Kanye West and Modern Fascism

Kanye West as a Strategic Facilitator to White Supremacy and Fascism

There's nothing especially new to Kanye West's open association and collaboration with modern fascism in the form of the Donald Trump-led movement. Long-gone is the old Kanye West who was at one point against the genesis of the growing fascist threat in the midst of the brutal 'war on terror' / 'shock and awe' years. In Sept 2nd 2005 Kanye West nervously but correctly denounced George Bush that 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' in the context of the structural and institutional racism to the Katrina disaster and relief measures. 

Kanye West is a very talented musician having helped to make further beautiful Hip-Hop music. He considers himself a genius, while we can all have our opinions to the extent of his creativity the point to be made here is that Kanye West clearly thinks of himself as genius who has failed to get the recognition he deserves and this dynamic has played upon his mental health in a negative and descending trajectory to say the least. His relationship with Kim Kardashian and its fall-out involving their children has added to his mental health challenges all in the context of his riches and the industry of narcissism and ego which is the upper echelons of the colonial entertainment industry. However, is his mental health really that bad to justify all of this utterly detestable postures? 

Frankly the combination of failed relationships (possibly involving children), frustration with one's career paths, feelings that one isn't respected by society coupled with the growing fascist global community since the 1990s is an extremely common one. Whole swathes global populations since children and young pepole in this last few decades have been infiltrated with far-right views through on-line gaming, the endless YouTube far-right conspiracy videos and its connected leading advocates like David Icke, Prison Planet/Alex Jones and others. 

Kanye West's descent into open fascist advocacy is common place amongst our peers. We have lacked effective anti-racist anti-fascist leaders and advocates for several years now which has created a growing fascist community which has great momentum and a very powerful world network and joint enterprise including Donald Trump, Brexiteers (especially the ERG group), leaders in Europe like Orban, Putin and others. 

Reflecting back to his comments on Bush and Katrina, Kanye said in April 2020 that: "'This white person didn’t do something for us'. That is stemmed in victim mentality ... Every day I have to look in the mirror like I’m Robert De Niro and tell myself, ‘You are not a slave.’". While Kanye is correct narrowly that no-one is a slave in the humanity-affirming sense or that no one can be solely defined as a slave, the comment is actually meant to deny historic white supremacy (including enslavement by colonisers) and its contemporary forms. 

Kanye doesn't, like many other oppressed people, want to be treated outside the framework of whiteness, but oppressed people don't have the power to just wish-away an objectively existing historic and current colonial system which still centrally uses white supremacy to facilitate its power and growing wealth from the labour and land of the world's oppressed and nature.

It seems instead of committing oneself in a collective struggle to counter act colonialism and white supremacy, Kanye has chosen to fold into modern fascism and seeks to benefit from it. Where else does Kanye have to go? Where is the modern movements and struggles anti-colonial black power struggles that Kanye can join that isn't attached to the other indirect wing of modern fascism - liberal imperialism? There isn't a place for him to go in this regards, it has to be constructed and someone like Kanye like everyone else in the establishment isn't going to be the one to lead it. This is a major crisis of our times. 

In his frustrations and narcissism Kanye has denied white supremacy and instead done the classic far-right trick to then scapegoat another group of people generally kept outside the framework of whiteness by colonialism: Jewish people. 

The establishment of the colonial settler state of Israel which has and continues to oppress and annex Palestinians and their land does not change the relationship of Jews to whiteness, what changes with the state of Israel in 1948 is a *Zionist* movement which has some influence amongst some Jews but like supremacism one has to totally resist right-wing/far-right naturalising or essentialising of an entire people who aren't in the realm of whiteness. Jews are an easy target for this for a number of reasons not least that due to their own oppression (something that is reflected in parts of the African heritage Black community) they are disproportionately represented in certain areas of society including the entertainment industry. 

The anti-Jewish comments and postures of Kanye and his denial of anti-Black racism are often in the framework of far-right / Neo-Nazi politics two sides of the same fascist coin: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years that sounds like a choice.”

Kanye's well publicised and televised meeting with Donald Trump in the White House was another depressing occasion when Kanye says of the event: "There was something about when I put this hat on [MAGA hat] it made me feel like Superman. "You [Donald Trump] made a Superman - that's my favourite superhero - you made a Superman cape for me."

