Is there any proposition vile or ludicrous enough that the Tory mental gymnasts won't defend it?

Let's not pretend there's not a common human tendency to resort to absurd post hoc justifications for outrageous behaviour when it's our own, or perpetrated by those we support.

This tendency exists, and anyone who has ever even attempted to develop a rational worldview must have confronted their own tendencies to perform this kind of mental gymnastics routine.

Post hoc mental contortionism to defend the indefensible has been a feature of discourse for as long as any of us can remember, but in recent months there's been a constant stream of Tories willing to take the most absurd and demeaning positions to defend the outrageous behaviour of their political tribe.

There's never been a government full of people willing to absolutely demean themselves by defending the utterly indefensible.

The most obvious and glaring example that springs immediately to mind is the absurd story that Dominic Cummings engaged in a lockdown-defying 30 miles each way to the historic beauty spot of Barnard Castle in order to test his eyesight.

The idea that you'd conduct an eyesight test by packing your family into a car and driving them around the country is as absurd as the concept that undertaking such a reckless public-endangering test was an excuse to defy lockdown measures.

But a whole stream of Tories were herded onto social media to announce how convincing they'd found Cummings' explanation, and that it was 'time to move on'.

But the biggest absurdity of all came when Tory government minister Michael Gove told a right-wing radio interviewer that he too had conducted this kind of radically dangerous driving-eyesight test, which they both had a jolly good laugh about because deceiving the public with absolute bullshit is clearly some kind of lovely in joke for ex private school Tories to chuckle over.

On the subject of Michael Gove, he was at the centre of another one of these frenzies of Tory mental gymnastics when his wife posted a picture of his bookshelf, which proudly displayed the work of the Holocaust-denier David Irving, and the outrageous bible of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve.

It's not hard to imagine the absolute cacophony of outrage from the Tories had a figure from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn for example, been found with the work of racists and Holocaust-deniers on his bookshelf.

Yet the Tory reaction to Gove's bookshelf was to snap into ultra-defensive mode, and suddenly begin portraying Holocaust-denial as 'required reading actually' and even deriding critics of Holocaust-denial as Nazis!

Another Tory figure to have provoked numerous impromptu displays of Tory mental contortionism over the last few months is their beloved cult leader Boris Johnson.

When he skipped five consecutive COBRA meetings in the crucial early stages of the pandemic, the Tory mental contortionism circus pretended that it was supposedly perfectly normal (no Prime Minister in history before Johnson has skipped five COBRA meeting in a row during a national emergency), and that he was actually in the right to focus on other issues, despite skipping one of them to lark about with a Chinese dragon!

When Johnson publicly bragged about defying social distancing rules (and basic self-preservation) by shaking hands with coronavirus patients, and then presented "take it on the chin" as the preferable option to "draconian measures" like ... erm ... actually attempting to contain the virus, the Tories put on their cognitive clown outfits again and utterly demeaned themselves by jumping through all manner of hoops to defend the ridiculous behaviour and reckless rhetoric of their cult leader.

Then there was the absolutely ludicrous Tory decision to completely sideline the government's own scientific advisers in order to replace the clear and concise slogan "Stay At Home", with a sequence of nonsense verbiage like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!".

Suddenly Tories were flocking onto social media to pretend that this absolute gibberish was perfectly clear and intelligible, despite the fact that if you'd said "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!" to anyone pre-2020, they'd have assumed you were having a stroke and called you an ambulance.

And now we've got the absolutely repulsive spectacle of Tories tying themselves in knots to actually defend monuments to slave traders.

When the people of Bristol took matters into their own hands, after six interminable years of political incompetence, to remove the statue of Britain's most notorious slave-trader Edward Colston, the Tories complained bitterly about the lawlessness and the vandalism.

But then when Tower Hamlets Council removed the statue of slave-trader Robert Milligan, in a completely calm, lawful, and safe manner, the Tories erupted in paroxysms of outrage again.

It turns out that the lawlessness and vandalism objection they started with was just a cover for their real objection, which is apparently that they just like statues of racists, because they get some kind of perverse dopamine kick out of the fact that other people find the memorialisation of Tory slave traders and Tory fascist sympathisers abhorrent and disturbing.

