Vivienne Westwood and the messy, racist tensions in Punk

Was Punk Aware of Racism?

Westwood, who has just passed away, pioneered a counter-culture fashion and culture in the 1970s overwhelmingly centred on a young white English mainly working class community in the 1970s whose appetite and push for for rebellion was predicated on three things: 1, their alienation of a capitalist-colonial Britain in clear economic decline after the post-war boom, and an country and culture that was still very grey and traditional in that typically weird, awkward english manner; 2, the global space for rebellion opened-up primarily by the Vietnamese resistance and victories culminating in 1975, and 3, Black-rebellion especially but not solely in the USA which was also in considerable part radicalised by the Vietnamese communists. 

Westwood teamed-up with the opportunist businessman Malcolm Mclaren and opened up her clothes shop initially called SEX and then by the end of the 1970s was called World's End. Westwood wanted to further radicalise and contribute to this youth rebellion in culture through her art and fashion design, and she did so quite effectively. These attempts were encapsulated by her 'destroy' t-shirt which had a massive Nazi swastika on it with the word destroy and also a fainter upside down Christ on a cross and also a picture of Queen Elizabeth II. Clearly Westwood's design was arguing to destroy these things, as she explained her motivation more recently: "We hated the older generation and it wasn't young people, but old people we felt were responsible for the mismanagement and cruelty in the world still going on... To us, it was a way of saying to the older generation, 'We don't accept your values or your taboos.'" 

The problem with the t-shirt is that in the Punk scene and other related and overlapping cultural groups of Rock culture the symbol of Hitlerite Nazism were already evident: Peter Fonda in the 1966 film The Wild Angels wears an Nazi 'iron cross' around his neck; the Hell's Angel racist gang proudly display all kinds of nazi symbols. The Rolling Stones on 5th July 1969 at their Hyde Park concert had got the far-right Hell's Angels gang to be their 'security'. Into the 1970s, Punk culture in England proudly displayed symbols of Nazism. Did they do this to shock the conservative oldies that they blamed for their alienation? Yes. But let's look into this social context a little more, as London in the 1970s was not a city only of grey/white people. 

London had the largest concentrations of Black and Brown working class people in the country, areas like Southall, Peckham, Brixton, Whitechapel, Tottenham, Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill and other large swathes of the city had high and visible concentrations of Black and Asian communities. 1950s, '60s, '70s London going into the 1980s and even into the 1990s was a difficult place for our communities to live because of overt, vicious and intense racism on all levels. Racist street attacks and racist murders were frequent, open racist abuse by teachers, police and other people 'in authority' was just routine. Overt racism was the norm all the time on TV, too. 

Black and Brown people were largely excluded from access to cultural and musical activities that were open and welcoming to white people so we largely constructed our own in Reggae sound-system culture and dances, 'blues parties' which was when Black people organised their own dances often in residential homes; Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis etc organised their own 'welfare centres' where they also had their own concerts. Through all this we syncretised increasingly with each other and also more slowly with Rock and Punk etc. 

We were attacked a lot by racist white people from all the 'new' sub cultures of Teddy boys, Skinheads and Punks. These white sub-cultures however arguably only came about because they saw Black and Asian youth pioneer their own resistance including culturally which made a massive spectacle in the otherwise largely culturally-dead and boring white England. Our food was pungent, our dress and music was loud and proud and from time to time we would rise-up and smash-up our oppressors in the police and white civilian racists. WE opened up this space for rebellion globally and locally, and white people followed behind but failed to address the central issues of racism that existed for everyone to see everyday. 

In this context the emerging Punk movement just failed to give any understanding or respect to these social contexts and the experiences of their non-white neighbours. In their project to reject their parent's generation by use of the swastika, it should be reflected empathetically as to how Black and Brown communities may have felt about this. If we take the least-problematic cultural product of Westwood's 'destroy' t-shirt, from a few metres onwards the t-shirt looks like a massive emblazoned Nazi symbol. Our parents and grandparents and young people who have some understanding of the violent white supremacist racism that it represents were not made to feel more at ease by it, they would have felt at unease by it. And that's just unacceptable. The reality is that many other white punks would use racist iconography all over themselves. More recently a few months ago British rapper (a light-skinned Black brother) Slow-Thai, with the most anti-fascist of intentions, wore Westwood's 'destroy' t-shirt at a concert a few months back, but all anyone could see from the crowd was a big Nazi swastika leading Slow-Thai to apologise and reiterate it was meant to be an anti-fascist message. 

An on-going controversy which is instructive to these issues is the Oi/Punk concert on 3rd July 1981 in Southall. Southall through the 1960s like other parts of London became increasingly a town of racialised immigrants. The new mainly Indian Punjabi arrivals faced racism on all levels including by 1976 the racist murder of teenager Gurdip Chaggar. Then the Labour Government backed a meeting of the far-right National Front at Southall Town Hall and they instructed the police to conduct a vicious para-military operation on those resisting the racists by beating us and arresting hundreds and killing a local teacher Blair Peach. Indian children in the 1970s in Southall also faced a horrific 'bussing' abuse, whereby the authorities would bus children out of the area as white racists thought the sight of our children was sullying what their slowly disappearing middle class white Southall. After all this a bunch of Punk bands decided to have a concert at a pub at the Hayes-end of Southall high street in July 1981. Local Asian youth and their friends launch an attack on the pub where the white skinheads were having their event and burn the place down. July 1981 in Southall became a leading moment of Black resistance in Britain along with uprisings in Handsworth, Toxteth, St Pauls, Brixton, and other places.

