Reasons To Be Cheerful!

I've done it again. Despite forcing myself to spend at least a part of each day doing this 'relaxing' thing (in practice, mostly analysing the cackhanded post-human theorising of lots and lots of Battlestar Galactica and wanting to be as cool as Starbuck) I've worked my normally robust immune system down to the shell and am now holed up in bed shivering, feeling sorry for myself and drifting in and out of fever dreams in which a giant robot with the head of Nick Griffin chases me through central Brighton.

This morning, I was in Westminster to do an interview. The mood in parliament has ceased to be panic-stricken and is now subdued, depressed. The Election Results That Must Not Be Named and string of resignations have left the place stunned, and even the infamously costly tropical trees in the foyer look like they're expecting a chainsaw at any moment. So I've decided to remind myself and everyone patient enough to have read this far that not everything is utter pants. There are, in fact, some reasons to be cheerful.

1. Firstly and most importantly: justice, of a kind, for the Saro-Wiwa claimants against Shell. The oil company has agreed to pay millions of dollars of compensation to the families of nine environmental protestors executed by Nigerian troops in 1995, which dreadfully cynical anti-business Penny Red readers might interpret as a sign that there was sufficient evidence to prove that Shell had arranged for those men and women to be murdered and many others injured and mutilated. The case has been ongoing for over fourteen years, and many did not expect it to make it to the courts in New York, such were the obstacles thrown in its way. And although no verdict was reached, this really is a stunningly important precedent for international business law, reminding corporate giants that it's just not okay to shit all over people's lives because they happen to be poor and live somewhere rural. One year ago I sat in on a meeting in which Baroness Shruti Vadera scorned the idea of any international corporate justice system; today that noble goal just got a whole lot more achievable.

2. Yes, almost a million people voted for the BNP, and yes, that does make me bloody ashamed to be British. But it was only a tiny increase on their proportion of the vote in 2004, and look, look, right: today Nick Griffin got egged by anti-fascists outside the Commons, where, if you'll recall, he still doesn't actually have a seat. The racist scumbag was forced to abandon a press conference after the brave lads and lasses from Unite Against Fascism turned up with hearts full of hope and hands full of poultry produce. Nice one.

3.No, really. Watch the video. The BBC newsreader is loving it. Especially when he fumbles delicately over describing the 'er, thickset men...security, I think, is the word...that escort Nick Griffin wherever he goes. Yes, gosh, there are an awful lot of cameras here now, and you can see the eggs...' Gods bless Auntie Beeb.

4. Not everybody has slammed their laptop shut in disgust, and the blogosphere is doing us proud in these dark days. Great new initiatives include the Asian Women's Carnival, the second round of which is up today and makes for fascinating reading. Compass, too, are doing sterling work drawing our attention back to the important stuff: read Salma Yaqoob's cross-post to the Guardian on the New Left, and Carola Becker's clarion call to remind us why welfare reform is still a crucial campaigning topic - even if the Labour party are by now so ashamed of the plans that they've forced them off the schedule for the party conference in September.

5. Look. We live in a world where a sickly neonate leftist hack can pop across the road to the corner shop and buy a magical painkiller that simultaneously gets rid of the horrid aches and pains and stops her falling asleep; where said poorly journalista can munch on said painkiller in front of a high-speed internet portal allowing her access to more current information than she could ever possibly digest at the click of a button; where fresh tomato soup, soothing episodic science fiction and fan heaters can be had even on a startup writer's measly half-salary. We are living in the future. That really makes me happy.

6. No, look, isn't the future great? A hundred years ago I might have died of this flu. Now I'm enjoying a lovely half-day off work, work which incidentally I'm allowed to do because here and now young women are allowed to earn a wage, contribute to the world of media and citizenship, have some control over their reproductive capacity, enjoy sex, travel and education, and generally have options that aren't marriage, church and early death in childbirth. The future is stunningly fantastic. Also, they make computers the size of paperbacks. Apologies, I tend to get a little techno-utopian when I'm feverish.

That's as much as I can think of for now. Please comment and add your own reasons to be cheerful. Tell me about what you last enjoyed eating. Post funny pictures of cats who can't spell. Youtube yourself singing the shitty English lyrics to The Internationale whilst tearing up BNP pamphlets. Anything.