But they'll just keep on inventing one post hoc justification after another to defend what can essentially be boiled down to statue trolling.

The latest post hoc excuse is that they're simply defending history, but where on earth were they when their own party was using austerity extremism as an excuse to shut down 800 libraries, annihilate funding for museums, and trash public investment in history departments and history education at every level of the education system?

They clearly don't really give a damn about the nation's history, or they'd have raised concerns over the last decade of Tory historical vandalism, it's just the latest contortion required of them by the leaders of the CCHQ freakshow circus.

In a matter of months the Tories have proven themselves willing to excuse all kinds of nonsense and depravity, from pretending that driving a vehicle on public roads with failing eyesight constitutes reasonable behaviour, to vehemently defending Holocaust-denial as if it constitutes required reading. And from laughing off the actual Prime Minister mocking his own government's social distancing measures, to publicly eulogising slave-traders!

As a nation we've lumbered ourselves with the most inept and cultish government in British history, with piss-witted simpletons in almost every single crucial position, and no matter how badly they keep on screwing up, we're stuck with them for another four years thanks to their 80 seat majority.

There's very little we could do to rid ourselves of them, and the increasingly bizarre and contorted displays of mental gymnastics they're willing to perform to defend the outrageous words and actions of their own cult illustrates the fact that it simply doesn't matter how bad things get, they'll just spout total gibberish, and continue to get away with it.

They know the gibberish they're spouting is absolute bollocks. We know it's absolute bollocks. And worst of all they know that we know it's absolute bollocks.

But they also know there's basically nothing we can do about it, so they're actually getting a perverse kick out of doing stuff like defending the indefensible, excusing Holocaust-denial, and eulogising slave-traders, because they believe that a nation that elected an incompetent, bone idle bigot like Boris Johnson as their leader will never hold them to account for any of it.

Hopefully the British public with eventually grow tired of this lamentable Tory freakshow of mental contortionism, and get rid of them.

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OR

The modern extreme-right are just copying ideas straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook

There's absolutely no doubt that the extreme-right is on the rise. Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Israel have elected extreme-right ethno-nationalists into government.

In Britain it's not all Brexit voters were vile extreme-right fanatics, but there's no doubt whatever that the extreme-right demographic were numerous enough to tip the balance in favour of Leave in a very close 52%-48% referendum vote.

In the United States Donald Trump was propelled into power with the support of the KKK and the 'alt-right', and he returned the favour by appointing the alt-right ideologue Steve Bannon as his most senior adviser, and then actually claimed that the Swastika-carrying "Jews will not replace us" thugs and murderous extreme-right terrorists in Charlottsville included "some very fine people".

One of the most extraordinary things about this resurgence of fascism is that the modern extreme-right are doing little more than lazily copying tactics straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook, presumably because they don't actually have any new ideas of their own, and just want another stab at world domination via the methods that almost succeeded for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The censorship fallacy

One of the most blatant examples of the modern extreme-right ripping off Nazi propaganda tactics is the continual refrain that their ideas are being censored, often expressed through sound systems on stages and glitzy websites (where the money actually comes from to pay for all of this extreme-right propaganda is the subject for another article ...).

Even worse than standing on a stage to claim that you're being silenced is the extreme-right tactic of screaming "censorship" whenever anyone else dares to use their own freedom of speech to criticise what the extreme-right fanatic was talking about. 

Freedom of speech means that you're free to say whatever you like (within the bounds of the law), but it certainly doesn't provide freedom from criticism if what you chose to say was a load of absolute shite.

Just like Adolf Hitler in 1928 the modern extreme-right are pretending that their views are being unfairly censored, and if these dangerous fanatics ever did assume political power, we can be absolutely sure that their very first moves would involve launching their own clamp down on free speech and setting about the ruthless persecution of their political opponents, just like Adolf Hitler did before them.

Free speech and criminality

Of course extreme-right fanatics will immediately try to counter criticism of their victims of censorship posturing by citing Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

"But we are being censored" they'll wail "because our beloved Tommy has been jailed for free speech".

The problem with this "free Tommy" narrative is that it's pure deception. Yaxley-Lennon wasn't jailed for free speech, he was jailed for attempting to disrupt the prosecution of child sex abuse gangs as a personal publicity stunt.

