Britain never had a reckoning with the fascists in our midst

In the 1930s the British upper classes were absolutely riddled with fascists and antisemites.

There was Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, which boasted tens of thousands of members, and loads of high-profile supporters including the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere (great-grandfather of the current owner), who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

There were fascist-sympathisers throughout the aristocracy and the royal family. We've all seen the pictures of Edward teaching the young future queen Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral Castle (despite royalist efforts to censor them).

The Tory party was particularly infested with fascists, with loads of Tory MPs and lords signed up to secretive organisations aimed at promoting fascist and antisemitic ideologies.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to fostering stronger relations with Nazi Germany. It boasted dozens of Tory party politicians amongst its membership, as well as Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks (who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists), Bank of England governor Montagu Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Geoffrey Dawson who was editor of The Times.

Tory members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included Peter Agnew, Lawrence Dundas, Ernest Bennett, Robert Bird, Robert Tatton Bower, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Robert Vaughan Gower, Thomas "Loel" Guinness, Norman Hulbert, Archibald James, Alfred Knox, John Macnamara, Thomas Moore, Assheton Pownall, Frank Sanderson, Duncan Sandys, Murray Sueter, Charles Taylor, Ronald Tree, Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell, and the Duke of Wellington.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was supported by a propaganda operation called The Link, headed up by the traitor Barry Domville.

There was also the Imperial Fascist League which was led by the virulent antisemite Arnold Leese, who continued propagandising in favour of Nazi Germany deep into the Second World War from a series of hideouts.

Then there was the truly despicable Right Club which sought to drive Jewish people out of public life, founded by the Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.

The Right Club attracted a load of high profile establishment figures, including the 5th Duke of Wellington, Lord Redesdale, Lord Lymington, Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, George Henry Drummond, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Tory MP John Hamilton Mackie, and William Joyce (who went on to become Lord Haw-Haw).

The Right Club finally collapsed in 1940 when they were discovered plotting to undermine the British war effort by stealing secret cables between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, with the intention of leaking them.

And let's not forget that the widely-celebrated Tory MP Nancy Astor was one of the leaders of the fascist-sympathising Cliveden Set.

Tories, royals, capitalists, and establishment elitists adored Nazi Germany because the first thing Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to send all the socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and other assorted leftists to the concentration camps.

They saw fascism as the perfect means of preserving their own wealth, power and privilege, through the ruthless persecution of the political left.

A small minority of the most egregiously pro-fascist figures like Barry Domville, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, and Archibald Ramsay were interned as national security threats during the Second World War, and Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured and executed for treason in 1946.

However the vast majority of these establishment fascists were allowed to keep their positions of power and influence in the upper echelons of British society throughout the Second World War, and long into the post-war period.

Loads of these aristocratic fascists were even handed important promotions in the post-war period, and lavished with establishment honours like knighthoods and seats in the unelected House of Lords.

Is anyone really naïve enough to believe that all of these people simply gave up their extreme-right, antisemitic, and rabidly anti-left politics, despite having suffered absolutely no punishment whatever for holding such disgusting beliefs, even after our cities had been pounded to rubble by the people they'd been championing?

Of course they didn't. They just learned to hide their despicable extreme-right political views more carefully.

This abject post-war failure to stamp fascists out of public life is one of the big reasons why there's still a disturbing and powerful seam of fascist ideology within Britain's grotesque establishment class.

You look at the racism of the British tabloid press and their constant scapegoating of immigrants; the revocation of British rights from Commonwealth citizens in the 1970s; Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech; the anti-gay hysteria of the 1980s; the decades-long campaign of blacklisting of left-leaning journalists from the BBC; the rampant racism within institutions of state like the Metropolitan Police; the casual disregard for the millions of victims of Britain's imperialist war-mongering; the systematic demonisation of all left-wing political figures; the extreme-right ultranationalism that drove Brexit over the winning line; the fetishisation of nationalist symbolism and the military; the idolisation of disgustingly antisemitic Nazi-sympathisers like Nancy Astor; the massive blacklists of trade union activists across numerous industrial sectors; the ongoing systematic persecution of disabled people; Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" and the Windrush Scandal; the constant right-wing agitation for the destruction of our human rights; Boris Johnson's depraved "let the bodies pile high" attitude to the plight of vulnerable people during the pandemic; and Priti Patel's deportation of refugees to Rwanda ...