Kanye in the depths of his own confusions and ego sees an empowerment in attaching himself to Donald Trump and his political project, the dynamics of subservience to the 'white man' is rather loud and clear here. A denial of Black peoples experience of current and historic racism, an attachment to the most infamous figure and leader of global rising fascism and the attacks on an 'other' in the form of Jews and according to Kanye the 'false BLM narratives'. The BLM movement has a heavy dose of colonial liberalism to in in-part in terms of its funding and the way it places itself in the politics in world, there *is* a legitimate critique to be made of it from a more radical perspective that comes out of the traditions of the 'Black radical tradition' / 'Black marxism' / 'third world socialism / black socialism' etc. The attack on BLM and 'woke' politics however is hegemonised (totally controlled more or less) currently by the growing fascist community and as such is no critique at all as it's a totally bad faith approach with an agenda of manipulation and deceit at the service of the most vicious capitalist global ruling classes. 

Reflecting Kanye's own cowardice to take responsibility for his own mistakes and to decide to look in the counter-opposite direction to the long standing black liberation movement and its liberation ideologies and the general ease by which people are slipping into the white supremacist fascist project the recent Kanye interview reflects something else about our times: too many are making excuses for people they know and their own descent into fascist madness. We have all experienced sitting together socially with friends and some mad fascist nonsense comes out of the mouths of one of our friends, perhaps against African people, or against Asian people, or against Jewish people or perhaps against more than one oppressed group of people. In these contexts often people allow the madness to pass without opposition or critical engagement. The same thing is happening here whereby people are making all kinds of twisted and nonsensical excuses for Kanye's sell out. If the root base of your stuff is bat-shit crazy fascism then everything else that might have a drop of truth in it is just materiel for the bat-shit crazy fascism. 

Cowardice and sellout at the feet of growing fascism is the buzz of our era. It's where people seem to want to be as they think everything else is just a bit of an effort not worth making for whatever cheap and expedient excuses they give themselves. A few of us will not submit, and like the sellouts we too can clearly see what's going on it's just that we aren't going to sellout to the mass collapse into global fascism and racism. Some of us know our traditions that lead to liberation, and we know what leads to our further oppression.

Ministry of African Propaganda interview the Malcolm X Movement

On South Asian Divisions in Leicester and Agendas of the Far-Right State and Orgs

For decades, Leicester built communal walls. Waves of immigrants made it more toxic

East Ham and Waltham Forest are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi. Each walled off their neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

The first petrol bomb was lobbed through the windows of the Shri Pragati Mandir in Birmingham’s inner-city area Sparkbrook. Fire burned through the carpet at the Krishna Temple in Coventry, and the doors of the Veda Temple run by the Vishva Hindu Parishad were damaged in a blaze. The Shri Krishna Temple in West Bromwich, among the largest in the UK, was gutted in a similar attack. A Hindu priest in Derby had a narrow escape when his temple was firebombed.

Earlier that week in December 1993, the Babri Masjid had been demolished by Hindu karsevaks.  Iqbal Sacranie—among the key figures in the anti-Salman Rushdie movement that exploded across England in 1988—alleged some Hindus in Bradford had distributed sweets. The wave of fire-bombings across the Midlands and North of England—the first attacks on religious institutions in England since Luftwaffe bombs tore apart historic churches in 1942—was meant as revenge.

The still-simmering Hindu-Muslim violence in Leicester, mainly pitting young ethnic-Gujarati Hindus against young Gujarati Muslims, judging by details so far released by the police, should provoke introspection on why homeland hatred casts such a dark shadow overseas. Toxic competition between Islamism and Hindutva has sharpened communal battle lines in England, but the tensions aren’t new. Thirty years ago, Hindus and Muslims exchanged petrol bombs in Blackburn after a cricket match—exactly as they have now done in Leicester.

Allah-o-Akbar, Jai Shri Ram: The aggressive displays of religious identity by young men in Leicester is the product of the self-segregation of England’s South Asian diaspora into ethnic-religious ghettos. The ghettoisation has ended up reproducing the dysfunctional Hindu-Muslim relationship in the homeland.

Leicester’s communal walls

Fifty years ago, following what he claimed were instructions from God given to him in a dream, dictator Idi Amin Dada ordered the mass expulsion of Uganda’s mainly Gujarati Indians. Within three months, some 50,000 people were forced to leave their homeland for the UK and Canada. Even the 8,000 or so Indians Amin’s laws theoretically allowed to remain were threatened by being dispatched to dig shambas, or vegetable gardens, or with mass deportation to the waste-lands of Karamoj.

Ever since the completion of the colonial trans-Uganda railway in 1902, the Gujaratis had come to occupy a critical position in the economy, selling consumer goods in the country and shipping out cotton and coffee to ports. The Indians earned great wealth, historian Vali Jamal has written, but their fortunes earned them the hatred of Ugandan Africans.

Leicester, which had grown a small East African Gujarati population through the 1960s, seemed an attractive destination. But the Labour-led city council, conscious of the sentiments of its White working-class constituency, proved less than welcoming. “In your own interests and those of your family,” an advertisement by the council bluntly proclaimed, “[do] not come to Leicester.”

