On Suffragettes and the British Union of Fascists

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Having received a number of emails from readers responding to my last post on Sadiq Khan and the Suffragettes - most of which expressed shock and disappointment to discover that the latter were more than happy to use violent means to achieve their political ends - I thought it might be interesting to say a bit more about these insufferable women to whom history has granted heroic victim status [2]. 

 

Deeds Not Words - this is the slogan of many an ascetic militant or armed revolutionary. And it usually means that someone somewhere is about to be shot, blown up, stabbed, or beheaded in the name of some higher cause or greater good. In other words, such murderous actions are justifiable when they are committed in the name of freedom, justice, or God, for example. 

 

In addition to smashing shop windows and setting fire to all kind of buildings, including theatres and churches, not just government offices, the suffragettes were also prepared to kill politicians, judges, and members of the public. In 1912, one of these deranged harpies even threw an axe at then Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (it missed him, but injured another MP, almost slicing off his ear) [3]. 

 

If only a handful of people were actually killed as a result of the suffragette terror campaign, there were dozens severely injured. But that's not really the issue: the issue is whether such violence can ever be acceptable [4]. I don't mind if someone answers yes to this question, but then I don't expect them to complain about the violence that invariably befalls them or start squawking about their human rights. 

 

If you live by the sword ...

 

 

II. 

 

The fact is, Pankhurst, her daughter Christabel, and the rest of her criminal gang, essentially revelled in the violence and the chaos caused - dismissing those women who called for patience and peaceful protest. It's little wonder, therefore - and this too will come as a shock to some readers - that many of the most militant suffragettes eventually drifted into the sweaty embrace of the black-shirted strongmen of the British Union of Fascists ...  

As the British historian Martin Pugh points out [5], Oswald Mosley's paramilitary movement drew all kinds of cranks and crackpots, including Mary Richardson, the former suffragette notorious for slashing The Rokeby Venus in 1914, who ran the Women's Section of the BUF (est. 1933), after Mosley's mother gave up the role.

 

When asked what attracted her to Mosley and the BUF, Miss Richardson explained that she saw in the Blackshirts the same courage, dedication, and loyalty that she had known in the Women's Social and Political Union. The fact that the BUF were ultranationalists who wanted to make Britain great again and keep Britain for the British, also appealed to her extreme brand of patriotism.         

In the interwar period, votes for women was no longer the burning issue it once was for women like Richardson and Christabel Pankhurst [6]. In fact, they now repudiated the entire parliamentary system and advocated total obedience to a supreme leader. They also regarded feminism as a form of decadence and openly sneered at women such as Nancy Astor, the first female member of Parliament.

For these women in their black blouses, black berets, and grey skirts it was fascism which uniquely offered a true form of feminism and promised an escape from the twin evils of domesticity and democracy and they enthusiastically gave the BUF their full support.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This image was used to illustrate an article by Martin Pugh entitled 'Why Former Suffragettes Flocked to Fascism' (14 April 2017), in the online magazine Slate: click here. The article was excerpted from Pugh's book Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, (Pimlico, 2006).

 

[2] There are even memorial statues of Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (1903), in London and Manchester. 

[3] Readers might also find it interesting to know that future PM Winston Churchill was also assaulted by a suffragette using a horse-whip, whilst on a platform of Bristol railway station, in November 1909. The woman was arrested for assault, but was simply found guilty of disturbing the peace. 

 

[4] For me, the acts of terror and political violence perpetrated by the suffragettes are objectionable on several grounds, including the fact that they betray class privilege and indifference to the suffering of those deemed social inferiors. These ghastly women simply didn't care if a policeman, or a postal worker, or a train driver, was injured or killed, because they didn't know any such people personally and were most unlikely to have family members employed in such roles.

      A bit like the Just Stop Oil protestors today, they also knew they were unlikely to be subject to the full force of the law as they came from posh backgrounds and had friends and supporters in postions of power and influence.  

 

[5] See note 1 above. I am indebted to Pugh for his published work in this area. 

 

[6] During 1916-17, the House of Commons Speaker chaired a conference on electoral reform which recommended limited women's suffrage. Then, in 1918, the Representation of the People Act was passed which allowed women over the age of 30 (who met a property qualification) to vote. Although 8.5 million women met this criteria, it was only about two-thirds of the total population of women in the UK. It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that all women over 21 were finally able to vote. This act increased the number of women eligible to vote in UK elections to 15 million. 

 

 

For a follow-up post on two speeches by Emmeline Pankhurst, click here.  

Sadiq Khan and the Insufferable Suffragettes

A group of Suffragette terrorists pictured in 1913

 

 

That human weasel posing as London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has come up with a way to waste millions more of tax payers' money: a rebranding of six Overground lines with names said to celebrate the city's diverse history and culture. 

 

In other words, it's another attempt to impose a pernicious ideology and for Khan to virtue signal his own wokeness to the world. 

 

But there's a certain irony, of course, in naming the Gospel Oak to Barking Riverside route the Suffragette Line. 

 

For as readers who have read the history of this women's organisation from the early part of the 20th-century will know, their activism included an orchestrated bombing and arson campaign in the years 1912-14 that was described as terrorist in nature by the authorities and admitted as such by leaders of the movement, including Emmeline Pankhurst, whose daughter Christabel directed militant actions from the safety of exile in France.

 

Their radical slogan Deeds Not Words meant targeting not only government officials, but members of the public, with the aim being to make every aspect of English life insecure and unsafe. 

 

On 25 October 1912, this involved setting fire to a train carriage as it pulled into Harrow station. Fortunately, nobody was hurt in this incident - but they certainly could have been. Which is why, as I say, there's an irony in naming a train line in honour of these fanatics. 