The reason the British establishment class is so rotten is that we never had a reckoning with the people who wanted Britain to emulate Nazi Germany.

Instead we let them keep their positions of power and influence, and quietly seep their disgusting fascist ideology into the fabric of British society.

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This Tory statue outrage is the latest manifestation of their 'property above people' ideology

On Sunday June 7th 2020 anti-racism protesters tore down the Edward Colston statue in Bristol and threw it into Bristol Harbour. Many would argue that this represented a fitting end for a statue of a slave trader whose ships threw 19,000 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean.

The outraged Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue is an absolutely telling demonstration of their militant ‘property above people’ ideology.

In the midst of a huge global uprising against racism, you might have thought that the Tories would have tried to keep a low profile, given their very recent history of implementing unlawful systematically racist policies, and the racist words and actions of their leader. But no, they couldn’t help themselves.

The unlawfully racist Tory Hostile Environment resulted in the systematic persecution of black British citizens. They were denied housing, employment, social security, banking services, and even life saving medical treatment. Scores were even deported, with several actually dying in exile overseas.

But Tory MPs have more tears for the fallen statue of a historical slave trader than for the thousands of real life victims of their own Windrush scandal!

We all know the Tories love a statue of a racist, because in the middle of the 2019 General Election campaign Boris Johnson and a load of other senior Tories flocked to Plymouth to pay homage to a statue of the notorious antisemite and anti-black racist Nancy Astor.

Not only was Astor a vile fascist sympathiser and antisemite who described Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to the “world problem of Jews”, she also told a room full of African Americans that they should be “grateful for slavery”!

It’s absolutely beyond question that Tories see more value in statues of racists, than in the actual lives of the people who have suffered at the hands of slave traders, fascists, antisemites, and their own racist policies of systematic anti-black discrimination.

The rhetoric they’ve used to defend their beloved slave-trader statue gives a horrifying insight into the Tory mindset.

Their primary tactic has been to adopt the ludicrous pretence that removing monuments and statues to discredited figures and ideologies equates to erasure of history, which is a ludicrously weak argument.

Did these Tories cry bitter tears of frustration about the erasure of history when monuments to Lenin were torn down in post-Soviet Russia? Of course they didn’t.

Did they howl with outrage when the statue of Saddam Hussain was torn down in Baghdad, and the symbols of Ba’athism were destroyed across Iraq? Of course they didn’t.

Did they vehemently object the erasure of history when statues and monuments to Jimmy Savile were removed after his depraved crimes came to light? Of course they didn’t.

Would they argue that it was wrong to remove all the Swastikas and monuments to Hitler after the defeat of Nazi Germany? Because any kind of consistent application of their erasure of history principle suggests they believe Germany should still be covered in the iconography of Nazi Germany, and Russia should still be covered in the symbolism of the Soviet Union.

Then there’s the nonsensical demand that people should have just waited for politicians to sort it out, rather than taking matters into their own hands.

The problem of course is that the people of Bristol left it in the hands of the politicians to sort out, and instead of taking the required action of calmly taking the statue down, moving it somewhere appropriate (like a slavery museum) and then replacing it with a monument to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, they spent literally years debating the precise wording of a plaque to be attached to the plinth!

And the local council allowed the slavery apologists at the Society of Merchant Venturers more say on the wording of the plaque than black civil rights activists in the city, or even the mayor!

No wonder people got sick of the political game-playing and eventually took matters into their own hands.

Another problem with the Tory erasure of history attack line is the fact that in one single day the removal of the statue did more to raise public awareness about Britain’s participation in the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade than leaving the statue in place for another century would have done (ridiculous plaque or not).

