Written by Blade Runner

On Saturday 13 September, more than 110,000 people turned out in central London, travelling from across the UK, in a mobilisation framed as a defence of “free speech” but saturated with white nationalist, Islamophobic, and anti-migrant rhetoric. It is said to have been the largest far-right protest in history.

The social media influencer who called the mobilisation, Tommy Robinson, was joined by international supporters: Elon Musk appeared by video link, calling for the government to be removed and parliament dissolved, while Éric Zemmour, the French far-right politician, invoked the “great replacement” myth in openly Islamophobic terms.

Saturday’s counter-protest drew up to 20,000 people, organised by local trade unions and grassroots groups. After a rally, they marched and ended up behind the far-right stage, where they were surrounded and effectively kettled for hours, with hostile crowds pressing against police lines. A small black bloc was at one point trapped behind far-right lines before withdrawing to the left bloc. Beer bottles and other projectiles were thrown at both police and anti-fascists.

The sheer scale of the crowds overwhelmed the under-resourced police force, which had otherwise been fully prepared to arrest hundreds of supporters of the proscribed Palestine Action. By the end of the day, the Met reported 26 officers injured—four seriously—and at least 25 arrests for assault and violent disorder, mostly of far-right attendees attempting to break through cordons. Anti-fascist blocs were eventually escorted out through narrow corridors in the middle of hostile crowds.

This mobilisation followed a summer of racist outrage, coordinated online, amplified particularly by Labour politicians, and legitimised by media coverage. Already in June, London had hosted a mass rally under the “Football Lads Against Grooming Gangs / For Our Children” banner—another openly racist march where a small anti-fascist bloc was kettled “for its own protection.”

Unlike previous eruptions in Britain, today’s racist outrage is consistently organised. Protests are rapidly mobilised, digitally coordinated, openly backed by political forces and legitimised by mainstream media, who push the myth of a “migrant invasion threatening a decaying country.”

This is part of a broader domestic and international counterinsurgency embedding the far right within Western societies. Fascists present themselves as defenders of working-class communities, co-opting the language and aesthetics of protest, all in service of white supremacy. Clashes with police are disciplinary theatre—reinforcing state power, not challenging it.

Anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left often appear disconnected from local communities, with little presence in the neighbourhoods or direct connections to refugees. We arrive as outsiders, sometimes facing kettling, harassment, and arrests.

Mainstream accounts frame the far-right surge as a backlash to left failures—neoliberal betrayal, cultural elitism, identity politics “gone too far.” But this obscures the deeper truth: Western societies long ago abandoned ideological politics, and whatever radicalism remained was absorbed and neutralised by social-democratic parties acting as pressure valves. Today’s political irrelevance is the result of decades of co-option and betrayal.

The gap between consumerist comfort zones and excluded populations has become an unbridgeable chasm. Digital natives grow up immersed in a technologically curated reality. Inside the citadel of the wealthy Global North, most can meet their basic material needs, while outside survival itself is precarious. Yet on both sides of the wall, the capacity to imagine life beyond the dominant narrative is vanishing.

The new middle classes function as highly specialised technicians and computer operators in a fully automated dystopia that extracts and destroys at unprecedented levels. Those who fail to adapt are rendered expendable. Genocide and ecocide advance hand in hand—perhaps the bleakest picture humanity has painted in civilisation’s history. Both the left and the right struggle to confront this reality in its full scale.

Governments steer reactionary domestic fronts—claiming to counter far-right drift while pushing anti-migrant policies. Repression is intense, with AI-driven surveillance defining a new society of control and feeding into a global shift toward a de facto wartime economy driven by the military–industrial complex. Militarised, racialised social orders prepare for war abroad and repression at home.

The far-right resurgence in the UK mirrors trends across Europe and the US. It is fuelled by wealthy donors and business interests, unfolding amid post-colonial restructuring. Nationalist militarism is global capitalism’s go-to strategy for managing its own contradictions, demanding a compliant, racist, and surveilled population in exchange for hollow “security” and “sovereignty.” War restructures society through displacement and discipline, always along racial lines.

New migration waves toward the citadels will continue, driven by deepening inequality, war, and ecological collapse. Migrants will remain scapegoats for crises they did not cause.

In the Middle East, this scapegoating turns genocidal. Palestinians—once a key source of precarious labour in Israel—have been rendered surplus. Racism so dehumanising it treats them as disease-carriers underpins the ongoing offensive: erasure of an indigenous population to consolidate a Greater Israel aligned with US interests and settler-colonial permanence.

The same logic that obliterates Gaza demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white nationalism. Racism and xenophobia justify both foreign aggression and domestic repression. Liberalism cloaks this in the language of rights—but its function remains control. The UK’s Public Order Act 2023 claims to preserve safety and democracy while criminalising protest and expanding police powers, wrapping repression in procedural fairness.

The left, meanwhile, clings to illuminated vanguardism and backs authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. Reviving the ideological zombies of Marxist orthodoxy and party-line praxis will not get us out of this nightmare. The revolts of this century were announced as joyful majority movements grounded in the lives and resistance of the displaced, exploited, and exiled. Building trust in our communities means abandoning the ideological habits that isolate us and reduce us to joyless, miserable lifestyle cults.

Palestine, climate, migration—these are not separate struggles. Internationalist solidarity must stretch across all fronts. Our enemies are not only abstract “isms” or tanks and cops, but also patriarchy, borders, data centres, and propaganda systems—left and right—that sustain the global war economy.

As global restructuring accelerates, the left–right binary fades. Direct action beyond ideology and party politics gains traction among a new generation. We must revive revolutionary imagination and resist the cynical pessimism of rigid orthodoxy.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—but we do need to joyfully rise to the occasion. Grassroots counter-information and deep community engagement remain as relevant as ever.

And we must have honest conversations with our leftist friends and allies: there hasn’t been a single uprising in history that left leaders didn’t betray. Disappointment will follow hollow promises for a “better” party.

The spectre of revolt from the past decades still haunts the elites and this reactionary wave is their effort to stop it from taking form again. Our task is to crush the snake eggs before they hatch—to build bonds of trust, create spaces of refusal, and confront not just fascism but the system that breeds it. What it fears most is our capacity to live ungovernable.

The post Far-right eruption in the United Kingdom appeared first on Void Network.

“Kops and Klan go hand in hand!” This chant was shouted in street gatherings across the country during the 2020 uprising against white supremacy and police violence. The historic connection of white nationalist vigilante violence and the police became glaringly obvious in the disparity between the treatment of the Proud Boys and that of antiracist protesters, where police often refused to intervene while the far-right gangs leveled attacks on left-wing demonstrators.

Antifascism is built on the notion that these insurrectionary fascist groups, such as the alt-right or the Proud Boys, are extraordinary and distinct from the larger liberal order, yet it’s not that simple. Instead, the role of the police as an institution of social control in racial capitalism and settler-colonialism has always had some relationship to the insurgent white supremacist groups that are looking to reinstitute racial hierarchies. This apparently symbiotic relationship forces antifascists to reckon with the similarities and differences between white nationalist groups and the police as they build strategies to deal with both.

