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I've often said here that I don't like excessive immigration into the UK; I want England, the land I love, to say English, but does that make me a racist? I'm completely okay with the multiculturalism in London, but I also like to live in the familiar English surroundings that I was brought up in. This it's my home.Many working class and middle class people feel the same, but by ignoring their wishes and calling them racist will make them turn to the right, which maybe what the ruling elite have in mind. One day all countries will be multicultural, but it's needs to happen more slowly, in my opinion. Who gives a damn what the working classes want? What’s important is what we want them to want. This isn’t the 1990s, after all. All that nonsense about globalization, and supranational
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I've often said here that I don't like excessive immigration into the UK; I want England, the land I love, to say English, but does that make me a racist? I'm completely okay with the multiculturalism in London, but I also like to live in the familiar English surroundings that I was brought up in. This it's my home.I've often said here that I don't like excessive immigration into the UK; I want England, the land I love, to say English, but does that make me a racist? I'm completely okay with the multiculturalism in London, but I also like to live in the familiar English surroundings that I was brought up in. This it's my home.Many working class and middle class people feel the same, but by ignoring their wishes and calling them racist will make them turn to the right, which maybe what the ruling elite have in mind. One day all countries will be multicultural, but it's needs to happen more slowly, in my opinion. Who gives a damn what the working classes want? What’s important is what we want them to want. This isn’t the 1990s, after all. All that nonsense about globalization, and supranational
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Many working class and middle class people feel the same, but by ignoring their wishes and calling them racist will make them turn to the right, which maybe what the ruling elite have in mind. One day all countries will be multicultural, but it's needs to happen more slowly, in my opinion.
Who gives a damn what the working classes want? What’s important is what we want them to want. This isn’t the 1990s, after all. All that nonsense about globalization, and supranational entities like the WTO, and the World Bank, not to mention “American jobs” … only fascists talk like that these days!
But, seriously … if you’ve made it this far in my essay, and you consider yourself a leftist of some sort, you’re probably extremely frustrated with what passes for the Left these days, and with how the working classes are flocking to the Right, both in the United States and all over the world. If I’ve got that right, you might want to read this essay by Diana Johnstone (which we lefties are technically not allowed to read, because it’s posted in The Unz Review, where a lot of “alt-Right” pieces are also posted … and you don’t want to get any of that stuff on you!)
What she is writing about is the ongoing “populist” insurgency against globalized capitalism, which is what I’ve also been writing about for the better part of the last two years. This is the historical moment we are experiencing, a clumsy, sloppy, partly fascistic, partly non-fascistic democratic uprising against the continuing spread of global capitalism, the erosion of what is left of national sovereignty, and … yes, people’s cultures and values.
The international working classes understand this. The neo-nationalist Right understands this. The majority of the Left does not understand this, and is refusing to admit that it’s happening, and so is standing around on the sidelines calling everybody “racists” and “fascists” while the global capitalist ruling classes and the neo-nationalists sort things out.
Which is exactly what the ruling classes want, and what the official Putin-Nazi narrative was designed to achieve from the very beginning. The “Overton Window” (i.e., the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse) works best when divided into two clean halves. During the so-called “War on Terror,” it was Democracy versus the Islamic Terrorists. Now, it’s Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis. Both of which narratives are fairy tales, of course, the reality, as ever, being rather more messy.
If what is left of the Left expects to play any meaningful part in our historical moment (other than sanctimoniously cheerleading for the global capitalist ruling classes), it is going need to get its hand a littler dirtier, mingle a bit more with all those working class “populists,” talk to them, and, I don’t know, maybe even listen to them.
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