The arrival of the Ugandan Gujaratis had been preceded by a deepening of racial fractures across the United Kingdom.  Enoch Powell, a prominent Conservative politician, prophesied in an inflammatory 1968 speech of the coming race war. Edward Heath, who became prime minister in 1970, promised to control immigration, but the far-Right grew steadily through the decade, culminating in pitched battles with police in 1977.

South Asian self-segregation

Even though Leicester now celebrates itself as the UK’s most diverse city, the self-image is deeply problematic. Educated, relatively-affluent Hindus immigrants from East Asia soon began to move out of the Highfields neighbourhood into the White working-class Belgrave. Belgrave Road—site of the so-called Golden Mile, where the recent clashes took place—rapidly grew into a thriving business hub. Working-class Highfields remained mired in poverty, as industrial Leicester imploded in the 1980s.

Three decades ago, scholars Deborah Phillips and Valerie Karn observed “the spatial polarisation of Hindus and Muslims in Leicester.” Each urban ward had evolved clusters around markers of religious identity, like temples and mosques.  The new enclaves, research on Gujarati immigrants by anthropologist Kenneth Hahlo showed, sometimes mirrored homeland divisions right down to the level of village and caste.

East African Hindu estate agents and solicitors grouped together to block other immigrants from buying into their new enclaves, Phillips and Karn wrote. The discrimination wasn’t one-way. “Muslims,” they recorded, “have been have been known to refuse council house offers because of the proximity of Hindu tenants.”

The same segregation process, scholar Apurba Kundu has observed, was evident elsewhere in the UK. East Ham and Waltham Forest in London are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi.  Each community grouped together as protection against White racism, but also walled-off its neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

Following 9/11, new conflicts emerged. Muslims registered consistently lower attainment in education and employment than other groups, official data showed. They blamed it on religious discrimination. Hindus and Sikhs complained that counter-terrorism programmes provided disproportionate funding for Muslim groups.

A toxic competition

Leicester’s complex demographics helped fuel communal competition. In 2001, some 15 per cent of the population was Hindu, and 11 per cent Muslim. In the 2011 census, the percentage of Hindus remained similar, and still does today. But the Muslim population share went up to 18.6 per cent, driven by the arrival of Somali and Kurdish immigrants. Immigrants of Indian origin remained the largest single block—28.3 per cent —and Gujarati the most-spoken language after English.  Islam and Hinduism, though, became competing categories for State patronage.

The competition, the work of scholar Sean McLoughlin shows, expressed itself in a surge in applications for the construction of religious sites in Leicester. Funding from the Leicester city council also ended up reinforcing particular constructions of identity—for example, Garba events—over trans-community projects, like youth football.

For the children of the diaspora, lacking the wider cultural context and linguistic affiliations of their parents, religious identity had become the principal marker of identity.

Large-scale proselytising activity by homeland fundamentalists tore through the diaspora in the coming decade. The now-internationally proscribed terrorist, Masood Azhar Alvi, visited the United Kingdom in 1993, lecturing at mosques on “jihad, its need, training and other related issues.” Large numbers young people from the UK travelled for training at jihad camps in Pakistan, up to the 7/7 bombings of London’s transport system.

The Hindu-nationalist movement also grew dramatically in the United Kingdom through this period, political scientist Chetan Bhatt has recorded.  Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) units—first founded overseas  by Jagdish Chandra Sharda in 1947, on a Kenya-bound ship—slowly grew across the United Kingdom. Long struggles to build Hindu temples, notably the Swaminarayan Mission in north London and Bhaktivedanta Manor at Letchmore Heath, helped mobilise a new generation of Hindu immigrants around faith.

Few of the leaders of South Asian communities understood the dangers of these divisions in the 1980s. Faced with race tensions in the 1970s, the British State had turned to multiculturalism—outsourcing its engagement with issues of identity to political contractors who gained their status from their communal constituency, not advocacy of the wider community. Instead of the political and social equality they were seeking, ethnic and religious minorities ended up getting institutional patronage to maintain their differences.

The violence in Leicester will empower no-one except White supremacists, who’ve long argued immigrants import their homeland conflicts. For decades, Leicester’s Gujarati immigrant families struggled to overcome their traumatic exodus from Uganda. Their children, blinded by hatreds they barely understand, seem determined to walk into the trap they’ve laid for themselves.

[source]

Trade union strike wave, Part II: The Historic TU Sellout and Chris Kaba Campaign Collapse

 Trade union strike wave, Part II 

- Another wave of strikes after the historic sellout

- Chris Kaba campaign collapse demoralises potential of Black resistance

After the unilateral undemocratic decision of the RMT, ASLEF, CWU leadership to call off strikes in respect to the monarchy and its handover, the trade union strikes have started-up again. The sellout of the strikes for the British monarchy is one of the most glaring sellouts of the left ever in history up there with the support of the 1stWW by Brit 'socialists' and the sellout of the nine-day 1926 General Strike and the year-long 1984 Miners Strike by the Labour Party and TUC (there's a hint as to which forces hold back the workers in collaboration with the ruling classes).

