Tuesday 12 May 2009

The Myth of Fascist Drift

The current MP's expenses scandal seems to have brought yet another "crisis of confidence" in the main political parties according to Fleet Street (even though Peter Oborne pointed this out two years previously). As noted in the Guardian yesterday, voters wishing to punish the guilty have various choices open to them - voting for their opponents which means potentially electing candidates that don't reflect your concerns, calling for deselection which could involve the MP staying on as an independent, or withholding the vote altogether and thus allowing fringe parties to benefit.

Every time these crises occur, there is always the scare story that the BNP will benefit from voter apathy on the ironic basis that fascists are more likely to exercise their democratic rights. In the 2005 election, it did increase its vote - from 47,129 to 192,850 votes. Whilst this is a four-fold increase, it represents a tiny fraction of the total votes cast. Even in the Barking & Dagenham area, where the party scored their biggest triumph, they only polled 16.89% of the vote.

Various MP's have stated that ignoring the voices of labour supporters in deprived areas may lead to increased support for far-right parties. In the areas where BNP support is highest we can see various factors at play - extreme deprivation, struggle for public resources and an influx of different cultures that may not integrate with each other vying for their share. Rather than address the root causes of the problem (which would obviously involve budgeting for more social housing, creating employment opportunities, etc), the fear of working class voters turning towards racist parties as a protest against being passed over by mainstream politics is used as a warning by the main parties to continue voting for the main parties. It's never mentioned that other parties may also benefit from dissatisfaction with the narrow focus of the homogenous centre-right.

Historically, it's always been the working class that lived in the areas where new immigrants flocked to, and as such have generally been the first to live alongside and integrate with them. If we look at the majority of white, working class culture in the last 40 or so years -from rock steady and the early skinheads to rave onwards - its clear that the influence of new cultures were originally adopted by those living in that environment and filtered out to the suburbs much later.

The idea that there is a latent racism just waiting to rear its head in times of hardship is a myth - people either are or aren't, and I'd say that people either stay the former or move to the latter as new cultures are experienced and become part of the local "in group". In terms of representation, how multicultural are the middle-classes of the suburbs exactly anyway?

People competing for scarce resources are more likely to perceive unfairness, disenfranchisement and in desperate times are more likely to believe those resources should be prioritized for existing inhabitants. If the main thrust of political debate involves appealing to the voters in Middle England swing constituencies, grievances outside of that scope are unlikely to be heard and so people will feel disconnected from the democratic process. It doesn't necessarily follow that they will switch to the BNP though. They've just become the latest "savages" that fall to barbarism without their enlightened leaders to steal their goods and then teach them their superior morality.

Remind me again who's the biggest threat to race relations in this country - embittered east end bigots or those playing with fireworks in the Middle East?

Saturday 9 May 2009

Angel of Birth

"There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins."

"In the testimonies we collected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him. Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood."


These are the children of Candido Godoi in Brazil, where the probability of giving birth to twins is around 1 in 5, or 16 times more than the 1 in 80 chance found in the general population. So who was this cell-splitting, fertility guru and what's his secret?

Take a closer look at the picture - awful lot of blonde hair and blue eyes donchathink? And why would he be so interested in getting women to spawn twins? Does sound eerily familiar this Boy From Brazil doesn't he?

This article suggests that Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's infamous Angel of Death, was continuing his plan to repopulate the Hitler Youth for some time after it was fashionable, starting with his first appearance in the town in 1963. In the two years before the end of the Second World War, he had picked out all of the available twins as they arrived at the camp and performed some cruel but seemingly pointless experiments on them (which you can read about here you sick fucks). Working under the name Rudolph Weiss (german for white, naturally) he worked as a travelling medic (lucky he didn't confuse his nomadic alias with a gypsy and gas himself).

However, after searching through google and finding the exact same story copied more or less word for word from the press release on most of the hits, an alternative, non-nazi, yet luckily just as titillating explanation has been found - the abundance of arytwins is down to a recessive gene passed down through the town's denizens being inbreeders extraordinaire -

" The high number of Aryan twins, meanwhile, probably has more to do with the town’s German ancestry than with any genetic manipulation on Mengele’s part. “I don’t think Mengele would have the knowledge, not to mention the means, to engender the rise in twin births in this community,” Matte says. “It’s noteworthy that twin births occurred there in almost every time period, even in the 1990s, so what kind of long-lasting manipulation could he have perpetrated?"

So much for the master race. So how come even after looking at the photos and seeing that the youngest twins look about 3, yet would be almost 30 if they were born in 1979 when Mengele encountered his final solution, did no-one but historynet and me mention this?

Is the level of fact-checking so poor in today's journalism that once the magic word "NAZI" was introduced that nobody even bothered looking for an alternative explanation, the "hang-on-a-minute..." feeling that something wasn't quite right here? It's lazy journalism and having missed out on the added inbreeding angle that the UK press was so appalled by (yet found so very, very newsworthy) during the Fritzl case they must be kicking themselves. If the UK press were an Old Testament book, they'd be Doucheronomy.

More on the world of churnalism here if you're interested.

Oh, found out the Microsoft Wingdings/NYC "accidental" anti-semitic faux pas at Snopes.com just to keep the nazi theme going for a bit of potential ad money. Not quite sure what all the fuss was about really...


Edit: Hmmm, seems like it became a smiley sticking its tongue out since I stuck the wingdingthing up. Some sort of Microsoft revisionism going on perhaps...

Thursday 7 May 2009

Bedlam Revisited

"In the 18th century people used to go to Bedlam to stare at the lunatics. For a penny one could peer into their cells, view the freaks of the "show of Bethlehem" and laugh at their antics, generally of a sexual nature or violent fights. Entry was free on the first Tuesday of the month. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000 such visits."