To this day we have punks defending the concert and basically blaming the local Asian community and totally ignoring and erasing all the contexts of what was taking place for decades in that community.  This white racist arrogance and conceit reflects a large part (not the entire part!) of these white-dominated cultural scenes. Yes, there were a few Black and Asian skinheads in the venue as they were in that scene, but it was a scene that was totally and proactively ignorant of racism. It's like the odd Asian or Black person who joined Tommy Robinson's / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's English Defence League, yes there are a few non-white people in that milieu, but that social group is a racist white space and gives no respect to actual racist experiences and societal realities. 

Even what might appear to be a less racist space like the 1990s British Indie scene or the usa-based Grunge scene tended to be a white culturally defined space although by this point many Black and Brown people are delivering the scene as in the case of Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation, Fun>da>mental, State of Bengal (albeit the last three are fusions of Hip-Hop/Rap, Reggae and Rock and Punk with sounds from the Indian subcontinent), and also in the case of Grunge and related Punk / Hard Rock: The pioneers of Bad Brains (from 1974!), Kim Thayyil of Soundgarden, Fishbone, 24-7 Spyz, Chuck Mosely of Faith No More, Ray Ahn and Keish DaSilva of the Hard-Ons, and of course the trailblazing pioneer Zack De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine amongst many others. 

The Clash did perhaps more than most in the Punk scene to explicitly address anti-racist challenges head-on, especially with songs like Guns of Brixton and White Riot. And then Grove-based dread, activist and cultural figure Don Letts forms Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones who was previously in The Clash. The Clash on their 1983 album cover feature an iconic scene of the Notting Hill Uprising with Don Letts walking across a line of police. Interesting to note that Letts encouraged Bob Marley to look into the London Punk scene which inspires Bob Marley to make his song Punky Reggae Party with the lyrics including the following:"It's a punky reggae party

And it's tonight

It's a Punky Reggae Party

And it's alright

What did you say?

Protected by society

Treated with impunity

Protected by my dignity

I search for reality

...

"New wave, new craze

New wave, new phrase

I'm saying

The Wailers will be there

The Damned, The Jam, The Clash

Maytails will be there

Dr. Feelgood too

Ooh

No boring old farts, no boring old farts, no boring old farts

Will be there, singin'

...

"A bubble, a bubble

Looking for no trouble

But if you trouble, trouble

We'll give it to you double

Let me tell you

It takes a joyful sound

To make the world go round..."

However, because the white-dominated (racist on an either conceited-level with Oi/Punk/ Skinheads or 'lazy-racist' in the case of Indie and Grunge) cultures were largely excluding Black and Brown youth, these youth just got-on and made their own cultural musical movements that came to dominate the country and then the world in the form of Jungle Drum n Bass, and other genres. In hindsight and with the all-important principle that these spaces *should* have been always open to ALL youth of all backgrounds, and as such things only become a bit more healthy in these dynamics if Black and Brown youth take the lead. Black and Brown youth historically have always welcomed the participation of their white counterparts in their cultural spaces, but this has not been a reciprocal relationship.

The roots of Punk and Rock are also in Black music in Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Gospel and Folk. MC5 were one of the first hard rock primitive Punk bands who were closely associated with the Black Panther Party. Which makes all this racist conceit and ignorance all the more wrong and unethical. The instances of racism in alternative Rock genres through the 1980s and 1990s are frequent and sometimes shocking as in the example of Axl Rose's / Guns n Roses 1988 song One in A Million in which Roses mouths-off against 'faggots, immigrants, n****s' and Muslims. See here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/08/guns-n-roses-remove-song-homophobic-racist-language-one-million-reissue-album

In conclusion it's clear in the case of Westwood's attempts at radicalising the Punk scene through her 'destroy' t-shirt was definitely well-intentioned but in the absence of a concerted attempt at understanding and then navigating the leading-role of racism then mistakes will be made by even radical-minded people who try and attempt to contribute something to the struggle. Westwood herself went on a journey of becoming a celebrated figure of the establishment and collected her 'Order of the British Empire' from the Queen back in 1992. It's no surprise that she then said: "What I learnt from punk rock was that you don't change the establishment by attacking it." Clearly she thinks having become an establishment figure she can effect some 'change'. Whatever. Selling-out to the cause is nothing new, John Lydon from The Sex Pistols has turned, like many of his generation of the Punk scene, into a cliched gammon Brit nationalist. Mensi from the Angelic Upstarts, who even fronted a documentary for Anti-Fascist Action in the early 1990s, ends up an open sleazy racist in Thailand before his passing last year. None of this is to take away or distort Westwood's good intentions in the 1970s and her contributions to fashion and culture. That aside but connected: the bottom-line is that a community of people is either interested in understanding their place in society to fight oppressions from the system including racism, or they are not. It's just as simple as that. To be able to understand and traverse these complexities means pro-actively and appropriately keeping your doors wide open to anti-racist thinking, action and pro-active inclusivity to Black and Brown youth, and taking a lead from racialised communities amongst whom you will find those with understanding and experiences of the on-going fight against rising racism and fascism. 

Appears that Putin/Dugin Implicated in Fascist Coup in Germany

Red-Browners serve as the facilitators of fascism and fascism coups be it Jan 6th and now apparently Germany

In what some people might see as an extraordinary historic development but no surprise to anyone following the fascist project globally and specifically to Putin and Dugin's leadership of it, it seems that the German state and intelligence services have foiled plans for a fascist coup. They have conducted 135 raids in Austria, Italy and Germany. They have arrested some 25 people including of members of a far-right 'Citizens of the Reich' organisation that reports state has some 20,000 members, a senior members of the Putin/Dugin-backed Alternative for Germany Party (AFD), a Heinreich the 8th part of an old regional royal family in Germany, a Russian national called Vitalia B (more details to emerge about this) and a former AfD member of Germany's Bundestag, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann who was currently a serving judge and it is alleged she was being lined up as the new justice minister in the new government. Kevork Al-Massian, an Armenian heritage Dugin-paid operator was in the AFD. Was Kevork Almassian aware or involved in this the fascist coup? Berlin hosts a number of media platforms including Redfish (ran by our old comrade turned fascist collaborator and grifter Lizzie Phelan), Ruptly and other similar platforms. Socialism and anti-imperialism is not won through collaborating with, having dinner parties with, backing and promoting the far-right and their leadership. 

