This is a reply to two posts already published on this blog. The first is another guest post, by Ian Beck, called “If you’re not pissed off you’re not paying attention“. The second is one of Scrapper Duncan’s regular posts, published the day after the first, called “No-one is accusing SchNews of political sophistication“. This guest post is published exactly as it was submitted, without alteration or amendment, except for the title – because no title was supplied. Read on…
We’ve travelled a long way in this debate…now our refusal to issue a condemnation of a small protest group in Worthing for their leaflet, which satirically combined a swastika with the Sussex Police logo, has become either emblematic of or is just plain responsible for the collapse of the British left.
We are accused by Ian Beck of ‘giving the green light’ to groups to use the swastika. Thanks for crediting us with this level of influence but we are not an industry regulator or any kind of anarcho ombudsman so it’s hard to see how this can be the case.
SchNEWS is unequivocally anti-fascist. Not only by way of opinion but in fact and on the streets. To suggest that we endorse fascism and Nazism, don’t take it seriously or (as Ian suggests would be happy hanging around in Nazi costume with a Tory M.P is stupid and offensive.
We are equally worried by the rise of the Golden Dawn party in Greece, their collusion with the Greek police, the electoral gains of Marine Le Pen and Casa Pound in Italy. The new counter-jihad right in the U.K is not looking as healthy as it did eighteen months ago, but the fact that the EDL can put even 700 on the streets is alarming. They were putting nearly 3000 out last year but the resistance has slowly been building. One of the reasons the EDL is faltering is they have felt the need to declare war on the whole of the left – we have been part of that resistance.
To read SchNEWS on anti-fascism go here and here.
You (Scrapper) seem to have grouped us under your umbrella..perhaps as slightly wayward and uneducated fellow travellers on your project of ‘the Left’. We’re not in disagreement as such, we simply lack your ‘analytical sophistication’ and so our views are ‘polarised’. The fact that we might be coming at things from a completely different but equally reasoned perspective doesn’t seem to have occurred to you.
According to your psycho-analysis of ‘the Left’ we have suffered from ‘low self-esteem’ since the union busting 80s. Even the greybeards in the SchNEWS collective were still in school at this point. The movement we were born out of had it’s hey-day in the 90s – the anti-roads, reclaim the streets, summit hopping, euro-rioting crowd. Since then we’ve had the huge protests against the Iraq war and are now sniffing the beginnings of a major shift as the population starts to reject austerity.
We don’t aim to ‘recruit people’. We are not a vanguardist party, we’re a newsletter. We aim to inspire people to go out and see things for themselves, take action for themselves. ‘Information for action’ has always been our motto. Politics and political engagement is not a gentlemen’s fencing club, (or even dare I say it a court-room) where points are awarded on achieving the perfect angle and timing of thrust. Sometimes to get the message across it’s necessary to paint in broad brush strokes. (and even mix metaphors).
To take perhaps the most significant recent mobilisation of ‘the Left’ in Brighton – the effort to stop the March for England. Was time spent posting detailed rigorous analyses of the politics of the MfE and their links to the EDL? Working out whether the EDL fit within a historical definition of fascism acceptable to ‘people who regard life’s little details to be important’.Or was it more profitably spent communicating via stalls, leafleting and social media in small sound-bites? (which by their very nature contain inaccuracies).
You say yourself ..”Our problem is not the strength of our arguments, it is how we forge the practical bonds which create solidarity in our communities.”. We totally agree but the problem rather than a lack of analysis has been over analysis – the traditional left often resembles a theological college debating exactly how many workers can dance on the head of a pin. This is why Occupy, despite its many flaws has been a breath of fresh air. I’m not sure how valid the statistical analysis behind the 99 vs 1% slogan is – but as a meme it’s a corker.
To communicate effectively we must communicate in shorthand. That shorthand is by its very nature going to lack a degree of sophistication. The right doesn’t care about this and we witness their success in getting memes like ‘benefit scrounger’ , ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘bleeding heart liberal’ out into the public consciousness. Unfortunately this is the terrain in which we have to fight. SchNEWS has deliberately adopted a tabloid style to communicate with Joe Public, perhaps the reason that ‘no-one could accuse us of political sophistication’.
We must always be willing to engage with criticism (and we think the words expended on this debate count as engagement but we feel your attempt to force us to condemn a small protest group was ‘fundamentalist’ and lacked the solidarity you seem so keen on.
See you on the (crudely built) barricades.
Jo Makepeace
There has been over analysis by the Left but Occupy is a very bad example. As regular readers will know, I was heavily involved in Occupy London, setting up the legal team which defended various eviction attempts. Although ultimately (& predictably) unsuccessful, we obtained considerably more time for political activists than anyone expected. Unfortunately, they used it to drive people away, with the result all the most capable people have moved on to other stuff & only, (with a few exceptions) the least handy are left, squabbling amongst themselves. Simple decisions were never resolved one way or another. I won’t rehearse my extensive posts on the subject. Suffice it to say, these people, who point blank refused to analyse anything, created a really ugly atmosphere on the ground, characterised by distrust, confusion and violence. Unsurprising then they failed to recruit anyone to any cause. It gave us an effective meme and then actively dissuaded people from joining in.