I interviewed abolitionist organizer Kelly Hayes — who is the host of Truthout’s podcast “Movement Memos” and a contributing writer at Truthout — about her experiences confronting these interlocking systems of oppression, how she became an organizer, how she approaches this relationship between antagonistic forces, and how we can build up an abolitionist antifascism that goes further than only defeating fringe neo-Nazi groups.

Written by Shane Burley, AK Press

Shane Burley: How does police abolition work connect to antifascism?

Kelly Hayes: Police, who are themselves fascistic, are the entry point to incarceration. There’s nothing more fascistic in the US than our prison system. If fascism escalates, it already has a mass disposal system for human beings and a populace that has been conditioned to ignore what happens in those places. We already know that people suffer and die horribly in those places, and we know people allow it. People participate in mythologies about the purpose and function of it all. These facilities manufacture conditions that bring about premature death and they extract time, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has explained. The prison-industrial complex and its many tentacles are the beast the fascists would feed us to.

It’s important to remember that fighting fascism means fighting the erosion of human empathy. It means fighting the further normalization of mass suffering and death. That makes the prison-industrial complex ground zero.

What role does the police have in the growth of the far right?

The police are a natural home for right-wing militants and it’s important not to think of far right forces and police as distinct. The membership overlap between police and white supremacist organizations is quite telling.

But I think people also sort of limit themselves sometimes in how they perceive that overlap. Most racist people don’t join racist organizations. We need to understand the police as a white supremacist organization that has formalized power. It’s entrenched in the government, and maintains state interests, and has a whole mythology of “upholding decency” around it. Policing, as an idea, appeals to a lot of people who aren’t down with the [Ku Klux] Klan. Since police can be well paid in an economy that generally screws over Black and Brown communities, we see a lot of nonwhite cops, and that demographic diversity helps legitimize police violence.

People have a narrow image of what white supremacy and the far-right looks like because we are conditioned to see state violence as inherently legitimate. Police don’t just have legal immunity, for the most part, they also have social immunity, and their actions are not scrutinized in the ways that everyday people are. If they were, people would have no trouble recognizing, based on simple inventories of events, that the police are a force for white supremacy.

A lot of vigilante violence that helped impose order under Jim Crow became institutionalized as the police became more professionalized, and more heavily armed. Lynchings where no one was charged gave way to shootings and beatings and other violence that was dealt out from a place of police legitimacy.

It’s not surprising to see collaboration between police and right-wing vigilantes because they’re natural allies and grown out of the same cultural formation. We rarely see them clash, and, when they do, they often do it with kid gloves. You cannot effectively pit these forces against one another because they are too entwined and have too many shared values and purposes.

We saw these two forces, the police and the far right, even more explicitly collapse into each other over the past few years. How do you think we can build social movements capable of taking on both forces simultaneously?

We have to understand that there is no alternative to taking on both the police and the far right simultaneously. The police are the most powerful right-wing gang in the country.

When strategizing against them, it must be understood that they are in collaboration with other white supremacist organizations. When countering white supremacist organizations, it must be understood that police are either actively entrenched in those organizations, or could come to their aid at any time, because they’re on the same side.

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source: https://truthout.org/articles/we-must-unlearn-the-lie-that-state-violence-is-inherently-legitimate/

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The post We Must Unlearn the Lie That State Violence Is Inherently Legitimate- Interview with Kelly Hayes appeared first on Void Network.

The talk situates these formations within a social and political context in which various modes of difference were being mobilized to illustrate and expand the symbolic flexibility and the “writerly” potentials of socialism – particularly by the politically imaginative work of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the 1978 Socialist-Feminist Conference, the radical queer activist group Gay Liberation Front, and others.

The talk uses these formations as the context for arguing that this decade of socialist experimentation was one in which black queer activists and artists were central. More directly, those activists and artists were part of various projects to revise socialism in accordance with an interest in politicizing homoerotic desires and eroticizing anti-racist and socialist visions.

This lecture was recorded on December 3, 2013 at Barnard College in New York City.

SEE ALSO

The post Socialism in Black Queer Time: 70s and the Erotic Potentials of Radical Politics- Roderick Ferguson appeared first on Void Network.

IN 1909, A poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow travelers, sending his car into a ditch and completely destroying the vehicle. Here’s how Marinetti described the encounter:

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch! … I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air …

You can already tell from this account that Marinetti was a bit of an eccentric. He was a poet, after all. And while he positions the cyclists as the issue, it’s likely that Marinetti wasn’t the safest driver. The lines that lead up to this retelling of the crash recount just how fast they were going in their car, “hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron.” (In case you’re wondering, yes, there was drinking that night.)

But this account of a poet’s chaotic, life-threatening drive isn’t just some strange remnant from his personal files. The crash—to him a symbol of how the old ways (bicycles) must give way to the new ones (his car)—is what propelled Marinetti to put into writing a theory of progress that he’d been ruminating on for years. The words above are actually the beginning of The Futurist Manifesto, a document that Marinetti published in 1909 with the help of a small handful of fellow Italian artists who had dubbed themselves Futurists. What follows the car crash story is a list of 11 declarations—the tenets of Futurism.

Today, when we talk about futurism, we’re not usually talking about sculpture, painting, or poetry. Futurists today are scenario builders, people with advanced degrees in strategic foresight, science fiction writers, consultants to businesses. Futurists focus largely on technology, and the field today is inextricably linked to technologists working on everything from artificial intelligence to Crispr. And today’s Futurists almost never link their work to the existence of Marinetti, and the Italian movement that came before them. This is in part because Marinetti was an artist, and the Italian Futurists worked in paint and bronze and clay, rather than future forecasts. And there is no direct link between Marinetti’s group and the strategic foresight consultants working today. But the link is also one that today’s futurists would prefer to avoid in part because of another element of the artists behind the Futurist Manifesto of 1909: Marinetti and his cohort embraced and championed fascism. There are lessons to be learned for today’s technologists and futurists in Marinetti’s manifesto, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Let’s first take a look at the words often used to describe the Italian Futurist movement: invention, modernity, speed, industry, disruption, brash, energetic, combative. Italian Futurists were obsessed with cars and airplanes; they emphasized youth over experience; they believed that the only way to live was by pushing forward and never looking back. The first tenet in the manifesto reads, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Disruption? Moving fast (and perhaps breaking things)? The rejection of history? Today’s most vocal voices in tech might not communicate their values with the same aplomb as the Italian poets, but they’re often saying the same kinds of things. Here’s a quote from Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Waymo, about the value of history: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” Here’s a quote from the 1909 manifesto: “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?” Where Marinetti declares “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!” today’s technology moguls say “the future is now.” Where the Italian Futurists were hypnotized by cars and planes, today’s technologists are drooling over rocket ships and space travel. Where Marinetti believed that women were too effeminate to bring about the kind of speedy progress he desired, former Google employee James Damore writes about how the gender gap in tech exists because men and women “biologically differ”.

Not only was Marinetti instrumental in the Futurist movement, he was also one of the artists who pushed the idea of artists as a brand. “Marinetti’s public braggadocio—and his manipulation of and engagement with the mass media—changed the way artists conceived of their relationship to the art world and popular culture,” writes Jon Mann at Artsy. Marinetti believed in the power of the manifesto, and in the idea that artists should be personas, and that they should push their narrative into the world. If Marinetti could have lived to see Elon Musk launch a red Tesla to space, he would likely have been beside himself with joy.