The pattern of fascism has become clearer and clearer, when it comes to Orban, Trump, Boris/Sunak Tories: the preferred approach of the modern fascist is to achieve power through official channels of the system of government albeit in a context where the far-right are in the ascendancy and then once having captured political power in the state to attempt to change and purge the organs of the state to turn them into a fascist state. Trump/Bannon's Jan 6th attempt at a coup is the model when the fascist project feels so emboldened that it attempts full fascist takeover. Germany is Europe's and the EU's most important state, Germany has made it clear to Putin that it won't be pressured by means of the Russian war of invasion, occupation and annexation of Ukraine. Germany turning fascist and pro-Putin would be a devastating development for the working class and oppressed people in Germany and globally. The outcomes of such a fascist coup are darker beyond our imagination.

This is a hugely important historic development and points to where history seems to be taking us currently: towards fascism brought to life by a global joint enterprise between particularly the Trump/Bannon-led western fascists and neo-nazis and the Putin/Dugin-led global leadership of far-right politics and forces. 

It's interesting to see the reaction of the western imperialist media to this coup attempt in Germany, currently at this time it's number EIGHT on the headlines on the colonial liberal Guardian news website. It is not seeing rolling coverage on the imperialist TV news media either. The western ruling classes in-general as well as the red-brown fascist collaborators don't really want to see this problem, the former because they are compromised and don't want to raise the alarm lest people take a militant anti-fascist approach that would radicalise socialist and anti-imperialist forces and raise their capacity, and the red-browner collaborators want to downplay the new fascism because they are committed to twisting as much fascism into 'socialism' as possible or to just attempt to bury the issues like Jan 6th and the broader global fascist project. 

The German state like many other western states (see France) is in a precarious state as increasing numbers of their masses want fascism. However, there is also clearly a conflict within the German state as to whether they should take a full fascist approach like many of the pro-MAGA ruling classes in the usa, or not. At the moment the German state seems to have decided that they are not going to tolerate a total fascist takeover. If the German state has been the force to stop a fascist coup, then this is highly significant. It doesn't make the German state a political entity for Black Communists etc to support, but at the same time we have to state things as they are and recognise the weakness of Black communities and the general class struggle that isn't really playing an actual anti-fascist role anywhere in the 'West'.

As we go forward it will be interesting to see what more comes out of the investigations and prosecutions of the German state against this attempted fascist coup. What was the role of the usa state and the British state, if any? Russian state spokesperson Peskov has stated: “This appears to be a German internal problem. There can be no question of any Russian interference,” which reminds one of the saying 'nothing is true until it's been officially denied'. Russia has the biggest agenda to gain out of a fascist coup in Germany led by a far-right movement with senior elements of its proxy AFD party there. 

As ever, smash the red-browners, smash fascism. The global class struggle of the black working classes will not be able to gain capacity until this global fascist project is challenged to its defeat. 

On the White Racist Attack on Dover Immigration Processing Centre

Further Far-Right Tory Weaponisation of War on New Migrants

The toxicity borne out of the growing and deepening crises of global capitalism continue to play-out amongst the Tories in Brexit Britain. This level of toxicity sees the strange situation whereby Black and Brown leading Tories in government are the promoters of this new fascism but also its targets especially in the instance of Rishi Sunak. Indian East African heritage Suella Braverman as Home Secretary attempts to shore up her own flimsy position by whipping-up the worst of Brit racism and racists and its support to her weaponisation of newly arrived migrants supported by Brit Prime Minister and Indian heritage Rishi Sunak who himself is the target of growing Tory and right-wing grassroots attacks as being a 'globalist' and for 'blocking Boris' return'. The constantly deepening war on migrants in Britain took a massive jump forward with the victory of the Brexit vote that opened-up a higher intensity of constant far-right racist anti-migrant media propaganda that has inspired the racist attack on a immigration processing centre last Sunday October 30th in Dover and the inhumane conditions at Manston processing centre.

Braverman's position as Home Sec is constantly on the verge of total collapse following shortly after her messy demise as Home Sec for 41 days under the most farcical Prime Ministerial rule of Liz Truss. Braverman seems utterly desperate to use the far right-wing culture war of using the most oppressed people in our society - newly arrived immigrant families who have come via small boats across the Channel  - to agitate mass support from the Tory and general far-right to attempt to perpetuate her political position as Home Sec. Braverman seems utterly desperate in trying to hold-on to her position and seems to rely purely on whipping up fascist fervour against migrants to enable herself which involved claiming there is an 'invasion' of England's shores by migrants. Using the term 'invasion' on the beaches of England seeks to plug into the mass racist nationalism harking back to the British war with Germany which the latter tried unsuccessfully to invade Britain. 

The concept of 'invasion' of migrants also skews the reality of the fact that the problem is the vicious anti-working class system that attacks us all rather than still relatively small numbers of people entering into this country. A basic position of humanity informs us that the British state is involved in a collective neo-colonialism around the world that continues to loot the wealth of labour and land and in this devastation some people refuse to be subjected to super-exploitation in the global south and instead decide to follow the looters to their own base being the 'West'. Migration is perhaps the central political issue of our times which is in the context of the fact that the world is dominated by western imperialism and its partners. Anyone who isn't a basic racist scumbag stands with the oppressed and their right to enter the colonial centre in a safe and supported manner. Any position against migrants means tying oneself to the pole of imperialist oppression and looting in a period of growing global fascism.