Feminism vs fascism: vote out the stupid!

There are going to be European elections soon, and the fascist British National Party are hoping to get an MEP elected. On top of the far-from-insignificantly fucking scary racism, xenophobia and homophobia that riddles their policy platform, the BNP are pushing a specifically and deliberately sexist agenda. Stopping these stupid bigots from gaining any more of a toehold in our nation is a feminist issue, too. Here’s why:

The BNP hate what they call, without a shred of irony, 'feminazis'. By this they seem to mean not just self-identified feminists but any woman who, in the words of a recent BNP candidate, is 'unnatural and vile... it is a strange kind of woman who would want to invest [her] energies into her job rather than into a man.' The BNP are specifically and explicitly AGAINST equal rights between men and women. Party leader Nick Griffin has described the very idea of gender equality as 'feminist poison'.

One of the first things they plan to do if they attain power is repeal the anonymity currently granted to rape victims, on the basis that "innocent men who are falsely accused of rape have their lives ruined while their lying accusers cannot even be named" (P7, BNP manifesto). And it doesn't stop there. Go on, read it for yourself in the BNP's white paper on family law, but have a little bag to hand to be sick in. You're going to need it.

This, lest we forget, is the same party which forwarded a senior London Assembly candidate who went on record saying that "rape is a myth...rape is simply sex, and women enjoy sex. To sugest that rape is a serious crime is like suggesting that force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence".

Have you ever been f0rce-fed chocolate cake, Mr Eriksen? Finallyfeminism101 has a perfect (but potentially triggering) debunking of this ugly reasoning.

Footage of a BNP spokesman and pimply racist wassock youth leader demonstrates the party's belief that the right of average workingmen in Leeds to "look at women wearing low-cut tops in the street", the right of men to objectify and consume the female body, is "part of our history - and more important than human rights". Never mind the rights of the women in question to wear what they want or, for that matter, to walk down that Leeds street without fear of harrassment. No, this is about our right to look at boobies, and damned if 'they' - whether 'they' are 'Islamists', 'foreigners' or 'feminazis' - are going to "take it away from us".

The BNP also want to reform family and tax law, bringing back tax credit schemes that would re-establish women as dependents of their husbands; introduce strictly fault-based divorce law "aimed at protecting the injured party instead of the current gender bias against women"; allow only married couples to benefit from artificial insemination; ban all homosexual partnership arrangements and, yes, deport all furriners.

*deep breath*

And in a shock move, the BNP is violently anti-choice.

Everyone's experience of suffering the effects of racism, sexism, homophobia, ablism or any form of prejudice is different. However, the idiot, schoolboy logic of fascists like the BNP throws up some interesting similarities in the reasoning between casual and not-so-casual racism, sexism and homophobia. It's the whipping-girl syndrome. It's the process whereby a gang of disenfranchised, angry and often fairly personally inadequate people cast about for any convenient, preferably marginalised group to blame for the fact that they, the (mostly) white, (mostly) middle-or-working class, (mostly) miserable (mostly) men, are in so much bloody pain. The BNP are angry, heartsick, dissatisfied, and terrified by how individually powerless they are. Easier by far to blame immigrants, Muslims or 'feminazis' than to turn and look at one's own culture and how it shapes you and works you over.

Watching the videos of speeches available on BNP live tv, what I felt to start with was amused. Then nervous. Then angry at the reams and reams of stupid lies coming out of these people like so much oily drool. But beyond that, I found myself...moved. Yes, genuinely moved. I felt the stuttering rage of these men like a punch to the solar plexus. I felt their bewilderment. I felt their utter incomprehension at what was happening to a world they were once sure of growing up to inherit. And I felt full of thick anger at the sheer stupidity of misdirecting those emotions towards a pointless bullying of other people who, guess what, haven't inherited it either. In 'Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man', feminist journalist Susan Faludi points out that

By the century's end, [there began] a search for someone to blame for the premature death of masculine promise. What began in the 1950s as an intemperate pursuit of Communists in the government, the schools, Hollywood...would eventually become a hunt for a shape-shifting enemy who could take the form of women at the office, or gays in the military, or young black men on the street, or illegal aliens on the border...but none of it would satisfy, because the world and the fight had changed. The real fight was between men on the same side...

