Meeja Hoors
Segregated Britain: Disunited Kingdom
C4, Wednesday 29 October
Kenan Malik’s doc saw him investigate the sad transition from anti-racism to multiculturalism, and captured his dismay as he found that the goals of the former (equality and integration) have been pretty much abandoned. Instead, everyone from Nick BNP Griffin to Lee London Assembly Jaspers is preaching segregation as a necessary construct of our fractious society.
Multiculturalism, as in celebrating difference like it’s one big Zadie Smith novel, sounds innocuous enough, but Malik tried to demonstrate that the whole diversity industry that's sprung up (from corporate ‘diversity training’ and other PR exercises, to govt-sponsored ads ‘Celebrating Multiculturalism’ as Culled in our latest ‘zine) is completely superficial and cosmetic. At best, it trains people to be nice to one another – though as Malik pointed out, old-style anti-racism was never about avoiding confrontation. This new dogma of diversity avoids challenging racial hatred completely: nothing that Malik heard on his visit to a Ford company diversity workshop contradicted anything Griffin had to say.
At worst, this prioritising of diversity of culture (over commonality of needs) unites liberals and extremists in the belief that the way forward is separate schools, separate neighbourhoods, each to their own. Malik's footage of Asian kids bussed in by the Bradford LEA for visits to all-white schools (and vice versa) showed how such areas are returning to the time when people of different colours were mysterious, exotic and threatening. Come the weekend, central Bradford changes colour, as the whites celebrate their ‘culture’ (getting off their face in theme bars) having stewed over their erroneous beliefs all week in their enclaves on the periphery of town. Two white twats professed a liking for ‘Pakis’ (an interchangeable term incorporating Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis) before they proudly revealed it was all a joke and they ‘hate the lot of them' really. Like their fashionable labels they wore, their views are sadly mainstream. London dwellers, who at least see a veneer of that much-vaunted unity, need to be reminded of this in particular.
Race once again has become something non-negotiable, something you cannot challenge, play with or escape. Gone are the ideas that race, like gender, is culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. Your identity is once again already decided for you in advance by your skin colour.
Surely this is to be opposed, regardless of whether your resultant fate is preferential treatment or a lynching?
Of course, the issue that completely undermines the multiculturalist dogma is at the same time the one thing that seems to unite Britons (save football fans, whose chief target seems to be ‘the Turks’) of all colours and creeds: the mass hatred of asylum seekers. This term itself is legal rather than pejorative or racist, but its connotations are much the same as racist epithets have been in the past – proving that the issue is not the terminology but the actual practices of discrimination and dehumanisation in progress.
Anti-racism has moved from political commitment to individual psychology; the importance of publicly acknowledging that asylum seekers are the new ‘pakis’ and all the prejudicial history that this entails; proof that Jasper has (literally) grown fat on the politics of segregation and that much of his divisive rhetoric is born out of a fully-developed prejudice against whites.
The main points of Malik's argument can be found here:
http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/diversity_guardian.html
Celluloid parallels
The linen-suited, Lennon glasses-wearing BBC programmers receive rare praise for their showing of Ken Russell’s espionage flick Billion Dollar Brain on Tuesday. The 1967 film was Mickey Caine’s last reprising of detective Harry Palmer from Len Deighton’s pulpish thrillers.
In among the spy plot gubbins (flask of eggs, deadly virus) was a character with particular currency to today’s terrorist world. General Midwinter is a capitalist Christian freak intent on exporting his brand of Texan totalitarianism and overthrowing the Soviet Union, starting with Latvia. He has $$$$$ from his ‘A-rab’ and local oil ventures, and his huge centralised operation admits only yes-men. To Megalo Midwinter, Texans are the supreme race. His maddening mantra pre-invasion was “Be strong, Strong, STRONG”. Sound familiar? Yep, I don’t even have to mention his name. Luckily, the Soviet Colonel Stok tricks the invading army into driving in on thin layers of ice, the crew including Midwinter and the vehicles sink and everything’s ok. Caine might even get the horny Soviet agent provocateur.
Unfortunately it’s not so benevolent an outcome in the real world. For ‘commies’, read ‘Islamists’, Latvia, read Iraq – the true testbed for Americolonisation of ‘ideals’ in the 21st century (though of course in the real world it’s better to raze it to the ground so you can start afresh – and don’t forgive any of the former dictatorship’s debt, as Mark Thomas satirised on C4 last night).
Given his love of pretzels and other couch potato fodder, his time spent loafing around Ivy League universities and his postgraduate mindless boozing, we can only assume that Dupe Ya was being influenced even before Perle and the rest of the Project Americans.
Blinging the game into disrepute
With canny prescience our latest print edition of Cull (email us at
whorecull@cinestatic.com for copies or wait for the online version) ran a feature called the Mad-for-it Mayfair Buglers, in which several of the game’s ‘top boys’ end up in compromising situations.
But there was no need for our artifice to mirror life. Viewed from the media filters of TV, newspapers, crap portal front pages and rumour sites, the game known as the ‘opium of the people’ has moved from tinfoil smoking to arse-area injections with little concern for its dissolute image. Several questioned for recent London hotel gang-rape; two Leeds players in sexual assault case; Liverpool youngster Jon Otsemobor shot in buttocks by small-calibre weapon; United’s Rio Ferdinand ‘forgetting’ his drug-test (which incredibly short short-term memory loss is all the evidence you need of casual recreational drug use).
The socio-economic-cultural background is easy enough to paint. Working-class white, half-cast and black men earn far too much money after a youth ignoring education to concentrate on the game. They may be able to make nifty moves on the pitch but that intelligence does not extend to anything to do with their lives outside of football. Unlike, say, Johnny Wilkinson of England RU fame, they have no intention of doing the right thing and being the model sportsmen. Favourite icons include 50 Cent, Ferrari, Cristal. Favourite haunts are any nightclub where money is no object, a philosophy that suits these nouveau riches down to the ground. It is a culture that says I am the top boy, I can pay my way out of any situation, I can treat girls like shit, I can get away with this. It’s brain-dead modern materialism.
“Sex, sleaze and violence have long corroded football’s integrity… But football is more than the national sport. It is a huge business influencing Britain’s culture, economy and morality,” The Guardian wrote on 8 0ctober.
This is only half-true. Thatcher erroneously said in the 80s that hooligan culture was football’s fault and responsibility, and now what we have are a bunch of talented idiots who are getting all their cues from an all-encompassing culture of careless conspicuous consumption. Regulate that and football, with society, would be less abhorrent.