He risked collapsing several linked trials and freeing monstrous child sex abusers, he did it as a publicity stunt despite having been previously warned to stop disrupting trials by judges, and he pleaded guilty to the crimes he was charged with.

The fundamental deceit here is the claim that free speech gives people a blanket right to say and do whatever they like, but that's not how free speech works. Nobody is free to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, nobody is free to threaten to rape or kill people when they disagree with them, and nobody is free to deliberately disrupt child sex abuse trials for their own personal advantage.

Anyone who pretends that free speech does cover these things is simply misusing the term to excuse criminal behaviour.

Victim complexing

One of the most effective extreme-right propaganda techniques is victim complexing, which constitutes an effort to instil extreme levels of self-pity within the victims of their propaganda.

Pretending that certain minority groups are receiving favours is one way of doing it, pushing the fiction that the most privileged people in society are the biggest victims of discrimination is another, and pretending that certain political views are being banned is another.

The whole point of victim complexing is to inflate people's levels of self-pity as much as possible, because once you've got your intended audience walking around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of wind to get them all floating in the desired direction.

Xenophobia and anti-Semitism

Stoking fear of foreigners has always been a core tactic of the extreme-right, as has anti-Semitism. It's absolutely clear that this kind of rampant xenophobia and bigotry is on the rise again.

Look at Donald Trump's use of grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric to whip up his extreme-right base (despite the fact that his mother was an immigrant, and two of his three wives have been immigrants!).

Look at the way both Brexit campaigns used anti-immigrant fearmongering to achieve their aims (the Nazi style Leave.EU posters & the recently exposed Vote Leave campaign of highly misleading anti-immigrant fearmongering targeted social media dark ads).

Consider the wave of racism and racist attacks in Italy that have accompanied the rapid resurgence of Italian fascism there.

Consider the use of anti-immigrant rhetoric and vile anti-Semitic propaganda by the extreme-right Hungarian government of Vikton Orbán to provide cover for his ever more tyrannical and anti-democratic political agenda. 

The parallels between Orbán's massive anti-Semitic poster campaign declaring the Jewish billionaire George Soros as an "enemy of the people" and the two minutes hate against Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's 1984 are impossible to ignore.

Cultural Marxism

The threat of "cultural Marxism" is another fascist trope pulled straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook.

The Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) was a way of railing against modernism and progressive values. 

In those days allegations of "Kulturbolschewismus" were lobbed at modern art, Bauhaus architecture, and anything resembling socially liberal values. Today the same allegation of "cultural Marxism" is used to disparage issues like gay rights, transgender rights, and gender neutrality.

Given that Marx's economic philosophy centred on exposing the inequalities and abuses of the capitalist economy, and steered well clear of architectural aesthetics and transgender issues, it's absolutely clear that the term "cultural Marxism" is just a way of invoking scary red bogeymen in order to fearmonger against progressive and modernist trends that the extreme-right see as threats to their traditionalist hyper-conformist mentality.

Normalisation of Nazi propaganda

One of the most shocking things about this resurgence of fascism is the way in which Nazi propaganda is being rapidly normalised within political discourse.

Donald Trump is the obvious example, with members of the Republican Party ever willing to excuse, or even parrot Trump's extremist rhetoric out of their desire to ride on the coat tails of his success. It's not necessary to rehabilitate the reputation of the hard-right warmonger George W. Bush to note that at least the previous Republican President never resorted to racist Trumpian anti-immigrant abuse to whip up support from the extreme-right, nor sought to impose constitution defying anti-immigrant legislation.

In Britain the story is the same. The once centre-right Tory party has passionately embraced the extreme-right, welcoming the fanatically right-wing ultranationalist blue-kip demographic into the Tory fold with open arms.

from Theresa May spewing vile anti-immigrant rhetoric, through the disgusting BNP-inspired fearmongering of the Tories' 2016 London Mayoral election campaign, to young Tories openly spreading Nazi propaganda tropes without fear of recriminations, it's absolutely clear that the Tory party has shifted so far to the right, that what was until recently the domain of the extreme-right is now considered perfectly normal and acceptable, not just among the Tory rank and file, but more worryingly, within the party leadership too.

