As ever, the ‘legitimate concerns’ brigade includes a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, such as Carole Malone, Matthew Goodwin, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. Notably, however, these ‘concerns’ aren’t about the ‘bread and butter’ issues that many leftists seem to think will defuse racist agitation: as I’ve said many times before, it isn’t the economy, stupid. What the two recent moral panics have in common is the coprological image of matter out of place: borders and boundaries eroding and people being were they ought not to be. As was proven when the court revealed that the suspect is a British minor and the riots persisted, it doesn’t matter what ‘the facts’ are: we can’t ‘fact-check’ this phenomenon into oblivion. It would be instructive to ask one of these ‘whiteness’ or ‘Englishness’ rioters what they would have done had the suspect been white. One of the rationalisations of rioters claiming not to be racist was that, because the suspect killed children, he was not properly British because killing children is against ‘British values’. But even if it was conceivable that they would still have rioted over a white man killing children, what would they have been rioting for? What would have been their targets? The local Wetherspoons?
It is worth considering how these rumours work historically. In 1919, in East St Louis, Illinois, a racist massacre was sparked by the false rumour that local black people were plotting to murder and rape thousands of whites. In Orléans in 1969, Jewish shops were attacked by rioters inflamed by the salacious story that Jewish merchants had been drugging female customers and selling them into slavery. In 2002, the unsubstantiated claim that Muslims had firebombed a train with Hindu pilgrims aboard became a pretext for a gruesome carnival of Islamophobic mass murder and rape. As Terry Ann Knopf documents in her history of racist rumours and riots in the United States, these mobilisations work precisely by dispensing with “secure standards of evidence”, because the detail and speculation regarding extraordinary events – actual or imagined – function as nodes around which an already active racist fantasy life congeals. In those circumstances of emergency, again real or perceived, official sources are actively distrusted (only sheeple trust the ‘mainstream media’), and unofficial ‘eyewitnesses’ or ‘experts’ attain momentarily sanctified status. Distortion at fourth hand becomes method. What matters is what the fantasy licenses, what it enables to happen. In this case, it allowed people to realise their revenge fantasies.
And yet, these movements are also entirely parasitic on the mainstream, official sources they distrust. How can it be, after all, that the BBC can report on one such Robinsonade as a “pro-British march” and repeatedly refer to rioters innocuously as “protesters” while on ITV Zahra Sultana is scorned by a white panel for bringing up Islamophobia and news anchors describe Muslims engaged in self-defence as “masked people shouting Allahu Akbar”? How can it be that, as in France, the political centre’s most plausibly ‘populist’ moments are those wherein it attempts to outflank the fascists on race, migration, and the ‘Muslim question’? Nothing could be more impeccably bourgeois and conformist in this day and age than the racial metaphysics of the far-right.
—Richard Seymour, Facebook post, 06 August 2024
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