Smiling over spilt blood

It’s reassuring to know that there’s someone in the Conservative Party with a realistic take on foreign affairs.   If you haven’t already read Michael Gove’s piece in Friday’s Times  (£) “Iran is smiling at the blood spilt in Syria”  if you can’t access the Times online it’s also here , read it now.

Here’s a taster:

“For the Iranian regime, the West’s agreement to a nuclear deal was another sign of weakness, irresolution and short-termism. Iran will be free from any constraint after 15 years, and indeed it can prepare for the rapid acquisition of nuclear capability well before then. And all the time it can use, and has used, western danegeld to build up the armed forces now merrily slaughtering Syrian civilians. 

I strongly support any action to counter Iran’s advance and help Syria’s innocents but I fear that the moment of greatest opportunity passed in 2013. If Iran now wins its war in Syria it will turn its attentions more widely. It is already supporting the Houthi takeover of Yemen, fomenting unrest in majority-Shia Bahrain, funding Islamic State’s offshoot in the Sinai, extending its hold over Iraq’s political culture and seeking to radicalise Shia minorities in other states such as Saudi Arabia. Iran has rekindled its relationship with Hamas and will deploy Hezbollah to terrorise Israel from the bases that it will shortly control on the Lebanese and Syrian borders.”

A pile of nasty comments have appeared below the line.

Gove was on Dateline today. Craig has blogged it. Today’s elephant in the studio was to do with antisemitism. Lefties have suddenly noticed that a wave of overt antisemitism has been unleashed and, ignoring the jumbo sized reality (that  the most consistent antisemitism emanates from Islam and its sycophantic toadies) they accuse the alt-Right. In a massive case of group deflection and denial they have decided that the emergence of the alt-Right (Breitbart and Steve Bannon) has suddenly made it okay to be racist. (Okay, but only for  the far / alt-right.)

I don’t know if Steve Bannon is an actual antisemite or not, but the particular examples offered by those making the allegation seem flimsy to me. 

It’s almost as if the antisemitic lefties are facing a cognitively dissonant dilemma.  They’ve suddenly become aware that their own racist (antisemitic) tendency threatens their occupancy of the moral high ground - (they go lower, we go higher etc) so they flap their arms at the opposition furiously.

A "useful explainer" about the alt-right from the BBC World Service

Talking about Samira Ahmed, she tweeted a recommendation yesterday: 

She was talking about a programme called Boston Calling and the "useful explainer" came from Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker magazine, helped by BBC WS presenter Marco Werman. 

Mr Marantz is no fan of the alt-right. but, as he put it in The New Yorker recently, he has "spent much of this fall listening, both online and in person, to the connoisseurs of ugliness who call themselves the alt-right" and has written that, via the alt-right, "Trump connected to the segment of the population that was prepared to believe that racism was realism, misogyny was locker-room talk, inconvenient facts were media myths, and viciousness was the new normal."

Andrew Marantz

Here's a transcription of that BBC World Service interview:

Marco Werman: Here's something else that's become part of the Trumposphere - a right-wing political movement known as the alt-right. Now, when I first came across the word 'alt' I thought it was a weird word on my computer keyboard or a fringe music designation like 'alt-country' or 'alt-folk'. But 'alt-right'? That's a whole different thing. Andrew Marantz is a writer for The New Yorker magazine and lately he's been focusing on stories about the alt-right. So let's start with the description of what we call the alt-right today, Andrew, here in the US. How would you characterise it? Is it a movement?

Andrew Marantz: I think it's less an ideology than a sensibility. And it's actually, you know...It might not actually be as unlike alt-folk and alt-country as you might think actually, because it's not just more right than the right, it's not just more extreme, it's different - in the same way that alt-country is not just really country music, it's a different kind of country music. So this is a kind of right-wing thinking that does not really want to compromise on certain things - does not want to compromise on immigration or white nationalism or any number of intellectual positions that used to requires lots of sort of intricate compromises, and now the thinking is 'Let's just re-write the rules'. 

Marco Werman: So as far as being kind of uber-conservativism, the Anti-Defamation League defines the alt-right as people "who reject mainstream conservatism in favour of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy". Would you agree with that definition?

Andrew Marantz: I think there are certainly some people who are members of the alt-right who are, in some sense, the founding members of the alt-right who are openly white nationalist - or 'identitarian' they sometimes call themselves - who are interested in preserving European power and European American power. There are others who are just sort of chaos agents who, you know, could just take that or leave it but are, sort of, on board for other reasons. 

Marco Werman: Now we've got Steve Bannon, the head of the alt-right Breitbart media organisation, as Trump's chief strategist. How will that change the place the alt-right has had in the US?

Andrew Marantz: It will go from a completely ignorable fringe group to the absolute centre of the American media narrative. It's a complete overnight shift. 

Marco Werman

Marco Werman: Is the alt-right here in the US networked with similar groups in Europe?

Andrew Marantz: Oh yeah, very openly. I mean, Breitbart has an office in London. They're looking to open offices in Germany and France. Their front page, right after Trump got elected, was a piece by Geert Wilders, the Netherlands nationalist, saying, you know, this is a worldwide movement. So yeah, it's definitely networked, at least in Europe.

Marco Werman: Are they helping conservative groups here talk to conservative groups in Norway, for example?

Andrew Marantz: Er, well, you know, Donald Trump has said many times that he doesn't like to divulge too much of his strategy, so there are certain parts of the strategy that, you know, we don't know and must (hard to decipher) in the war room, but, yeah, there are definitely conversations happening across country lines. You know, Nigel Farage was on the stump campaigning for Trump in Mississippi. Geert Wilders, as I said, has openly voiced his support for Trump. Marine le Pen's people said they have been talking to Trump. Trump, for that matter, has said he's talking to Putin. So there's certainly communication going on both at the level of, you know, media strategy and at the level of just political strategy. 

Marco Werman: So if you had to kind of describe the differences between the far-right in Europe and the alt-right here, what would you say they are?

Andrew Marantz: Every country's different. I think a common thread is what they would call 'secure borders' and what a lot of people would call 'extreme nationalism' - shutting down immigration, deporting people who are already in your country, painting immigrants as a violent threat. You know, that's the kind of thing that is common to right-wing, neo-fascist movements throughout the world, and that's something we've seen even before Trump, you know, with Golden Dawn and Hungary. It's been happening in many places for some time. It's hard to say to what extent that is alt-right because the alt-right is really an American creation. But, you know, I think a lot of these groups use whatever memes happen to be convenient to their advantage.