when the talking heads of the British Media argue about which group they want to eliminate first, the top contenders are transgender people and muslims.
as it stands, both groups are under an intense amount of scrutiny and it is considered politically acceptable to talk about either in unfavourable terms. you can’t outright call for genocide, but you can say enough to insinuate that either group Shouldn’t Be Here, and boy a lot of people say that shit.
the only avenue of debate left for most of the main political parties (i mean real parties, not the lib dems, who are more a lobby for the interests of pro-eu homeowners) seems to be the question of how these groups are marginalised, and whether they should be eliminated wholesale or only scrubbed out of public life.
in the face of this mutual threat, there is only one party with a snowball’s chance in hell that’s also even remotely steadfast in its support for muslim communities and trans people: the green party of england and wales.
the greens have historically been rather fringe, and mostly a group of tories on bikes for a long while. this core of the party is responsible for their sillier positions, like the party’s strange opposition to caesarian section — “old merrie england” style-cranks, whose outsized prominence in a smaller party allowed for very odd wedge issues with little broader salience to be injected into the party programme.
then, after the 2024 election (where labour seemed to conclude that the entire electorate was actually full of vehement transphobic racists and triangulated accordingly), there was this huge vacuum for the Queers and the Muslims and whatnot to have someone who represented them. wunderkind zack polanski, this oddball gay jew what also used to be some breast-enlarging hypnotherapist, fit this role like a glove.
zack polanski does not come across as a populist man of the people. he doesn’t even have the kind of earnest sincerity that drips from corbyn’s tongue all the time. he’s this gappy-toothed bald guy with a very strong lisp. in the age of the Political Spectacle, where everyone’s trying to be the Trump of [X], or [X]’s Trump, or some anti-Trump, etc, one could be forgiven for thinking polanski lacked the force of personality required to unify the oh-so-discordant coalition of the Gays and the Muslims and the Progressive Youth and whatnot.
but then polanski did two very important things:
- he said “we shouldn’t eliminate transgender people or muslims and we should probably stop killing poor people. also, israel is doing war crimes and genocide and we should stop giving them guns.”
- he told the press to fuck off when they tried to hound him for these positions
this masterclass in political manoeuvring managed to vest in him the main bulk of the corbyn coalition over a very short period of time.
his main competition was Your Party (YORP), an entity which for most of existence was in superposition of “mailing list and old folks’ home for the labour left-in-exile” and “maybe a functional political party”, but eventually collapsed into the former once the lionness of coventry, zarah sultana, was tragically beaten back by the Corbynite Menace.
in any case, zack polanski got a lot of grassroots support and built a New Party with it around the core of Tories On Bikes and then the greens won a by-election very handily against both labour and reform uk in the gorton and denton by-election, an area with lots of muslims.
naturally, reform uk blamed said Muslims. you see, the Muslims in the area had locked in and voted in favour of the Don’t Kill Muslims Party, and this was clearly proof that the greens were actually performing Bloc Voting and doing Ethnic Sectarianism and Destroying Democracy.
the term “sectarianism” (the word what Racists use nowadays when they don’t want to say a Slur) was particularly weird to me because muslims wouldn’t vote so “sectarian”-ly if they weren’t being Othered. you designated these people as un-british! why are you surprised when they don’t vote Britishly enough?
what i also found odd was the banshee shrieks about how the party with Muslims was also a party with Gays. people were going, uh, don’t you know the muslims don’t like the Gays? why is there this ‘unholy alliance’? (tony blair’s actual words)
do these people not know how the real world works? i am one of the Transgenders and i know a lot of muslims are transphobic, but i also know the Government is Transphobic. my interests align with muslims because the Government is also islamophobic, and the muslims aren’t pricing trans eliminationism into every action, that’s what wes streeting is doing right now. so of course there is going to be Alignment.
the ridiculous point about all of this is it also completely sidelines the notion that Queer Muslims might exist. do these people think there aren’t any muslims what are gay and transgender? and where ‘muslim’ in practice doesn’t mean “religious belief” per se but just refers to the name of a Community with a real Social Structure manifest in community organisations and mosques and Whatnot?
do these people think ‘muslims’ just constitute a bunch of Single-Mindedly Homophobic Men and their Completely Obedient Veiled Wives, all in lockstep agreement? do they know about the intra-muslim ethnic and sectarian Beef what also happens? do they see single communities as Solid Things and not multifaceted terrains of struggle?
do they think this way of everyone? because you can split things like this all the way down and up, from the family all the way up to the state.
is it ‘sectarianism’ toward britain for political *parties* to exist at all? should we not all possess our one common, British vision?
i could fashion a fairly compelling argument, for instance, that east coast Gammons from decaying Seaside Towns are actually doing Pensioner Sectarianism. that they are trying to fracture Multicultural Britain (which is the real britain i actually grew up with) with the backing of a foreign power, america, and its leader Trump, all to secure the interests of a group of people who will all be dead in twenty years tops.
do they not see this?
