Racism of low expectations

When I was in my final year of my Media and Sociology degree course at what is now Leeds Trinity University, I did a module on contemporary media representation.  It was part debating chamber and part cultural Marxist propaganda.  At the time one of the most contentious issues was Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. I remember that time really well and the tutor (Dr John Short, rest  in peace) was putting forward the idea that the book should not be published because Muslims in Bradford would and did protest violently against it.  Hence the 'rightwing' media would portray the protesting muslims as knuckle dragging fascists, who called for the violent death of Rushdie.  The materials we were given all put the muslim side of the story and the tutor gave many reasons why it should not be published.

Even back then I had my doubts about this module and indeed, left ideology as a whole.  First, the media only portrays what is actually happening.  If the muslim protesters, which included the future head of the muslim council of Britain Iqbal Sacranie, did not incite Rushdie's murder then the media would not portray them as savages.

The course's tutors believed that the publishers should have self-censored because of the way muslims would react and the media would portray muslims badly and hence lead them to be stereotyped by society as a whole.  However, not once did the tutors mention that it was up to the protesters and muslims in general on how they should behave.  It is a fact that incitement to violence is a crime but the police did nothing about it.

This leads me to a fascinating term by conservative commentator, Michael Gerson, known as the 'racism of low expectations'. This form of racism is found purely in the cultural Marxist left.  It is the idea that certain groups need to be held to a lower moral standard, which is pure racism.  In the Rushdie case, it was the muslim community or to the precise, the muslim anti-Rushdie protesters.  By holding them to a lower standard, it implies that society in general gives in to their demands, no matter how regressive or reprehensible they are.  Further, it makes those communities act on it, for example, muslim leaders have warned that if the UK government did not change parts of its foreign or domestic policy then there would be 'reprisals' or 'repercussions'.  We also saw this after the Ferguson shooting whereby black community leaders warned the police there would be more riots unless the police reformed its 'racist' actions.

The Left's EU problem

Since my move from being pro-EU to being anti-EU, the questions and contradictions that dog the left still remain.  The EU, along with the EC and EEC before that, is essentially about trade, that is the free flow of goods, capital and people. Therefore at its inception the left was hostile to the concept of a trade bloc. Indeed, during the original EEC membership referendum the late Margaret Thatcher campaigned for a yes to enter vote and the late Tony Benn campaigned for no to stay out vote.  This changed slowly in the 80s and 90s as the EC and later EU moved more to the left with laws to protect worker's rights, thereby circumventing the sovernignty of its member states. But in the 2000's a new factor entered the mix - immigration.  The addition of the former Eastern bloc countries and the Blair government's policy of allowing citizen's from these new members to enter the UK to work and live turned the whole debate on its head. So instead of the EU being a businessman's club to help them earn more profits, the paradigm was about cultural diversity, enrichment and the benefits of immigration. Now the axiom was that if you were against the EU then you were racist, in the same way that being against mass immigration was racist.

We can see this in the way UKIP are demonized during the 2015 general election, and the Green's party rather confused policy of campaigning to stay in the EU during the referendum but cutting down on the amount of trade between the UK and EU.  Strange that Greens do not mention cutting done the free movement of labour, only the free movement of goods and capital.

So therefore now we are in a situation where the British left are essentially campaigning to stay in a businessman's club , because it does not want to be seen as being pro-nation state, pro-sovereignty and against immigration.  This all ties in with the fact that since the fall of the USSR, the left has been pushing a cultural marxist of Frankfurt school agenda rather than an economic one.  In that anything that undermines British or western culture is good as the western or British culture is essentially racist, imperialist and made no positive contributions in the the left's view of the world.