The paradox of tolerance

We've already seen how the extreme-right resort to victim-complex crying over their freedom of speech when they are imprisoned for their lawless behaviour, or even when others use their own freedom of speech to argue back against their propaganda.

It's absolutely clear that the extreme-right want to exist in an unlimited tolerance environment where they are free from the constraints of the laws of the land, and free from any criticism of their views.

Essentially they're demanding absolute tolerance of their ever increasing use of Nazi propaganda, and their unquestionably lawless behaviour.

But as Karl Popper pointed out in 1945, "unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them".

It's hard to argue that he was wrong given that he witnessed Adolf Hitler's rise to power using the victim complexing narrative that his ideas were being unfairly censored, only to immediately set about silencing and executing all of his political opponents to create one of the most deadly and intolerant autocratic regimes in human history once he got into power.

The lessons of history

Now that the same process is repeating over again, with the modern extreme-right using the exact same propaganda tactics to spread their intolerant ideologies, it's worth remembering Winston Churchill's warning: "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

Now that almost all of the generation who witnessed the disgusting barbarity of fascism first hand (which obviously included Orwell, Popper and Churchill) are now dead, with the very youngest of the WWII veterans into their 90s now, it's becoming increasingly clear that the lessons of history are indeed being forgotten, and the extreme-right are perfectly prepared to use the exact same propaganda tactics as the Nazis before them in order to attack and undermine socially liberal democracy.

 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

The contrasting fates of Alan Turing and the traitor Lord Sempill

Most British people have heard of Alan Turing. You would have to have studiously avoided learning about the the history of Second World War, computer science, code breaking and gay rights issues in order to have remained ignorant of one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th Century and his extraordinary contribution to the British war effort. Fewer people have heard of William Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill, yet his influence on the British war effort was no less dramatic.

Alan Turing was born in London to Julius Mathison Turing, a recently returned Indian civil servant and Ethel Sara Stoney, the daughter of a noted railway engineer. As a child he attended private schools, eventually earning a place at Cambridge University where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Mathematics. Turing managed to thrive at establishment institutions like Sherbourne and Cambridge University because of his intelligence, however he was treated with suspicion by the establishment elite due to his non-aristocratic background, eccentric nature, intimidating genius and his homosexual tendencies.

After obtaining a PhD from the prestigious Princeton University in New Jersey he returned to the UK to work with the secret Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) intelligence service where he concentrated on cryptanalysis of the German Enigma code. 

During the Second World War Turing was an important figure at the Bletchley Park codebreaking facility where he made many invaluable contributions to the deciphering of complex German military codes. He was described by fellow codebreaker Asa Briggs "the genius" that Bletchley Park needed.

It has been estimated that the work of Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park shortened the war by between two and four years, and that without their contributions the outcome of the war would have been uncertain. Turing didn't only make a significant contribution to the British war effort, he also did pioneering work in computing and is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

William Forbes-Sempill was the Eton educated son of John Forbes-Sempill, 9th Baronet of Craigievar and hereditary member of the House of Lords. 

During the First World War the younger Sempill served as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps and then with the Royal Navy Air Service. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service during the war.

Captain Sempill showing a Gloster Sparrowhawk
to Admiral Togo Heihachiro, in 1921.

In the aftermath of the war he led a British deputation to Japan where he assisted the Japanese navy in setting up an airforce base and establishing their aircraft carrier fleet. Sempill received a personal letter from the Japanese Prime Minister Tomosaburo Kato thanking him for his work with the Japanese navy, in which his contribution was described as "almost epoch-making" and he later received Japan's highest honour, the Order of the Rising Sun, for his "especially meritorious military service".

After American concerns were raised about the growing naval strength of the Japanese, Sempill's mission in Japan was officially discontinued. However Sempill carried on providing support to the Japanese by passing classified military and technical information to Japanese Naval attache in London, Captain Teijiro Toyoda. 

In 1925 he was questioned about his distribution of official secrets, but for undisclosed reasons he was never prosecuted under the official secrets act.