But Musk and his colleagues should heed the warning that the Italian Futurist movement provides. This love of disruption and progress at all costs led Marinetti and his fellow artists to construct what some call a “a church of speed and violence.” They embraced fascism, pushed aside the idea of morality, and argued that innovation must never, for any reason, be hindered. Marinetti and his movement cheered, for example, when Italy invaded Northern Africa. “Italian bombardment of Tripoli from biplanes and dirigibles was the first air bombardment in the history of the world, and thus a major technological innovation,” writes Eugene Ostashevsky. Today, some technologists praise drone warfare with similar language. “Though they painted themselves as scions of a new age, the Fascists and Futurists were really ultraconservatives ideologically,” writes Gabriel T. Rubin. Again, sound familiar? In their never-ending quest for progress at any cost, today’s companies are flirting with fascism themselves.

Amazon has been providing facial recognition software to police in the US. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, and Motorola Solutions all have contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE and are profiting off the current wave of deportations and internment camps. American scientists and technology companies are helping China track minority groups. China is also hoping Google will help it suppress any kind of information about their treatment of those minority groups. Brian Merchant at Gizmodo recently wrote about all the ways big tech companies are contributing to the current climate crisis. This is before we get into the ways that YouTube is contributing to the spread of conspiracy theories, white nationalism, and fascism.

Today’s technologists love to eschew history for the same reason the Italian Futurists did, but if they ignore the lessons contained in that movement, they’re bound to repeat it. And I’ll leave it to you to guess who said this, Marinetti or Musk: “Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the Stars!”

________

written by Rose Eveleth, an Ideas contributor at WIRED, creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

source: WIRED

The post When Futurism Led to Fascism—and Why It Could Happen Again appeared first on Void Network.

Why is the Far-Right on the Rise?

The scarecrow of “populism” has been frequently placed into a narrative that is also dear to liberal intellectuals and politicians. According to this narrative, the rise of the “populist Right” owes to the putative support it has enjoyed from white workers and more generally from the “native” plebeian elements of European societies. Despite the blessings it delivers, the story goes, the train of development and integration that Europe has been travelling on has left some people behind, exposing them to the propaganda of “ethno-populists”. In a recent article Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon have done a great job detailing that this line of explanation is both untenable and class biased. In the last analysis, its essential function is to stigmatize the working classes for political immaturity, as they are consistently being represented to be “carried away” or “duped” by demagogues. Whitewashed, at the same time, are the undemocratic structure of the EU as well as the role of the political, economic and technocratic class in charge. At best, this liberal discourse sustains a lukewarm drive for reform, which is supposed to include the “left-behinds” and, consequently, exorcize the twin ghosts of populism and nationalism.

As a corrective to the idea of a plebeian mass support, Winter and Mondon convincingly argue that the growth of the far right is spurred to a considerable degree by mainstream media. The relation does not necessarily or mainly concern open support, it has more to do with the mainstreaming of the far right agenda: the mass media across Europe are not only giving platform to the nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric of far right parties, at the same time they have been systematically promoting and inflating issues that are conducive to the spread of far right politics, like the “refugee crisis”, “the immigration problem”, “Islamic terrorism”, “criminality” and “anomy”. This, however, must not be taken to mean that the phenomenon (along perhaps the parallel decline of the far left) is little more than a media bubble. For that would downplay the historical, political, social, economic depth of the current crisis, without which neither the far right nor the far left could have emerged out of the political margins. As the recent Euro-elections ratify, a salient aspect of this ongoing crisis concerns political representation, in particular the decline of the two political traditions that have monopolized national government in western Europe after WWII and largely engineered the EU project: the moderate (liberal, conservative, Christian-democratic) Right and the social-democratic Left. While elitism, corruption and a detachment from social reality may have played a role, they do not suffice as explanations for the decline of the parties that belong to these two great political traditions. Instead, it is necessary to take also into account their growing inability to uphold the mediating role between actuality (how things are) and ideality (how things should be), whose tension has nourished modern democracies from their birth.

The Waning Promises of Parliamentarism

Every social formation necessarily represents itself under the light of justice, that is, as a historical form that crystalizes or moves towards the right order of things. In the dynamic context of modern societies, and buttressed by the grievances and instability that phenomena like inequality, systemic exploitation, exclusion, marginalization, and destitution generate, the affective gap between actuality and ideality acquires an endemic, constitutive character. In this context, political parties have taken up the task of promising the best way to bridge this tensional gap, with parliamentary politics serving to promote different programmatic visions of justice through peaceful means and legally regulated procedures. It is in this sense that the mediation of the gap between actuality and ideality is flagged as a key dimension of modern democracy, next to legitimizing governmental power and organizing political competition in a consensual manner that forestalls civil conflict.

In these terms, the social-democratic left and the moderate right have been offering two hegemonic political alternatives, while both respecting the fundamentally sound (or more strongly, just) institutional structure of the modern democratic state. Of course, and here we move closer to their crisis, the ideological and political traits of these political traditions did not remain static. Far from it, they have merged towards the “center” and jointly rode the bandwagon of globalization under the aegis of a seemingly triumphant capitalism. In the context of the “post-democratic consensus” that transpired, political competition increasingly took the form of rivalry over efficiency. The best that the “new” Center-Left and Center-Right could promise was optimal management, i.e. that they are the most capable administrators of a historical process hailed for leading towards a cosmopolitan, prosperous and technologically advanced future. A pertinent way to conceive the European Union is as one of the salient forms of this new international order.

For millions of its inhabitants, though, Europe was not living up to the expectations nor did they enjoy all the fruits of the infamous “European values”. Expectedly, the many-headed crisis that came out in the open since 2008 has intensified the gap between how Europe is and how it should have been according to the evangelists of European integration. From the “peripheries” of Europe, like Portugal, Spain and Greece, to countries that are considered its core, like France and Italy, the ideal of a civilizational unit moving towards political unification and economic prosperity was foundering in the rocks of indebtedness, unemployment, austerity and a deeply uneven concentration of power and wealth within and among the member states. Moreover, since this tension is played immanently on the level of institutional forms, the dominant institutions of European social formations could not remain untouched. One such institutional form is precisely parliamentary politics and its leading parties. In line with the moral panic liberals tend to bring whenever trust towards parliamentarism totters, initially the prevalent reaction from below was not to fall for aspiring Bonapartes but to fight for a “real democracy”. Much more than positing a demand through the formal circuits of the state or prescribing an ideal that is to cure the ills of this world, an international movement flourished that set out to experiment how such a real democracy should be. From Plaza del Sol in Madrid to Syntagma square in Athens, popular assemblies sprung which, along with declaring their opposition to austerity, tried to reanimate the principles of equality and people’s power from empty formalities, which they have been largely reduced to in recent decades, into a lived, practical experience. It is too early to assess the legacy of the cycle of struggles at whose forefront stood the “squares-movement”. Yet, in the short-term, uprisings failed to produce institutions capable to act as organs of a new democratic regime or even to revitalize existing democracies. Likewise, they have failed to block austerity. And as it frequently happens after the regression of a popular surge of struggles, this double failure has opened the way to the far right.