Knowing what happened with the sellout to the monarchy and then the strikes re-starting by the same sellout leadership leaves us in a strange position, we have no actual left in this country who has the capacity or ideological ability to take stock of what happened, popularise it and then act on it to improve the class struggle. Nevertheless, despite all these massive limitations it's a good thing not a bad thing that workers in trade unions are back mobilised in the streets and on picket lines. The problem is that people should clearly now know that they have a very corrupt sellout leadership who don't want a real fight against the tory state but want to protect their big salaries. The RMT sold-out the P&O dispute in front of everyone's faces and hardly anyone has said a thing. 

Why do Brit workers accept and cover-up the sellout culture of the TU leadership? Partially it's because they share the racism and brit nationalism and careerist grift of the TU leaders and union structures. Mick Lynch openly argued in favour of prioritising former brit soldiers as RMT members above anyone else in a recent interview (see here). Another reason so many are so accepting is because people are increasingly desperate for hope that something will work for them. So they suspend critical faculties and become a little religiously delusional to some extent. We had the same dynamic played-out so graphically and tragically in the Corbyn years. 

Due to the deep internalisation of Brit state racism and colonialism on the left the strike wave brings out the entire white left onto the protests and picket lines. Black and brown people are generally squeezed out of left culture, trade unions and organisations so you have a massive disproportionate presence of white people and an equally disproportionate absence of black and brown people in the strike wave movement. 

The black radical grassroots were and still are to a lesser extent ready to mobilise around the police shoot-to-kill of Chris Kaba. However, the state and counter-revolutionary forces mobilised and the campaign for Chris Kaba has basically ground to a halt with no process and strategy of street protests and mobilising the community. To add to that the Chris Kaba spokesperson Jefferson Bosela stated on a 'twitch' session hosted by Michael Morgan on Weds 28 Sept that he had a meeting with London Met Police chief Mark Rowley and that Rowley had asked Bosela to keep that meeting secret, Bosela said on the twitch event that he would respect Rowley's request for secrecy. To meet the chief of racist and misogynistic torturers, rapists and killers which is the London Met Police chief and have the meeting in secret and keep the details from the community is indicative of the current low-point in the campaign. 

Black and brown communities have no leadership, organisations and very little voices that can build towards the kind of movements we need to develop the entire working class struggle as only the most oppressed and militant workers can lead and fight and they are the Black and brown working classes. We have the most radical class struggle traditions in this country from William Cuffay and his leadership of the Chartists, through to oppressed Irish people radicalising the working class movement in Britain through to Black and Brown working class youth leading the resistance against the state especially in the uprisings from 1979 to 1981 and of course the Aug 2011 uprising across the country. 

Then there is the sorry and pathetic sight of small number of farright forces who use and abuse Hinduism and their mirror-opposites using and abusing Islam mobilised a few youths respectively against each other in Tommy Robinson and the Brit state's dream in Leicester with a similar stupid incident in Birmingham. South Asian communities are largely hostile to this nonsense and a small group of idiots supported by a few leftists especially the reactionary role of Amrit Wilson backing the far-right using and abusing Islam should not be seen to represent anyone but their own sectarian and opportunistic agendas. 

The collapse of the Chris Kaba campaign and the sectarian antics which play neatly into the agenda of Tommy Robinson /Brit state in Leicester and the inability of Black and Brown communities to mobilise against and way beyond this into a struggle for Black Power socialist struggle remains a challenge that we cannot yet fulfil. For our part we in the MXM are mobilising public in-person events after a hiatus of two years to discuss exactly these issues on Fri 28th Oct 630pm at the London Irish Centre in Camden with leading grassroots trade unionists and anti-colonial socialist fighters and organisers on the platform. 

MXM Public event: STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

Eventbrite event page

Facebook event page

*Fri 28th Oct 2022

630-830pm (Starting sharp at 630pm)

London Irish Centre, 

50-52 Camden Square, 

London NW1 9XB

£5 suggested entry

This event brings some of the most experienced speakers directly involved at the forefront of the class struggle exploring challenges of defending working class people under increasing attacks by the Tory state in the contexts of a growing far-right state, racism in the colonial capitalist global crises in general.

