The Gigarich at the top are using those at the bottom. I have some faith left that Trump might, at some point, crack down on the manipulation. I have no faith left that Johnson will.
Apologies for some initial throat-clearing, but what I want to say tonight needs a balanced context.
Most of the news we’re exposed to now (filtered or otherwise) requires three judgements: do we trust the provenance, what is our reaction to the interpretation of the events involved, and do we think that the people being lauded or demonised have a case?
When it comes to the “mainstream” media – and increasingly, that really means agendad and/or serving narrators known or unknown – my reaction nearly always to those three questions is “no”, “untrustworthy” and “sometimes” respectively. For the pro-am online commentator, the two tasks to be faced are first, seemingly endless and often chaotic research; and second, a close look at the track record of the groups or individuals involved.
Having looked at all those elements, I tend to seek out a descriptor that I think accurately sums up, in one or two words, what the subjects of the ‘story’ are really about – their goals, sincerity, innate privilege, hypocrisy and so forth. This is not (and should never be) an attempt to tar everyone involved with the same brush. It is, if you will, a ‘noun-bite’, acronym or whatever summing up the core archetypal belief system and attitude set involved.
Over the years, therefore, I have used the term ‘WUTS’ (Wishful Unthinking Tendency), ‘Fluffies’, ‘Liblefts’ and ‘IABATO’ (It’s all Bollocks/Bullshit And That’s Official) in order to try and clarify exactly what it is I’m on about.
The year is 2020, and we have been through by far the most turbulent half-decade of my life. We’ve been exposed to a technically ‘independent’ US President; an attempt to rekindle the anarcho-socialist fervour of the period 1919-39; a UK Establishment at first offstage and then brazenly trying to overturn and reverse Brexit as a policy; the emergence of a UK Conservative Prime Minister of highly dubious character charged with getting Brexit; a federalist-dominated EU staring into the abyss of life without the United Kingdom; a global corona virus transformed by media hyperbole and Big Pharma hypocrisy into something it never was; several Unelected State bodies using confusion to increase their power; and latterly, a revived Black-White race war.
There are quite clearly connected groups looking to sow confusion and critical bombast…..in order, variously, to dump Trump, bash Boris, hide econo-fiscal greed-cum-disaster, silence opponents etc. Sometimes, I am sure, they create and bankroll some of the inflammatory developments we see developing…..to suggest that, in terms of health cover, social care, policing and race, the State is unfair – and only violent revolution has the antidote.
The organisations involved at the secondary level, I now strongly believe, we should start referring to as the Stalinazis….for reasons which will, I hope, become clear.
Here endeth the throat-clearing.
‘Stalin’ was the nickname given by early Bolsheviks to Josef Dzugashvilli – ‘The Man of Steel’. He used a preposterous neo-Marxist belief system to justify acts of violence against the merciless Tsarist State. He was a master of tactical persuasion, cynical alliances, political organisation, and the author of many intuitive observations – not the least of which was, “History is made by those who turn up”.
He was a passionate believer in martyr promotion, pyschological propaganda, the personality cult, fear-creation and surveillance techniques.
In all of that, he was a Soviet Adolf Hitler. Indeed, in the late Summer of 1939, he formed a pact of psychopathic betrayal with Nazi Germany in order to facilitate the division of Poland between them.
So ‘Stalinazi’ is, it seems to me, a historically and factually based term.
But what is it about organisations like Antifa and Momentum – or the Hard Left MPs in Parliament – that justifies calling them Stalinazis?
Well, first of all they continue to display rabid anti-semitism – a world view shared entirely by Stalin and Hitler. Second, they are street-fighters very much in the same vein as the two dictators: Stalin’s followers were keen statue-demolishers, while Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung smashed Jewish shop windows and beat up anyone who intervened. And third, they were constantly on the lookout for martyrs.
Very few people today are aware of who Horst Wessel was. Born in 1907 into a religious Protestant family, Wessel was an intelligent German Law student nevertheless committed to ‘Might is Right’ as a philosophy. In 1927 he joined the Nazi Sturm Abteilung, and quickly gained a reputation for recruiting the sort of “respectable” bourgeois colleagues he knew through University….the sort of ‘Useful Idiots’ also courted by Josef Stalin prior to 1917.
Significantly, he was a keen student of Stalin’s terror organisation principles, and in July 1928 was involved in implementing a reorganisation of the Berlin Nazi Party into a cell-structure like the one used by the German Communist Party.
Horst Wessel’s own SA unit, Friedrichshain Sturm 5, had a reputation as being a band of brutal yobs, and Wessel himself was in fact that most dangerous of all political fanatics, the intelligent thug. He became well-known among Berliner Communists, but after moving in with a notorous prostitute in September 1929, the rising Nazi got involved in a brawl about rent, was severely injured by Communists sent to evict him, and eventually died in hospital after his wounds became infected.
Although Horst Wessel was a nascent psychopath who had been lucky himself to escape imprisonment for his own violent exploits, Nazi leader and arch propagandist Josef Goebels immediately stressed the “respectable” origins of his favourite SA man, using every media means at his disposal to provoke higher levels of violence in Berlin and condemn the “Reds”, while turning Wessel into an iconic martyr.