Yet, liberal fears again notwithstanding, parliamentarism has not suffered the same fate as the parties that dominated it. Rather, once the first wave of popular mobilizations in Spain (with the Indignados), Greece (with the Aganaktismenoi) and every other country where anti-austerity movements emerged (e.g. Britain and Bosnia) ran out of steam (and indeed a similar pattern is repeated today with the Yellow Vests movement in France), parliamentary politics has reasserted itself and the rise of the far right is actually one of the mediums of this reassertion. For unlike the fascist movement of the interwar period (a difference that hasty identifications fail to register) the contemporary far right does not directly challenge parliamentarism. Instead, by channelling discontent in the formal conduits of protest-vote and by fostering hopes that their electoral victory will solve all problems, far right parties have served to shield parliamentary democracy from the critical attitude popular movements have shown towards representation and the potential of a more radical democracy that this critical stance carries. This is not to exclude the possibility of a more authoritarian turn, since this is arguably an immanent potential of the far right. But we are not there yet, and the more the threat it poses to democracy is inflated, the more the role of the far right in augmenting the existing undemocratic structure of European states is downplayed.

Neo-Archaic Visions of Past and Future Glory

While the crisis of political representation may be an important factor in the rise of far-right parties, it is not the sole one; the decline of one form does not automatically bring the rise of another, as the poor performance of the radical left testifies. Clearly, far right parties say something that sounds attractive to many of those disillusioned with traditional parties. Schematically, at the center of the far-right’s propaganda (and the same holds true for similar trends outside Europe) is a reassertion of the nation state as the effective solution to the problem of justice, i.e. the problem of giving to a social formation (or even life at large) its proper form. For if this problem at its heart contains the aforementioned tension between actuality and ideality, the far right prescribes a strong, protectionist and ethnically homogeneous nation state as the best form for bridging the gap between how things are now and how they should be.

Political projects do not emerge in a historical void and the apparent success of this key idea has been certainly boosted by real sociopolitical trends. On the one hand, the internationalization of capital has generated industrial wastelands inside Europe as well as facilitated the production of polyethnic societies through flows of immigrant labor. At the same time, the European Union has served to undermine whatever elements of popular sovereignty existed in favor of a centralized, bureaucratic structure of power. In this context, precarity, insecurity, anger, disenfranchisement have variably affected segments of the working and middle classes throughout Europe. Precisely, the far-right steps in to mediate these affects, shape them and channel them towards a conservative (nay reactionary) and nationalist direction. The populist trope of elite/people is fused with a nationalist and racist discourse in order to produce a singular imaginary threat, the “foreigner” (in Brussels, in the ghettos, outside the borders) and a single cause for all that is wrong today, the subversion of the national community. In this way, the far-right promises on the one hand to give back to native workers their dignity and on the other to protect the privileges of the middle classes but also, let’s not forget, the profits of national capitalists. Overall, by mobilizing the power of the familiar, the far-right acts as a vector for the reconstitution of a closed, national body.

Looking Forward, Looking Left

If the specter of masses assembling behind nationalist banners appears to be fleshing out in front of our eyes, a few years ago the prospect of popular mobilizations acting as engine for radical change also seemed to be on the agenda. The radical Left in its turn promised to play a catalyst role by entering a sort of dialectic relation with grassroots movements: joining them in the streets but also channeling them towards the existing state with the hope to democratize it. A trend certainly existed: SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, a little later the leftwing turn of Labor in the UK; even in the previous European elections an identifiable presence was registered at the left of social democracy. But, instead of opening new horizons to popular movements, leftist parties practically served to curb them. Thus, if the booming fortunes of the far right are based to a considerable degree in their capacity to mobilize the power of the familiar, the decline of the radical Left has something to do with its failure to harness the energies of the new. For sure, the Left may also have failed to draw from its own tradition and assert effectively familiar forms it has once helped consolidate, above all, welfare and labor rights. But, unlike the far-right, a leftist project cannot base its success on a neo-archaic assertion of old forms. The promise that the Left carries can only be transformative. Even those things that deserve to be defended need to be integrated to a politics that responds to the problem of justice not by evoking an idealized past but by pointing forward towards a different future. Naturally, this is far more difficult, for such a future cannot simply be posited ideally, it needs to be built through the forms that develop today. The combined effect of systemic inequality and exclusion, endemic psychosomatic pathologies, mass population displacement, geopolitical competitions and environmental degradation poses severe challenges and the odds may certainly look adverse if not grim. But when were the odds ever really in favor of leftist projects? To see in the material reality of present injustice and in the multiform resistances against it the seeds of a new justice is a necessary quality for a radical Left worthy of its name.

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George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory and currently teaches and is a researcher at the International School of Athens. His book, A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet, is available now. He is a member of Void Network

source: https://medium.com

The post Between Past and Future: On the Contrasting Fortunes of the Far-Right and the Far-Left in Europe By George Sotiropoulos / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

This is according to a new report released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Inspector General, which finds that, since 2017, the Trump administration has separated thousands more children from their parents than it previously disclosed and that it tracked these kids in ad hoc, disparate databases, including Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Sharepoint accounts, further complicating the already tortured process of figuring outwhere those children are today.

These border separations dominated headlines last spring and summer when then-attorney general Jeff Sessions announced a so-called “zero tolerance” immigration policy at the border, leading to a spike in children being taken alone into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. At the time, some former HHS employees and legal minds worried that existing governme nt technology was incapable of adequately keeping track of these kids and their parents. The inspector general report not only suggests that those concerns were valid, it also finds that these separations have been going on for almost the entire duration of the Trump presidency, without sufficient technological processes in place to manage them.

“The total number and current status of all children separated from their parents by [the Department of Homeland Security] and referred to ORR’s care is unknown,” the report reads. It lists the “lack of an existing, integrated data system to track separated families” as a central obstacle to reunification.

The report was triggered in part by a court ruling last June as part of a class-action lawsuit, Ms. L v. ICE, which ordered the government to identify and reunite children who had been separated from their parents by DHS and were in ORR’s custody at that time. The order included an exception for parents who were deemed “unfit or present[ed] a danger to the child.” Around the same time, the public outcry over the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy was mounting, adding to the inspector general’s decision to investigate the issue.

Without so much as a unified database in place, the government was left scrambling to meet the court ordered deadline. Finding these children at all required a crisis management task force at the Office of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response to mine dozens of systems for adults and children with the same last name, who were apprehended at the same place on the same day. Government staffers manually reviewed the case files of the roughly 12,000 children in ORR’s custody at the time of the court order, and relied on shelters to report any children they believed were separated and within their care.

In July, ORR told the court that 2,654 children fit that description. The OIG’s report finds that even at that time, staffers believed another 50 to 100 children were, in fact, eligible, and decided not to include them in their count in order to meet the court deadline. That number continued to fluctuate through December of 2018, as officials discovered additional kids to be added to the list.

The number currently stands at 2,737. According to the report, 159 of those children remained in ORR custody as of last month. Of that group, 28 have parents who the office considers unfit or dangerous, another 28 were determined not to have been separated from a parent, and 95 have parents who declined to be reunified. (Reports have surfaced of parents saying they were coerced into giving up their rights to be reunified.) Now, ORR is working to reunify or “discharge” the eight remaining children.