By the 1930s Sempill was an active member of several far-right, fascist and Anti-Semitic organisations including the Anglo-German Fellowship, The Link and Archibald Ramsay's The Right Club, (which was a secretive organisation with the aim of ridding the Tory party of Jews). Sempill was far from the only member of the British establishment elite to embrace the fascist ideology. The founder of the British Union of Fascists was Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, whose fascist activities received a lot of positive press from the 1st Viscount Rothsmere's Daily Mail newspaper. 

The British Union of Fascists counted dozens of Knights, Earls, Dukes, Barons, Lords, Ladies and Viscounts amongst its members. The Royal family, who were at the very epicentre centre of this orgy of hereditary entitlement and establishment ennoblement, also had a number of keen fascists, Edward VIII maintained notoriously close relations with Nazi Germany, causing their arms industry minister Albert Speer to lament that "I am certain that through him, permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.". The Queen mother famously stated that she would have been happy for the Nazis to invade the UK, as long as they kept the Royal family, and the Royal adults famously taught the infant Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral castle.

Most of the intelligence files on Sempill's activities during the 1930s and 1940s mysteriously "disappeared" from the national archive, however it is known that he continued to receive regular payments from the Japanese government owned Mitsubishi Corporation, and entertained several high ranking Nazis throughout the period.

Despite his track record of passing classified information to foreign powers and his collusion with fascists, Sempill was assigned to the Admiralty in 1939 on the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany. 

Sempill's position allowed him access to highly sensitive information about the latest British military hardware and official secrets. In June 1940 MI5 discovered that Sempill was still receiving payments from Mitsubishi, and an investigation revealed that he was almost certainly passing secret information to the Japanese. However the Attorney General (Lord Donald Somervell, Baron Somervell of Harrow) advised against prosecution, and Sempill was allowed to keep his position in the Admiralty and his access to sensitive information. 

In 1941 Sempill personally intervened to secure the release of the Japanese ambassador Makahara, who had been arrested under suspicion of spying.

Six months after the August 1941 Newfoundland Conference meeting between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Japanese Embassy in London sent detailed notes about the meeting back to Tokyo. These encrypted notes were intercepted and decoded at Bletchley Park and the transcript was passed to Churchill, who noted that they were "very accurate", Three months later, further notes on Churchill's personal agenda and inner circle were intercepted on their way from Japanese Embassy in London to Tokyo. An investigation by Anthony Eden concluded that only two men could have created the notes: Commander McGrath or Lord Sempill.

The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill intervened
to protect Lord Sempill despite a mountain of
 evidence the he'd been spying for the Japanese.

On 9 October 1941 Churchill gave instructions to "clear him out while time remains". The following week the Admiralty confronted Sempill and told him he could either resign or be fired. Sempill protested, and Churchill intervened to say "I had not contemplated Lord Sempill being required to resign his commission, but only to be employed elsewhere in the Admiralty". Sempill was then shifted to a post in northern Scotland, however he still continued to assist the Japanese. 

In Early December a raid on his office found him in possession of classified documents that he had been instructed to return months previously. Then around a week later he was caught making phone calls to the Japanese (more than a week after the Japanese invasion of British Malaya and their attack on Pearl Harbour). Sempill was made to resign, but he was never prosecuted for his treasonous relationship with the Japanese that did so much to help them to develop the technology they used to kill thousands of British and American servicemen during the Pacific War.

Sempill's activities were never made public during his lifetime and he continued to live the privileged life of establishment nobility, keeping his position in the House of Lords that he had inherited from his father, and even receiving the chairmanships of the Institute of Advanced Motorists and the British Gliding Association.

Sempill died peacefully in 1956 having never faced punishment or public criticism for his crimes. His hereditary seat in the Lords passed to his daughter Ann, and his Baronetry to his younger brother Ewan. It was only in 2002 that the scale of his treachery and his fascist and Anti-Semitic tendencies came to light after classified documents about his activities were finally released into the public domain.

All of the vital codebreaking activities that took place at Bletchley Park
remained shrouded in secrecy until well into the 1970s.

Returning to Alan Turing; he had a much harder time after the end of the war. All of his codebreaking work was classified by the government so he could never talk about his extraordinary contribution to the war effort.

