London’s Metropolitan Police arrested another 492 people over the weekend after a protest Saturday in Trafalgar Square, as the Starmer government accelerated its crackdown on opposition to the Gaza genocide.

The entirely peaceful protest was held to oppose the proscription of Palestine Action. It was organised by Defend Our Juries and attended by over 1,000 people. Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.

  • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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    4 hours ago

    Historically, British Zionism has been fundamentally tied to English supremacism and antisemitism.

    Essentially, Israel is the UK’s “not quite final solution” to the “problem” of Jews living in Britain - a place to dump all the Jews so England can be more ethnically pure.

    This is public information - see the history of Zionism in Britain on wikipedia. The lesson ethnonationalists took from the holocaust - with Hitler publicly bemoaning he had no place to dump Jews forcing him into his final solution - was that every ethnicity needed their own homeland.

    The story is similar for USAmerican white supremacists and ethic supremacists across Europe. If Israel collapsed, millions of Jews would flee to Europe and the US, and that’s terrible if you’re an antisemite.

    But for the past 80 years, publicly admitting you’re doing it for antisemitic or even ethnic supremacist reasons has been a faux pas, so there has been a whole literary genre of dogwhistles and motivated reasoning, combined with weaponizing of the “antisemitic” label, resulting in an intentionally opaque mess of justifications.

    So then, as icing on the cake, the observation that this is a mess has been brilliantly co-opted by the propagandists through antisemitic conspiracy theory: Don’t look behind the curtain, look at the Jewish boogeyman projected onto the curtain.

    And of course capitalism also plays into this, but the capitalist elite has always been quite generous towards their fellow elites. “Socialism for the rich” is not just a turn of phrase, a lot of billionaires lost good money in the 2008 financial crisis bailout.

    Golden parachutes, positions for each other’s nepo babies, charity balls for trophy wives’ pet projects, etc. - Despite capitalism supposedly being about profit maximization, the elites don’t eat their own. They will let their portfolio burn billions to help each other out. But who is the in-group?

    Surprise - it’s white supremacists again. It’s Epstein, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Waltons, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the British royals, etc. Nonwhites can definitely get invited to the cookout - Obama, Oprah, Rothschilds, etc. - but they are always peripheral and more easily cast out.

    It’s not a cabal, it’s a community. Trump was the village idiot but his talent for demagoguery made him the hero of the town. White supremacy isn’t a nefarious grand scheme, it’s just a common belief that affects their friendships, their worldview, and their choices. Multiculturalism was a fun idea that helped destroy unions but now that people are angry it’s easiest to fall back on the people you know (if you know what I mean). Bailouts are helping friends through tough times.

    And Israel? Israel is a lightning rod. Anti-elitism can be tainted with antisemitism, ethnic supremacy is legitimized by their existence as a supposed solution to antisemitism while criticism of it isn’t directed at white supremacy, anti-imperialism can be externalized, Islamophobia is sustained to justify oil wars, the military-industrial guys have a nice playing ground, the news can always look away from coups and neocolonial violence elsewhere, etc.

    So that’s the world - a bunch of rich white guys using Jews as a scapegoat for their own fuckery. Same as the past 1800 years, really.