Writing about feminism and equality movements often feels like one long game of 'we are not your problem'. The further we get from living memory of what life was really like for men and women of all races and classes before the civil rights movement in the US, before the women's movement, the more mythologised that time becomes. Certainly, old ways of life have been stripped away. Certainly, men in particular are suffering the loss of certain automatic loci of security and social status, and feeling their own disenfranchisement harder as a consequence. But if you or I asked even the most frothing BNP man if he genuinely thinks that he will be a happy, free, powerful, confident individual as soon as all the furriners and wimminz are sent back to their respective homes, I wonder what answer we'd get? Have they even bothered to think that far?

Louise Livesey, who broke this story at TheFWord.org and who is also a Hope Not Hate activist, reminds us that we have a chance to stop these bastards in their tracks by using our vote against the BNP:

So what’s the message - Ensure you are registered to vote and then go out and vote in the European and Local Elections on June 4th!

The European election voting system means that the BNP can only win if turnout is low. The fewer people that vote, the better the BNPs chances are of getting representatives elected because they can and will turn out their hardcore supporters, sensing a miasma of politically opportune apathy at the moment. So go and cast your vote - don’t let the BNP win through a willingness to not oppose them.

The BNP need only 9% of the vote to win a seat in the European Parliament. Please. Don't sit at home and let it happen. Vote them OUT. Not just because they're sexists, racists, homophobes, xenophobes and crashing red-faced bigots who are a disgrace to the actually quite good country we live in. Vote them out because they're stupid. They're stupid. They're idiots, idiots, crashing toe-sucking thickoes who shouldn't be running a website, much less a department in Brussels. Please, if you're a Brit, do your bit for your country and vote out the stupid.

Via the Ministry of Truth: 'British Wildcats' are a front for the BNP

That brilliant spark in the darkness of the blogosphere, MiniTrue, has done some digging and proved that the British Wildcats - the group massing behind the 'British Jobs for British Workers' union-rejected strikes going on across the UK this week - are an official or semi-official BNP-affiliated group.

The proof? Here.

The BNP aren't just infiltrating the strikes. They're claiming them for their own and touting themselves as organisers and future organisers.

The British public needs to know that fascists are organising, or claiming to organise, action in our name, in order to divert public anger away from the business leaders who bear responsibility for growing unemployment and onto innocent immigrant groups. Spread, propagate, disseminate: let the internet do what it's best at. Please. Put this on your blog, put it on facebook, tell your friends, your neighbors, your cats.

Because - sing along! - we'll never rest again until every Nazi dies.

Neo-nazis say: vote Obama

Esquire magazine, admittedly not always the most reliable of sources, has interviewed several prominent US career fascists, and amongst the drooling, gum munching racist filth it was today revealed that significant members are planning to vote for Barack Obama rather than his white, Republican opponent.

Rocky Suhayda, the Chairman of the American Nazi Party, said: 'White people are faced with either a negro, or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.'

And there's more!

Tom Metzger, the Director of White Aryan Resistance, said:'The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person--more dangerous than Bush...I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person.'

Please understand the difference between endorsing white supremacists' rhetoric, which I'm not doing, and giggling helplessly as the last rats leave the sinking McCain schooner and American politics goes through the looking glass. Combine this with possibly the worst assassination plot ever (two young men plan to buy/steal some guns, wear white tuxedos and drive in the general direction of Obama, somewhere, whilst shooting things and shouting, before getting shot by police. That was their plan. That was their whole plan.) and I think liberal American kiddies can sleep safe in their beds.

When we're done cackling, we should probably remind ourselves that on this side of the pond we're rather short on Charlie Chaplin fascists - instead we've got a highly organised neo-fascist faction, the BNP, with a stunning PR team and the guile to get out there knocking on doors and trying to win parliamentary influence, having already gained a seat on the London assembly. Just, yknow, saying.

Friday webcomic: Brittania 12/09/2008

Art by Withiel. Design and concept by Penny Red.