Turing continued his work with computers, famously devising the Turing Test as a means of determining whether a computer has achieved artificial intelligence, a test that remains an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. He also developed the LU Decomposition method (complex algebra) and did pioneering work in the field of morphogenesis, (which is the study of how biological organisms develop their shape).

In 1952 Turing was charged with the "crime" of Gross Indecency after admitting to having had a homosexual relationship with a man who later robbed his house. He was found guilty and given the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration. 

This conviction meant that his security clearance was revoked, which meant that he was barred from continuing his cryptographic work with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Turing chose to be chemically castrated rather than face imprisonment.

On the 8th of June 1954 Turing was found dead by his cleaner. A post mortem examination determined that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning, however no forensic examination of the property took place, and his death was officially attributed to suicide.

Many people, including his mother, refused to accept the suicide verdict. The ambiguous circumstances of his death and the lack of a thorough investigation mean that nobody will ever know whether his death was intentional suicide, accidental poisoning, or the result of foul play.

Turing's brilliance was not recognised until years after his death. In 1966 the Turing Award was established to for technical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's highest honour, equivalent to a Nobel Prize in computing. It took until 2009 for the British establishment to make an official public apology, which was made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

The similarity between the two men lies in the way the war conduct of both of them remained shrouded in secrecy until long after their deaths. Sempill was never exposed as the traitor he was, and it seems that somebody intervened to ensure that many presumably incriminating files from the 1930s and 1940s "disappeared", never to reach the public domain at all. Meanwhile, all the hugely important work undertaken at Bletchley Park remained secret until the 1970s, meaning that Turing's outstanding contribution to the war effort was not recognised until long after his death.

In the UK, living in a castle like this and an Eton education 
seems to provide immunity from prosecution for treason.

Had the public been allowed to know about the codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, Winston Churcill's famous speech about the valiant fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain could easily have been made about the codebreakers too; "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".

What is remarkable about the contrasting fates of these two men is the way that members of the British establishment (including the Prime Minister and the Attorney General) repeatedly intervened to protect one of their own, despite his fascist tendencies and decades of treasonous behavior, whilst the establishment people Turing had known and associated with during his time at Cambridge University and at Bletchley Park refused to intervene to help him when criminal charges were brought against him for the trivial offence of engaging in homosexual acts, despite his outstanding contribution to the war effort.

It seems amazing that British nobility, including the Prime Minister, would repeatedly intervene to ensure that another member of their privileged class avoided prosecution for the incredibly serious crime of passing official secrets to foreign powers at a time of war, yet wouldn't do anything to lean on prosecutors to drop the charges against a war hero and genius who happened to have been born into the "lower social orders".

The British nobility turned a blind eye the most heinous of crimes (espionage, treason, fraternising with the enemy, Anti-Semitism)  because it was one of their own class doing it, yet they refused to intervene to prevent a true war hero from suffering homosexual prosecution and chemical castration, simply because he was not one of the upper classes.

This disparity in the way these two men were treated illustrates the classism that is still rampant in Britain today.

If you're one of the establishment elitists you can do pretty much anything without fear of criticism or punishment from your fellow elitists who maintain an enormously disproportionate influence over the criminal justice system, the political system, and the media.

However if you're from non-elitist stock, woe betide you if you ever dare to step out of line, because the establishment elitists will make you suffer for it.

It's one set of rules for the establishment class, and another much harsher and more unforgiving set of rules for the rest of us. It's the way it's always been, and it's the way it will continue to be until something is done to confront the absolute scourge of classism in Britain.

 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.

What now for Spain?

On Sunday October 1st the ugly face of brutal right-wing Spanish nationalism was revealed to the world as police shipped in from all over the rest of Spain attempted to violently repress the Catalan referendum.

Meanwhile supporters of the right-wing Spanish nationalist government gathered in Madrid to support the state violence, sing Falangist songs from the Franco dictatorship era and strut around making Nazi salutes.

Spanish nationalism

By using the Guardia Civil and the Federal Police as the violent militia of Spanish nationalism, the right-wing Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy has created a huge rift between Catalonia and Castillian Spain, and also revealed the ugly face of right-wing Spanish nationalism to the world.