Speakers: 

Steve Hedley (former Assistant Gen Sec RMT Union)

Suresh Grover (The Monitoring Group, former Stephen Lawrence family campaign coordinator)

Glenroy Watson (Chair of RMT's 2023 Black & Ethnic Conference)

Arnie Hill (London Black Revs)

Chair: Malcolm X Movement

*This event will be audio-visually recorded for upload onto social media, please let the chair know if you do not wish to be recorded  

*We apologise that there are steps leading into the room

UK State Terrified Chris Kaba-related Black-led Uprising will Destroy its Hyper-Monarchist Narrative

 

UK State Terrified Chris Kaba-related Black-led Uprising will Destroy its Hyper-Monarchist Narrative

- State attempting to keep Chris Kaba campaign quiet and ineffective

- Importance of employing quick effective strategic grassroots direct-actions around #ChrisKaba justice campaign

- Grassroots Fenians led the way in political resistance to the Monarchy

- British left terrified of street-protest against Monarchy, instead hiding on (anti-)social media

The Queen died and immediately the Brit colonial-capitalist ruling classes sighed in profound relief that their labour lieutenants in the trade union leadership - CWU/Ward, RMT/Lynch/Gordon/Dempsey etc - actually turned out to be more loyal to the Monarchy than even the bourgeoisie! A historic sell-out in the working class trade union movement that exposed the Monarchist loyalty and leanings of those in the case of Lynch and Dempsey like to bandy around their apparent political affiliations with leading Irish republican socialist James Connolly. 

However, just as the sell-out was announced on the morning after Elizabeth Windsor's death the police shoot-to-kill of 24yr old Chris Kaba in Lambeth, South London set off again the pattern of state killing of a working class black youth and the resultant outpouring of grief, anger and determination of black and allied working class people seething with a sense of injustice and seeking to get that justice, many would like to in the words of Malcolm X to 'declare their/our right on this earth to for Chris Kaba and the Black community to be treated as a human being, to be respected as a human being, which we/they intend to bring into existence by any means necessary'. As soon as the colonial capitalist state removed one irritation: the strike wave, another wave of humanity asserted itself around the martyrdom of Chris Kaba.

The preparations for the death of Liz Windsor have been years in the making, a weaponisation of her death for the state to deepen its control over the great unwashed domestically and globally. In this context the possible uprising of the Black and poor youth at this time around Chris Kaba is something the state wants to avoid at all costs. The spectre of the 5-day national uprising after the shoot-to-kill of Mark Duggan on Aug 04 2011 haunts the ruling classes. 

The August 2011 Uprising haunts the state and lives-on as a glorious folk tale on the council estates across the country. Mark Duggan's 21yr old son Bandokay , a well-known rapper from the Broadwater Farm-based 'Original Farm Boys' crew/music group, often speaks about the uprisings on the many interviews on social media. These interviews and the music of OFB / Bandokay keeps the Uprising alive in the minds and imaginations of our youths beyond that which they hear in conversations amongst their older peers and family. Of course Broadwater Farm council estate itself is a militant symbol of Black working class-led resistance and victories against the British state especially due to the Uprising there on Oct 6 1984.

The state quickly announced a homicide investigation into the police officer who shot dead Chris Kaba. And then quickly announced that the officer was suspended (on full-pay, no doubt), angering his colleagues who threatened to hand in their weapons. Please do, thank you. Now it seems the family are imminently going to receive the body-cam footage. Labour Party MPs were quick to make statements pretending to be in synpathy with the Chris Kaba family while they daily collaborate with the state to deliver torture and death to our people on the council estates. Labour Party MP's were at the Chris Kaba protest in Whitehall where Diane Abbott was booed by Black youths for demanding everyone keeps everything peaceful. 

It is globally known that if your loved one is killed you go out with all your peoples and you make as much noise and destruction to show that the injustice will not go without resistance, hence the meaning of the slogan: no justice, no peace. The two-week Black-led uprising following the martyrdom of George Floyd is a case in point. There are alternatively many peaceful means by which the same aims can be met. 

The point of tactics is to achieve strategies of rallying further sections of the grassroots, building a broad united front, and to show the powers that be that we can apply direct pressure to ensure that they cannot oppress us without consequences to them. Such peaceful direction actions could be occupations and sit-ins of strategic institutions of the police, council etc; non-violent direct actions could be a on-going rolling hunger strike-tents at Brixton police station or New Scotland Yard; to peacefully block the transport system of the capital which is easily done with quite few people. With the imaginations of the grassroots many other things can be done. Ideally all tactics should be deployed all at once. 

The Chris Kaba justice campaign has grassroots backing to do so. The grassroots are ready for action but lack the leadership , determination themselves and organisations necessary for what we need to do for Chris Kaba and for everyone in defending them against further death and injury by the state, Realistically, it is probably unlikely that the grassroots will rise-up but we cannot but point to what decades, generations and centuries of our resistance informs us to do. We stand with our martyrs and ancestors whose sacrifices meant that we live today, there is no alternative to our advocacy.

