Racism: The socialism of Fools; Racist Cancer Spreading from Ballymena in Ireland

Original Post >> tomasoflatharta

Below Fearghal’ s timely article – which contains very useful warnings from history : relevant references are made to the Marxist scholars and activists August Bebel, Victor Serge and Ernest Mandel :

We add :

A chilling report of an interview with the DUP Westminster MP for the Upper Bann constituency, Carla Lockhart.

A stark report from the 6 County bit of Ireland headlined “Week of Violence in North “Akin to 1930s Germany”Racist Cancer Spreading From Ballymena in Ireland, Irish Times, June 14 2025

Ballymena; Racism the Socialism of Fools; Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh

I recently discussed three interconnected issues on Raidió na Gaeltachta: reform to the South’s rent caps benefiting landlords and international funds, Trump’s authoritarian militarization of US protests, and the racist attacks in Ballymena/Larne.

These stem from the same root: the establishment’s addiction to neoliberalism. The government plans to ‘reform’ rent pressure zones, ultimately forcing young Irish workers to subsidise wealthy foreign pensions. This isn’t ‘entrepreneurial culture’ – it’s rule by a geriatric property class and vulture funds, while servicing tax-dodging multinationals. Predictably, this breeds deep inequality and fuels far-right scapegoating, as seen in Dublin’s riots last year.

Dr. Lorcan Sirr (Irish Times, 12 June 2025) rightly warns that allowing ‘market resets’ at every tenancy change (after 41% rent hikes in 6 years) is alarming. The government’s fantasy that more rent inflation will magically increase supply is Flann O’Brien-level absurdity. Only massive state-led building can break this cycle, ease housing pressure, and counter anti-immigrant hate – but this clashes with their landlord and finance backers. History proves it’s possible: Fianna Fáil built dynastic legitimacy through mass public housing, especially during crises (100,000 council homes 1898-1948, 65% under de Valera).

Globally, we face a false choice: a soulless ‘radical centre’ cannibalising the commons for war and profit, or a barbaric authoritarian right scapegoating the vulnerable. The US leads this decay. Spending $1 trillion annually on militarism while hiding $7.6 trillion offshore, it incubates white supremacy and misogyny (a rape every 6.2 minutes). Trump shreds checks and balances, deploying troops against protest and expanding a prison-industrial complex exploiting 2.3 million via the 13th Amendment’s slavery loophole. Hate crimes surged under him.

As the radical centre winks, the far-right pushes for authoritarian rule. The first based on pure cynicism, the second pure sadism. Ireland is on the same trajectory, ravaged by the same greed and collapsing social contract.

August Bebel called antisemitism “the socialism of fools.” Today, racism serves as the twisted ‘analysis’ of the desperate – a marginalised underclass and an impoverished petty bourgeoisie. The racist violence in Ballymena and Larne isn’t an anomaly; it’s a premonition. Like in the US, Israel, or among Afrikaner tech billionaires funding online hate, this outburst emerged first within loyalism due to its colonial-settler roots – communities steeped in supremacism where the target has simply shifted from “Fenian” to “Foreigner.” Stormont’s dysfunction compounds deep austerity in Britain’s most impoverished region. It’s no accident only 3.4% of the North’s population isn’t ‘Irish’ (Orange or Green); it’s an economic blackspot shunned by migrants. Racism explodes here from a toxic mix of legitimate economic grievance and supremacist history/ideology. Crucially, many worse-off areas in the North blame the actual 1% ruling the world, not the 3% of immigrants. Ballymena and Larne, for now, scapegoat the vulnerable.

Victor Serge wrote powerfully in 1943 where this socialism of the fools led – global imperial catastrophe and the gas chambers. ‘Today this humanism is struck at its foundations: in totalitarian systems the Christian spirit, the scientific spirit and the socialist spirit are destroyed or mortally disfigured.’ Serge understood that fascism hinged on ‘directing the violence of the masses against an unarmed minority of the nation. In order to better destroy the dignity of the human person, it is necessary to accustom society to the humiliation, spoliation, and extermination of a social category arbitrarily chosen precisely because it is defenceless.’ In 1944, he elaborated stating that fascism sought to ‘create an irrational psychology at a time when rational thought was becoming dangerous to governments; to create through violence, spoliation and massacres the terrible bond of criminal complicity between all participants in antisemitism (in order to cement its ability to resist); to degrade mankind in general in order to more easily break its opposition to the totalitarian regime.’ As Israeli missiles strike Iran, and genocide unfolds in Gaza, the cruel historical irony of these words should also awaken us to the fact that Trump’s kleptocratic and xenophobic government is preparing the way for an authoritarian coup and a global conflagration.

As that other great Trotskyite holocaust survivor Ernest Mandel once wrote: “In normal times the repressive apparatus only plays a secondary role in maintaining the capitalist system, since it is de facto respected in everyday life by the great majority of the working class. It is different in periods of crisis (whether the crisis be economic, social, political, military or financial), in which the capitalist system is profoundly disturbed, in which the working masses express their desire to overthrow the system, or in which the latter itself no longer manages to function normally. Then repression comes to the forefront of the political scene. Then the fundamental nature of the bourgeois state quickly reveals itself in its naked form: a body of armed men in the service of capital. Thus a more general rule in the history of class societies is confirmed. The more stable the society is, the more it can afford the luxury of granting various formal freedoms to the oppressed. The more shaken and unstable by profound crises it is, the more it has to exercise political power through open violence rather than by means of eloquent speeches.”

We are entering the era of what Engel’s defined as a ‘body of armed men in the service of capital’. We cannot rely on the Liberal centre as they have sowed the seeds of fascism for four decades and they will, with some honourable exceptions, cut their cloth to suit the naked misanthropy of the emperor’s new clothes. To return to Serge, when the Nazis promoted their New World Order in the 1930s, ‘by cultivating an irrational ideology based on murder, they managed to awaken and mobilize in the whole world those sadistic instincts that Christian civilisation, scientific culture, European humanism and socialism seemed to have tamed. The psychological and social consequences of this degradation of modern man will certainly persist long after the liquidation of Nazism and the punishment of the guilty.’ The neo-liberal triumphalism of the end of history rings hollow at every turn. The days of the hidden hand are over and unless Irish people, and humanity in general rediscover the great radical humanist tradition and finally take steps to create a human society and future then Ballymena and Larne will only be the start of it.

During a BBC Radio Ulster interview (Friday June 13 2025) the DUP Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart raised “legitimate concerns”; she related issues like housing and cost of living to immigration; when challenged that the 6 counties has a very low number of immigrants, way less than the rest of the British state or the 26 county bit of Ireland, what is Carla’s answer? Huge numbers of illegal immigrants are entering the 6 county bit of Ireland from the 26 county bit, and nobody is counting!

The radio interviewer William Crawley on the Talkback programme makes valiant efforts to contradict Lockhart’s sinister lies, but it’s pointless. He might as well be talking to ethnic cleansers like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Benjamin Netanyahu.

DUP Westminster MP Carla Lockhart fans racist flames on BBC Radio Ulster Talkback programme

Lockhart is a leading member of the Democratic Unionist party, which is fanning racist flames in the north of Ireland – and which is part of the Stormont government.

Are we witnessing the disintegration of the pathetic GFA settlement? Do we need to arrive at a reopened Train station last used in 1972 after Derry ‘s Bloody Sunday : Smash Stormont. If DUP Minister for Communities Gordon Lyons does not resign

Sinn Féin should bring down the Stormont government.

John Meehan June 14 2025

Racism: The socialism of Fools; Racist Cancer Spreading from Ballymena in Ireland