The phrase "white working class" was popularised by the Far-Right & tries to persuade white people that their problems are to do with being white, or are caused by non-white people, when actually they're caused by greedy elites & decades of neoliberalism.
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A THREAD of THREADS (!) covering the rise of the Far Right, the funding of Laurence Fox, 'gang culture', the alt-right lexicon, the Attlee government, the BBC, Priti Patel, neoliberalism, propaganda, Foucault, the contemporary Left & more... #HappyChristmas2020 #KnowledgeIsPower
“Still no deal on future trade with the EU … If governing is about forward thinking, Johnson has failed. From ‘saving #Christmas’ to a hard lockdown and looming shortages of fruit and vegetables – how can it all have gone so wrong for Britain?” nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/12…
Britain’s response to the pandemic had been “mired in inaction, plagued by failures of the state to mobilise and Johnson’s own destructive habit of promising false dawns simply because he cannot stand to be the bearer of bad news".
Boris Johnson's U-turn on #Christmas had “once more shown the yawning gulf between the prime minister’s airy promises & the real world... fast being filled with the anger & fear of a nation hit ever since by horror story upon horror story”.
A short THREAD which attempts to summarize the interesting & informative paper: 'MORBID SYMPTOM: IMMIGRATION AND THE RISE OF FAR -RIGHT POPULISM IN WESTERN EUROPE', by Ayaz Rzayev.
It contains pragmatic suggestions for stemming the rise of the Far Right, which deserve a hearing.
ALL Far-Right parties across Europe:
▶️Emphasise 'nativism' rooted in myths about an idealised past, & hostility towards immigration
▶️Have programs directed toward making the nation more ethnically homogeneous & returning to 'traditional values' of Western civilization.
ALL Far-Right parties across Europe:
▶️Accuse the establishment of favoring their own narrow self-interests over the interests of the people
▶️Try to avoid explicit #racism by emphasising 'the Muslim threat' & welfare costs of immigration.
If you were still in any doubt about not just how divisive & misguided Laurence Fox is, but also how dangerously irresponsible he is, this might help.
Brextremist millionaire Jeremy Hosking, who funds contrarian libertarian magazine 'The Critic', also funds Fox's Reclaim Party.
Hosking is a multi-millionaire financier with a financial interest in Marathon Asset Management, which is owned offshore in Jersey & operates in the Cayman Islands. Hosking gave over £1.8 million to the Vote Leave campaign & previously donated £700,000 to the @Conservatives.
Like other rich libertarians such as Robert Mercer who funded Breitbart, last year Hosking gave £850,000 to Standpoint magazine - its core mission "to celebrate western civilisation", in particular 'free speech'. Michael Gove is on the advisory board.
Seeing as #Foucault is trending, I have some quotes:
"If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal, then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing."
"One has to distinguish between different things in the analysis of an institution. First, there is what can be called its rationality, or its aim, that is, the ends it has in view and the means it possesses for attaining those ends... Second, there is the question of results...
Media texts are a form of discourse that are not simply reflective of reality, but a primary vehicle for the articulation & reproduction of dominant structures of power.
Breitbart's (& in the UK, Spiked's) "discourse of binary opposition focused on ‘us versus them’ dyads that use precisely the language of the culture wars of the 1980s & 1990s, is sufficient to demonstrate the persistence of culture wars discourse in contemporary media discourse."
Through their coverage of news & politics, they create "a self-referential ‘communication world’ in which certain ‘truths’ about the binary nature of issues are parsed as an agonistic struggle between the ‘us’ of (common sense) conservatism & the ‘they’ of (woke) ‘Liberalism’."