Richard Seymour pictures what the BBC cannot picture.
– Once again, Ulster’s peace-loving bampots determined that such violence could only have been brought to Northern Ireland by brown-skinned interlopers. Never mind that the province has its own gory history of knife violence. Never mind that Ogilvie himself had previously been tortured by a gang linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force, the loyalist paramilitaries that murdered Catholics with the collusion of the British state during the “Troubles.”
– To an extent, as Séamas O’Reilly argues in the New Statesman, this is a new expression of old violence: loyalists in Northern Ireland have decades of experience in burning people out of their homes and violently policing community purity.
– Among all demographics in Northern Ireland, Catholic or Protestant, young or old, anti-immigrant racism is pervasive.
– Far from “two tier policing” disadvantaging whites, the evidence is that the same Hampshire constabulary that mistreated Henry Nowak has a very recent history of institutional racism
– Such pogroms are neither wholly coordinated nor entirely spontaneous. They are a form of distributed violence, with elements of top-down control and spontaneous social contagion. The pattern is that of the armed shitstorm, wherein the frenzies and loose associations of online contagions are transported into meatspace.
– In general, income inequality, regional neglect, and personal trajectories of decline are strongly linked to support for ethnic nationalism. If one wants to find “material conditions” conducive to aimless frustration and resentment, waiting to be orchestrated into violent cleansings, they are there.
– Yet there is an argument missing here. If the cause is deprivation and state failure, why are we not witnessing violent riots against austerity, stagnant wages, rising bills, and failed governments? Why are all of these riots precipitated by violent crime, and only violent crime committed by someone with brown skin? Why is the preoccupation with moral threat and why, when asked what they want, do rioters invariably say things like “immigrants out” rather than “wages and housing”? Why is ethnic purification the answer to social malaise? Why support an ethnonationalist project that is a conservative obstacle to the improvement of those material conditions? And if migration has become a cipher for social decay and disorder, how did that happen? On the other hand, why have millions of people whose lives were wrecked by capitalism, never joined or justified a pogrom? Why are those at the bottom often the leastsusceptible to ethnonationalist ideology?
– This racism, though justified as a response to “legitimate concerns” rising from the grassroots, is organized top down as part of a suite of authoritarian measures through which bourgeois politics manages the collapse of its legitimacy.
– While governments bend over backward to patronize and accommodate the racists, it encourages them to demand more. Suddenly it is no longer about numbers, but about “Islamists” running the country, or about a supposed “two tier state” said to be “against white people.”
– Even the way in which the state revises the meaning of racism, to include opposition to genocide, but not anti-migrant bigotry, clears a path for neonate fascism. Dystopia breeds dystopia.
– There is something else. For perpetrators, these pogroms are recreational. They offer an exciting, if transient, experience of being part of something bigger than oneself, and of political efficacy.
Pogromism is dangerously addictive for those it attracts: it offers short bursts of adventure and felt achievement, but it can’t satisfy. It could no more be placated with more racist violence or state sadism than a phobia about spiders could be soothed by the killing of more spiders. To keep going, it must escalate.
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