The use of the mentally ill for entertainment purposes has fallen out of favour in recent years due in part to competitive self-righteousness amongst the "caring" ranks in their empathy Olympics ("loves kittens, hates frightfulness"), improvements in psychiatric drug treatments, and razor-wire and other security measures to keep "us" from "them" (or "them" from "them", or "them" from "those" if the psychoses manifest in singing teapot form).

This seems a shame because the anecdotes that stem from this can be inspired. A friend of mine who's recently been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, recounted how he believed that he was the subject of a reality tv show and how he "won" by guessing correctly what the audience had requested him do that week. He told how a map of Iraq on the wall seemed to metamorphose into his dad having anal sex with his object of desire at that time - not exactly something that inspires sweet dreams.

Increased drinking and isolation then led him to consider himself some sort of ubermensch or "Alpha" (the ranks all seemed to follow greek letters with some sort of class-based correllation) and this ultimately led to an ill-fated arson attempt on his flat (put out due to sudden pangs of consideration for his neighbours) and finding himself sectioned for the next three months, not before ringing 118 118 to explain the situation to the bewildered operative that told him he should maybe ring the fire brigade instead.

Whilst inside, he made friends with a fellow sufferer who believed he was God, and as my acquaintance was in his "Digital Jesus" phase at the time, they got on like a house on fire. There was a war in alterna-heaven over "divinity issues" though and they soon parted company. He's now recovering and writing to Richard Dawkins with his briefer efforts at disproving God, and has lost his paranoid fear of all politicians by now just considering them all to be in the positions they're in through possessing higher intellects and better leadership skills than the rest of the populace. I'm not convinced by this cure to be honest...

Now the thing is he actually volunteers this information to more or less anyone that so much as asks "so, what have you been up to lately?", often to people that he's just met up with. None of this "just between you and me doc" coyness - say it loud, he's mad and he's proud.

In comparison, the twatter-chatter of the drearily sane cannot compete. The motivations of most people for status, affirmation, sex, knowledge, company, or anything to distract them from the mundanity of their meat-machine existence are all too blindingly obvious and bear no great surprises. Indeed I often wonder whether the inanity of their prescence is what triggered this move to more exciting neural pastures rather than having to listen to their work colleague's weekly retelling of how drunk she got that weekend.

Having recently spotted another schizophrenic I knew chatting to galactic cops in pursuit of illegal space aliens living in a nearby apartment complex, I couldn't help but get the feeling that maybe he had actually made better life choices than myself - he has this vivid fantasy, and I have to listen to pretty much the same tales of pets and children and desperate attempts to fill quiet moments with forced conversation.

The scouser in the park that seemed to be making political speeches to invisible crowds and trying on people's hats without any concern for their permission, the man trying to start a fight with a bus-stop, the woman who stored 20p's in her cho-cha until she'd grin and release her jackpot - are these people not actually hypersane when set against the control group?

Whatever is going on in their heads, I'm convinced it's considerably more involved than the cavalcade of shit-drizzle that passes for entertainment these days.

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Smash Sumthin'

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" (attributed to Albert Einstein)

Heralded as a "great success" by the organisers, Smash EDO, the world of international capitalism and their chums the arms trade seemed to be "business as usual" at start of work after the Mayday jaunt in Brighton.

As can be seen, the police adopted their usual "softly softly" approach in their rather fetching Altern-8 outfits, whilst some of the more "pro-active" protestors protested about the amount of force the rozzers used trying to stop them terrifying children quietly munching on Happy Meals in Maccy-D's. We were told by megaphoned, bicycle guy that MacDonalds invests in EDO/ITT and are thus very bad people which makes it ok to attack them (instead of say KFC or Burger King who have shares in shetland ponies and kittens).

A team of beach anarchists later staged a rooftop protest at the cafe on Palace Pier, presumably because it's owned by "the man" (not the adversary of the Black Panthers, the other man) and showed him they didn't give a Bel Biv Devoe for his bourgeios ways by spraying paint on the totalitarian coffee house and getting arrested. Smash the state indeed, right on bredrin.

Up on Ditchling Road, some shenanigans were had as a pink, de-motorised car (very eco-warrior), presumably to be used as a battering ram was let loose, almost knocking over several revellers as it hurtled down the street before crashing into a wall. A big shouting match between angry, grey-haired man ("you could'ave fuckin' killed a kid, you fuckin' wanker"), and unsurprisingly posh anarchist who seemed at a bit of a loss to explain the ingratitude of the very proles he had come to liberate from the machinations of the evil corporations. With some hint of irony, Sony recording artists Rage Against the Machine soundtracked the sorry misunderstanding. The car was pulled back up the hill before the pacifists again lost control and crashed into a car that was parked round the corner. It is still unconfirmed whether the car was a mechanism of oppression or just a common or garden planet-killer.

As the day went on, the police indulged in formation dancing with a clearly appreciative german porn star

Six vans and a phalanx of police blocked off the offices of RBS on Preston Park, which the protestors mostly ignored so that they could drink beer on the swings. Realising they were now the other side of town to the Evil Merchants of Death, some wondered whether it might be better to continue northward and declare war on Burgess Hill. This was seen as a good idea by everyone that had been there.

I spoke to an older gent in the park who appeared bemused by the festivities and said it reminded him of the old ruckuses between the mods and rockers in years gone by, but lacking sartorial niceties and with less sense of purpose.

As mentioned in the Indymedia comments section -

"A very inspiring day, and a bloody nose to the forces of oppression!"

Indeed. I'll leave you with a picture of some horses in legwarmers