Of course people in former Spanish colonies across the world (south and central America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, Mexico) are perfectly well aware of the evils of Spanish nationalism, but the shocking levels of brutality, the blatantly anti-democratic motivations, and the resurgence of sickening extreme-right Falangism are profoundly shocking to the people of liberal democracies who imagined Spain as one of us rather than a country that never really made a clean break with the Franco dictatorship of 1939-1975.

Any Catalan over the age of 50 will remember the deliberate state repression of Catalan language, culture and identity under the Franco regime. In fact many of them will still have Castillian names on their birth certificates because under the Franco dictatorship it was even illegal to give Catalan children Catalan names. The brutality of the Spanish police and the flag-waving Falangists in Madrid are a powerful reminder of how brutal and repressive extreme-right Spanish nationalism has been within living memory.

After the events of October 1st 2017 it's not just people old enough to remember the Franco era who recognise extreme-right Spanish nationalism for what it is, the whole world has seen the democracy-hating brutality of Spanish nationalism through countless social media clips and images.

Spain is not a liberal democracy

One of the major problems for the corporate mainstream media is that their instinct to defend the right-wing estabishment status quo in Spain is terribly at odds with the principles of liberal democracy that they have actively promoted for decades. 

We all know what kind of "look at the evils of socialism" narratives the UK mainstream media would have spun if the brutal democracy-loathing attacks on peaceful civilians had been carried out by a left-wing government like Venezuela or Cuba, but because the force of repression is driven by the same hard-right neoliberal ideology as the UK establishment, the British media have ended up downplaying, obfuscating or even outright supporting the state violence.

Having conditioned the public to believe that the fundamental point of participatory democracy is the ballot box, and having held up non-violent resistors like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and Desmond Tutu as our political role models, the countless images of Spanish police brutally attacking non-violent citizens and violently confiscating ballot boxes are  profoundly shocking to most people, and clearly totally incompatible with the mainstream media determination to spin events in favour the right-wing Spanish establishment order who carried out these acts of repression.
Conflicting forms of nationalism

The majority of the media in the UK couldn't paint a realistic picture of events in Catalonia because not only do the UK press overwhelmingly support the Tories who are the ideological blood brothers of the repressive hard-right neoliberal Spanish establishment party (PP), they're also proven themselves to be savagely biased against the Scottish independence movement, and they're all too aware of the parallels between the Scottish and Catalan independence movements.

So mainstream media organisations (especially those in the UK) have attempted to frame the violent repression of the peaceful democratic referendum as if the only nationalists in the equation are the Catalan independence movement, while the repressive Spanish regime are somehow just the status quo, rather than the representatives of Spanish nationalism that they are.

It's obvious why the UK media couldn't portray the situation as violent and repressive right-wing Spanish nationalism vs overwhelmingly peaceful and democratic Catalan civic nationalism.

They can't condemn the actions of the Spanish government and help us to examine the evils of Spanish nationalism, because that's uncomfortably close to them telling us to examine the dark side of British nationalism.

One of the many parallels between Catalonia and Scotland is that the nationalism of the dominant nation is routinely accepted by the media as the unquestionable status quo, even though the ancient nations of Catalonia and Scotland long predate the constructed states of unified Spain and the United Kingdom that they were incorporated into. 

Catalonia was fully absorbed into Spain by the Nueva Planta Decrees in 1716 that abolished all separate Catalan laws, institutions and rights, and Scotland was absorbed into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union in 1707.

Painting a picture of a brutal anti-democratic right-wing Spanish nationalism out of Madrid repressing the peaceful and democratic civic nationalism of the Catalans is the kind of explanation mainstream media hacks are terrified of giving out of fear that it could be so easily transposed onto the British nationalist elite in Westminster and the peaceful civic nationalism of the Scottish independence campaigners.

The desperation to defend the establishment status quo is the reason that the secessionists are always painted as the only nationalists in the equation, when all independence movements are actually conflicts between two rival forms of nationalism (the dominant nationalism of the occupying state and the repressed nationalism of the secessionists).

What next for Spain?

Although the parallels between the Scottish and Catalan independence movements are obvious, there is one major difference. While the UK establishment class have managed to rule for three uninterrupted centuries, Spain has chaotically lurched from crisis to another every few decades.

