Tracking Milo Yiannopoulos — Democratic racism
Though a general Islamophobic sentiment has been fermenting for decades in western Europe, there is a new strategy that is being employed by a small group of people — both politicians and public figures — that is manipulating a passive islamophobia into a broader and more pointed active racial hatred.
The public level debate has changed very little on this subject, though due to a rising prevalence of alternative news outlets and “alt-right” public figures, the way in which people interact with and interpret the public debate has drastically changed, and the number of people who now believe in and agree with an extreme prejudice against an entire religion has grown to become a large part of the democratic voice of Great Britain.
The following is an a analysis of a news story from today, the way in which it has been used by Milo Yiannopolous, the way it is received by his followers, and the growing effectiveness of thegeneral strategy employed by the right wing in creating anti-muslim racist ideology.
News
27th April 2017 — A terror suspect on the French overseas territory of Reunion was killed during an attempted arrest at his home, during which he shot and injured two police officers.
The first I heard of the article was through Milo’s Facebook page itself. In the “mainstream media” coverage there was little to no reference of the event. For people who already believe in the conspiracy of the “MSM’s” lack of coverage of Islamic terrorism, this undoubtedly serves to strengthen their belief that the liberal mainstream world is either oblivious to, or ignorant of the scale of the threat of Islamic terror.
Milo’s article
Note — The url of the article is /france-terrorist-shoot-police . Describing an event that neither happened in France itself, or by a terrorist carrying out an attack.
Milo’s reporting of the event, clearly attempts to distort it, and portray it as a terrorist attack against police officers, similar to that which recently took place in Paris.
Anyone who was just to read the title “Islamic terrorist shoots two police officers on french island” would inevitably perceive the event event to be an offensive terror attack. The report goes on to describe the event in more detail, to give a not completely inaccurate report of what actually happened.
The strategy here though is to place the reader from the start of the article in the frame of a terrorist attack, so that the true context of the event can be lost, and the additional reporting adds only superfluous details which do not change the stance of that initial frame —which is that of an attack by a muslim.
Milo’s Facebook post, linking to his reporting of the story
The structure of these articles - where the biased interpretation of the event comes first, and with the facts and actual context only added as mere side notes deeper down the article - is here exploited further by Yiannopoulos.
When the article is shared, only the title and first paragraph is included on Facebook, again removing the true context of the event. This allows those who only read this far to add their own context, which invariably comes from their own distorted world view, and the world view that is implicitly spread by people like Yiannopoulos through their perpetual disproportionate focus on and reporting of negative Islam related events .
Comments on Milo’s Facebook post
An indicator of the success of this strategy of disorientation and distortion of events, is well illustrated through the responses of those that comment on the article. The following is the entire set of comments that had been made at the point I found the post. It is not a selection of the worst or most extreme, it is all of them.
It is important to note that Facebook includes no report button for comments on posts.
In the comments there is a horrifying openness towards objective anti-muslim racism, which very often finds itself in the realms of actual hate-speech, wishing death upon muslims
— “The only way to stop this is to kill the muslims” — (screenshot 2)
and eradication of “the Islamic plague”. — (screenshot 1)
The vocabulary of the current anti-muslim attitudes illustrated in the comments of Milo’s page, demonstrate an attitude against Islam that is racial and not religious.
A much loved response to those displaying anti-muslim behaviour is that they are not racist, because they simply disagree with ideology of the religion. But the reality, as demonstrated through word choices such as an “islamic plague”, describe something biological, and something that is inherent in these people that makes them different to us.
This belief of an objective racial superiority is one that naturally leads to a justification for violent response. That muslims are a lower form of human and therefore to treat them as such is entirely valid.
Demonstrated by Frank Cavanagh below (3 likes)
There is a very strong mechanism here that allows for the propagation of the anti-muslim racism. One in which people are able to hide behind less radical and more accepted public figures and politicians, such as Yiannopoulos, Raheem Kassam, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen. The mainstream debate from the politicians, is often based in rationality, and they use arguments that are not easily identifiable as racist. When challenged about the support they get from anti-muslim racists, they claim that they aren’t racist themselves, and that they never directly incited the racism of their supporters… which is almost true. The missing link is the alt-right figures such as Yiannopoulos and Kassam, who serve as a bridge between the politicians and their supporters. These people are the ones who frame the politicians ideas in a way that gains support from anti-muslim racists. They themselves exist right on the edge of implicitly and explicitly racist messaging. Usually fuelling their supporters with articles (such as this one) and images , that have been stripped of context or down right manipulated, like this one -
The anti-muslim racists are then able to apply their own context, to what they’re told by both the middle-men figures, and the politicians.
In this way figures such as Farage and Le Pen can get away with never having to say anything explicitly racist, because their supporters add that context to the politician’s actions themselves.
The comment here from Sharon Marcum Estes is a very common one in this community. There is a bizarre irony in the justification these socially conservative people use in their challenge of Islam, relying on liberal arguments against, pedophilia, homophobia, patriarchy e.t.c. against muslims.
