Suchergebnisse

In this polemic against state policies and sections of the mainstream media in France, Germany, Italy and the UK since 7 October 2023 in relation to Israel/Palestine, the author exposes the ways in which a concerted anti-Palestinian racism interacts with civilisational racism and the criminalisation of international solidarity. The piece, based on speeches and briefings by the author in 2023–24, foregrounds the attack on the Palestinian diaspora in Europe. It focuses on the way a moral panic around shows of solidarity with Palestine have been fomented; the suppression of the works of artists, academics and public figures, including prominent Jewish anti-Zionists, who question official narratives; the equation of solidarity with terrorism and antisemitism and hence a reframing of what constitutes 'hate crimes'; and the restrictions on the right to protest.

In Race & Class 65.2, two key articles examined the British war on woke (Hugh Davies and Sheena MacRae) and the role of Tory 'post-racial' gatekeepers (Rima Saini, Michael Bankole and Neema Begum). This commentary draws out the lessons for activists, from the two articles and campaigns on the ground, as to how far-right 'theories' and ideas are becoming mainstreamed by the media, politicians and academics.

This article, developed from a panel speech on 'Radical internationalism and shifts in the global order' at the IRR50 New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference at King's College, London, October 2022, takes issue with simplistic and partial positions surrounding Russia's war with Ukraine. It points to the fact that we now have to reckon with a clash of imperialisms (of the US and Russia), the weaponising of local nationalisms and a reworking of Eurocentrism born of the Cold War. The author warns that revanchist ethnonationalisms in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic States − based in a distorted rereading of history, especially of the countries' roles in the Holocaust − are being ignored in the interests of a larger geopolitics with consequences also for the future direction of the EU (see Figure 1). In this, anti-Communism, which has defined so much of the history of the Global South in terms of violent opposition to anti-colonial liberation struggles, is being updated and revitalised.

Manufactured, divisive and destructive outrage over supposed 'woke' issues has long been building in the UK, fomented by think-tanks, media and politicians. To understand the relationship between culture wars in the US and the UK, the interests that lie behind them, and what can be learnt from US resistances to corporate donor influence, Liz Fekete interviews Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, authors of Free Speech and Koch Money: manufacturing a campus culture war (Pluto Press, 2021). Wilson and Kamola analyse the situation in terms of a plutocratic class's counter-revolution against progressive gains in labour, civil rights and consumer and environmental protections. Though corporate leaders do not hesitate to make use of figures on the alt-Right and those who promote racial science, the authors argue that culture wars are ultimately related to the need to unchain wealth from any regulatory or other constraints.

Following analyses in the US of the reaction to Black Lives Matter in the Blue Lives Matter movement and the recasting of the police as victims, the author explores similar tendencies in Europe, in the context of changes in territorial policing, new technology and enhanced police powers under neoliberalism. She examines how racism has become entrenched in policing as the rank and file are resituating themselves as society's victims and organising on an ever more extremist agenda. Police excesses are explained away and impunity extended to officers. At the same time, police are assuming the right to a special role and status in society that is not allowed to other agencies or public servants. In some instances, this has spilled over into collusion and collaboration with militarised far-right groups. The penetration of the far Right into policing is compounded by the dehumanisation within policing culture which stigmatises the 'undeserving poor' and emphasises threats to social order and governance as arising from marginalised black and ethnic minority communities.

In an extended version of a presentation on 3 February 2022 to the Stuart Hall Foundation's fifth Annual Conversation on 'Manufacturing Dissent: Moments of Solidarity', the director of the Institute of Race Relations asks whether a refreshed anti-fascism, that tackles the global war against the poor, New Right 'culture wars', 'total policing' and the surveillance state, can act as an inspiration for diffuse struggles to come together into communities of resistance.

A roundtable discussion on the UK's 'hostile environment' policy (on making life so difficult and unpleasant for certain groups, they would 'choose' to leave) from new angles: the weaponisation of deterrence; how the psy-complex is helping to obscure the consideration of material conditions shaping human desperation; the exploitation of and life and death conditions for workers without rights; the difficult questions for BAME and other professionals in 'caring' jobs, now tasked with controlling and punishing the rightless; the ways in which immigration control has now become monetarised with money-making targets; organising resistance both from inside and outside to the new human brutalising regimens of state racism and hostility.

In the light of highly politicised accusations of antisemitism against the Labour Party and its leader during the general election, the author argues for the necessity for activists to reclaim anti-racism. She shows how over a number of years the space for anti-racism has been shrinking. The professionalisation of anti-racism, especially around hate crime, has tended to shift focus from the social to the individual, from the institutional and systemic to personal hatred and bigotry, especially online. With the introduction of the government's Prevent strategy, a multitude of movements from Right and Left are now considered extremists. Anti-racism has lost its international thrust and its cross-community depths. We should not, she argues, see the new anti-racism as just a change in narrative, but a systematic structural denial which is part and parcel of neoliberalism, witnessed in the chequered histories of those now empowered to promote equality.

The ongoing trial of sixty-eight members of Golden Dawn, a violent neo-Nazi political party in Greece, has been called 'one of the most important trials in contemporary Greek history'. Based on direct observation and insights from a trip to Athens in September 2019 to observe the trial, which coincided with the sixth anniversary of the murder of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, this article documents the role that activists, lawyers and the families of victims of racist violence have played in bringing members of Golden Dawn to justice. The author examines the trajectory of authoritarian violence inherent in recent Greece history and the culture of police impunity and collusion in racial violence that continues today.