SchNews has missed the point completely. Realising that they were probably too busy to dwell on the detailed post Ian wrote, I spelt it out in the first paragraph of my post. It lacked the eloquence or historical information of Ian’s but it made the point really clearly:
This guest post fails to mention this issue at all, even though it is supposed to be a reply to these two posts. Why does SchNews avoid the main issue? It seems only willing to only debate the thing on its own terms.
Mostly this post reads as a reply to Scrapper Duncan, rather than me. Anyway, in response to your response:
1. “We’ve travelled a long way in this debate …”
I’m not sure we have, though many words have been spilled. We still don’t agree on the meaning of the swastika (hakenkreuz if you prefer, just to be sure we don’t mix it it up with other swastikas) and whether it was ok for Worthing Freedom Campaign to use it. I defer to Duncan’s response on this, as we agree.
2. “Giving the green light to groups to use the swastika.”
I did say this on twitter, out of frustration at your refusal to criticise WFC’s use of the swastika (which they have thought better of anyway) in our discussion the previous evening. It’s unfortunate that I’ve learned that the best way to get a response from you is by provocation. In response you labelled me “a bit of a troll,” which I suppose is fair enough. Perhaps you underrate your influence? I heard of you first more than a dozen years ago, and don’t even live in Sussex. I expected you to take a firmer position on this, was shocked at some flippant responses referencing semiotics, and this inspired me to write something.
[continued]
3. You are clearly offended by my “stupid” suggestion that you hang out with that Tory MP and his friends who wore Nazi uniforms on their stag party in France. Well, this was calculated to provoke, and it worked, but also to support a serious point about you condoning a similar use of Nazi emblems by WFC. I don’t doubt that you are “unequivocally anti-fascist,” but the dissonance between this and not calling WFC out for employing the hakenkreuz is what started this affair. If you do, as you claim, take Nazism “seriously” I don’t see why you can’t just say WFC shouldn’t have done this. I don’t think this need amount to a total condemnation of all WFC stand for.
4. We’re on the same page re Golden Dawn and the EDL. Would just like to make clear that I fully support and applaud your anti-EDL actions. I live in Wales where there are fewer problems with stupid English people, but if there were I would be doing the same. If they hit Brighton again on a weekend I’ll maybe even troll down and help out? We could maybe have a beer? But I’ll understand if you don’t want that.
The point of the original post wasn’t about having solidarity with another “small” organisation.
The point was that the aforementioned “small” group was wrong in using the Swastika.
At best it’s use regarding the police was hysterical. At worst willfully ignorant.
I’m assuming you at Schnews are aware of how offensive many people find the symbol? People alive today who lost family during the Holocaust,who very possibly live in the area you are active in.
Would you tell them that they are in some way missing the ironic point,that the symbols meaning has now changed and they should get over it?
Your piece reads like a reactionary one and spends more time defending/promoting your group than it does addressing the points raised in Ian Beck’s post.
To clarify, when I say “lost family during the Holocaust” I refer to the war at large. Of course this means Jews,gypsies,political dissidents and so on. But also, the families of the men who fought in the war. British,French,German,Polish,American.would you tell any of those people that they are missing the satire involved with using the Swastika to hysterically exaggerate the police exercising authority?
It is grossly inconsiderate and small minded to think the swastika has lost any of it’s meaning.
Perhaps the day neo-Nazi’s no longer use it to daub the walls of predominantly Jewish areas (for example) as racist abuse,it will no longer have “that” meaning.
My ultimate final word to Ian Beck…
Thanks for your reasoned response to our response Ian. The start of this debate was that we refused to “call out” the WFC for their swastika graphic. Let us try to explain whilst remain cool, calm and collected. There’s all the difference in the world between having a word in private, and issuing a public condemnation.
If the Worthing Freedom Campaign had shown us their design before printing their flyers we’d probably have said something like, “Er, you might want to pick a different graphic mate”. But that didn’t happen, and the first we heard about it was from you chaps on twitter. We know from personal experience how tough it can be to keep a small, local campaign going and how easy it is to get disheartened (especially when attacked from your own side), and so even if they score a Godwin’s Law fail for their graphic, we’re not going to slag them off. Period.
As for the other point- the objection to the claim that the swastika is used as a symbol for tyranny. The answer is simple. It is. You may not like it, we may not use it as such ourselves, but it can’t be denied that the Worthing Freedom Campaign is not the first group to use the swastika as a shorthand for oppressive state thuggery.
You’ve demanded an explanation and you’ve got one. You’ve demanded an apology/retraction/condemnation. You’ll not get one, no matter how many more tweets you send our way.
We’ve learned quite a lot during this debate- not about the use of symbols, but about the problems of social media. This debate has taken up hours of our time, time which we should have been putting into supporting anti-fascist, anti-capitalist,…
environmental and animal rights campaigns. We’re glad that people actively pay an interest into our newsletter, but this has become a irritating distraction.
Lastly Ian, if you’re offering have a drink with us then, thanks. We reckon this is one of those things that should have been sorted out in the beer garden.