And this is Skittles. Just a little treat for you before we get into this because we’re
gonna be looking at some really whack nazi shit today.
We’re gonna be taking a look at a video by British neo-nazi Mark Collet, former head
of publicity for the BNP, a far right white supremacist group from the UK for those lucky
enough not to have heard of them. He also dates this charming woman here, and puts out
videos such as The Jewish Question Explained which, sadly, is exactly what it sounds like.
We’re not gonna talk about that video though because the decades old nazi conspiracies
he regurgitates in it have been long debunked and I want to have a look at a more modern
examples of the way the far right make their arguments.
A few months ago Mark uploaded a video titled: Sadiq Khan - London's Muslim Mayor EXPOSED
But only about half the video is really anything to do with Sadiq Khan. I was planning to break
this video up into clearly defined segments but to be honest it’s kind of a rapid fire
series of claims and statistics all in service of the idea that London is in ruins, like
it’s fucking GONE. Listen (clip)
This probably comes as quite a shock to all the people currently living in London who
weren’t aware they were now on the set of a Mad Max film.
Throughout this video there is a phrase I want you to keep in mind. “Using a truth
to tell a lie”
This tactic is not unique to the far right by any means but it IS a favourite of theirs.
I first discovered this idea in the first chapter of Edward Said’s Orientalism. In
which British Statesman Arthur James Balfour justifies British occupation of Egypt.
He claims that because Egypt has a history of being governed by pharoahs in an oppressive
monarchy-like governing style, a truth.
That Egyptians simply PREFER to be ruled in that fashion, or indeed naturally REQUIRE
it, a lie.
He uses something that is understood to be true to justify a dishonest conclusion, and
we’re gonna see some of that throughout Mark’s video.
So the first 2 main points Mark makes are that crime is tearing London apart, and that
there’s less white people than there used to be… and more muslims.
He does something very sneaky here, he sandwiches crime stats between stats about demographic
changes in the city, so as to IMPLY that these two things are connected. So we’re going
to take a look at his first demography stat, then the crime stats, then his RETURN to demography
so as to respect the chronology, and also to demonstrate the tactics Mark uses to convey
his real point.
(roll clip about 45% white Londoners) Now, that’s not what a minority is. If the
other 55% were one group then that would be the case but taking a quick look at the 2011
census data that the article references the next largest group would be people from ALL
Asian backgrounds, including British born. Even if we pretended that the Chinese, Indian,
and every other Asian population of London were similar enough to group under one banner,
which is ridiculous, they still wouldn’t even come close to the white british population.
White brits in London still hold an enormous majority
It’s very telling of the way people like Mark view the world that they see 55% which
includes all other ethnicities, including other white people as a monolithic Other that
could somehow constitute a majority over, again, the largest ethnic group in the city
BY FAR.
Next Mark comes to the section about crime. A topic that he is VERY concerned about.
Mark provides us with the headline of an Independent article saying London’s murder rate has
surpassed New York’s for the first time ever. Mark didn’t bother to provide a link
to this article so after a quick Google search I found it aaaand
“While London remains substantially the safer city overall, with less than half the
homicides of New York last year, a recent spike in knife crime meant February was the
first month the UK capital was home to more murders than the US city.”
Substantially the safer city overall, huh? Not quite in ruins, is it?
The news outlets are also to blame here as they were all running with this story back
in April when these stats were released. It makes for a scary headline especially if you
don’t know that New York is the second safest city in the US with a population over 500,000.
And even then London remains “substantially the safer city overall”
Now, a few months down the line, we’re able to highlight the reason we look at annual
trends in crime and not month by month. From January to June of this year New york has
seen nearly double the homicides that London has. And again, that’s the second safest
big city in America. I think London is gonna be okay.
As you can see here New York has absolutely dwarfed London in homicides in every other
month so far. This is why we don’t cherrypick, it can very easily make you look silly when
someone else simply provides more information. I think it would be more appropriate yet to
use entire years like you’re supposed to. Mark
“Looking at 2017, the homicide rate per 100,000 population stood at 1.2 in London
and 3.4 in New York.”
London has seen an uptick in homicides the past couple years but it remains much much
lower than it was in the 90s and early 2000s. And remember, in the 2001 census London had
about 7 million people, compared to 8 million in the 2011 census. We can expect some reasonable
growth between 2011 and 2018 as well. And yet despite over a million additional people,
some of whom will be muslims (oh no) there are still less homicides in 2018.
And recently Met Police Chief Cressida Dick has reported that in fact violent crime is
decreasing as of September this year.
