everyone who has pretended that there are "legitimate concerns" about immigration at play in british politics these last few decades bears responsibility for the pogrom in belfast. It's racism; it has always been racism.
🌂 when you Fucking Ask people in a casual setting what they mean when they say immigration is a big problem and the universe's d20 comes up on a 4 or lower and they pause, maybe stammer about, knowing they don't want to say something obviously racist and just reiterate that it Is a problem
🌂 jesus christ...
We need a muscular multiculturalism. We need mass antifascism and anti-racism -- there needed to be thousands mobilised on the streets against the hundreds of pogromists -- but we also need the positive message of diversity backed up by a pro-diversity, pro-multiculturalism street movement.
There is also, blatantly, a need to kneecap the social media companies. I've said this before but: if a platform uses an algorithmic feed then there is an editorial decision being made, and so x, facebook, etc, should be regulated as publishers and legally responsible for every post they publish. So much of this shit is driven by social media shit, by companies using this pretence that they're a neutral platform like royal mail or a telephone company while openly shaping british politics to a trumpist agenda.
I think it's worth noting as well that the loyalist groups who are currently spearheading this year's pogrom have a huge amount of experience with ethnic cleansing and have been tolerated by the British government for decades because they're politically convenient to have around. I know someone from Antrim Town who had to leave in 2002 because her house was firebombed because they were Irish Catholics living in what the loyalists decided was "their" area. The reason why Northern Ireland is such a flashpoint for racist rioting bolstered by racist "legitimate concerns" rhetoric (see: the pogrom in Ballymena last year) is the open tolerance and, at times, support by the British government of an openly fascist movement that has been ongoing in fits and starts since 1609.
Every year on the eleventh of July, enormous bonfires are built across Northern Ireland and adorned with Irish flags, along with photographs and effigies of Irish politicians or people from Northern Ireland who vocally identify as Irish in public life more generally, along with the flags of groups British loyalists perceive as being connected to Ireland; Palestinian flags have been a common sight on loyalist bonfires for decades.
The "KAT" acronym crudely scrawled on the Irish flag at the centre of the image stands for "Kill All Taigs", with "taig" being a slur for Irish people derived from the given name "Tadhg". The "Stop the Boats" rhetoric of the broader British far-right is present too, but it takes a backseat to the age old bigotry which sees Belfast divided by literal walls on lines of ethnic cleansing and pogroms perpetrated by the grandparents of, parents of, and, in many cases, the same people who participated in Monday night's pogrom.
The pogroms in Ballymena last year and in Belfast this week are, however, different from what's happened in the past not only because the targets have moved from Irish Catholics to essentially anyone who isn't white, but because for the first time in history the Irish far-right and the British Loyalist far-right are collaborating. Two factions whose ideologies are diametrically opposed have managed to find common ground on a shared belief in the great replacement conspiracy theory after centuries of mutual animosity, and as an Irish person who spent the first twenty years of my life there, that fucking terrifies me. In the past, we were spared the kind of organised fascism that plagued the United Kingdom since the 1930s because of the simple reality that Irish nationalist groups typically leaned left or far-left with right-wing groups existing only on the fringes while British nationalists, which is what so called "loyalists" really are, leaned to the right or far-right with virtually no left-wing fringe at all.
























