Hyperbole around the assassination of the right wing Christian fundamentalist agitator Charlie James Kirk has made the removal of a footnote to the current populist chaos seem bigger than the sum of its parts. Perhaps in an embryonic form, this demonstrates the endemic unease about the ripples across our current social fabric.
As if waiting for the brink of some fascist apocalypse, this has been widely described as a “Reichstag” moment – a reference to the murky ignition of the German parliament building in 1933 that acted as the pretext for the Nazis rolling out the seizure of power via democratic Parliamentary instruments.
The rest, as they say being history. In this case, there is no replay. This is now and the lessons are not the product of cosplay voyeurism but a pulsing Zeitgeist cautionary tale. Whatever the motivation turns out to be, it inevitably feeds into the right’s strategy of tension to divide and rule.
The myth about Kirk at the moment is that he was speaking his beliefs and martyred on the crucible of free speech for doing so. This fascist fantasy / liberal apologia is not the case, though it uncomfortably demonstrates the uneasy alliance between these two capitalist expressions.
He’s been speaking his beliefs for 13 years. A juvenile debating school tirade of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and toxic masculinity masquerading as speaking truth to power. His targets, as those of the ideological populist Right he represents, are the most marginalised, excluded and vulnerable in US society. The diasporas of an atomised working class.
His hate speech has moved beyond the expression of his belief. Recently he’s been articulating, validating and fuelling the policy of social violence against minorities currently being enacted in the United States.
This makes Kirk not a dystopian visionary to disagree with, but a fascist street fighter. Trump’s Horst Wessel, an extinguished nazi thug lionised to inspire others.
His death’s utility to the reactionary project has been used with immediate effect – despite the lack of clarity re. motivation. His image used as a central rallying theme to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s “Unite the Kingdom” mobilisation of the right, the ignorant and the inarticulately frustrated on the streets of London.
Alarmingly attracting in excess of 100,000 people, most feeling understandably a great sense of disenfranchisement in the current era, they were addressed and incited by the world’s richest man, multi billionaire Elon Musk.
Channeling a chilling message through the convicted violent thug convening the rally, Musk said: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you…you either fight back or you die.” A warning perhaps to the meagre 5,000 to 10,000 counter demonstrators from ‘Stand Up to Racism’.
And where is the Labour government’s real anxiety about this demonstration? Where do they stand on the assault on minorities and the dispossessed? Why is it that they felt it necessary to deploy new dystopian facial recognition technology for the Notting Hill Carnival yet not for the largest far right demonstration in British history?
The liberals and their Trotskyoid-Leninite allies in Stand up to Racism want you to think this is a choice between totalitarianism and democracy. Your rights versus ‘their’ dictatorship. This is a lie. Liberal democracy took us to war and both want to crush us for power and profit. Two cheeks of the same arse!
Liberalism like Fascism wants and needs capitalism, having throughout history betrayed the working class if capitalism was under threat, (from Spain 1936 to the other 9/11 – the anniversary of Pinochet’s US sponsored militarised junta/fascist coup in Chile 1973, for example).
It is not the fascists (yet) locking us up for protesting genocide and their warfare state but a Labour government. This, the party of partition, strike breaking, numerous regressive immigration acts and the atom bomb. Our enemy and our focus is capital and state in all their forms and their relentless drive to war, be the general’s democrats or fascists.
The rise of the right at the moment measures the scale of the challenge to a weakened and as yet, fragmented working class. A weakness used for exploiting and manipulating fear and insecurity to preserve the agenda of the warfare state and its lust for profit.
Ultimately, only class unity through class struggle can put an end to the abuse of the far right and our inevitable annihilation at the hands of the warfare state – whatever its political hue.
While we may at times have nostalgia for the days gone by when generals, presidents, Kings and Parliaments would genuinely fear the retribution of ardent members of our class, the actions of one cannot replace the action of us all.
As revolutionists we know that demonstrative acts of propaganda by deed are no substitute for the mass action of a revolutionary working class. Changing the faces of the tyranny in power changes nothing and can easily reduce us to mere onlookers and passivity. Yet that does not mean that we hypocritically condemn.
We don’t slate our class; those exploited, repressed and now sometimes seriously living in fear of being targeted by violent nativist xenophobes, if they raise a smile when they see it as one of the bastards getting it. For whatever reason transpires.
AnarCom Network 