The Sinn Fein leadership continue the political rationale of the British colonial 'good friday agreement' which means SF members have been strictly instructed to the nutty colonial monarchist sentiments of the unionist community in the occupied 6 counties. So heartbreaking and embarrassing to see SF leaders Alex Maskey and Michell O'Neil schmooze with king charles the turd and try to spin it as something positive for Irish people. 

This should not take away from the fact that the real opposition to the uk monarchy at the grassroots has been led by Irish Fenians / Irish Republicans. Be it the slogan against the king on Black Mountain by Belfast, the 'fuck your crown' banner drop by the Green Brigade in the stadium and the only street protest called against the monarchy in Belfast too. This current Brit monarchist hype is being used to further push away any chance of Scottish independence or Irish reunification. The monarchy doesn't just handover the break-up of its union and rule, it only does so when there is an escalating mass pressure from the colonised masses, of which currently there is an absence. 

While one might criticise the SF leadership, what SF have done in the past and still today are head and shoulders above the pathetic state of the British (colonial) left who have firmly stayed in their bedrooms looking nervously out of their windows into the real world while writing some posturing nonsense on social media. We say: fight by any means necessary for justice for Chris Kaba, against the racist anti-working class brutality of the brit state. As we go forward the global system of colonial-capitalism is going to deepen even further to terror which it is inflicting on workers and peasants the world over, this increasingly pressure on us including in Britain and Ireland will push all the oppressed to react. How and when, we don't know, but the science of repression and resistance is a universal and permanent one. 

Further watching:

What to do when the state kills one of us: 'Ultraviolence': https://vimeo.com/570908985

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

- Politics of Brit colonial partition of India alive and kicking in Leicester

- Brit state with people like Tommy Robinson/Yaxley Lennon see strategic successes in Leicester clashes

- Brit state employed and directed TR/Yaxley-Lennon/EDL etc to exactly achieve manipulation of far-right in Hindu community against all Muslims

- Brit state cultivated right-wing/far-right forces in ALL religious/national communities 

- Brit state has nurtured the divisions which we now see in the open in Leicester

- Divisions hide growing South Asian exploitative and parasitic landlords and employers

- Ideal optics for the racist & colonial Brit state to see brown youth fighting while Brit govt/NF/EDL etc all laugh at them/us

- Historic failure of secular-oriented radical grassroots communities to develop leadership amongst South Asian youth

[Pictured: Malcolm X talking to Bengalis in England / EDL racist provocations / Leicester police line and South Asian youth]

What a sorry state of affairs that some in the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities in Leicester are playing-out in September 2022 the old British colonial policy of encouraging their colonial victims to divide themselves around right-wing/even far-right frameworks of abusing religon to, not fight their common oppressor in the British colonial state, but against the 'other' who lives in the same conditions of poverty and racism. As we see the actual reach of the UK monarchy across the planet this is an that divisive forces in the Hindu and Muslim community are not acting independently of themselves as there is a much bigger and global power at play in all of this which are the ruling classes of the British state. 

The collapse into pathetic colonial divisions in the South Asian community is linked to the global balance of forces as manifest in the region with far-right religious movements developing in India with the BJP government and RSS, in Pakistan and other places in South Asia with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, return of the Afghan Taliban and similar movements, in Sri Lanka and Myanmar of right-wing nationalist manipulation of Buddhism, and in the Sikh community of the supremacist right-wing movement of 'Khalistan'. 

The forces of unity and socialism have dwindled decade by decade in South Asia and also in their diasporic communities in the 'west' including in England. The need for secular and atheistic movements that respect all religious cultures and faiths and correctly interpret them as a force for unity and solidarity are desperately needed, and we must remind people that only a secular and united movement of all peoples based primarily as working class racialised human beings is the only framework to push-back on these colonially-imposed divisions. In South Asia it is only the secular socialist, anti-caste, pro-tribal peoples, communist and other similar forces who have provided unity in struggle in previous generations and continues to do so. Although including many political forces, the recent victory of Indian Punjabi farmers show the continued ability of communist and socialist forces leading successful social struggles that benefit ALL communities of peasants from all religious backgrounds.  