The racist attacker against the immigration processing centre in Dover was a 66yr old white man from 100 miles away in man in High Wycombe and the attacker has reportedly been investigated for child sex offences and threatened to kill himself while being questioned by police. The attacker committed suicide in a nearby garage after his attack on the immigration processing centre. The actual act of racist firebombing of an immigration centre is inspired directly out of the growing racist atmosphere and hysteria that the Tory leadership are committed to continuing to scapegoat migrant communities and attempt to divide people and distract from the growing working class anger around the cost of living crisis. 

The Tories have an open racist policy of 'hostile environment' for migrants as official policy since 2010 which is a kind of preemptive racist terror to deter people trying to even come here. Of course this isn't going to work as nearly everyone coming here is not going to be put off by any of the Tory actions against migrants. The most vicious elements of these racist policies are the attack on the Windrush migrants from the Caribbean, the threat to permanently expel migrants to Rwanda and running down immigration detention centres like the Napier army barracks and the outbreak of disease and massive overcrowding at Manston, which even chief inspector of prisons in Britain says the conditions there are unacceptable. 

These are openly fascist policies being promoted proudly by the Tories, but they, like so many other growing oppressions in our society, are not being countered by movements of people in protest. The left is failing to mobilise people against this despite some positive grassroots spontaneous actions in Kenmure Street, Glasgow last year and a few incidents in London which all resist attempts by the Home Office to kidnap people they deem 'illegal'. The direct action movement of Just Stop Oil shows that there are people willing to take risks from the left against the state, it's just that we don't have what we should have in a similar waves of people willing to disrupt and confront growing Tory fascism on issues such as the attacks on migrants and racist police brutality. The Tory weaponsation of migrants is being used as fascism always does for the most rapacious elements of the rich to attack and control us further so they can amass more wealth and power. Although largely absent at present, resistance on all levels is needed urgently to scupper their oppressive plans. 

When Gaddafi Gave Military Training to Black Australians and Maori

 During the 1980s the Libyan regime worked over-time to recruit activists in Western countries, including Australia, to Gaddafi’s so-called Islamic Brigades and terrorist movements with whom Tripoli was in sympathy, including Arafat’s PLO. Advertisements included a two-part call in the 9 March 1984 issue of An-Nahar (Sydney) for volunteers for the PLO and the Libyan Army. The advertisement was directed to female graduates, encouraging them to join Libyan military academies. There were also several cases of attempted radicalisation of Australian Aborigines, with individuals receiving paramilitary training in Libya.

...

Libya was also active in this period in attempting to radicalise New Zealand’s Maoris and supporting the New People’s Army in the Philippines. Representatives of all these groups would show up periodically in Libya. Gaddafi also turned his attention to Fiji, inviting an anti-nuclear group for a conference.

...

 Libya was also active in this period in attempting to radicalise New Zealand’s Maoris and supporting the New People’s Army in the Philippines.

[source]

Don't Be like Alexis Castillo, Don't Die for Red-Brown trash

Alexis Castillo was a Black man who was born in Colombia and spent his childhood in Spain. He seemed to have been involved in some left-wing activities there and he ends-up joining a pro-Russian militia in East Ukraine in circa 2014 when Russia attempted to claim the Donetsk area. It has been reported he has been killed allegedly by shelling, pro-Russian sources imply it was shelling by Kyiv forces.  

Some are glorifying that a Black migrant to Europe ends up dying for Putin's dirty supremacist war of invasion, occupation and annexation of another people's country, a war which is also a Nato proxy war that sees Western imperialism successfully bait Putin into a war of entrapment. We deplore and denounce this glorification for a number of reasons, not least that Putin's war is conducted totally by racist right-wing nationalist forces in an explicit manner. 

Lenin was a revolutionary against Russian chauvinism and all chauvinism and racism, he was on-point when it came to oppressed peoples and their path towards liberation. Lenin inspired many oppressed peoples including the Pan-Africanist pioneer Marcus Garvey who called Lenin the greatest man in the world, and rightly so. 

Putin's Ukraine war is the counter-opposite  of Lenin in the explicit words of Putin himself when he made the speech explaining his war on Ukraine: "Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy and can be rightfully called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine.” He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents, including Lenin’s harsh instructions regarding Donbass, which was actually shoved into Ukraine. And today the “grateful progeny” has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine."

This is not a war any Black person or any person should be invested in. The Ukrainians have been invaded and their land is being taken away in an overt act of colonialism by Putin, in a sense the Ukrainians have the moral high ground and it's understandable they get sympathy from people as invasion, occupation and colonial annexation is so immoral that it will garner some sympathies. However, no one should be going to fight on the Ukrainian side either as it is tainted by the strategic involvement of Nato. 

On Putin's side you have the total control of very racist, right-wing and often far-right nationalists who control Russia annexed areas of Ukraine and the Russian state itself. Putin has long openly promoted anti-Black and racist politics across the world and saw it fit kidnap and weaponise a young Black gay woman - Britney Griner - for his war strategies and culture war against those opposing white supremacy racism. 

Alexis Castillo must have noticed the endless senior and mass right-wing nationalist head jobs around him, did he share any of these reflections and observations with anyone? Did anyone encourage him to see that killing, injuring, maiming and dying for Putin's far-right project is perhaps something he should refrain from doing? We would be interested to hear from anyone who knew him if there were problems around this that he experienced or commented on. No one who goes to the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine can be unaware of the fact that it is controlled by racist and far-right oligarchs and nationalists unless they are drunk off the red-brown juice that befuddles their brains to mush.

