[Reader-list] Marxism Exposed: How Labour And The Tories Are Destroying Britain

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

I am delighted by Pawan Durani's endorsement and quotation from a  
website -  www.greenarrow.co.uk -  that declares its mission to be to  
-  "...unoffiically support the British National Party in their fight  
to secure a future for the indigenous peoples of these islands in the  
North Atlantic which have been our homeland for millennia."

The British National Party, as is well known (though perhaps not to  
Mr. Durani) is the far right wing fascist party that wants a 'whites  
only' United Kingdom. Had Pawan Durani happened to be a hard working  
Asian Migrant in Britain, then, he would know that the BNP are the  
ones who control the thugs that subject all asians and all people of  
colour in Britain to racist abuse, and indeed violent attacks. To the  
BNP's not very nuanced form of politics, Mr. Durani's protestations,  
were he a South Asian immigrant subjected to their attacks, that  
maybe he hates muslims as much as they do, would not hold much water.  
For the BNP's cadre, even Mr. Durani, because he is a South Asian of  
colour, would only be a "Paki". The BNP, the Shiv Sena and needless  
to say, the Lashkar-e-Toiba, share the same view about those who  
happen not to agree with them, or to pollute their understanding of  
'pure' homelands. It is indeed wonderful to see Mr. Durani in such  
august company. I have always maintained that someday the Hindutva  
hard right will understand that their natural allies are the KKK and  
Islamist fundamentalists. Perhaps Mr. Durani is a beacon of this  
dawning understanding.

What is even more interesting is that Mr. Durani has offered for our  
perusal a long tract that along with suggesting that the Labour and  
the Conservative Parties in the UK are currently controlled by  
Marxists (how I wish this were true) also suggests that Marx and  
Engels were racist holocaust promoters (Note that the BNP's self  
confessed racism and its known, persistent, flirtation with holocaust  
deniers and neo-nazis in Europe is left uncommented on).

Marx and Engels, in their necessary polemics against the deeply anti- 
semitic and reactionary elements within Slav nationalism did perhaps  
use some regrettable and sweeping expressions. As someone sympathetic  
to the vision and politics of Karl Marx, I have no hesitation in  
critquing them, and in seeing within them traces of the provincial  
markers of Marx and Engels' own intellectual formations. Marx and  
Engels are not and were not gods who could do no wrong. They were  
fallible and interesting human beings with their own prejudices and  
quirks, (many of which changed during their lifetimes).

We have to ask, however, whether Marx and Engels remained wedded to  
these sentiments throughout their lives. Both became champions of the  
liberty of colonially subjugated peoples, in India and Ireland, for  
instance, (even though Marx might have, contrary to his own  
sympathies, condemned Indian societies to the 'refuse of history' )  
without falling prey to Nationalism, and Marx, more so than Engels  
was able to distance himself from some of his more extreme cultural  
prejudices, prejudices, which were indeed commonplace in the milieu  
in which they found themselves, in Victorian Britain and nineteenth  
century Europe.

  But to put their remarks in proper context, what Marx, and more  
specifically Engels meant by the deployment of the 'Ethnic Trash',  
(volkerabfall) term - was that the matter of 'national' interest and  
the 'nationality question' in Europe, especially as it played out in  
Eastern Europe was a divisive and reactionary brand of politics that  
sought to divide European Workers on the basis of their racial and  
ethnic origins. Slav Nationalists were at the foreground of the anti- 
semitic pogroms that swept through Eastern Europe in the nineteenth  
century, and it was perhaps in this context that Marx and Engels made  
their pronouncements. Bakunin, Marx's adversary in the First  
International, was able to combine his laudable anarchism, with an  
unfortunately venomous anti-semitic streak, and the polemics against  
Bakunin, do give Marx and Engels an unfortunate and shrill edge.

Having said this, it is equally important to recognize, that Marx  
himself came to recognize the slav traditions of the rural peasant  
commune in Russia as providing perhaps a means to bypass Capitalism  
on the way to a Communist future. (See his draft of a letter to Vera  
Zasulich at -  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/ 
zasulich1.htm - ). While Marx's estimation of the Slav traditions of  
peasant communism may have been an 'over-estimation' at least they  
demonstrate that he held the traditions of the peoples he had himself  
once thought to have been 'refuse of history' (which would be the  
more accuate gloss of terms like Volkerabfall) in high regard.

Mr. Durani's anti-marx prejudice seems to have been acquired under  
some special circumstances, because he swings from one extreme to  
another, in exhibiting it. Right now, he has tried, with the help of  
the fascist BNP's unofficial supporters, that Marx was racist. Not so  
long ago, however, he had himself (perhaps unwittingly) become the  
vehicle for the transmission of the classic anti-semitiic (anti- 
Jewish) slur against Karl Marx.

