police protection she is imprisoned awaiting trial.  Her two children have been taken into care.  She has been broken by the system which will pass judgement upon her.

That system, meanwhile, demonstrated the nature of its compassion in this judgement, again reported in the Mail:

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