Those that are glorifying a Black migrants death for the cause of racism and colonialism should perhaps go themselves to die for this cause if they consider it so glorious? Why aren't they engaging in organising themselves to die for their trashy sleazy racist leader? The fact is that those who are posturing on the tragic death of Alexis Castillo are committed to deceit, lies and manipulation in order to peddle their industry of fascist collaboration because their own grift and narcissism informs it. We call for the smashing of this racist racket. Pictured is a photo of leading British fascist in the vanguard of attacking migrants and especially Muslim communities Tommy Robinson / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon standing in the offices of what he considered his 'favourite news channel': Russia Today / RT. To encourage a Black migrant to Europe to fight and die for a cause whose leaders have and continue to demonise exactly such migrants and countless attacks on them by racists and racist states is an act of shameless racism. 

1919 Race Riots in Cardiff, Liverpool & East London (white racist mobs and resistance to them)

The first of the so-called race riots in British ports took place on Tyneside. Arab and Somali seamen are said to have settled in South Shields in the 1860s, and there were some West African and West Indian seamen in North Shields before the First World War. The war increased the area’s black population fourfold.4 In February 1919 some Arab seamen, all British subjects, having just paid £2 each to clear their union books, which had to be up to date before they could ship out, were then refused work. An official of the stewards’ and cooks’ union, J.B.Fye, incited a crowd of foreign white seamen against them; he was later convicted of using language likely to cause a breach of the peace. Fye hit one of the Arabs, who hit him back. The crowd chased the Arabs to Holborn, the district of South Shields where they lived. Here they were joined by some compatriots armed with revolvers, who fired warning shots over the heads of the at- tackers. The Arabs then turned the tables by chasing the crowd back to the shipping office, wrecking it pretty thoroughly, and beating up Fye and another union official. Army and navy patrols were called in and 12 Arabs were arrested. At Durham assizes, where the judge expressed some sympathy for them, three were acquitted, 12 were sentenced to three months’, and two to one month’s, hard labour. 

That was not however the feeling in south Wales, which was experiencing at the same time ‘one of the most vicious outbreaks of racial violence that has yet occurred in Britain’. During a week of anti-black rioting, three men were killed and dozens injured, and the damage caused to property cost Cardiff council over £3,000 to repair. The rioting ‘left a scar on the race relations of the city which took more than a generation to heal’.18The trouble began in Newport. On 6 June 1919 a crowd collected when a black man was alleged to have made an offensive remark to a white woman. One account said he put his arm round her and was attacked by a soldier. There was a fight in which many people were hurt, crowds started smashing the windows of black people’s homes, and the occupants defended themselves with pokers and staves and fired warning shots over their assailants’ heads. Two houses in George Street were wrecked and ransacked by a mob of several thousands that smashed every window, tore out the window-frames, threw bedding and furniture, including a ‘valuable piano’, into a nearby railway siding, and set fire to them. In Dolphin Street, Chinese laundries and a Greek-owned lodging house were wrecked, as were black people’s houses in Ruperra Street and a restaurant in Commercial Road owned by a black man named Delgrada. Twenty black and two white men were arrested. Plain-clothes and mounted police were drafted into the town, but it took a baton charge to disperse crowds making fresh attacks on George Street boarding-houses. ‘We are all one in Newport and mean to clear these niggers out’,one rioter told a reporter.The scene in Newport, said the South Wales Argus, looked like the aftermath of an air raid: ‘Windows are smashed, furniture in the front rooms has been wrecked, blood-stains are visible.’

On 11 June, at Cadoxton near Barry, a 30-year-old demobilized white soldier named Frederick Henry Longman, a dock labourer by trade, accosted a 45-year-old seaman from the French West Indies named Charles Emanuel with the words ‘Why don’t you go into your own street?’ then punched him on the forehead. Three other white men joined in, one of whom began hitting Emanuel on the back with a poker. Emanuel took out a clasp-knife and stabbed Longman, killing him instantly. Emanuel was chased by a large crowd and arrested with the knife still in his hand; he was later found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. After his arrest crowds gathered outside the police station, smashed the windows of black people’s homes, and ‘paraded the streets of Cadoxton looking for coloured men’ until the early hours of the morning. Next day, though extra police had been drafted in, there were attempts to wreck black people’s homes. 

Cardiff ’s black population had increased from about 700 on the eve of the war to about 3,000 in April 1919. About 1,200 of these were unemployed seamen. There were at least as many demobilized white soldiers in the city, most of them unskilled. On 11 June a brake containing black men and their white wives, returning from an excursion, attracted a large and hostile crowd. Soon a crowd of whites and a crowd of blacks were lined up on opposite sides of Canal Parade bridge. A reporter saw ‘a howling mob of young fellows and girls facing the blacks at about 100 yards distance’. With shouts of ‘Come on and set about them!’ the whites made a rush from the north side throwing stones, whereupon revolver shots came from the black crowd and a white soldier was wounded in the thigh. The whites pressed forward in an attempt to reach Bute Town, the narrow cluster of streets between the Glamorganshire Canal and the Taff Vale Railway where a large number of Cardiff ’s black citizens had their homes, but police managed to stop most of them.The chief constable’s report, issued a month later, blamed whites for the original incident. ‘If the crowd had overpowered the police and got through’, he wrote, ‘the result would have been disastrous, as the black population would probably have fought with desperation and inflicted great loss of life.’Some attackers did get into Bute Street, where they smashed the doors and windows of Arab-owned lodging-houses with sticks – one shop front was ‘smashed to matchwood’ – and where a woman was arrested for flourishing a razor and ‘vowing vengeance on “niggers”’. A house in Homfray Street was set on fire and gutted, and in Caroline Street a white man died after his throat was cut – by a black man, it was alleged, though no eyewitness ever came forward, no black man was found in the vicinity, and no one was ever charged with the crime. A house owned by black people at the corner of Morgan Street and Adam Street was ransacked. Police broke into a house in Hope Street and dragged out a black man with blood streaming from his head: ‘He was greeted by a howl from the crowd, and several kicks and punches were aimed at him.’ A second soon appeared, ‘in much the same condition as his compatriot’. Last to be brought out was ‘a white girl, whose mouth was bleeding’. A black man called Norman Roberts was admitted to hospital with a severe knife wound in the abdomen. The disturbances went on until around midnight. 