Not many may remember, but I do, that on the 15th of November, 2008,  
Mr. Durani, apropos of Karl Marx, had written, in this very list, the  
following gem.

"We do not live inside some mind like that of Karl Marx and the  
occultist elite who funded him (Satanic Rothschild Dynasty ). We live  
in a real world."

[ See - http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2008-November/ 
016614.html ]

In response to that slur, I had composed a brief (and alas, unsent)  
riposte to Mr. Durani, which I now offer for all your entertainment.   
Please enjoy, but while doing so, remember how, Pawan Durani can  
suddenly be a bleeding heart liberal (without any irony) in the  
company of the racist BNP one day, and a sly anti-semite on another  
occasion. I marvel at his versatility and his flexibility. Perhaps it  
comes from not having to be bothered by the inconvenience of an  
ethical spine.

best

Shuddha


"I have heard many really low down and colourful anti-semitic jibes  
in my life. But the one about Karl Marx being funded by the 'satanic'  
Rothschild family takes the cake. I am absolutely delighted that  
Pawan Durani has offered us this rich serving of tripe. The 'frisson'  
of this rumour of course has to do with the fact that both Karl Marx  
and the Rothschilds were Jewish by birth. I am familiar with this  
story, as I am and have been a keen observer of right wing esoterica  
both on the internet and beyond it, and the 'Marx-Rothschild-Jewish- 
Communist' Plot to take over the universe has a long and  
distinguished pedigree on the outer fringes of the loony right.

This rumour circulates widely amongst virulntly anti-semitic  
Christian Evangelical websites (whom Pawan Durani may or many not be  
so comfortable with,as they are not known for being nice to Hindus,  
and also amongst the higher echelons of the followers of Mahmoud  
Ahmedinijad, though here it is  generally found in Farsi), and  
indeed, is to be found in Ku Klux Klan literature. All of is  
apparently based on accounts of two 'cheques' in the British Museum  
which show that Marx was paid by the Rothschild to destroy the world  
as we know it. Marx received some stipends from a distant relative of  
his who had links with the family that founded the Phillips  
engineering corporation. And of course he was supported by his friend  
and comrade Friedrich Engels, whose income derived from the  
operations of his family firm in Manchester.

The 'Marx-Rothschild Fuding' rumour is said to have originated in the  
pre-firing squad confessions of the dissident Bolshevik Rakovsky to  
Stalin's secret police, the NVKD, and was then circulated, first in  
Francoist circles in Latin America and Spain, before taking a new  
life on the internet. This is a wonderfully surreal world, with born  
again Christians, Stalinists, occultists of a discreetly Nazi  
persuasion, KKKites, Ahmedinijad supporters and anti-semites graced  
now by the company of none other than our very own Pawan Durani. If  
the sad day of a Hindutva-Stalinist takeover of India were ever to  
arrive, then I would hope that delirious repetitions of rumours first  
circulated about  on the Reader List by people desparate to say  
anything to escape the cold end of a pistol's nozzle do not land me  
in trouble.

I had better take care, before Pawan or his zealot friends discover  
my jewish great aunt Rahel's address in some remote Kolkata bylane,  
and having done so, furnish an updated edition of the 'Protocol of  
the Elders of Zion' to state that I (nothing other than a diluted  
Jew)  the ghost of those devious Jews Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, the  
current wife of Amartya Sen (none other than Emma Rothschild, "Oh my  
god, they got him the nobel prize" and everyone knows that Amartya  
Sen hates hindutva) are party to the conspiracy to destroy the  
planet. Perhaps the details of this would include speculations about  
whether or not I 'recieved' ghost money from the ghost of Marx,  
sourced from the ghost of Rothschilds.

Did I hear someone say that global warming was a crypto Jewish- 
Marxist-plot in league with giant lizard aliens, and that yesterday's  
patriotic Indian mission to the moon, was only the first salvo in the  
galactic war against global warming, which is actually produced by  
the swarming of anti-national elements on the internet, which somehow  
produces lunar currents, which in turn leads to global warming.

No, I didn't.

But if we are to believe Pawan Durani on Marx and the Rothschild's we  
might as well prepare ourselves to believe this too.

regards,

Shuddha"


------



On 20-Feb-10, at 2:06 PM, Pawan Durani wrote:

> Part One: Birth Of The New Man
>
> Introduction
>
> Something is wrong with Great Britain and Western Civilisation. Badly
> wrong. Imagine, if you will, that the brave warriors who fought to
> preserve Great Britain from tyranny during the Second World War have
> been resurrected and allowed to visit modern day Britain to see for
> themselves the fruits of their sacrifice.
>
>

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net