As David Olusoga pointed out, the removal of the statue wasn’t erasure of history, it was actually a defining moment of history.

And if the Tories really gave a damn about the erasure of history where were their torrents of outrage when the Windrush boarding cards were destroyed by the Home Office, or when the national records were vandalised to erase Britain’s colonial crimes?

The Tory objections to the destruction of actual historical records were non-existent of course, because they don’t mind history being erased if erasing it suits their purposes, and because their erasure of history argument is obviously just disingenuous nonsense to obscure the actual reason they’re enraged by the removal of a slave trader statue.

Perhaps the most despicable Tory argument of all is the way they invoked the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz as if it constitutes some kind of direct comparison.

’If the Auschwitz concentration camp wasn’t demolished, how dare you pull down our slave trader statue?’

The answer of course is that Auschwitz was preserved as a memorial museum about the Holocaust, while the Edward Colston statue was erected as a memorial to a slave trader.

You’d have to be disgustingly ignorant, or wilfully obtuse to treat them as identical cases.

But what’s even more sickening than this grotesquely misleading comparison in itself, is the way that Tories will dredge up the suffering of one people, in order to whitewash the suffering of another.

Let’s remind Jewish people of the horrors of the Holocaust in our hastily constructed, and searingly incoherent justification of a modern day monument to a slave trader!

The Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue has been divisive, deluded, depraved, and above all disingenuous.

It’s divisive because demanding that memorials to slave-traders should be left standing is an insult to all right-minded people who object to the Tory ‘property above people’ mentality, it’s a spit in the eye for black Brits, and it's especially insulting to the African American and Caribbean descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

It's deluded because leaving it to the politicians resulted in endless naval gazing over the precise wording of a stupid little plaque, rather than the required action of just calmly taking it down and replacing it with a memorial to the victims of slavery.

It’s depraved because the logical conclusion of their erasure of history argument would mean leaving Swastikas over Germany, the Saddam Hussain statue in Baghdad, and all the Jimmy Savile statues and monuments that used to be dotted around Leeds.

And above all it’s disingenuous because whatever rhetoric they're spouting to oppose the removal of this statue, the real reason they're so furious is that slave-trader Colston was a Tory MP, and they see the removal of this monument to one of their beloved Tory brethren as an attack on Toryism.

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Grand Wizards and Nazi conspiracy theories: what the hell has the Tory party turned into?

First we found out that the Tory Brextremist faction have been gleefully paying tribute to the KKK by going around calling themselves "the Grand Wizards" and then within the space of a day the Tory MP Suella Braveman openly promoted the modern era reworking of the anti-Semitic Nazi era conspiracy theory of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus) by ranting about the threat of cultural Marxism.

This is definitely a story about obscene bigotry and extreme-right fanaticism within the Tory ranks, but it's also a story of two very different styles of journalism.

The chief political editor of the BBC News Laura Kuenssberg was the one to break the extraordinary Grand Wizards story, but she named no names, and did absolutely nothing to hold the Tories to account for their grotesque tribute to the KKK white supremacist terrorist group who have lynched and killed thousands of people.

In fact once the story that she broke started going mega-viral, she desperately tried to put the story back in its box with an extraordinarily panicked Tweet aimed at downplaying the story, and creating the absurd fiction that none of the Tory ERG Brextremists were aware of the fact that Grand Wizard is the name of the head of the KKK when they started calling themselves "the Grand Wizards".

What Kuenssberg tried to do was portray the scandal as just an innocent mistake, but it simply came off as a desperate last ditch PR damage limitation exercise on behalf of the Tory party after her original matter-of-fact Tweet ballooned into a huge scandal.

Suella Braveman ranting on about the extreme-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory  demonstrates an extraordinary lack of awareness, and to do it when the Grand Wizards thing was still brewing up into huge scandal was unbelievably bone-headed.

But this time the journalist didn't treat it as some kind of benign anecdote and then desperately try to row the story back when people pointed out how outrageous it was. This time Dawn Foster immediately pointed out to Braveman that the mass-murdering extreme-right terrorist Anders Breivik was fixated with the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory.

