Cornucopia of Conspiracy

"I hate the white working class." The sentiment runs through the rhetoric of anti-democracy campaigners and seems straight enough - such campaigners hold prejudices on the grounds of skin colour and of class. But things start to break down once one tries to work out: who, exactly, are the "white working class"? I got a clue as to the configuration of this singular group when talking to two black men at a political meeting. They said that when they changed their views from far-left to centre-right they were treated as if their skin-colour had changed overnight. Although students, they were made to feel as if they were two instantiations of the amorphous "masses" that had turned up in the wrong place: the "ordinary people" left-wingers fetishize as an abstraction but hate with every fibre of their being when they turn up in places judged to be above their station. (The men told me being treated as white in any way was bad enough when coming f...

A strange and disturbing article has turned up in the Daily Telegraph:  Children as young as 13 joining Satanic Nazi groups, report warn s . The report is by the pressure-group Hope Not Hate, an anti-fascist group that seems to derive its own perverse pleasures by throwing the most extreme allegations at people with views it disagrees with. Some of these are indeed extremists, many others are simply democrats. The thing is, the term "anti-fascist" is not all it seems. I had this to say about it in Planets and Meaning: A Phenomenology of Fate -  the lessons of jackboots fascism’s military defeat have been learnt, and it has been the preliminary tasks of contemporary fascist leaders to wrap themselves in the iconography of antifascism in order to enlist sincere people, including politicians and public figures, to what appears to be a worthy project as long as one doesn’t penetrate too far beneath appearances. Democrats are, correspondingly, cast as fascists by such lea...

In saying that "the guillotine" awaits democratic politicians who are attempting to action the UK electorate's four-letter instruction to its Parliament, "leave the European Union", Guy Verhofstadt is doing much more than revealing his intentionally skewed understanding of the history of modern democracy. He states that Jacob Rees-Mogg will suffer the fate of Robespierre because Robespierre's efforts "were not appreciated by the common men they claimed to represent" which, in his unique reading of history, is why Robespierre and his associates "all ended up at the guillotine". Robespierre (below) did indeed end up at the guillotine - but not at the hands of the sans-culottes , the working-class men and women whom the revolutionaries expected to do the fighting and dying for them. Robespierre was not happy that the new regime was the anicen régime mark 2, the same structures of oppression but overseen by the upper middle classe...