But even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. According to the report, ORR staffers started informally tracking separations in 2016, enough to notice a spike in the number of separated children being referred to them by DHS in the summer of 2017, nearly a year before the zero-tolerance policy was introduced. The percentage of unaccompanied minors who’d been separated from their parents rose from .3 percent in 2016 to 3.7 percent in August of 2017. This runs counter to President Trump’s claims that President Obama “had the exact same policy.” In addition, these children were, according to an email reviewed by the inspector general, often very young and needed to be placed in specially licensed facilities, which sometimes resulted in a shortfall of available beds.

And yet, the court in Ms. L v. ICE didn’t require the government to count any of these children as qualifying for family reunification, the report says. That means that the estimated thousands of children who were sent to and released from ORR custody before the court case have gone unaccounted for in this national conversation. The report also notes there is no fixed legal definition for what constitutes “separated children,” making it too easy for kids to fall through the cracks.

The report lays bare the glaring lack of administrative preparation that went into a sweeping policy change that would come to affect thousands of families. This haphazard system resulted in children who were eligible for reunification being identified some five months after the original court order. Stories have abounded over the last year of separated children suffering psychological trauma. Now it appears that the scope of the problem is even larger, and has been going on for far longer, than was previously known.

ORR modified its case management system in July so that staff can now indicate whether a child was separated. But, according to the report, “It is not yet clear whether ORR’s recent changes are sufficient to ensure consistent and accurate data about separated children, and the lack of detail in information received from DHS continues to pose challenges.”

In a letter responding to the report, Lynn Johnson, the assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, said the agency “generally agrees with OIG’s findings” regarding the number of children eligible for reunification under the court order. But Johnson pushes back against its assertions about the thousands of children who went largely uncounted prior to the court order, saying that ORR has no requirement to track those children. “Even if ORR were to invest a substantial part of its limited resources in a count of prior DHS separations, the count would not fulfill any current operational needs or enable HHS to provide any form of relief to discharged children,” Johnson writes.

The United Nations’s high commissioner on human rights has described the border separation policy as an “unconscionable” violation of the rights of children.

ISSIE LAPOWSKY

source: WIRED

READ also:

Nazi Govern USA: 10,000 migrant children at 100 concentration camps in 14 states

https://voidnetwork.gr/2018/06/26/nazi-govern-usa-10000-migrant-children-100-concentration-camps-14-states/

The post How the FEDS failed to track thousands of separated children – by ISSIE LAPOWSKY appeared first on Void Network.

Ολόκληρο το κείμενο της Πρωτοβουλίας:

Το τελευταίο διάστημα παρατηρείται μια συντεταγμένη προσπάθεια φασιστικών ομάδων μέσα στα σχολεία. Συγκεκριμένα, είδαμε καταλήψεις σχολείων με εθνικιστικά και φασιστικά συνθήματα, πορείες μαθητών σε πόλεις της Β. Ελλάδας, ακόμα και στοχοποίηση μαθητών και εκπαιδευτικών από φασίστες. Σα να μην έφτανε αυτό τις επόμενες μέρες έχει κυκλοφορήσει στα social media κάλεσμα για πανελλαδική μέρα καταλήψεων με ανάλογο περιεχόμενο. Καταγγέλλουμε και στεκόμαστε απέναντι σε κάθε τέτοια προσπάθεια που σπέρνει το δηλητήριο του φασισμού και του ναζισμού στα σχολεία μας.

Η μέθοδος με την οποία διάφορες ακροδεξιές φασιστικές ομάδες (μεταξύ των οποίων και η Χρυσή Αυγή) καλούν στις εθνικιστικές καταλήψεις στις 29/11 είναι η κλασική μέθοδος του παρακράτους, δηλαδή ανώνυμα και στα μουλωχτά, χωρίς ανάληψη ευθύνης. Να μη μιλήσουμε φυσικά για δημοκρατικές διαδικασίες και συλλογικές αποφάσεις. Θα ήταν αστείο…

Προσπαθούν να παρουσιαστούν σαν αγνοί πατριώτες που νοιάζονται για το καλό μας και το καλό της χώρας . Προσπαθούν να παρουσιαστούν ως αντισυστημικοί ταυτίζοντας τους αγωνιστές και το κίνημα με την ξεπουλημένη συστημική κυβέρνηση Σύριζα. Να μην χάψουμε τα ψέματα τους πίσω από το αγνό »πατριωτισμό βρίσκεται ο επικίνδυνος εθνικισμός , το μίσος και ο φασισμός . Ο εχθρός μας είναι οι το σύστημα , η φτώχεια , η εκμετάλλευση, ο πόλεμος , ο φασισμός όχι οι γειτονικοί λαοί . Ο εχθρός μας βρίσκεται στις κυβερνήσεις , στις τράπεζες , στην Ε.Ε και όχι στους γειτονικούς λαούς . Την ίδια στιγμή που μας λένε για εθνικά θέματα εννοούν να ετοιμαστούμε να πολεμήσουμε για τα κέρδη των αφεντικών τους αντί να παλεύουμε για τα δικαιώματα και τις ανάγκες μας.

Οι αγωνιστές μαθητές που συμμετείχαν στις πανεκπαιδευτικές κινητοποιήσεις της περασμένης περιόδου θυμούνται πως αυτοί που τώρα καλούν σε μαθητικές φασιστικές καταλήψεις και οξύνουν την εθνικιστική-φασιστική ρητορεία στα σχολεία ήταν οι ίδιοι που όταν οι μαθητές κατέβαιναν στον δρόμο για να προτάξουν το σχολείο των αναγκών τους, αδιαφορούσαν και πολλές φορές κατέστειλαν τους αγώνες μας .

ΔΕΝ ΘΑ ΤΟΥΣ ΠΕΡΑΣΕΙ

ΚΑΛΟΥΜΕ ΟΛΟΥΣ ΤΟΥΣ ΜΑΘΗΤΕΣ ΝΑ ΣΗΚΩΣΟΥΝ ΚΕΦΑΛΙ ΑΠΕΝΑΝΤΙ ΤΟΥΣ

Πρέπει να τσακίσουμε το φασισμό! Δεν ξεχνάμε το Φύσσα, ή τον Αλέξη Γρηγορόπουλο και όλα τα υπόλοιπα θύματα του φασισμού! Απέναντι σε αυτούς να παλέψουμε για την παιδεία των αναγκών μας για δουλειά με δικαιώματα, για να κοιτάμε το μέλλον μας με αισιοδοξία και όχι με ανασφάλεια.

Καλούμε όλους τους μαθητές να πάρουν την κατάσταση στα χέρια τους και να μετατρέψουν την εθνικιστική φιέστα σε πανελλαδική μέρα πολύμορφης δράσης ενάντια στον φασισμό και τον εθνικισμό. Να κρεμάσουμε πανό να πραγματοποιήσουμε συμβολικές αποχές , να πάρουμε αποφάσεις καταδίκης της συγκεκριμένης δράσης μέσα από τις συνελεύσεις μας , τα 15μελή και τα 5μελή .