Genuinely surprised an MP would double down after being directly confronted with the fact it’s a term used by Breivik, purely because it’s bound to attract press attention https://t.co/JmrXDk8VHs

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) March 26, 2019

This challenge resulted in Braveman actually doubling-down on her use of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, claiming that "no one can be offended" because "we're in a war" and "it's damaging to our British genius"!

It's delightful to see a journalist actually holding a politician to account on the dangerous rhetoric they're spouting rather than running damage limitation PR for them like Laura Kuenssberg

But it's disheartening that Dawn is one of the minority who actually do their job and hold the powerful to account, and even more dispiriting to see that most of the mainstream media have chosen to just ignore the fact that a Tory MP and former government minister has been publicly spouting Nazi rhetoric.

Of course there are reasons for this lack of coverage. One is that highlighting an extremely overt and obvious case of Tory anti-Semitism would spectacularly undermine the carefully curated mainstream media narrative that Labour are the nasty bigots with the anti-Semitism problem.

Another reason this story isn't getting traction is that a lot of the pro-Tory establishment propagandists in the mainstream media hack pack understand how much of a headache this would present for Theresa May if it gets amplified.

May would be left with the choice of suspending Breveman from the party which would incur the absolute wrath of the ERG Brextremists, or she could ignore it which would infuriate the "moderate Tories" who detest what she's allowing their party to turn into.

Tories from all factions of the party are already itching to get rid of Theresa May, so her supporters in the press don't want to rock the boat by amplifying this story, for fear of causing the May government to collapse and ushering Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street in the ensuing General Election.

These outrageous Tory scandals aren't just an indictment of a Tory party that is rushing headlong towards the extreme-right to such an extent that they're publicly espousing the vile rhetoric that motivated Anders Breivik and the Christchurch killer, it's an indictment of the mainstream media for allowing this to grotesque Tory radicalisation go on right in front of their faces as they desperately try every trick in the book to paint the vehemently anti-racist Labour opposition as the terrifying bigots.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Freedom of speech doesn't mean we're obligated to give extreme-right fanatics a platform

As regular Another Angry Voice readers will know from all the extreme-right trolls who infest my Facebook comments, I've got very strong anti-censorship views.

In the 8 years I've been running the AAV page I've blocked fewer than two dozen accounts from commenting, which is incredibly low for a page with 335,000+ followers. It works out at about 3 a year, or 1 in every 14,600 followers. So just 0.0068% of people are depraved enough to get themselves thrown off my page. I defy you to find me a page with a lower block rate than that.

The only time I block people is when they do stuff like post calls for ethnic genocide, repeatedly spread defamatory accusations, bully and threaten other people in the comments, and/or hijack my page to post links to stuff like extreme-right hate groups and anti-Semitic conspiracy sites. Behaviour that is not only vile and outrageous, but that could also end up getting my page shut down if I didn't remove it.

Whenever I do block people or remove comments I take the very unusual step of informing the group what I've done, which stands in total contrast to extreme-right social media pages that routinely ban anyone who dares express a dissenting opinion in the closed ideology hate chambers they're curating (just try asking about all the white paedophiles in the EDL on a Tommy Robinson fan page and see how long your comment lasts).

But whenever I inform the group about the removal of extreme-right content from my page, I always get extreme-right fanatics crying "see, look at the terrible lefty censorship".

Aside from the grotesque hypocrisy of extreme-right propagandists decrying the open and transparent moderation of content by a left-leaning page when they absolutely don't give a shit about the industrial scale deletion of dissenting opinions on extreme-right pages, this kind of extreme-right victim complex snowflakery betrays a crucial misunderstanding of the concept of free speech.

Yes, everyone has the right to say whatever they like (within the constraints of the law), but nobody has the right to force other people to actively promote their hate speech.

In Britain it's not actually a criminal offence to glorify the Nazi party, praise Adolf Hitler, or deny the Holocaust, but it's also not obligatory for others to promote these views when they come across them.

