The next turn of the ratchet
The right will never be satisfied with diet bigotry
Last summer Simon Childs reported on a spate of racist and xenophobic riots around the UK. It was the culmination of years of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the press and from across the political spectrum.
Luke O’Neil
Rioters have smashed the windows of hotels housing asylum seekers and attempted to set them on fire. They have rampaged around a non-white residential area smashing windows. They have formed vigilante traffic checkpoints and asked drivers if they are white before letting them pass. They have dragged an Asian driver out of his car and smashed it up. A former anti-terror police chief has said that some of the violence could be classified as terrorism. Not to mention the videos of people casually using racist slurs on streets up and down the country.
Today he joins us again to write about the somehow still increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and further shift to the right from Labour and Keir Starmer.
Paid subscribers can read that piece in full down below or go to it directly here.
Luke O’Neil
He writes:
Each rightward lurch is met with disappointment from Starmer’s liberal base and ridicule in the right wing press, but it always seems to justify the next turn of the ratchet. The prime minister’s panicked advisors never seem to understand that his broad but shallow electoral coalition could easily turn away, while the right will never be satisfied with diet bigotry, when the full-fat, real deal is available.
The shift over there parallels our approach to immigration in the States. With the ostensibly center-left politicians offering nothing but a (somewhat) kinder approach to violently removing vast numbers of people from the country. Maybe it will work for them!
Oh that reminds me who wants to carpool to this?
Hopefully you read the latest issue of Hell World concerning an ICE abduction of a woman in Worcester, MA late last week. Local police also arrested two others on bullshit charges.
Luke O’Neil
Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira is currently being held in a detention center in Rhode Island it has been reported. Bill Shaner also has a couple of followups on his newsletter here and here. He writes in part:
This is fucked. What happened was fucked. What's happening is fucked. The city is coming unglued. City Hall is giving up pretenses it has any control whatsoever over the police department.
The police are fabricating stories about how a woman in elected office assaulted them so they can cry to ~the media~ about having been hit by a woman. Mommy she hit me. Literally. Lying in the smarmy way a brother would to get his kid sister in trouble.
Local 911 President Thomas Duffy is a leader of the gang unit and he has a long and well documented history of let’s just say... hitting people.
I was there. I saw what Etel was doing. None of it came close to assault. They were assaulting a woman. Etel was saying hey don’t do that. That is “assault” now to these little cry babies we give guns.
This is what police and their bootlicking politicians on the right always do of course. Lie and cry. Much like they're doing right now with the story of Newark mayor Ras Baraka – who was arrested for "trespassing" at an ICE facility in his own city on Friday – and other lawmakers with him that the feds say they are considering bringing charges against for "assaulting" officers.
Something I wrote in 2021:
Luke O’Neil
While it’s bad enough that we cause so much suffering what’s worse is that then on top of that and also like cops we need to be big fucking pissing babies about it whenever anyone tries to call us out on our bullshit. Barbarians and martyrs at once. ... Crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you.
Please read this letter from Mahmoud Khalil to his newborn son.
Mahmoud Khalil
Deen, my love for you is deeper than anything I have ever known. Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation. It is liberation itself. I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom. I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction. And I will spend my life making up for the moments we lost – starting with this one, writing to you with all the love in my heart.
Another Hell World reader writes in:
AI is a fucking nightmare, man.
I teach, and I’ve basically abandoned any pretense of trying to stop students from using AI in their papers. The really obvious ones are obvious, but the burden of proof is on the instructor and I barely have enough time to keep up with the parts of the job that I enjoy, much less the ones I don’t.
I realize I am playing into the hands of these tech assholes, and it sucks so bad.
The alternative is to come up with assessments that aren’t as hackable, but that doesn’t really resolve the underlying problem. This is just the next step in the commodification and financialization of higher education (and everything else, tbh). We have come to regard college as an “investment vehicle” in the same way that houses and etc are now, not places where we live and make a space for ourselves and forge families and communities, no, it’s just a thing to be flipped for future value at some point in the future.
Sometimes I feel like the students never really had a chance.
Once again, thank you for putting to pen a lot of the same shit I struggle with on the regular.
"It’s just a thing to be flipped for future value at some point in the future."
I really like that. What a good way to put it. Not the fact of it of course. I don't like that.
One more thing before we get to the main piece. The boys down at the metaphor factory must have been working round the clock on this one.
From Ars Technica:
Over the weekend, America's top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., shared pictures on social media of himself fully submerged in the sewage-tinged waters of Rock Creek in Washington, DC. His grandchildren were also pictured playing in the water.
The creek is known for having a sewage overflow problem and posing a health hazard to any who enter it. The National Park Service, which manages the Rock Creek Park, strictly bars all swimming and wading in Rock Creek and the park's other waterways due to the contamination, specifically "high levels of bacteria."
Ok here's Childs. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read the whole thing. Thanks for being here either way.
A years-long tale of xenophobic scapegoating in the UK
by Simon Childs
It has been less than a year since England erupted into horrifying race riots that saw hotels housing migrants set on fire and mosques attacked. With a new, ostensibly left wing government now in command of a decent parliamentary majority, you might have hoped that this would mark something of a turning point. One where politicians became determined to articulate a more positive vision of a multiracial country in which everyone can prosper. Instead we’ve come to just the latest grim chapter in a years-long tale of xenophobic scapegoating and possibly a precursor to something even worse hurtling towards us at frightening speed.
For years politicians have blamed migrants as the cause of Britain’s problems, all while encouraging migration to stimulate the economy. Now the economy sucks, migrants are still coming and resentment is boiling over.
On Monday prime minister Keir Starmer made a speech in which he claimed that migration makes us an “island of strangers” and pledged to make net migration fall. In striking language he announced a raft of anti-migrant policies, declaring that a “squalid chapter” of British history which saw migration increase is over. The similarities with the infamous “rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell – a Conservative politician from the post-war era beloved by racists – have seen Starmer christened “Enuch Powell” in my left wing corner of the internet.
Starmer hasn’t always spoken like this about immigrants. “We must never accept the Tory or media narrative that often scapegoats and demonises migrants,” he wrote in 2020. “Problems of low pay, housing and public services are not caused by migrants – they are caused by a failed economic model.”
He's right about that. Or was at the time.