And I’m sure Mark will be happy to hear that “Moped-enabled crime has also fallen
by almost half” since that was such a big concern for him. Falling by half is pretty
substantial. Especially considering there’s still so many muslims.
In stark contrast with the fear mongering imagery of a city in flames that Mark tries
to sell you, things are improving, and at their worst this year they were still far
better than they were 10 years ago. Long Before Sadiq Khan was mayor, and when there were
fewer muslims.
The correlation Mark tries to draw between ethnic diversity and crime doesn’t hold
water
Mark shows us the headline of an article by the definitely trustworthy RT stating that
Britain’s muslim population will TRIPLE by 2050. Again this is implicitly understood
by Mark to be a bad thing, but hang on, is it even true? Well the RT article does NAME
a study by the Pew research center, but they don’t bother to link it. Fortunately I understand
basic citation so I went ahead and found it and it will be linked with every other article
and study that I use, as well as Mark’s since he couldn’t be bothered to link most
of them.
The Pew study posits 3 hypothetical scenarios. A zero migration scenario, a medium migration
scenario, and a high migration scenario. Guess which one RT and Mark decided to go with?
The high migration scenario.
“a “high” migration scenario projects the record flow of refugees into Europe between
2014 and 2016 to continue indefinitely into the future with the same religious composition
(i.e., mostly made up of Muslims) in addition to the typical annual flow of regular migrants.
In this scenario, Muslims could make up 14% of Europe’s population by 2050 – nearly
triple the current share”
Which means this projection assumes the REFUGEE CRISIS is going to go on at its peak rate
for the next 30+ years. And even in that incredibly unlikely scenario, the study itself clarified
they would still be a much smaller group than christians and non religious people.
So this number is almost certainly not accurate, and the study also does not account for muslims
LEAVING. You know a lot of people forced to flee their homes, should their homes become
livable again, will want to return. The study uses a particular period of immigration from
Turkey and North Africa due to labour shortages as justification for this but I find it hard
to compare that situation to fleeing war. Overall I’d say this report is incomplete,
which is fine because...
The study also says this: “The projections in this report are not meant to forecast the
future, but instead present estimates for the religious composition of Europe under
three migration scenarios to convey a range of “what if” outcomes.” Only somebody
trying very hard to push a dishonest narrative would be using something like this as evidence
of anything. This is typical great replacement myth nonsense. If you want to learn more about
that, Shaun has a very good video on the topic but I’m going to move on to Mark’s next
point.
Mark spends the largest portion of the video doing something really weird, while he stresses
that Sadiq Khan is not the REASON London has been “destroyed” he does spend a lot of
time implying Sadiq Khan is sympathetic to islamic terrorism. In fact, a list on alt
right conspiracy site ZeroHedge is the ONLY one of his sources that he bothers providing
a link to beneath his video.
According to Media Bias Fact Check Zerohedge rates strong for conspiracy theories but only
mild for pseudo science. So they’ll likely try to convince you that “globalists”
are secretly manipulating world events, but they hopefully won’t try to sell you Brain
Force about it.
He links to a lengthy list of instances in which Khan has either defended or “shared
a platform” with people connected to or said to be supportive of islamic terrorism.
These range from complete fabrications to things that are technically true but don’t
really mean what Mark thinks they do. See before Khan entered politics he was a lawyer.
Guess what lawyers and politicians both have in common? Their work will have them associating
with many many people who they do not agree with. Serial killers still get defended in
court. Mass murdering dictators still participate in diplomacy with other nations. Recently
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have shared platforms, they’ve met, been friendly with each other.
Something tells me they aren’t suddenly best buds who agree with each others politics.
An example of something that is technically true but is being used to spin a false narrative
is the case of Khan opposing the extradition of Babar Ahmad to the US. Babar is a London
born British citizen who was arrested IN BRITAIN for posting two articles that were supportive
of the Taliban. Khan’s desire to keep him in Britain and try him IN Britain are extremely
reasonable, and although he did eventually lose his case against extradition the US judge
found that his actions did not constitute a terrorist act and with time served he was
out in months. Even Boris Johnson, the missing link in human evolution has stated that Babar
should have faced trial in the UK. This was hardly a spooky muslim conspiracy, unless
Boris knows something we don’t
I’m not going to go through every individual claim on this list but seeing as this is the
one thing Mark actually provides a link for, feel free to have a look for yourself. It’s
a great case study in how information is selectively used to IMPLY an association that can’t
really be proven.
In fact I’d like to juxtaposition this with what I did at the beginning of the video.