Consider these examples:

• Should a Jewish baker be forced to fulfil the order of a neo-Nazi who comes into his shop to demand a cake with Nazi Swastikas, Hitler's face, and a message saying the Holocaust didn't happen?

• Should the World Wildlife Fund be forced to host adverts on their website from gun safari operations that arrange for mega-rich people to go out shooting endangered wild animals in Africa?

• Should a black civil rights magazine be forced to accept article submissions from white supremacists promoting ethnic cleansing and the formation of a white ethno-state in their country?

• Should atheists or secularists be forced to promote content from terrorist-supporting Islamist extremists or civil rights-opposing Christian fundamentalists on their social media accounts?

• Should environmental charities like Greenpeace be forced to host climate change denier propaganda paid for by shady fossil fuel industry lobbying outfits?

Of course they shouldn't. So why should a left-leaning Facebook page be forced to allow extreme-right fanatics to hijack their page in order to promote neo-fascism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacism to their audience.

Yes these far-right extremists have a legal right to spread their hateful ideology in their own online spaces (as long as they avoid breaking the law by inciting terrorism or whatever), but they absolutely don't have a right to force other people to promote their dangerous ideology for them.

We may have to listen to their depraved extremist ranting every so often, but we have absolutely no obligation to hand them a megaphone.

In fact we actually have a duty not to. If allow our online platforms to be used to actually help these people spread their fanatical extreme-right ideas into mainstream political discourse, we're actually complicit in what they're doing.

So when the BBC give a ridiculous soft ball interview to an extreme-right hate preacher on the very day one of his acolytes was jailed for carrying out a deadly extreme-right terrorist attack, they're actively complicit in the spreading of dangerous extreme-right fanaticism into the mainstream.

Of course the state broadcaster giving vast dollops of free publicity to terrorism-inspiring extreme-right hate preachers is much more problematic than ordinary people or relatively small independent media pages inadvertently allowing their comments threads to be hijacked by neo-Nazis, but it's all part of the same problem.

The extreme-right continually invoke "free speech" and present themselves as poor innocent victims whenever anyone refuses to give them a platform to spread their hateful ideology (just like the Nazis did in the 1930s), but:

Why should left-wing, liberal, and progressive people tolerate them posting their extremist views on our pages when they routinely delete all of our views off theirs? 

Why should those who actually believe in free speech be forced to amplify the reach of those who would ruthlessly destroy the very freedom of speech they use in order to demand that we provide them a platform? 

Why should left-wingers allow neo-Nazis to hijack our platforms with their propaganda when we know that if they ever actually achieved political power the very first people to be herded into their death chambers would be us?

The answer to all of these questions of course is that we shouldn't. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Why do liberals and 'centrists' so often end up supporting the extreme-right?

First things first, this article is not intended as a defence of the Maduro government in Venezuela. Anyone who attempts to present it in such a way is simply lying in a desperate attempt to discredit what they don't like reading, and don't want other people to read.

Whether you like Nicolás Maduro or not, whether you understand the multitude of internal and external factors that have created the current situation in Venezuela or not, whether you even know anything much at all about the Venezuelan political system or not, there's one thing that's undeniable: Anyone who sides with a guy who appoints himself President of a country without standing in a Presidential election is displaying utter contempt for the concept of democracy.

This is exactly what's happened in Venezuela with Juan Guaidó appointing himself President of the country despite the fact he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, let alone win it.

Thus Venezuela now has two Presidents. One who won the 2018 Presidential election and the other who didn't even participate in it and simply appointed himself because he didn't like the outcome of the ballot he didn't even contest.

The United States immediately backed this anti-democratic coup and recognised the self-appointed coup-President, just like they rushed in to back the spectacularly failed 2002 coup in the country too.

Back in 2002 the US were the only country to recognise the coup leader Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela before the coup rapidly collapsed and Hugo Chávez returned to power within two days.

The international reaction to this 2019 coup is very different, with numerous other countries rushing to throw their support behind this unelected self-appointed fake President.

The UK foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that the human rights defying Tory government support the unelected coup-President.