ΝΑ ΦΤΑΣΕΙ ΣΕ ΟΛΗ ΤΗΝ ΕΛΛΑΔΑ ΤΟ ΜΗΝΥΜΑ ΟΤΙ Ο ΦΑΣΙΣΜΟΣ ΚΑΙ Ο ΕΘΝΙΚΙΣΜΟΣ ΔΕΝ ΧΩΡΑΕΙ ΣΤΑ ΣΧΟΛΕΙΑ ΜΑΣ

Πρωτοβουλία μαθητών και σχολείων εναντία στον φασισμό /εθνικισμό από το 1ο ΕΠΑΛ Νεάπολης , 1ο ΓΕΛ Καλλιθέας ,1ο ΓΕΛ Πεύκων ,1ο ΓΕΛ Πεύκης, 2ο ΓΕΛ Πεύκης, 6ο ΓΕΛ Αμαρουσίου ,1ο Καλλιτεχνικό Γυμνάσιο/Λύκειο Κερατσινίου Δραπετσώνας ,1ο ΓΕΛ Βριλησσίων, 2ο ΓΕΛ Θήβας, Μουσικό Σχολείο Πρέβεζας, Λεόντειο Λύκειο Πατησίων, Πρότυπο ΓΕΛ Βαρβάκειου Σχολής, 1ο ΕΠΑΛ Πρέβεζας, 1ο ΓΕΛ Πρέβεζας, 2ο ΓΕΛ Πρέβεζας, 1ο γυμνάσιο Πρέβεζας, 2ο γυμνάσιο Πρέβεζας, Πειραματικό Λύκειο Αγίων Αναργύρων, 2ο ΓΕΛ Δάφνης , 5ο ΓΕΛ ζωγράφου , 2ο ΓΕΛ Χολαργού , 3ο Γυμνάσιο Γαλατσίου , 6o ΓΕΛ Ν.Ιωνίας

(η συλλογή υπογραφών συνεχίζεται και τα σχολεία που ξεσηκώνονται ενάντια στους φασίστες-εθνικιστές πληθαίνουν)

The post Πρωτοβουλία μαθητών ενάντια στις εθνικιστικές καταλήψεις appeared first on Void Network.

WHITE WOMEN MUST HOLD EACH OTHER ACCOUNTABLE FOR RACISM

We know that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. We know that some white women are so blinded by their privilege, their racism, and a patriarchal system that insists their lives as wives and mothers are “precious” that they happily carry water for the white men in hoods and iron crosses. We know that some white women march right alongside them in neo-Nazi rallies, drop racial slurs on social media, and push racist legislation in Congress. And we know this has been going on for a long, long time—well before Trump’s Klansman father was born. However, viewing white women’s involvement in perpetuating white supremacy solely through their relationships with men not only denies their agency, but assuages their culpability. As the old saying goes, men talk, women do.

Historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s new book, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, is a fascinating, meticulously researched, and damning look into the myriad ways white women have consciously worked to aid racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and sanctify their racially pure vision of white motherhood. The book focuses on four women—Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, Cornelia Dabney Tucker, and Nell Battle Lewis—across multiple generations of white-supremacist activism; it takes us from Deep South racism in the “progressive” 1920s to the mob of screaming white mothers who greeted Black schoolgirl Ruby Bridges in 1960 New Orleans through the Boston school busing controversy of the mid ’70s.

For decades, these four women and others performed “myriad duties that upheld white over Black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials.” They taught their children that racial hierarchies were not only scientific and just, but actually God’s will; that Black people preferred segregation; Black boys were unintelligent and sexually overdeveloped; Black men were dangerous; and falling in love, marrying, or having children with Black men was the most horrific thing a white girl could do and would hasten the extinction of the white race. (The alt-right “white genocide” meme is nothing new). They formed political action committees, penned newspaper columns, passed out pamphlets, rallied for white-supremacist politicians, and leaned on their maternal image to manipulate the discourse.

After 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling destroyed the fictional idea that white people were the most responsible shepherds of racial justice and Black Americans were happy under segregation, these women pivoted to a family-focused political ideology that painted the Supreme Court decision as federal overreach that threatened mothers’ authority over their own children. This tactic attracted more moderate and liberal types to their cause, and effectively feminized mass resistance (a term used for the package of laws passed in 1956 that aimed to uphold Jim Crow and delay school integration). For white-supremacist women, the home and the school were their battlegrounds, and their most sacred duty as mothers was to keep them free of Black influence. According to McRae, without their efforts, “white supremacist politics could not have shaped local, regional, and national politics the way it did or lasted as long as it has.”

One of the more intriguing political tidbits from the book is the way white-supremacist politics criss-crossed party lines, with its proponents hopscotching between Democrat, Republican, Jeffersonian Democrat, New Right, and the catchall “conservative” tag. To simplify a complex development, following decades of pushing white supremacist policies, the Democratic Party’s growing acceptance of desegregation and racial equality inspired a mass exodus of white Southern women, and led them to seek representation elsewhere. McRae is careful, however, to illustrate that white-supremacist politics were not confined to the South; in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Boston, white supremacy manifested under the cover of dog whistles and obfuscation, where parents weren’t racist for not wanting their white kids to share classrooms with Black students, they were just “concerned about school choice.”

The parallels between the past and our current state are stark, and often unsettling. Everything old is new again, just repackaged and refurbished to suit a new audience. We can find echoes of newspaper owner, columnist, and constitutional fanatic Mary Dawson Cain in the rise of both conservative pundits like Tomi Lahren and white supremacy mouthpieces Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone, all of whom espouse “traditional” viewpoints that range from casually racist to virulently white supremacist. Nell Battle Lewis—with her liberal education, outraged editorializing, and patronizing “color-blind” view of her Black acquaintances—is the spiritual foremother to today’s “woke” white feminists, who “don’t see color” and sport vagina hats with pride, but balk at any sort of intersectional analysis of feminism, privilege, or power.

We see the ideological granddaughters of Cornelia Dabney Tucker—who organized the sending of countless handwritten letters decrying the Brown v. Board of Education ruling—in the white women who now send panicked tweets about Black Lives Matter. Elsewhere, Florence Sillers Ogden’s efforts to brand the labor movement as “un-American” and blame outbreaks of racist violence on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s willingness to freely socialize with people of color would fit right in on any race-baiting FOX News segment. Roosevelt was a target of ire for white segregationist women—her progressive politics and commitment to racial equality rendered her little more than a communist witch in their estimation; one can’t help but think of the way Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton—herself a polarizing, deeply flawed, yet (comparatively) progressive political powerhouse—was treated during her presidential run, and how much of the white female electorate turned on her in the end.

As I read their stories, I saw my mother’s face. The same cold, quiet cruelty that emanates from the photos in Mothers of Massive Resistance stared back at me 15 years ago, when she told me that my boyfriend Aaron* wasn’t allowed to come to our house for junior-prom pictures. He was a skater kid from a nice family who lived in a nice house in a nice neighborhood my family could have never dreamed of affording or fitting into—but since he had locs and dark skin, she forbid me from seeing him again. I remember how she told me, in what she must have imagined to be a comforting tone, “He’s a nice kid, but it just ain’t right.”