There is absolutely an aspect of the exact writing of the Koran that goes against equality and freedom, that is followed literally by some groups of muslims. And those people and their ideology should be challenged. But the response from the people here is that islam itself in it’s entirety should be overcome and eradicated. You don’t find these anti-muslim people actually sticking up for the rights of the oppressed in these Islamic countries or communities, but you just hear them say “Islam is bad it must be stopped”. What they are doing is using these issues to shield their inherent prejudice against that religion in all it’s forms, and as a means to justify the total refusal of the religion, culture, and people.
It seems like trivial humour, they’re just “funny” memes, photos, and soundbites. But the very fact of the triviality with which people express what are actually extreme ideas about racial differences is horrifying.
“Light-hearted” memes, showing muslims as an animal pest to be exterminated. The similarities here between anti-semitic propaganda from the 20th century and the current anti-muslim rhetoric is shocking.The openness with which they are shared and lack of opposition that inherently comes with these groups on social media, makes this potentially even more of a dangerous phenomenon than in the past.
Again, the openness which which people feel able to share their radically anti-muslim views is objectively despicable. These are not mildly “naughty” pictures and comments, they’re f*cking awful.
Whose echo?
Talk of echo chambers and bubbles have been thrown around in our post brexit post trump era, as a sin of the liberal elite. Though there is truth in this accusation, it was through a concerted effort to escape my own liberal bubble, that I found myself in an even tighter bubble with louder echoes. I joined a number of alt-right conservative forums, and had reasonable rational conversations with people- and it was here at the self-professed far right extremes that I found the most rational people. But it was on open public facebook groups, and in the comments of Milo Yiannopoulos and the like’s public pages, that I found the true radicals, and discovered it was the mainstream voices that were extreme. The openness with which actual hate-speech is exchanged, death upon muslims is incited, and a racial prejudice spread, is bewildering — and is going completely unchallenged and un-checked.
It is people in these echo chambers that are forming genuinely harmful opinions, and exist in the strongest machine of self-perpetuating prejudice and ideology.
Anti-muslim racism
During our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a real problem in England with racism against muslims from those parts of the world. But the general rhetoric was one of “go back to your own country”, and based on little more than an ignorant “fear of the other”. Though this general attitude still exists, and was played upon heavily in the EU referendum by UKIP, Leave.eu, and the “badboys of brexit”, it tends to come under frequent scrutiny, and is openly challenged.
What we are now finding is that this fear of the other prejudice is being forced into a very different thing entirely. What now exists is no longer a passive fear of an unknown, but an active hatred of the “known”. People who wish for the eradication of a whole religion, and for the deaths of the people who follow that religion.
The long standing anti-muslim sentiment in western Europe is being exploited and turned into something much more dangerous, and importantly in the vast part it is going completely unchallenged. The shocking similarity between anti-semitic propaganda and the images that are shared between these people, and fed to them by public figures like Yiannopoulos doesn’t even seem to be known about, yet alone challenged.
The role that figures like Yiannopoulos are playing is criminal, and without them being singled out and challenged, the rhetoric that they spread, is only going to gain momentum and acceptance. There is a level of complacency in Europe, that liberal values are universally accepted and deeply entrenched within our societies. That we have learnt from our history and need never worry about the return of the potential threats to entire races and religions of people within our continent.
Democratic racism
After the EU referendum we have seen an attack on any challenge to individual opinion. Any challenge to someone else’s viewpoint is elitist and against the spirit of democracy. The fact is that people’s opinions of the world are not immaculately conceived, they don’t come from god and they aren’t sacred, instead we form our opinions from our direct interaction with and experience of the world. The fundamental of democracy is that everyone’s experience of the world is equally valid, and no one’s interpretation of experience should have any more weight over someone else’s. However, in the internet age, the balance of our interpretation of the world, between the things we experience ourselves, and the things that we are told from someone else is substantially shifting. With this evolution, a greater emphasis needs to be taken on questioning what we are told, and challenging those who have the loudest voices. It is those people who are actively manipulating consensus through spreading racist propaganda, and forcefully creating opinions in people, that are guilty of the gravest sins against democracy - yet they claim to be the greatest champions of it. It is no surprise that they protect the will of people, who’s will they have directly subverted for their own purposes.
We need to remember that, though yes there is a sanctity of opinion, and of human interpretation, and of democracy, it is because those things are sacred that we have to stop those who purposefully set out to exploit them. Those who feed us lies and propaganda, which distort and manipulate our understanding of the world that we don’t see ourselves.
We far too frequently like to make comparisons between Nazi Germany and the current rise of right wing politics. Regardless of the irrelevance of these comparisons, there’s one I want to make — It is only possible for a genocide to take place in a “democratic” country, because a substantial number people within that country believe that another race of people is lesser to themselves. People have jumped to make comparisons between right wing leaders like Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and Adolf Hitler, as if it is the mad ideology of a single person that can bring about an atrocity on the scale of the 1930’s and 40’s. Racist leaders in a democracy represent a racist populous. If we have any hope of preventing the rise in anti-muslim racism from becoming a substantial democratic voice, then we have to really confront those who are spreading these messages.
Unless figures like Milo Yiannopoulos stop serving as a bridge between popular debate and popular racism, and we continue to fail to present an equally loud argument against their lies, then we will allow the very nature of democracy to be used against itself, and the will of the people may soon will the eradication of Islam.