Another leader to have immediately thrown their support behind the coup-President is the recently elected Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro.

Several other hard-right governments in Latin America have backed the unelected coup-President, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay.

None of this is remotely surprising given Britain's increasingly pathetic subservience to US foreign policy, and the massive historic divide in Latin America between US-backed right wing governments and US-opposed left-wing governments that has existed since the United States began their outrageous campaign of toppling left-leaning Latin American governments in the region decades ago.

What's ostensibly a lot more surprising is the way European liberals and self-declared centrists have been rushing to support the US-backed "regime change" that's happening in Venezuela. 

Take the leader of the Liberal grouping in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt. His reaction to the coup attempt has been to personally recognise the self-appointed coup-President, lie that he's elected when he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, and then call for the EU to join Trump and Bolsonaro in recognising this coup leader as the legitimate President!

The very same guy who was furiously attacking Donald Trump as an "autocrat" and "a threat to Europe" back in 2017 is now wilfully sitting on Trump's knee like a yapping imperialist poodle!

Another Liberal to jump on the extraordinary 'this is a good coup' bandwagon is the centrists' darling Emmanuel Macron, who even had the gall to praise the bravery of the anti-government protesters in Venezuela as the French state brutally attacks and systematically represses the gilets jaunes protests against his own government!

Everyone knows that this US-backed coup is all about access to Venezuela's oil reserves (the biggest in the world) because Donald Trump's already publicly declared that US interventionism should be used to steal the natural resources of other nations.

It's extraordinary that so many trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are openly supporting this US imperialist "regime change" agenda while Trump's people openly talk about the prospect of making the already desperate situation even worse by launching military action in Venezuela.

They can't pretend to not understand what the motivation actually is after Trump's spelled it out for them so clearly. And it's especially alarming given the way that these people really should have learned all about the appalling consequences of imperialist "regime change" agendas after the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the destruction of Libya in 2011.

Both of these countries have been reduced to lawless terrorism breeding grounds with humanitarian conditions far worse than they ever were under the authoritarian governments of Hussain and Gadaffi.

Of course it's understandable that European liberals are no great fans of Maduro (neither am I, and I'm a leftie), but what does it tell you about their political principles when they're clamouring to align themselves with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to support a brazenly anti-democratic coup?
Even if you believe the 2018 Presidential election in Venezuela was rigged, supporting a self-appointed coup-President who didn't even stand in the election is utterly nonsensical from a democratic point of view. 

And what does it tell you about their bone-headed refusal to learn the lessons of history when they wilfully ignore the unspeakable levels of death, destruction, and suffering that imperialist "regime change" policies have caused in Iraq and Syria to support the exact same imperialist agenda in Venezuela, only this time orchestrated by an even more unstable, profit-driven, and fanatically right-wing US President than George W. Bush was?

It's beyond question that anyone supporting the self-appointed and unelected fake-President Guaidó is siding with extreme-right ideologues like Trump and Bolsonaro, refusing to learn the lessons of history about the horrific consequences of imperialist "regime change" policies, and displaying their absolute contempt for the concept of democracy.

One of the most extraordinary things is that many of these liberals and centrists pledging support for the Venezuelan coup were the ones crying the loudest when Donald Trump won the US Presidential election, and bitterly decrying the rise of far-right populism when Bolsonaro won the Brazilian Presidential election in October 2018.

But scroll forward just a few months and these same trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are now wilfully stepping in line with the extreme-right demagogues they decried when they won power to actively support the transparently anti-democratic coup they've orchestrated in Venezuela.

This farce in Venezuela is far from the first time that liberals have ended up supporting and enabling extreme-right demagogues. We can delve into history to look at the way the liberal German establishment wilfully handed power the Nazis in 1933 by making Adolf Hitler Chancellor, or we can look to current day Italy to see how the trendy liberal MS5 party have enabled the fascist Lega Nord into power by joining them in a coalition government.

