‘Foreigners Like You Have No Right to Interfere’
- January 16, 2019
- by
- Matt
Just after the referendum in 2016, I got a message on this site from an anonymous fascist, which I wish I’d kept. The gist of it was that the people like me had lost, and that people like the writer were now going to take their country back.
The tone was quietly triumphant and determined, and it was clear that the writer saw the referendum as the beginning of something much bigger. I thought of that letter yesterday, when Professor Tanja Bueltmann posted the following screenshot on Twitter, listing the abuse that has been directed...
El Cid Meets Donald Trump: Fascism Returns to Spain
- January 10, 2019
- by
- Matt
Until recently Spain was something of an anomaly in the ‘new’ populist/far-right European politics. Despite – or perhaps because of – the recent memory of the Civil War and the decades of dictatorship, it had no explicitly far-right party of any influence.
Even the Partido Popular (PP), which swept up much of the post-Franco right, was...
The Resistible Rise of Saint Tommy
- June 13, 2018
- by
- Matt
It’s been a strange year for Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the English Defense League. In February, he was cited as a key influence on the Finsbury Mosque attacker, Darren Osbourne. At the end of March, he was banned from Twitter. In April, he led a ‘free speech’ demonstration in London that...
Corbyn’s Migrant Failure
- March 11, 2018
- by
- Matt
Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference last week has drawn a lot of criticism from the SNP and others, for appearing to attack and blame migrants for the UK’s economic woes. Corbyn’s defenders have naturally rejected these charges. Paul Mason has dismissed the criticisms of Corbyn to the ‘pro-SNP media’, whatever that...
ISIS, Trolls, and the Language of Hate
- January 02, 2017
- by
- Matt
In a powerful New Year’s video for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Kemal Pervanic, a Bosnian Muslim, remembers how he ended up being interrogated and tortured in a concentration camp by his favourite teacher during the Yugoslav Wars. He asks his viewers to learn the lessons of history, and bear in...
2016: The Year of Living Fearfully
- December 28, 2016
- by
- Matt
There was a time – it seems many years ago now – when governments in the Western world told their populations that things were getting better, and that they were helping them to get better. In those days voters by and large believed them, and made their political choices from amongst a cluster...
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