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Alright, I'm going to give my entirely anecdotal thoughts on your questions. I have known some racists very intimately, in the US and UK, and that is my only "qualification" to speak with authority. Please note that I am talking about people who are undoubtedly racists, not people who are attracted to right-wing populism but haven't thought very hard about it, or your aunt saying covertly racist things at Thanksgiving. Those people are a little different, although they are also the ones that enable the transition to a period of heightened racism. 1. Probably. 2. Western racists (open, overt, avowed ones) are best divided by class and education level. The first, and biggest, group is comprised of uneducated working-class people shouting about muslamic ray guns and the knockout game. These people are easily dismissed. During times of low racial antagonism, the devout ones tend to become gang members and end up in jail. They get facial tattoos of swastikas or openly brag about their beliefs at work. In short, they are not too bright, and don't make a lot of effort to hide their views for personal gain. Again, I am not talking about your average Trump or Brexit voter here, or UKIP/Tea Party member, but the true believers in racist ideology among the uneducated. EDL members. Visitors at Nordic Fest. If we actually had a fascist society, the SA would recruit from these people. Then (because history repeats itself) it would be realized that they're a bunch of unruly criminals, they'd be purged, and replaced with an American SS that recruited from the military or whatever. The more educated type are dangerous, because they can harness both the above group and people with covert racist attitudes (who tend to make up the majority that vote for harmful policies, often with what they think are good intentions). The braver ones are people like Bannon. They come up with some sort of "new movement" and their own alternative press. They espouse the same old ideas, couched in language which is more explicit than a dogwhistle, but sufficiently different from the discredited movements of the past. The more cowardly ones are Bannon's readers, who would never admit to being a "fascist" or "racist" in public (although they will definitely admit to voting Trump and reading Breitbart), but will in private. I guess these people hope they will be low-level gauleiters when white people win the race war. They will never be the first ones going out starting trouble- they are too smart, they don't want to lose their jobs if it all comes to nothing- but they would join in a full-swing war, and they fantasise about that day coming constantly. It might help a bit to think of the former group as being authoritarian followers and the latter as leaders (or wannabe-leaders). 3. On the alt right, open white supremacy is pretty much the order of the day. It's couched in a bunch of pseudo-intellectualism, and has not traditionally had much of an expression on the street (rather than the internet). Individual members might have been involved in small-scale Nazi groups, the Tea Party, or have stumped for Trump, but they haven't yet really organised in an independent way. That doesn't mean they aren't a threat, but they prefer to get behind other movements they think benefit them. The Front National, BNP etc. are sanitised "ex"-Nazi groups. A French poster will better explain what happened with the FN. The BNP literally used to be the British National Front. They were street thugs who went around kicking in the heads of minorities. They tried to legitimise themselves in the 90s and 00s, but largely failed. UKIP is a bit different. It was founded as a single-issue party to leave the EU (wrap it up, UKIP-uccesses) and immigration was only one of the initial concerns. It was always right-wing, but after it became clear we were not going to adopt the Euro, the anti-immigrant rhetoric came to the fore. UKIP used to mostly attract "respectable" racists. Like my acquaintance from my hometown who was obsessed with his Scandinavian heritage and yelled at gypsies, but would never defend Hitler use the word "racist" to describe himself. It's no surprise to me that UKIP got more traction in the UK than the BNP. British people love to think of themselves as being essentially moderate and fair-minded. A student protester throwing a brick through a bank window immediately invalidates anti-austerity protests in the mind of an average person here, and therefore the BNP's history invalidates what they have to say. But UKIP is just a bunch of chaps with good banter talking common sense. 4. Yes, this mostly has to do with the culture and region they grew up in. In the US it's typical for actual fascists to hate black people the most, followed by Arabs and other muslim-dominated ethnic groups like Persians/Pakistanis, then Latinos, then Jews, then South and SE Asians and Natives, then East Asians. East Asians (especially the Japanese) are sometimes said to be almost as good as white people, maybe even smarter, just "less creative" or something along those lines. Hating Jews in the USA is a tell-tale sign of reading conspiracy/fascist literature and websites, because there doesn't seem to be much of an anti-semitic culture among your typical Fox News viewing Tea Partier. For a long time, supporting Israel was de rigeur, and still is among establishment Republicans. It seems to be making a comeback with the rise of the Alt Right. Except for the notion that they are "parasites", hatred of Jews almost seems to be a type of jealousy, because they are seen as a clever race that ruthlessly self-promotes itself. This is what the racists think "the white race" should be doing. I've heard so many times that the discrepancy between right-wing Israeli policy and left-wing Jewish expats is some sort of calculated ploy by the hive mind ("they try to spread multiculturalism in other countries, but don't accept it in their own state, as they want the other states to fail") rather than a result of the fact that different Jewish groups and individuals have different opinions. Nearly everyone who is racist to the degree I'm talking about in this post denies the Holocaust on some level. In the UK, muslims (chiefly South Asian) and Eastern Europeans attract the most ire. Muslims because of terrorism and a few high-profile crimes like the pedophile gang in Rotherham,* and Eastern Europeans for largely the same reasons as Latinos in the USA. Black people are disadvantaged, but they haven't been the most hated group for a couple of decades. Talking to a US racist about UK racism is fun. They don't understand the hatred for Eastern Europeans (especially if they have Polish ancestry or something) and they try to come up with some biological, as opposed to socio-cultural, reason that black people are seen differently. "Most of your blacks are from the West Indies, they must have interbred differently and they are more well-behaved", that kind of thing. That said, pretty much all open racists hate everyone who isn't part of their ethnic group, to different degrees. The exception is someone who maybe is mixed race and self-hating. Sometimes they try to come up with some reason that they are an exception to the rule. 5. What Main Paineframe said, but yes they do. Often they accommodate themselves to rejecting "mainstream" news and coming up with reasons that rigorous sources are all biased before they get on to the websites that leave alarm bells ringing in most people's heads. They go from some forum/image board, to a PUA blog, to Breitbart, then places like Infowars and Stormfront. If someone linked Infowars right away, they would nope the gently caress out of there. Someone I know thinks Alex Jones is "controlled opposition", because he agrees with many things he says, but is lucid enough to realise that chemtrails and lizard people are not real. So his belief is that he puts sensible views next to crackers ones to make the former look bad by association. 6. I suppose it's as good as any? If these events actually happen, something has to be the trigger event, and it's typically something inconsequential. But it's just as possible that we see a rise in hate crimes and police violence that is largely swept under the rug. Most well-to-do white people won't even realise it's happening. * The thing about the alt right is that they have like... memes about race relations in other countries. Mention any given country and they will parrot out some event that happened there that makes non-whites look bad. At least twice, I've had foreign racists who couldn't even point it out on a map of Britain chant ROTHERHAM!!!! at me as if it was a QED in itself. Every time I speak to someone from Rotherham for my job, I think of these fuckwits now. Another time, I told one about my upcoming trip to Berlin, and he started going "ficky-ficky" in reference to some rapes that occurred at Carnival in Cologne. I think they genuinely believe you cannot walk into these places without getting raped by immigrants. TBH It's worse than the stereotypical thing with Americans not knowing anything at all about other countries.
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Nov 28, 2016 20:18
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