The fact is that given the choice between moving leftwards towards socialism, and rightwards towards fascism, an awful lot of self-declared centrists and trendy liberals will chose the fascist option because they understand that fascism goes hand-in-hand with corporatism meaning that their financial interests will be protected.

As long as corporations and their personal financial interests are protected, a lot of liberals and self-declared centrists are willing to overlook the obvious dangers of enabling the extreme-right into power, or siding with the extreme-right axis when it comes to global politics.
 

This centrist willingness to overlook the dangers of fascism most often comes from the position of extreme privilege.

Most wealthy, white, westerners know they have the least to fear from fascism (unless they have leftist political sympathies) because it's always the political left, minorities, the vulnerable, and people in the developing world who bear the brunt of the persecution and suffering under extreme-right rule.

Of course people should be able to recognise the thin end of a wedge, and they should be aware of Martin Niemöller's warning about the danger of escalating fascism (see picture), but in reality these coddled liberals and centrists keep making the same mistakes over and again.

Liberals and centrists will have tantrums for a while when fanatical right-wing ideologues like Trump or Bolsonaro are elected because they hate not having things their own way, and because deep in their hearts they know the extreme-right is wrong, but when push comes to shove they repeatedly fall into line and quickly start supporting them.

The gleeful reaction of so many self-declared centrists and trendy liberals to the anti-democratic US-backed imperialist coup in Venezuela is yet another perfect illustration of their outrageous tendency to wilfully align with and support the extreme-right thanks to the shared belief in corporatism.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Why was this vile extreme-right hatemonger given airtime on the BBC?

When the extreme-right hate-monger Jonathan Jennings was jailed the BBC ran a short piece on their website about his 16 month sentence for multiple offences between March and August 2017, which included extreme anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic abuse and a threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn.

One thing the BBC somehow 'forgot' to mention in their article was that this extreme-right fanatic was selected by BBC Question Time producers as one of the select few to be awarded a question on live TV in November 2017 (after the abusive messages and death threats he was jailed for).

By November 2017 Jennings' online abuse had already been well documented and reported to the police, but the BBC somehow managed to pick him out of an entire crowd as one of the lucky ones to be given a question.

It beggars belief that the BBC somehow managed to pick one of the most vile extreme-right fanatics in the UK to be be given a question. Even the most cursory of background checks would have come across Jennings' White Genocide podcast and articles like this one detailing his extremist views, like "all those who oppose Donald Trump must be killed".

Whichever way you look at it, the BBC's platforming of this vile individual is unforgivable.

Either they knew about the White Genocide podcast and the Twitter abuse and decided to give him a platform because they believed that extreme-right fanatics like him are more deserving of a question than any of the scores of decent ordinary people in the crowd, or they didn't bother to do the slightest check on who they were awarding airtime to.

The vile hatemonger Jonathan Jennings was jailed last week for a mass of extreme-right abuse & death threats (including a threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn).

Here he is being given airtime on @bbcquestiontime AFTER he posted the comments he was jailed for.

How did this happen? pic.twitter.com/nmZIaBtZSR

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) August 14, 2018

Anyone who is familiar with the continual stream of Tory party activists who have been handed headline questions on Question Time must surely suspect that Jennings was not given a question on the show despite his vile extreme-right views, but because of them.

Jennings was so delighted at having been awarded the chance to push for a hard-right "no deal" brexit on national television that he uploaded a clip of his Question Time appearance on his extreme-right White Genocide podcast.

It's hardly a surprise that the BBC 'forgot' to mention the fact that they gave this jailed extreme-right fanatic a platform on national television less than a year ago, because had they (or anyone else in the mainstream media) bothered to mention it, surely people would be demanding an investigation into how on earth it happened, and whether the show's producers were aware of his extreme-right activities when they made the decision to put him on air.

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Where is the mainstream media condemnation of this extreme-right "ambush"?

On Saturday August 4th 2018 a group of around a dozen masked extreme-right thugs "ambushed" the socialist bookshop Bookmarks on Bloomsbury Street in London, where they trashed book displays, chanted anti-Muslim slogans, slandered staff as "paedophiles" and reportedly intimidated staff with threats to return and "show what they can do".