The British state has in recent decades achieved the cultivation of right-wing forces in all these religious communities. The connections between the right-wing sectarians who use and abuse Hinduism in the BJP have high-level relations with the Tories and the Labour Party. The Tories especially see an affinity with the BJP as both are part of a global fascist revolution that facilitates their exploitation of the working classes so as to achieve their pursuit of fascsit power and capitalist exploitation of the masses. Vicious racist and former Tory Home Office minister Priti Patel calls BJP leader Modi "our dear friend" and praises his "dynamic leadership", indicating a joint enterprise and relationship between the senior Brit tories and their junior helpers in the BJP to achieve their common goals of scapegoating oppressed communities in order to pursue power, money and sexual exploitation. October 2017 saw RSS-supporting Tapan Ghosh of the National Council of Hindu Temples (NCHT) UK and Tory MP Bob Blackman meet Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon and a former BNP leader. Ghosh argued excitedly at the global fascist revolution at an event at the time in Parliament that  Modi, Trump and Putin had been "raising hopes amongst people against Islamic aggression".

British authorities have through a long policy of 'collusion' developed a caricature of Islam and Muslims in its open support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh and other similar factions in its policy of recrtuiting and grooming thousands of Muslims to join its foreign policy agendas in fighting in death squads in Libya, Syria, Iraq etc openly exposed in the Arab Sting years. Majid Freeman who is interfering in Leicester at the moment was a well-known recruiter for British interests in encouraging Muslims to join death squads in Syria and today he continues his divide and rule role for the state by inciting religious hatred against "Hindu mobs" similarly to the other oppurtunist - Mohammed Hijab who has advocated along explicitly bigoted lines in Leicester recently: "If they (Hindus) believe in reincarnation, what a humiliation of them to be reincarnated into some pathetic, weak, cowardly people like that." Of course Roshan Salih Muhammad, a long-standing promoter of violent sectarian divisions within the Muslim community, decides to positively platform people like Freeman on his sectarian grifting racket which is the  '5 pillars' platform, with the Brit intel services no-doubt nodding in satisfaction at these antics. One might have wondered how the British intelligence services were going to again deploy their actors in their collusion racket after the Arab Sting horror, and here we can see the useful role these fools are playing for the British state.

The British state has facilitated and directed the work of Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon since June 2007 in the forming of the English Defence League (EDL)  to attempt to manipulate Black and Hindu communities against the Muslim community playing upon many colonially-imposed divisions and tensions between the respective communities. Britain First, UKIP, and many other factions of the far-right play a similar role. The events in Leicester recently with masked-up youth from South Asia allowing themselves to be divided and fighting not the white racists, richest employers, landlords, monarchy and ruling classes that oppress them all, but to engage in fighting each other. When we are going deeper into a cost of living crisis and inflation amongst other capitalist crises the British ruling classes love to see some of us diverting from the real problems and real culprits of our conditions and attacking our neighbours that we have lived amongst for centuries in the homeland. Now in recent years and decades we leave the homeland to come here because the Brit white man stole everything from us and made us poor so we have left our ancestral homes and live in deprived areas on a grey, cold, depressing and unfriendly island. Fighting your neighbour for the benefit of the richest white man is not what our ancestors and our faiths inform us to do, rather they inform us to protect the oppressed and exploited and unite together to fight common oppressors. The racist state and its minions like the EDL are exactly designed to keep us divided and easy pickings for further poverty. 

The real terror and oppression impacting BOTH Hindu, Muslim and Sikh working class communities is institutional racist poverty. In a population of 357,394 some 40,000 children in Leicester live in poverty. When you get into areas of high concentrations of Black and Brown people like in the area of Spinney Hill Park where the recent divisive tensions have flared-up child poverty rockets to around 50%. This is in a city which has the highest population of non-white people in the country with self-defined white people being just over half of the population. In a survey a few years ago of hundreds of children and young people in the city one in five said they worried about having enough to eat every single day. Leicester, like so many migrant working class areas, has massive potential in terms of what people could be doing if they were to unite and pool their creativity into grassroots socialist action for the community. 

The reason why the grassroots in our community don't get together and deliver unity and happiness to each other is exactly because of the agendas of the British state that through its racist overt and covert actions keep us divided and depressed. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu working classes are all terribly exploited in factories and warehouses in the city, a scandal that made headline news for the manner in which people were terrorised by the employers at work through the covid pandemic. Look to the deprived neglected streets where unemployed young people struggling with mental health and lack of cultural, sports, social facilities take to the streets to numb the pain and hang-out socially, there is nothing but superficial differences between working class youths nominally from different heritages and faith communities. 

A massive issue that very few people are talking about is how these abusers of faith and religion to cause division and conflict are a cover for the growing class conflicts within the South Asian community. While we have to keep very clear that the 'greater enemy' who has power in and guide these divisive trends are the British authorities, at the same time there is a growing parasitic exploitative class (of South Asian heritage) who are running slum housing, oppressive employment practices and other forms of exploitation that prey on the poor. There are millions of people in this country who are new migrants and who are 'illegal' being paid down to £1 an hour and who go home to live in squalid overcrowded conditions. Due to their relatively extreme precarious situation they have no political voice and no-one to advocate for them in terms of a joint class struggle to resist these oppressions. The rise of tensions in Leicester are in the interests of the bigger white ruling classes of this country but also the more localised parasitic capitalist class of landlords and employers. These parasites can deflect from their own oppressive role and unjustly and manipulatively point fingers at poor, often young working class members of another faith group.   