This was only the prelude to a much more determined and organized attack on Cardiff’s black community over the next few days. The whole of the city’s police force was concentrated in the cordoned-off area that The Times called ‘nigger town’; a company of the Welsh Regiment was secretly drafted into Cardiff and held in readiness; and the stipendiary magistrate was preparing to read the Riot Act. Contemporary reports make it clear that ‘Colonial soldiers’ (i.e. Australians) armed with rifles placed themselves at the head of the lynch mobs. ‘The methods adopted by the soldiers’, said one report, ‘were those of active service, and the men, after firing from the prone position upon the blacks, crawled back to safety.’ Some of these riflemen were in khaki or blue uniforms, others in mufti with medal ribbons. The Western Mail gave a vivid account of an attack on the former Princess Royal hotel in Millicent Street:Several Colonial soldiers present constituted themselves the ringleaders of the besieging party, which was largely made up of discharged soldiers . . .The door of the house was attacked and it was quickly burst in. Men crowded into the narrow hall and began to ascend the stairs . . .A revolver shot rang out, and with it the exclamation, ‘My God, I am hit!’ Five other shots quickly followed.The attackers dropped flat on their faces, crawling back and telling those behind to do the same. They held up a table as a shield, and the defenders backed to the wall of the room. ‘Once at close quarters, each of the surviving attackers took his man, and soon desperate struggles were in progress around the room.’ Meanwhile ‘others of the raiding party were . . . busily engaged in ransacking the premises. Kit-bags containing clothing were hastily abstracted, and there were willing “receivers” outside.’ After it had been looted the house was set on fire. It was in Millicent Street that 40-year-old John Donovan, wearing his Mons ribbon, was shot through the heart by A cornered Arab. Ibrahim Ismaa’il, a Somali seaman and poet who was living in Cardiff at this time, refers to the Millicent Street fighting in his remarkable autobiography, completed in 1928 and recently discovered by Dr Richard Pankhurst. A Warsangeli, from the eastern part of what was then the British Somaliland protectorate, Ismaa’il was between 18 and 23 years old and worked as a ship’s fireman. He and some companions had only just come to Cardiff:Shortly after our arrival the black people in Cardiff were at- tacked by crowds of white people .

A Warsangeli named ‘Abdi Langara had a boarding house in Millicent Street, right in the European part of the town. It is there that I used to have my dinner every day. ‘Abdi acted as a sort of agent for the Warsangeli, who left their money with him when they went to sea, and also had their letters sent to his place. As soon as the fight started, all the Warsangeli who were in Cardiff went to Millicent Street to defend ‘Abdi’s house in case it was attacked. But to me and to my best friend – who has since died in Mecca – they said: ‘You are too young to come, and you have never faced difficulties of this kind.’ We insisted, for we could not bear to stay away when our brothers were in danger of being killed, but our plea was of no avail . . .So we went to the Somali boarding house of Haadzi ‘Aali and there we waited, ready for an attack, as we expected that a crowd of white people might break in at any moment.In Millicent Street, the fight started at about 7:30 p.m. and lasted a fairly long time. Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end, the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived. One of them was left for dead in the front room and was later carried to the hospital where he recovered; some escaped through a neighbouring house and came to tell us the story of what had happened, the others gave themselves up to the police, and we did not see them for a long time. 

Crowds led by soldiers were surging from street to street wherever the cry of ‘blacks’ went up. One victim had a crowd of about 1,000 after him. The newspaper accounts are eloquent: ‘Always “the black man” was their quarry, and whenever one was rooted out by the police . . . the mob rushed upon him, and he got away with difficulty’ – amid cries of ‘Kill him!’ A black man spotted near the Wharf bridge was first insulted and then attacked by three whites, one of whom blew a whistle. This seemed to be an expected signal, because hundreds of persons rushed up from the neighbouring streets, including many women and girls, who had sticks and stones, and flung them at the unfortunate coloured man as they chased him along the street.Two men dragged out of their Bute Street house ‘fought desperately with frying pans and pokers’. A Somali priest, Hadji Mahomet, was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him to hide so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof, ‘and with true Eastern stoicism watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton’. A Malayan boarding-house in Bute Terrace was wrecked and the occupants, fleeing to the roof, were pelted with stones. In Homfray Street an Arab named Ali Abdul fired a revolver at his assailants; when he was arrested there were shouts of ‘Now we’ve got him!’ and ‘Lynch him!’ (Charged later with attempted murder, he ‘had some difficulty in walking into court owing to an injured leg, and he also bore evidence on his forehead of having received injuries’.) An Arab ‘caught and maltreated’ in Tredegar Street lay unconscious for a long time.One whom the lynch mob did succeed in killing, a young Arab named Mahommed Abdullah, died in hospital of a fractured skull after being savagely beaten in an attack on an Arab restaurant and boarding-house, used chiefly by Somalis, at 264 Bute Street. The mob charged down the street, threw stones into the building from both sides, and smashed the windows. Shots were fired from up- stairs. The mob surged in, and police arrived soon afterwards. 