The lessons I learned about whiteness, class, and the lengths that white folks will go to protect their ideas have been a foundational part of my political development, and are why I felt it was important to engage with this book and the uncomfortable history it reveals. The task of dismantling white supremacy rests on the shoulders of those who benefit most from it. It’s on us to confront racist, white supremacist white people who assume they can count on us to smile along or stay silent when they step out of line; it’s on us to ditch that poisonous “color-blind” worldview and understand the ways in which race, identity, and political/social power intersect; it’s on us to publicly, materially, enthusiastically, and genuinely support people of color, to confront and interrogate our own internalized racism and learned prejudices without expecting people of color to educate us.

It’s on us to protest side by side with people of color against this racist, fascist, xenophobic regime. When the cops show up, it’s on us to recognize that no matter our specific identities, they will see us above all as white women, and this affords us a vast measure of safety and privilege. We must understand that it is up to us to put our bodies on the front lines to provide cover for those who are under greater threat. It’s on us to do that work, to shut up and listen, to make space for marginalized voices and recognize when we’re veering into performative, self-serving, or otherwise hollow allyship.

The entirety of that 53 percent of white women didn’t vote for Trump because of “economic anxiety;” some of them were voting to uphold an ancient, bloody order, and those sins cannot be forgiven. We need to educate ourselves, and perhaps even more importantly, to educate our children. Mothers of Massive Resistance shows how effective white women’s historical efforts to influence the school curriculum in favor of their own views have been; we’ve done it before, and now we must do it again to ensure that the next generations grow up learning about the uncomfortable, violent, imperialist history of this nation. There have always been moderate, liberal, and radical white women who push back against white supremacy, but as the current state of our nation makes clear, we’ve been far less successful than we could be, and that failure has resulted in decades of unfathomable suffering.

McRae’s book shines a harsh light on our status as collaborators and progenitors in the mainstream white-supremacist movement, and is essential reading for any white woman who seeks to understand our history—and our responsibility to those we’ve failed. White male faces dominate the discourse around the way violent white supremacy has spilled into the mainstream, but lest we forget, there were white women in Charlottesville, too—and while many of us marched alongside Heather Heyer, some of them were there to continue the work their foremothers began. We cannot dismantle what we refuse to confront. White women, we have work to do.

*Aaron is a pseudonym to protect the person’s identity.

_______________________________

The post The History of White Women’s Racism and White Supremacy- by Kim Kelly appeared first on Void Network.

Τοποθετημένη σε ένα γεωγραφικό σημείο-αιχμή, λόγω της παραμεθοριακής και διασυνοριακής ταυτότητας που την χαρακτηρίζει, η Λέσβος βρίσκεται πάντοτε ανάμεσα στα πιο φλέγοντα ζητήματα της επικαιρότητας. Λόγω αυτών των χαρακτηριστικών, ένα μέρος των κατοίκων αντιλαμβάνεται τον εαυτό του ως “φρουρό” των εθνικών συνόρων, συνθήκη η οποία κατασκευάζεται κι ενισχύεται από τον κρατικό μηχανισμό. Το γεγονός αυτό, προκύπτει ως φυσικό επακόλουθο των μακροχρόνιων διακρατικών ανταγωνισμών, οι οποίοι τρέφουν κι αναπτύσσουν εθνικιστικές ρητορικές και πρακτικές. Δεδομένης και της ιστορικής ιδιαιτερότητας του νησιού, αξίζει να σημειωθεί η ύπαρξη και συνέχεια ενός ακροδεξιού (παρα)κρατικού μηχανισμού, ο οποίος εκμεταλλεύεται/δημιουργεί γεγονότα προκειμένου να καθορίζει τις κοινωνικές δράσεις και αντιδράσεις, λειτουργώντας με τον ανάλογο τρόπο στην εκάστοτε συγκυρία. Επομένως, με βάση όλα τα παραπάνω, η ακροδεξιά σε όλες τις εκφάνσεις της, χρησιμοποιεί πότε τοπικά και πότε κεντρικότερα ζητήματα με σκοπό να εδραιωθεί στο δημόσιο χώρο και λόγο. Χαρακτηριστικότερο παράδειγμα το οποίο χρησιμοποιεί εργαλειακά η ακροδεξιά στο νησί της Λέσβου, είναι το μεταναστευτικό.
Η μετανάστευση δεν είναι κάτι καινούριο, υπήρχε πάντα στις ανθρώπινες κοινωνίες και ιδιαίτερα στο νησί της Λέσβου που ήταν και είναι ένα πέρασμα για τους μετανάστες κάθε εποχής. Τα κέντρα κράτησης μεταναστ(ρι)ών δεν άργησαν να εμφανιστούν, μαζί τους και οι αγώνες ντόπιων και μεταναστ(ρι)ών ενάντια στην εξαθλίωση. Τέσσερα χρόνια μετά το κλείσιμο του πρώτου κέντρου κράτησης στο νησί, αυτό της Παγανής, το 2013 αναγγέλλεται από τον Δένδια η κατασκευή του κολαστηρίου της Μόριας. Το κλείσιμο των συνόρων και η υπογραφή της συμφωνίας ΕΕ-Τουρκίας, έχουν ως επακόλουθο την αλλαγή όσον αφορά τη διαχείριση των μεταναστευτικών πληθυσμών αλλά και την ανάδυση του ρατσιστικού οχετού.

The post 2ο Αντιφασιστικό Φεστιβάλ Λέσβου / 2nd Antifa Festival of Lesvos 28+29/9/2018 appeared first on Void Network.

Trump’s former White House chief advisor told The Daily Beast that he is setting up a foundation in Europe called The Movement which he hopes will lead a right-wing populist revolt across the continent starting with the European Parliament elections next spring.

The non-profit will be a central source of polling, advice on messaging, data targeting, and think-tank research for a ragtag band of right-wingers who are surging all over Europe, in many cases without professional political structures or significant budgets.

Bannon’s ambition is for his organization ultimately to rival the impact of Soros’s Open Society, which has given away $32 billion to largely liberal causes since it was established in 1984.

Over the past year, Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East.

After being forced out of the White House following internal wranglings that would later surface in the book Fire and Fury, Bannon is now reveling in the opportunity to plot his new European empire. “I’d rather reign in hell, than serve in heaven,” he said, paraphrasing John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost.

The Movement’s headquarters are expected to be located in Brussels, Belgium, where they will start hiring staff in coming months. It is expected that there will be fewer than 10 full-time staff ahead of the 2019 elections, with a polling expert, a communications person, an office manager and a researcher among the positions. The plan is to ramp that up to more like 25 people post-2019 if the project has been a success.

Bannon plans to spend 50 percent of his time in Europe—mostly in the field rather than the Brussels office—once the midterm elections in the U.S. are over in November.

The operation is also supposed to serve as a link between Europe’s right-wing movements and the pro-Trump Freedom Caucus in the U.S. This week Paul Gosar (R-AZ) was its envoy to Bannon’s operation in London.

Bannon and Raheem Kassam, a former Farage staffer and Breitbart editor, set up shop in a five-star Mayfair hotel for a week while Donald Trump was visiting Europe. Between TV appearances as Trump surrogates, they hosted a raft of Europe’s leading right-wingers at the hotel.