The various periods of Spanish instability and repressive rule include the rule of Napoleon's brother Joseph (1808-14) the three Carlist civil wars (1833-39, 1846-49. 1872-76), the First Spanish Republic (1873-74), the restoration of the absolutist monarchy, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923-30), the Second Spanish Republic (1931-36), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) and the economic collapse of 2008. 

In fact since 1808 no political system in Spain has lasted a full 50 years. 

The Catalan government are already calling victory in the referendum and talking about a unilateral declaration of Catalan independence and Rajoy's violent repression tactics have only made the situation worse.

Short of sending in the tanks to stop the Catalans there doesn't seem to be much the hard-right Spanish nationalist government in Madrid could actually do to stop Catalonia leaving, and the Basque Country following them quickly out of the door.

Either the constructed state of Spain breaks up into its component nations, or the Spanish nationalists will be forced to return to the kind of violence and repression of the Franco era to stop it.

It looks like history is repeating again and that Spain simply can't manage a half century without extreme political instability, civil war, or yet another return to the brutal autocratic rule of dictatorship.

 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

Charles Darwin and the price of fame

Charles Darwin was born on the 12th of February 1809. Alongside Alfred Russell Wallace he is credited with the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He is rightly considered to be one of the great thinkers of the 19th Century.

Unfortunately, due to his fame he has become a highly misrepresented individual. His name is used to categorise a number of vile social theories that he never would have supported, and his image has often been appropriated to promote a militant form of atheism he would never have wanted to have been associated with either. 

Social Darwinism

A warped interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution has been used to justify labelling ideologies that promote racism, elitism, competitive strife and eugenics as "Social Darwinism".

Nothing in Darwin's work suggests that he would have supported social policies of demonisation, discrimination, impoverishment and even outright extermination against sectors of society deemed to be inferior by powerful minorities. In fact Darwin's theories are entirely compatible with the idea of community rather than ruthless "survival of the fittest" because it's beyond obvious that a tendency towards forming into community groups can provide an evolutionary advantage (think of shoals of fish, murmations of starlings, colonies of ants, and the more complex social groupings of higher mammals like primates, elephants, dolphins and whales).

In 1902 the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin provided a detailed explanation of how cooperation amongst species was not just compatible with Darwinian evolution, but actually essential to it, in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

The fact that Darwin never wrote anything to suggest that he would have supported racist or eugenicist policies of deliberately eradicating members of society that are deemed "weak" by the powerful didn't stop people from evoking his name in the blanket term used to describe such theories. It's appalling that the concept of actively cleansing society of so-called "weaker" members still bears his name. 

Militant atheism

Charles Darwin is also often used as a poster boy by militant New Athiest types, despite the fact that he was nowhere near as intolerant of theists and theological debate as they are.

The way Darwin has been appropriated by the militant atheists is actually very similar to the way the economist Adam Smith has been appropriated by the militant Laissez-faire economic hard-right, despite the fact that the most cursory examination of his work reveals that he was nowhere near as fanatically right-wing as they are.

Another example of this kind of appropriation is the way the work of George Orwell is often invoked by right-wing people to attack socialism, even though Orwell was a committed democratic socialist who criticised the Soviet Union for their authoritarianism, not simply because they were left-wing.

To provide a little proof that Darwin was no militant atheist here's a quote from a letter he sent to John Fordyce in 1879:

"It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist ... But as you ask, I may state that my judgement often fluctuates. Moreover whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note. In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."

The idea of invoking the name of a self-declared agnostic (who maintained civil relationships with many theists) in order to promote a rabid form of militant atheism is just as bad as using the name of an economist who supported state intervention (such as infant industry protection) to promote right-wing anti-state fanaticism, or using the work of a lifelong democratic socialist to promote right-wing political ideologies.

The price of fame

It seems to be the price of fame that all kinds of people who have little regard for what you actually believed in will latch themselves onto your work, and use your image to promote their own ideologies, irrespective of whether they're actually compatible with what you said or not.

The way that the names of thinkers like Darwin, Smith and Orwell are invoked in order to add a veneer of credibility to ideologies they would have been very unlikely to support themselves is bad enough, but Darwin had it even worse than most because of the way his name has been associated with a bunch of vile ideologies that are grouped together under the name "Social Darwinism".

 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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