The inquest on Abdullah could not decide whether he had been hit on the head with a chair leg or a police truncheon. Hundreds of black people attended his funeral. Murder charges against six white men were dropped for lack of evidence. Some former members of the British West Indies Regiment were daring enough to go about the streets with their uniforms on, which afforded them some protection. But not much. One black ex-serviceman, described in a local paper as ‘a well-set-up young fellow’, ‘proved to be a brave man, and in perfect English appealed to the crowd not to molest him, but this did not prevent him receiving several blows’ before police escorted him away. For the most part however, in the words of the Western Mail, ‘the efforts of the police were confined to keeping the white men from damaging property’. Property being more important than people, the community under siege had two choices. They could leave the city; or they could turn their ghetto into a fortress. A few did leave, on the afternoon of 13 June: a sad little procession of seamen with kit-bags on their backs and sticks in their hands, escorted by police and followed by jeering crowds. The majority chose to stay and, if need be, fight.As crowds gathered again that evening in St Mary Street, Custom House Street, The Hayes, and the top end of Bute Road, the black citizens of Loudoun Square, Maria Street, Sophia Street, and Angelina Street ‘established quietly determined means of self- protection’. They posted sentries, loaded their guns, and left no one in doubt of their mood, as a South Wales News reporter who got through the police cordon testified:The coloured men, while calm and collected, were well pre- pared for any attack, and had the mob from the city broken through the police cordon there would have been bloodshed on a big scale, and the attacking force would have suffered heavily . . . Hundreds of negroes were collected, but these were very peaceful, and were amicably discussing the situation among themselves. Nevertheless, they were in a determined mood, and ready to defend ‘our quarter of the city’ at all costs. They had posted sentries at each entrance to give notice of the approach of any hostile crowd . . . An old resident of Loudoun- square told me that he and his wife had watched the negroes loading revolvers. They made no secret of it . . . As my informant put it, ‘There is enough arms and ammunition among them to stock an arsenal.’ Long-term black residents said: ‘It will be hell let loose . . .if the mob comes into our streets . . . If we are unprotected from hooligan rioters who can blame us for trying to protect ourselves?’ An outstanding leader of Cardiff ’s black community had emerged in the shape of Dr Rufus Leicester Fennell. A West Indian medically trained in the United States, he had survived 314 days of trench warfare and had been wounded three times while serving in Mesopotamia, where he had attended thousands of British troops. Lacking British medical qualifications, he had been practising as a dentist in Pontypridd. When the rioting started in Cardiff he went there. 

Neil Evans, interviewing old people in Cardiff a few years ago, found that Fennell was remembered for his courage and intelligence: ‘During the riots he was said to have walked boldly into the centre of the town, despite warnings of the possible dire consequences of this action.’29 Aged 31, about six feet tall, well dressed and highly articulate, Fennell acted as the community’s spokesman in negotiations with the authorities; pressed the claims of those who wanted to be repatriated; told reporters ‘that it is absolutely necessary to grip the evil, and not to play with it’; and told one of several protest meetings held at the docks by West Indians, Somalis, Arabs, Egyptians, and ‘Portuguese subjects’ that it was their duty to stay within the law, but ‘if they did not protect their homes after remaining within the law they would be cowards, not men’.

By mid-September 600 black men had been repatriated. But not everyone involved wanted to be, and part of Cardiff ’s black population indignantly rejected the offer. What the chief constable, in a confidential report to Scotland Yard, called the ‘militant section’ insisted on their right as British subjects to get fair treatment and stay in the United Kingdom. And some of the militants, the chief constable added, ‘expressed their willingness to be repatriated but openly stated that it would only be for the object of creating racial feeling against members of the white race domiciled in their country’.32Two hundred of those who did want to be repatriated – Egyptians, Somalis, and Arabs – were sent to Plymouth by train, and Fennell went with them. It may have been Fennell who told the weekly paper John Bull how shamefully they were treated. They were penniless, but the tiny gratuity promised them was never paid. They were hungry, but were given nothing to eat on the journey. And when they went on board ship the staff were all off duty, the captain was asleep, and there was no food at all for them. ‘These coloured Britons had all done first-class war work’, commented John Bull, ‘yet they were treated worse than repatriated enemy aliens.’Soon afterwards Fennell was in London, complaining to MPs and the Home Office about the flaws in the repatriation process.

Some had been sent home before they were paid compensation for losses suffered in the riots; others, before receiving the back pay due to them. Fennell accused the Cardiff police of prejudice against black people and asked that police cease to supervise the departures. But the officials were unsympathetic. Soon after leaving the Home Office Fennell found himself under arrest on a trumped-up fraud charge. After being kept in custody in London for a while he came up in court in Cardiff on 22 July, accused of obtaining £2 by false pretences from Ahmed Ben Ahmed Demary, a boarding-house master. Fennell’s solicitor told the court that there was ‘a great deal at the back of the case’ and that ‘certain men were anxious to keep the accused in prison because of the way he had watched the interests of the coloured men’. The magistrate dismissed the charge. London was not spared sporadic outbreaks of anti-black – and anti-Chinese – rioting. On 16 April there was a ‘serious riot’ in Cable Street, Stepney. Shots were fired, a violent street fight took place, and several black seamen were injured. 

On 29 May a seaman named William Samuel, described by a Colonial Office civil servant as ‘a burly negro, with an aggressive manner’,wrote from the Sailors’Home in St Anne Street, Limehouse, to the colonial secretary, complaining of attacks on black men in the London streets: ‘a sargeant of police said to us last night, why; We want you niggers out of our country this is a white man’s country and not yours.’ That same evening large crowds gathered outside the Strangers’ Home in West India Dock Road, cat-calling and insulting every black person who appeared and trying to force their way in. There were similar scenes outside lodging-houses used by black seamen. Outside the St Anne Street sailors’ hostel 29-year-old John Martin, a Jamaican on four weeks’ leave from the Royal Navy, was seized by the head from behind, knocked down by men armed with sticks, and kicked in the mouth. Alleged to have fired a revolver towards the crowd, Martin was arrested with injuries to head and face, and charged with wounding a ship’s fireman. He was found not guilty. 