“It was so successful that we’re going to start staffing up,” said Bannon. “Everybody agrees that next May is hugely important, that this is the real first continent-wide face-off between populism and the party of Davos. This will be an enormously important moment for Europe.”

Having seen the shock right-wing victory with the Brexit referendum and Matteo Salvini’s electoral success in Italy, which were achieved on relatively tight budgets, Bannon sees the opportunity to boost radically disparate nationalist parties by deploying a well-financed centralized operation intended to blow local opponents out of the water.

Up until now insurgent populist groups across Europe have often suffered from similar problems: lack of expertise and finances. Le Pen’s party was kept afloat by Russian loans back in 2014, when French banks refused to extend lines of credit for the Front National. Le Pen was back in Moscow shaking Putin’s hand before last year’s French elections, which the NSA  subsequently revealed had been hacked by the Russians.

The Movement plans to research and write detailed policy proposals that can be used by like-minded parties; commission pan-European or targeted polling; and share expertise in election war room methodology such as message discipline, data-led voter targeting and field operations. Depending on electoral law in individual countries, the foundation may be able to take part in some campaigns directly while bolstering other populist groups indirectly.

“I didn’t get the idea until Marine Le Pen invited me to speak at Lille at the Front National,” recalled Bannon. “I said, ‘What do you want me say?’”

The response came back: “All you have to say is, ‘We’re not alone.’”

Bannon was stunned to discover that the nationalist movements in Europe were not pooling skills and sharing ideas with populist parties in neighboring countries—let alone on a global scale.

Bannon said the Front National recognized that he was “the guy that goes round and understands us as a collective.”

Up on stage he told the crowd: “You fight for your country and they call you racist. But the days when those kind of insults work is over. The establishment media are the dogs of the system. Every day, we become stronger and they become weaker. Let them call you racists, xenophobes or whatever else, wear these like a medal.”

The former Trump campaign manager believes the fuse for the global populist revolt—now led from Washington, D.C. by his former boss—was lit 10 years ago during the financial crisis and President Barack Obama’s bailout of the broken financial sector. With income inequality growing, Bannon first championed Sarah Palin and then Donald Trump as vanquishers of the establishment elite who were capable of turning traditional politics on its head.

His next populist heroes can be found in Europe.

He sees Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, as the perfect foil to help accelerate that dynamic in Europe.

Noting Trump’s controversial decision to call out Merkel over her gas pipeline deal with Russia last week, Bannon said: “This is the lie of Angela Merkel. She’s a complete and total phony. The elites say Trump is disruptive but she’s sold out control to Russia for cheaper energy prices.”

He describes Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the French president who crushed Le Pen in a runoff election last year but has since flagged in the polls, as vulnerable figureheads of establishment Europe. With Britain voting to quit the E.U., Merkel and Macron’s vision of a united continent will be put to the test at next year’s elections.

Bannon is convinced that the coming years will see a drastic break from decades of European integration. “Right-wing populist nationalism is what will happen. That’s what will govern,” he told The Daily Beast. “You’re going to have individual nation states with their own identities, their own borders.”

The grassroots movements are already in place waiting for someone to maximize their potential. “It will be instantaneous—as soon as we flip the switch,” he said.

The sight of Brexit virtually upending the entire European Union with a campaign spending cap of £7 million ($9 million) was a great inspiration. “When they told me the spending cap was £7 million, I go, ‘You mean £70 million? What the fuck?!’ £7 million doesn’t buy anything. It doesn’t buy you Facebook data, it doesn’t buy you ads, it doesn’t do anything.”

“Dude! You just took the fifth largest economy in the world out of the EU for £7 million!”

This week, British officials ruled that the Brexit campaign had not stuck to the legal limit—overspending by more than $600,000. There were also unofficial campaigns which spent additional millions arguing that Britain should leave the E.U.

Nonetheless, Britain’s GDP is around $2.6 trillion and leaked government figures estimate that Brexit could wipe 10 percent off that figure, meaning the impact of the democratic decision vastly dwarfs the scale of the investment by the campaign.

“The first thing they teach you at Harvard Business School is operating leverage,” said Bannon. With his expertise, contacts and financial backing, he is convinced that he can have an outsized impact all across Europe.

Bannon went to Italy to observe the campaign earlier this year as populist parties surged in the polls despite their tiny operations. “Look at Five Star and the Northern League,” he said. “They used their own credit cards. They took control of the seventh largest economy in the world—on their credit cards! It’s insane.”

The two anti-establishment parties reached a coalition agreement that made Matteo Salvini deputy prime minister and put him in charge of the interior ministry two months ago. He has since shut Italy’s ports to NGO ships carrying rescued migrants and called for a census of the Roma community that may lead to mass deportations. Last year, he called for a radical crackdown on immigrants. “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood,” he said.

Bannon sees Salvini as a model for his future Movement partners to follow. “Italy is the beating heart of modern politics,” he said. “If it works there it can work everywhere.”

He admitted that the scale of his right-wing coalition could be limited by the extreme positions of some of The Movement’s potential partners. “Some people may opt out because they think some of the guys may be too immigrant focused,” he conceded.

“We’re not looking to include any ethno-nationalist parties in this although guys like the Sweden Democrats or the True Finns are perfect casting.”

Kent Ekeroth of the Sweden Democrats was one of those who met Bannon in Central London in the last week. The party, which had its roots in the Neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements of the 1980s, has shot up to almost 20 percent in recent polls after adopting a more conventionally populist, anti-immigration message.

Jérôme Rivière of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (Rassemblement National since June) also made the pilgrimage to London’s Mayfair, as did Mischaël Modrikamen of the People’s Party of Belgium, Nigel Farage of UKIP and Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist party formed in 2004 when its predecessor was found to be in breach of a Belgian law on racism and xenophobia.

Bannon said Farage and Le Pen would take the lead in figuring out the logistics of creating a new European parliamentary grouping that could be home to all of these parties and more.

Gosar, the Republican congressman, also stopped by Bannon’s London hotel. He was in Britain to attend a rally for the street protester and alt-right provocateur Tommy Robinson, who was recently jailed for contempt of court for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial. During his trip, Gosar accused the British government of jailing Robinson as part of a cover up of rapeperpetrated by “disgusting and depraved individuals” from Muslim immigrant communities, which he described as a “scourge.”

Bannon’s ambition is no less than to take a stranglehold on Europe in the same way that he believes Soros has been able to dominate proceedings in recent decades.

“Soros is brilliant,” he said. “He’s evil but he’s brilliant.”

Bannon wants to fulfil that role on the right and he is not ashamed to assert his objectives. “I’m about winning. I’m about power,” he said. “I want to win and then I want to effectuate change.”

He is not afraid of being caricatured in the way that Soros has been vilified by the right. He compared it to the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “Look at Chris Wylie [the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower]. He is saying ‘Bannon made psychological weapons.’ He’s literally made me the most brilliant evil genius. I’m a Bond villain. I kind of dig it.”

Kassam, who worked closely with Bannon at Breitbart and followed him out the door of the populist news site, said The Movement was shaping up as a force that would subsume national politics.

“Forget your Merkels,” said Kassam. “Soros and Bannon are going to be the two biggest players in European politics for years to come.”

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written by NICO HINES

source: https://amp.thedailybeast.com

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