Look at this historic context of these tensions going back generations to the anti-colonial struggle in undivided India. These communities came from traumatised ones from a land that was recently partitioned in 1947 whose architects also designed and delivered how Punjabis killed, raped and abudcuted 1 million of each other for the agenda of the British, as well as people of Kashmir being partitioned both peoples partitions continue to play into the colonalists aims of divide and rule. Another horrific war conducted by major nato-ally Islamabad/ (west) Pakistan conducting a supremacist genocidal war against those who won the independence of Bangladesh (formerly 'east Pakistan'') in December 1971. 

These communities then came over here to England and many of their first and second generation children united with each other and other Black people to fight-back police brutality and poverty from the 1960s until the early 1990s. The Pakistani Workers Association, Kala Tara and Asian Youth Movements, Indian Workers Associations of many factions (especially important was the leadership of Jagmohan Joshi in the IWA), Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) in Brixton and many other grassroots political formations saw South Asian communities unite with other Black people against racism. The challenge remains to develop this unity again on the basis of socialism and secularism that remains supportive of religious faith stripped of the manipulation, use and abuse by right-wing oppressive misogynists who use their corrupted religious opportunism for their own petty pursuit of power, money and often sexual abuse of women, girls and boys. 

United grassroots working class self-organisation is desperately needed in poor neglected Black and Brown communities like in Leicester and across the country in the Lancs, Birmingham, Hayes and Southall, Luton, Ilford, Peckham, East Ham, Tower Hamlets, St Pauls & Easton and many other communities. There are always tensions between nefarious operators manipulating religion backed by the Brit government, media, intelligence services and the far-right movements under their direction. Although Pakistan was a major colonial victory of division nonetheless the people of South Asia only became independent by means of relative unity and struggle, of mobilising the masses of poor on the basis of solidarity and collective action and organising which remain the challenges today. 

We need to see groups bringing ALL the flags of South Asian nations to fraternise together and celebrate unity, also when there is a big cricket match, or street celebrations for Eid/Vaisakhi/Diwali and independence days of the respective South Asian countries. The amplification of those that conduct racist divide and rule should not mean that we forget that there are many if not more people in our communities who want to see a unifying movement of all working class people to address our common issues. We should remember that there are a lot of young and older grassroots-oriented people who want to see a working class community unity and not this ugly nonsense whereby we become a laughing-stock for the NF/EDL and Tory state.

We encourage young people from South Asia to reject the politics of colonial racist divide and rule, to instead take a socialist interpretation and inspiration from all faiths revolutionary movements and ideologies that unite the oppressed and serve the oppressed towards united resistance against colonial-capitalism and for unity and socialism. We know there are a lot of young people in all oppressed communities who want this. We encourage you to form your own grassroots organisations. We also apologise that the socialist forces able to do this are so small and so many elder activists have failed their historic duties in creating effective projects and initiatives on the ground. 

We in the Malcolm X Movement and our friends have tried since 2014/2015 and continue to contribute to fulfilling these urgent challenges and tasks. Probably there are young South Asians on both sides of the clashes in Leicester who might be involved in the trade union 'strike wave' which would show the direct interest in unity-in-struggle that we all have as working class youth. Back in the homeland we have increasingly have everything to unite around and especially on the issues of overcoming right-wing movements of all kinds, the devastating impact of climate change which is increasingly migrant flows internally and to the 'west' (and the pro-migrant challenges that these flows bring), unliveable hot temperatures, floods all in the context of capitalist crises that brings further poverty around the 'cost of living crisis'. Unite and fight our common challenges and oppression, reject those who are using and abusing religion for their own and the British state' narrow and manipulative agendas. Reject TR/Yaxley Lennon's agenda becoming successful in our communities!

 

Further reading/listening:

Malcolm X - Message to the Grassroots - http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/grassroots.html

Black Panther Party Serve the People programs - https://youtu.be/Yspaulg-tSM + https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/hilliard-ed-the-black-panther-party-service-to-the-people-programs.pdf

Shaheed Bhagat Singh - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/index.htm

British state collusion with death squads in the Muslim world - https://danglazebrook.com/2017/05/26/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-part-one-with-sukant-chandan-2/

Southall Asian Youth Movement - https://youtu.be/OGWX233kHPg

Bradford 12: https://youtu.be/iLZ6Lbz6C04

Injustice (police killing of Black people) - https://vimeo.com/34633260