day of the rope

Chris Brooke informs me that David Blunkett considers the work of Anthony Browne to be near fascist. Well, shall we go a-wandering brielfy down the byways of the falange? From the man himself:

The support of Islamic fascism spans Britain’s Left. The wacko Socialist Workers Party joined forces with the Muslim Association of Britain, the democracy-despising, Shariah-law-wanting group, to form the Stop the War Coalition. The former Labour MP George Galloway created the Respect Party with the support of the MAB, and won a seat in Parliament by cultivating Muslim resentment.

From Crazy Mel:

That is why those in Britain who endorse the morally twisted and cynically selective logic of the Iraq connection — such as the wretched BBC — are behaving like traitors to their country in a time of war.

From Mullah-lookalike Mark Steyne:

…anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia's old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.

Nihilists, traitors, supporters of fascists…what is to be done with such people? From The Turner Diaries. The Day of the Rope

Even the streetlights at intersections have been pressed into service, and at practically every street corner I passed this evening on my way to HQ there was a dangling corpse, four at every intersection. Hanging from a single overpass only about a mile from here is a group of about 30, each with an identical placard round his neck bearing the printed legend “I betrayed my race”. Two or three of that group had been decked out in academic robes before they were strung up and the whole batch are apparently faculty members from the nearby UCLA campus.

Now I’m sure that the folks cited above would find this a little extreme. But it is the logical extreme of the line they’re currently pushing. The one about rootless cosmopolitans undermining the commitment of plain, honest folk to their nation in its time of crisis. The one about a sinister alien parasitic religion squatting in our midst, whose adherents are loyal only to each other and to their collective ambitions for world domination – the Protocols of the Elders of the Caliphate. The line that used to be pushed against Jews and is now being pushed against Muslims. And of course there's the political transvestism involved in taking a classically fascist line of argument to use against opponents deemed as fascist.

Comments

[Eric]

The one about a sinister alien parasitic religion squatting in our midst, whose adherents are loyal only to each other and to their collective ambitions for world domination – the Protocols of the Elders of the Caliphate.

Fascinating. I wasn't aware that the writings of Sayyid Qutb were a concoction by the Russia State, and that the desire of Hizb'ut Tahrir to return to Caliphate system was invented by people other than Hizb'ut Tahrir.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that making a comparison between a fictional Jewish conspiracy which contributed to the Holocaust, with a non-fictional conspiracy with a clearly stated objective by extremist Islamists (influenced ironically by Nazis) who have killed people in London with suicide bombs in the past month is downright offensive.

[Andrew Bartlett]

Eric, if there had been a small number of Jewish terrorists in the early 20th century (apart from the Bolsheviks, of course), would that have justified anti-Semitism?

No, of course not.

The political attitudes taken by many on the right and the reactionary left are indeed mirrors of those adopted by the forerunners of vicious anti-Semetism. They use the same canards, the same accusations of dual-loyalty, the same painting of an ethnic group as so alien they cannot be part of our modern nation state. These did not all rest on the Protocols... but were argued in their own right by people claiming to operate as genuine heirs to the Enlightenment, defenders of Western civilization and culture.

But we are beginning to see the reactionary left for what they are. Point out racism, authoritarianism, imperialism and exploitation, and all you hear in return is; "watch out for the Muslims - they're going to take over the world!"

[dsquared]

As a matter of history, btw, Andrew is right; the writings of Karl Marx played exactly the role in early twentieth-century Protocols panics that the writings of Qutb play here. There were, of course, plenty of people hanging round at the time pointing out that Communism was a political ideology which had precious little to do with the Jewish religion, but as now, there were more than enough "decent" social democrats hanging around to put us right.