The bookshop raiders had clearly just come from a protest in support of Alex Jones' extreme-right conspiracy channel InfoWars, and they're so damned stupid they even uploaded videos of themselves plotting their "ambush" and then carrying it out.

The mainstream media silence on this self-described "ambush" has been deafening, especially given the numerous potential avenues to explore.

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the book-burning events in Nazi Germany (especially if they've seen Indiana Jones), so the book-hating fascists are back angle pretty much writes itself when a bunch of extreme-right idiots raid a bookshop, ridicule books based solely on the covers, and shout about how they hope the shop gets burned down.

Another angle that pretty much writes itself is the contrast between extreme-right fanatics endlessly posing as champions of free speech, and this extreme-right raid on a shop because of their ideological hatred of books they have no intention of even reading!

Yet another easy angle to write is the extraordinary level of immunity to cognitive dissonance it must take to go from a "free speech" protest against YouTube's sanctions against a handful of InforWars videos (for breaking their community standards) straight to barging into a left-wing bookshop to set about trashing the place and intimidating the staff for spreading the wrong kind of information!

Given that these angles are so obvious, and so easy to write, it's incredible that pretty much the entire mainstream media has ignored this story.

The Guardian has covered it, as have the Independent, and while they're far more neoliberalism-lite outlets than socialist ones, they at least deserve a bit of credit for covering what most of the rest of the heavily right-wing skewed mainstream media have ignored.

What's the betting that if it is covered in the right-wing propaganda rags, the coverage will be sympathetic to the ambushers, and damning about "lefty snowflakes" for daring to object to it?

Now let's just consider how the mainstream media would have reacted if the roles were reversed. Imagine it was a group of lefties protesting against a conservative bookshop. Let's even say that these hypothetical lefties didn't even wear masks, enter the premises, rudely intimidate staff, or call slander them as "paedophile" with no possible justification.

Let's say they just stood outside protesting and dissuading customers from entering, rather than "ambushing" the place and yelling abuse at the workers.

We know that this kind of thing would chime with the extreme-right victim complex narrative that their freedom of speech is being repressed, so even if the event was entirely non-violent, right-wing leaning hacks would no doubt exaggerate it into some kind of intimidating riot.
 

There is plenty of precedent for this kind of media exaggeration too.

In 2015 the disgraced former Tory minister Priti Patel's complaints about a gang of "threatening thugs" intimidating her at her office were widely reported in the right-wing press ... but just contrast her claims of thuggery and intimidation with an actual photo of the protest.

Then there was the Jacob Rees-Mogg protest that was whipped up into headline news by the mainstream media as "violent left-wing thugs kicking off", when it was soon revealed that although noisy and unruly, the lefty protest only turned violent when a white-shirted Rees-Mogg supporter (who likes to dress up as a Nazi in his spare time) waded into the heated discussion to start shoving and hitting people.

When lefties protest against the right, the mainstream media instantly go into hysterical and wildly inaccurate shrieking mode, but when right-wing thugs actually "ambush" a lefty bookshop, throw books around, chant abuse, intimidate staff and reportedly threaten to return to "show what they can do", the mainstream media silence couldn't be more deafening.

This staggering lack of journalistic balance paints a frightening picture of a catastrophically failing mainstream media. Ever willing to talk up, exaggerate, and even lie about the misdeeds left-wingers when they non-violently protest against the right. And equally willing just bury the story when right-wing extremists actually resort to "ambushes", intimidation, and grotesque abuse.

Is it any wonder the extreme-right is on the rise in Britain under such circumstances?

Buy a book?

If you identify as any kind of lefty-liberal (democratic socialist, progressive, social liberal, anarchist, syndicalist, green anarchist, social democrat, left-libertarian) why not show your solidarity with Bookmarks by picking a book to order from their online catalogue.

If enough people order a book from them, this would certainly demonstrate the power of the Streisand Effect to the neo-fascist book-hating thugs wouldn't it?

Order a book here

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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