 

One wonders if a hundred years from now they'll accord the same honour to the Islamist suicide bombers who targeted commuters travelling on London's public transport network in July 2005 ...? 

 

 

For a follow-up post to this one on the suffragettes and the the British Union of Fascists, click here. 

 

For a follow-up post on two speeches by Emmeline Pankhurst, click here.

 

 

Boris Johnson - What a Cnut! (Further Reflections on Coronavirus)

King Boris I 

@ BorisForKing

I.

As a matter of fact, King Cnut wasn't a madman who believed he possessed supernatural powers that would allow him to turn back the tide. On the contrary, he was a wise and humble monarch who knew the limits of his own authority and wished to demonstrate to his courtiers that compared to the supreme power of God, the power of all men is vain.

Still, that's not how the legend is remembered or invoked within popular culture: and so, when it comes to Boris Johnson's desperate and deluded attempt to defeat (or at least control) Covid-19, we can rightly describe him as a bit of a Cnut; a man who dreamed as a boy of becoming world king now reduced to faffing about as the tide of events leaves him increasingly looking washed-up.  

What the PM doesn't seem to appreciate is that whereas one can barricade oneself indoors in order to be safe from a pack of hungry wolves, the same strategy isn't going to work when faced with a viral threat. If he spent a little less time studying Churchill and a little more time reading Baudrillard, he might understand this ... [1]


II.

To his great credit, Jean Baudrillard was one of the first philosophers to conceptualise the viral mode and how it corresponds to a form of cultural chaos and confusion, spreading rapidly within a global system lacking immunity. For a viral agent like Covid-19 doesn't just infect individuals, but all sectors of society, including the government, the media, and the world of commerce, thereby exposing the interconnections between pathogens, wet markets, digital networks, etc.  

The fascinating thing is not what Covid-19 does to the body, but what it does to the collective imagination. We might describe the hysteria surrounding the disease as a virtual symptom; one that is induced by the political class and the media and which massively inflates the actual threat posed by the virus. There's no point blaming Boris for this, or, indeed, anyone in particular. For our shared insanity "is a pyramidal synthesis of convergent effects, a phenomena in resonance" [2].

In sum: the current pandemic - just like terrorism - is a product of our own viral culture. And the fact that these things are not just matters of concern for our security services and medical experts but for us all, demonstates that they are not merely episodic events in an irrational world:

"They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one." [3]

Ultimately, the fight against Coronavirus - just like the so-called war on terror - is futile and unwinnable and, like it or not, we're probably all going to get our feet wet sooner or later ...

Notes

[1] I'm referring here to Baudrillard's four modes of attack and defence: first come the wolves, a visible enemy who attack us directly and against whom we can construct solid defences and arm ourselves with rifles; then come the rats, a rapidly multiplying and subterranean enemy who burrow under our barricades and against whom we must use poison; next are the cockroaches, which do not attack so much as infest and get everywhere, including in the cracks between our defences, making it extremely difficult to ever fully exterminate them; finally, there are the viruses, an invisible enemy transmitted from person to person or in the air itself, infecting the body and requiring the development of a vaccine or acquired immunity. Resistance with lockdowns, face masks, and hand wash is simply a form of Cnutism. See Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner, (Routledge, 2004), pp. 71-2.

[2] Jean Baudrillard. 'Ruminations for Spongiform Encephala', Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2002), p. 173.

[3] Jean Baudrillard, 'Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis?, Screened Out, p. 6.

Sur la terre et le terrorisme: A Brief Sadean Response to Rebecca Solnit

According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".

Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ... 

But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".

Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".  

This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.

And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism. 

Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.

How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.    

What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.

I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.

Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence. 

Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

See:

Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online. 

Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.

Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.   

Note: The photo of Rebecca Solnit is by John Lee: johnleepictures.com

On the Agony of Power II: The White Terror of World Order

Jean Baudrillard by Guillem Cifré

www.artisopensource.net

According to Baudrillard, domination becomes hegemony when the slave internalizes the master. But for this to happen, power must also absorb the negative - and that's problematic. For whilst the negative can certainly be swallowed, it can never be fully digested; rather, it starts to eat away at power from the inside in a cannibalistic manner. Justice is served in the form of auto-liquidation.    

Meanwhile, the external remnants of negativity - those things which have not yet been swallowed by hegemonic power, or have perhaps already been spat out - mutate into forms of evil that include chaotic weather events and suicide bombers.

The victory of the New World Order is, therefore, only ever apparent. It is obliged to fight a continual war on terror; at a military level, but, also, on a symbolic level as it seeks to liquidate all remaining values and to achieve a humiliating and nihilistic final consensus in which all is revealed as equally worthless and there is literally nothing left to disagree on. Baudrillard writes:  

"The terrorist's potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture ... truth is always on the side of unveiling ... exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage."

"This confrontation is not quite a 'clash of civilizations', but it is not economic or political either, and today it only concerns the West and Islam in appearance. Fundamentally, it is a duel, and its stakes are symbolic ... a universal carnivalization ... against all the singularities that resist it." 

Obviously Baudrillard is not advocating the most violent and reactionary forms of singular resistance, but invoking rather the most poetic of possibilities. However, there's still something troubling about his critique of Western modernity; one which is clearly related to a Romantic and irrationalist tradition of German philosophy that would include Nietzsche at his most Dionysian and Heidegger at his most politically compromised.
          

Indeed, I feel compelled to say that I infinitely prefer a demoralized and disenchanted world to one of sacrificial violence and fundamentalism and would much rather live in a hyperreal and extraterrestrial zone that has devoured its own logic and values than in those primitive regions of the world still living under strict religious law and the mythological authority of God.

Better the euphoric banality of the last man than the stupidity and savage cruelty of those who have yet to even enter history, let alone pass through it.

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'The White Terror of World Order', essay in The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 67, 69.