On 16 June a coffee-shop in Cable Street used by black people was stormed by a crowd that seized one of the customers and beat him. Next day there were disturbances in Poplar, where a gang attacked a house occupied by a Chinese family, cleared out the furniture, stacked it in the middle of the street, and set fire to it, causing a ‘huge blaze’ that gutted the house.40During that hot summer of 1919 black people in Britain were not only being attacked physically, in their homes and in the streets. They were attacked also with the pen by those who excused the aggressors by blaming their victims. The Manchester Guardian, for instance, blamed black people for daring to defend themselves against lynch mobs: ‘The quiet, apparently inoffensive, nigger becomes a demon when armed with revolver or razor.’ Above all, black men were blamed, as that Liverpool policeman had blamed them, for associating with white women. This explanation for the riots was advanced by a former British colonial administrator, Sir Ralph Williams, who had served in Bechuanaland and Barbados and had been governor of the Windward Islands in 1906–9. His recreation was ‘ceaseless travelling to far-away countries’, and when the riots reached their climax he wrote a letter to The Times summing up what he had learnt on his travels:To almost every white man and woman who has lived a life among coloured races, intimate association between black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror . . . It is an instinctive certainty that sexual relations between white women and coloured men revolt our very nature . . . What blame . . . to those white men who, seeing these conditions and loathing them, resort to violence? . . .We cannot forcibly repatriate British subjects of good character, but we can take such steps as will prevent the employment of an unusually large number of men of colour in our great shipping centres.

- Quoted from Staying Power, History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer

Rishi Sunak: Brown-skinned carrier for growing fascism that the fascist mob hates

Rishi Sunak is the embodiment of a white supremacy Brit racist stereotype of a particular kind of Indian boy / man. Not the Indian / South Asian kid who is ready to fight-back, who finds other resistance youth and cultures and integrates as quickly into that resistance culture ready to smack-back any racist white boy, ready to slap-back any racist teacher and face the suspension or school expulsion etc.

No. Here comes another kind of white supremacist colonial-created Indian boy, the nerdy geeky kid with the awkward body language and walk, top of his class in exams and grades, over-eager to please the teacher, the more white and rich and male the teacher the more crawling this Indian boy is to him. If that teacher abuses him and even makes fun of him in a racist manner, this particular Indian pupil wants the love of the white man even more, it doesn't matter what racist humiliation the system and people following it subjects him to, his desire to be white and have a career of riches enables him to eat-up the racist humiliation as the norm. 

The Indian boy is weak and snivelling, easy to bully and beat up. He takes the beating and goes off quietly. He knows there's more important things than standing up for his own humanity, there is the possibility of sitting next to the colonial white man and once he is there at the pinnacle of his success in life, he can finally put-out what he has internalised: a deep hatred for anyone poorer and darker than he. 

Rishi Sunak is at one time an East African Indian (Punjabi Hindu) heritage brown person, as well as one of the leading carriers of the British (brexit) type of growing white supremacy racism and fascism. Sunak is ready to eat-up the growing vicious racism against him only to try and prove to those who would love to lynch him Thomas Mair-style while shouting "britain first!" as the racist attacker hacks away at Sunak's face. 

Sunak is ready to publicly lick the hand of the man who has put him deeper into the clutches of the growing racist lynch-mob - Boris Johnson. Boris is the Trump of the fascist masses, the nasty sleazy woman abuser and child/pregnancy-denier/terminator hero of the Brit masses. 

Boris in his statement that he wasn't going for PM the other day openly sniped at Sunak basically blaming him for Boris' own inability and decision to attempt to become PM again. In so doing, Boris has exposed Sunak to his baying racist mob, and the fascist mob understood the cue perfectly and have been rabidly attacking Sunak as the "globalist", neo-nazi code for: 'loyal to the global Jewish bankers' who they argue control everything while far-right white-trash nationalist Vladimir Putin is the hero against the globalists! 

Sunak is the embodiment of that pathetic Brit racist stereotype, a racist stereotype that is seeing classic old 1970s Brit racism to rise again as in the meme about the footwear being left at the doorstep of 10 Downing Street that has been spread widely by people across the political spectrum including Nato culture lickspittle Mehdi Hasan.

Sunak's response that like typical Indian boy who thirsts for white supremacy responds to the fascist mob who want him dead by trying to love them more by means of sacrificing the working classes at their feet but especially the most marginalised sections of the working classes: the immigrant, refugee, 'without papers'. 

Sunak brings in a similar brown-skinned fascist nut job Cruella Braverman to lick the fascist mob with him in bringing back the 'Rwanda policy', one of the most fascist immigration policies we have seen since the Labour government in the late 1970s were conducting virginity tests on South Asian women at Heathrow Airport. Perhaps one shouldn't remind Sunak and Cruella of that lest to give them ideas.

Boris has played a good hand for himself: let the black and brown idiots take-up the poisoned chalice, let society collapse further by means of Tory race-class escalating wars, let things fall apart further and perhaps Boris will step-in later to save the day for Neo-Nazi Brexit Britain. 

The trade unions aren't a worry, for the day Sunak takes the position of PM the RMT leadership do their own fascist advocacy and posture by cancelling their strike on Nov 9 at the feet of Brit militarist colonialism. Public sector workers in unions are struggling to adequately feed and clothe their children, heat their homes, the RMT second sellout in as many months indicates there is deep collusion between the trade union leaders and the Brit intelligence services and Tory state.  Someone contact the Irish Republican parents and ancestors of Lynch and Dempsey to come and take these wayward scummy sellouts  to the proverbial dark alley to do what the unrepentant Fenian Bhoys would suggest. 

The Tories reflecting the system which they promote is in perpetual and deepening crises, but for the poorest and most exploited Black working classes have always lived in crises while for the ruling classes their riches continue to peak like at no other time in history. Considering the state of political affairs in the Tory community and its central growing racist anger against the new Black and Brown alliance of the PM and cabinet will be blamed by the fascist mob no matter how much Sunak & Co try to serve the fascist mob in the culture more with more fascism. All the while, the working class grassroots are sleeping as they are further crushed under it all.