See while Mark tries to establish that Khan is sympathetic to some radical trend of islamic
extremism with vague, incidental connections like having “shared a platform with” someone
or… trying to have a British citizen tried in the UK… which very much echoes the right’s
attacks on Jeremy Corbyn for “sharing a platform” with people connected to Hamas…
to discuss the peace process between Israel and Palestine. What the fuck do you people
think politicians do?
Here’s a bit of free advice, the phrase “shared a platform” doesn’t really mean
much and if that’s all someone has when trying to prove that two people agree with
each other ideologically, then they probably don’t.
So contrast that with how I establish at the beginning of this video that Mark is sympathetic
to fascist politics. I don’t tell you about how he once met with a fascist, or how he
“shared a platform” with a fascist. No, I establish that he has worked with the BNP
for many years who openly engage in white supremacist politics, I show he is in a romantic
relationship with a woman with a swastika tattoo, and I use his own words, in his own
video full of absolutely wild nazi conspiracy theories to connect him to those sorts
of politics. See the difference?
Mark closes his uhh, video… with a pretty unsupported claim that diversity in cities
is what causes terrorism and less diverse cities do not have terrorism. He cites Beijing
which is funny since Beijing is not free of terror attacks.
This is another good example of using a truth to tell a lie. Terror attacks often happen
in diverse cities so diverse cities must cause terrorism. That’s what we call correlation
without causation and it’s generally considered poor form.
My home city of Manchester is much more homogenous than London at about 80% white british population
and yet we were still hit by a terror attack last year. Moscow is about as homogenous as
Tokyo and Beijing at over 90% of the population being Russian in the last survery and they’ve
had terror attacks. Meanwhile Amsterdam, which is demographically similar to London, like
many major cities are, has not had the same problems London has. There was a stabbing
last month that certain people are trying very hard to establish was an act of terrorism
but even if that does turn out to be the case that would Put Amsterdam up there with, Beijing
for terror attacks in the past few years. It doesn’t seem that diversity is the deciding
factor here.
Do you think it’s just because the mayor’s a muslim, Mark? Do you think ISIS dudes are
just planning their movements like yeah London’s got a muslim mayor we’ll be able to do whatever
we want guys it’s gonna be super sick.
I said that as a joke but… is that what you think?
Most big cities are not racially homogenous but there are many cities that have never
had terror attacks. There simply isn’t any correlation between racial diversity in cities
and terrorism, and even if there was that wouldn’t establish causation, Mark achieves
NEITHER, and that’s why Mark doesn’t try to provide evidence to back up that claim,
there isn’t any.
One last thing before we get to the conclusion, Mark references a quote by Sadiq Khan multiple
times in this video about terrorism being “part and parcel” of living in a big city.
This is actually a misquote what Sadiq Khan ACTUALLY said was being PREPARED for terrorism
is part and parcel of living in a big city. Which… yeah it is. I promise you Tokyo and
Beijing and every other big city are prepared for terrorism, they ALL have measures in place.
By the way as far as I could tell that misquote originated in a tweet from Donald Trump’s
weird kid, so.
The reason I’ve picked this particular video, when Mark has said so much incredibly terrible
bullshit, is because this style of argument is extremely common on the far right. I mentioned
“using a truth to tell a lie” a few times throughout this video and you can really see
it at every stage of Mark’s argument.
Truth: Knife crime is up
Lie: there is an unprecedented crime wave threatening our city
Truth: The muslim population in the city is growing
Lie: They will replace us as part of some orchestrated conspiracy
Mark seems to either think you’re gullible enough to believe him without checking his
sources, or he genuinely doesn’t bother to fact check his own arguments. It’s almost
like fascists don’t care about what is true and have come to their conclusions BEFORE
searching for evidence. Funny that.
And the sad thing is, there are REAL problems threatening the city of London. Skyrocketing
property prices, stagnating wages, people being pushed out of their own neighbourhoods.
The number of rented homes in London is now greater than the number of owner occupied
homes, which means the fact that the average rent in London sits at around 2,000 pounds
a month is going to be relevant to more than half of London households. And forget about
BUYING your house in London, pal.
And that’s if you’re lucky enough to even have a roof over your head. According to government
data the number of people in England sleeping rough has increased 73% in the past 3 years
and a LOT of them are in London, where St Mungo’s found that a homeless person dies
every two weeks.
London is not “in ruins” but it’s facing serious economic issues that are hitting its
most vulnerable citizens the hardest.
But those problems aren’t caused by poor refugees with very little political power.
Those problems are caused by the wealthy class of landlords, property developers and business
owners with a FUCKTON of political power. I wonder what it says about a person’s goals
when they ignore the damage the wealthy and politically powerful are doing to fabricate
a threat from the poor and politically vulnerable.
Just kidding it says their goals are genocide.