well, it doesn’t matter, because they are eliminationists, signalling to a base, and the only messaging directed regarding this ‘alliance’ has three purposes:
- to let their chip shop blackshirts know that both ‘muslims’ and ‘queers’ may as well reflect the same political bloc for their purposes
- to make queer people more suspicious of muslims
- to make muslims more suspicious of queer people
as in, to say, that these people do not actually care about what happens to muslims or queer people, only between them — again, because they honestly believe that this is actually about some faustian bargain what we struck.
they honestly believe this is some plot going on, and not base survival.
it is also held that, say, muslims are using queer people for their own political purposes, that there is this big plot among The Muslims to take over the country using some Rainbow-Coloured Trojan Horse — of useful idiot activist types being cynically exploited by self-interested religious fundamentalists.
have these Wankers ever met a fucking muslim?
muslim community leaders don’t want to take over the country and institute some kind of shariah law. they are usually trying to prop up the standards and maintain the political security of their own communities, what they also rely on for political power.
it is not some rocket science. muslims aren’t guided by some intrinsic morality. nobody is. basic interests come before moral standpoints. if you come after muslims and queer people at once, then they band together as distinct interests, it is fucking Ridiculous to act as if this is some slippery slope.
while it may seem redundant to hammer home at this point, i say this again to illuminate the issue because you get leftist/progressive types who fall for this bullshit too.
and really, it’s a problem of treating these things as sects.
by aligning “queers” and “muslims” as distinct entities (as the green party is doing), there remains the fact that the base supremacy of “white” and “cishet” is filled in where a qualifier is not already established. so it ultimately appears as an alliance between “white queers” and “cishet muslims”, and you have to be queer or muslim in order to be a real force in that coalition.
so you can be a muslim and you’re part of a muslim community but you’re also chafing against the family order. and nobody actually gives a fuck about you.
this, more than ever, is why there’s a lot of unaddressed racism in this ‘Discourse’. because in any discussion about islamic queerphobia, the fact of queer islamophobia is completely sidelined. it is always presented as an issue of whether the Muslims are presenting themselves all proper. if the Muslims have Properly Aligned to these Progressive Values what we all hold.
because, to these guys, the actual material incentive structures behind groups of people do not matter — the real family orders, the real community networks, they don’t matter, what you need to do is get this entire fucking community full of this giant morass of competing interests in and of itself, and you need to make them all Woke by fiat.
and this standard is for some reason never applied to the hulking Morass of Big Whitey, because that’s background radiation for most people. the fact that it’s mostly white people propping up the anti-trans eliminationism of this big Labour Government, and prominent muslim transphobes like adnan hussein were basically just rowlingesque terfs being painted as religious fundamentalists for their skin colour — this doesn’t matter apparently.
what matters is adhering to this standard of ‘britain’. everyone agrees on this big old british soul what the whole body politic needs to adhere to for the former’s health. and everyone disagrees on what that britain is. zack polanski’s working on the old multicultural status quo, where britain’s a big tent of various communities, in the face of reform uk looking to reduce that tent back to the halcyon days of total Whiteness.
but there is no britain.
there hasn’t been a britain for quite some time.
decades of privatisations, of deregulation, of rising property prices and of a carceral regime that couldn’t figure out if it wanted to be brutal or ineffective and decided the best answer was both; the constant interweaving threads of people who came here for work, because we took over much of the world, and much of the world came to us and we blamed them for that; who were then tossed into this big old economic grinder the same as the rest of us, but with a new load of prejudices on countless different ends to boot; all this wound up turning ‘britain’ into little more than a bedtime story for kids like me, until we went out into the world, looking for a britain, and found nothing but a gig economy and squashed rooms in tiny houses worth huge bloody chunks of our monthly income.
we couldn’t fit a single inch of patriotic commonality into this world we lived in. and that’s our fault, now, because we don’t like our country. we’re killing that soul of britain. the Idealists believe that because we feel no romance for a thing that was killed, we are responsible for the death of that thing. they’re gaslighting us, yet again.
there is no britain. we are on our own. the state is aligned against us; not just queers and muslims, but also the entire morass of the youth, who are neglected, forgotten, and abandoned by a politics that is lockstep on pensions and will strip money out of anything else like copper wire.
but no, you’ve got to believe in a ‘britain’. in ‘british values’, even the ‘progressive’ parts of those british values. and if you can’t do that, well, say some, you don’t deserve to exist in this big old body politic.
because lucidly looking at communities as they exist? understanding that they are this interwoven system of interests? that exist on their own terms? that’s not allowed, and communities are going to be put under more and more pressure because otherwise, they might have the opportunity to lucidly regard themselves too.
but whatever happens, whatever occurs, we must identify with this thing, this tattered union jack. we must build a big old Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land, but if you want to face the real society which exists, build something for yourself — you’re betraying this thing, ‘Britain’, which to a lot of people may as well mean ‘God’.
and if you lucidly regard your interests anyway? if you align with people not because you agree with them, but because you have to?
well, that’s very unholy indeed.
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