So, the man who learned from Stalin, and was an early adopter of Nazi violence, became the George Floyd of the National Socialists.
Another sound reason, I would submit, for the adoption of ‘Stalinazis’ as a term applicable to our contemporary displays of ruthless political violence.
The parallels between the 1913-33 period and now are glaringly obvious. Antifa, BLM and Momentum have employed absolutely standard techniques: smashing Establishment icons, evoking guilt amongst (and then recruiting) sympathetic “liberals”. As with Moscow and St Petersburg in 1916 – and Berlin in the 1926-30 SA violence, no chance has been missed to confuse, humiliate, taunt and poke the organs of State in the eye. The blind eye among Bavarian cops to Hitler’s exploits after he left Landsberg prison is mirrored by the apparent fear of the British police to get involved in Black Lives Matter riots. The political Executive seems to be permanently absent. In the US, police have had to be replaced with mysterious and yet military-garbed, riot troops. But there too, the attempt to make Trump feel a prisoner in the White House (which he has always been in one way or another) has been reflected by throwing bricks and riot fences into the UK’s Downing Street.
And of course, the suitably cleaned-up martyr has been interred, and the myth created.
But after this point, contemporary events are only a rhyme rather than a rerun.
The difference between 1917, 1924 and 2020 is that today, the media explosion and satellite technology have given our world the appearance of being global. The reality is otherwise, but the impression is of this manufactured race-anger being an international movement on the scale of Band Aid.
It’s hard to avoid the sense – not certainty, but a very strong hint – of Sugar-Daddies with various motives both advising and financing the spread of the violence….something there wasn’t with the boys in Red and Brown.
I wrote an email to a close chum four days after George Floyd’s death, including these words: “This is organised and being expertly played in the media. It takes loads of money and friends in high places to get that”.
Very probably, both the apparent weakness of the State and the background certainty of serious financial support are the key reasons why, this time around, things are progressing further than in early 20th century history – into No-Go Areas in Seattle, and the hunt for ever more inflammatory flashpoints. This happened with the Staliners in areas of Moscow and SA Nazis in Munich in the original Production: but what’s very clear this time is that the street ideologues are looking to get some kind of formal deal whereby in the future, they’ll want a share in police and “social” management of some neighbourhoods.
This is a big part of what makes the Stalinazis different.
It’s clear that much of the American police community itself – in New York for example – is distancing itself from what senior officers call “soft touch legislators”, and flatly refusing to either appease violence or share power with people they see as likely to range from opportunistic looters to politically motivated anarchists.
But in relation to Seattle, yesterday the Washpost ran a piece seriously suggesting that local politicians might defund the police department as a sop to the rioters.
And in Britain, all the media without exception are still referring to the unrest as “anti-racism protests”. All I can say to that is that the branding may still be ‘BLM’, but the driving forces are Antifa, its allies on the Labour Left – and all those media/Tory/Whitehall jerks still gagging to see Boris Johnson fail.
What else might explain the craven appeasement of the riots by the senior officer class of the Met Police, versus the expressed opinion of the average poor cop bastards being told to kneel, wear a dress and otherwise make spineless fools of themselves?
If you feel the need for a quiet weep, read The Times piece today on fallen heroes – gerritt??? – that offers (without comment) a shocking list of spineless local councillor history-airbrushers queuing up to suck Antifa/BLM dick when it comes to the statues these Early Man fellatio enthusiasts don’t like.
I don’t want to get into the detail of monied media manipulation at the next level up. Such has been covered at length in these columns and elsewhere.
I would merely say this in conclusion. I have now lost any faith I had in Boris Johnson. This is nothing to do with the growing Guardian-to-Times-&-Mirror sport of bashing the Bojo (and if that has onanistic connotations, then they are entirely intentional); but it does have everything to do with how he has reacted to it.
His relatively low-profile article and speech of yesterday had only one sentence in it that might resonate with those who voted for him: “I will not support those who flout the rules on social distancing, for the obvious reason that we risk a new infection at a critical time – and just as we have made huge progress”.
I’m bound to say, it didn’t float my boat at all: that he continues to refer to “this deadly plague” shows he is still following the rhetoric of a ‘higher’ narrative; and his failure to either critique or even mention the abject failure of police to protect a public monument from brainless destruction was made worse still by his inability to give a very clear warning that any further such desecrations would be met with determined and implacable resistance.
To refer if I may to an old Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse parody of 1960s transatlantic disc jockeys, Boris is trying to be Nicey to Antifa’s Smashy. He must stop saying “I hear you” and start asking, “Just what the blue blithering fuck is it you want?”
I went in very hard three days ago in tackling Matthew Parris for his truly bitchy (and Remainer motivated) stream of bile aimed at the Prime Minister. I don’t regret it for a second, because I have zero respect for media critique where interests and vendettas are not declared. But Boris is not helping himself. There are twenty days to go before he must put his foot down and deny the blocist bad guys their extension of the Brexit process.
If he fails at that hurdle, I fear that Britain may become something close to ungovernable. Whether the Soros > Gates > NATO axis regards that as a victory remains to be seen.
Thank you for persevering with this longer than usual Slogpost.
The Slog 