Moderates Enabling Racism - 6 march 2020

In this quote Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't saying that moderates are 'worse' than bigots and far-right extremists, but that they're almost certainly a bigger problem because of their continual desire to 'compromise' with the racists and extreme-right fanatics in order to maintain order, rather than doing the hard work of actually taking a principled stand and fighting for what's actually right.

We can see this in contemporary US politics as the 'centrists' flock to support Joe Biden, despite his dreadful track record of attacking social welfare, supporting mass incarceration, and vehemently opposing gay rights. purely because he's the last man standing who could beat Bernie Sanders to the Democratic nomination and maintain the status quo.

They'll overlook all of that stuff, as well as his clearly declining cognitive functions, rather than actually stand up and fight for stuff like universal health care, free university education, workers' rights, infrastructure investment, and the green new deal.

The same kind of thing happens in British politics too, with the Windrush scandal as one of the most obvious examples of "centrists" chickening out of the fight in order to make life easier for themselves.

Back in 2014 the Labour leadership instructed their MPs to abstain on Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" legislation in order to allow it to glide through parliament virtually unopposed, and the Lib-Dems even whipped their MPs into actively supporting it.

Only 18 MPs opposed this systematic racism, with Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, most of the SNP, and a couple of principled Lib-Dem rebels amongst them.

All of the liberal capitalist "centrists" went along with Theresa May's systematic racism because they didn't want to take a principled stand, and they didn't want to be portrayed as "soft on immigration" in the right-wing propaganda rags.

As a result of this vile Tory legislation thousands of black Brits were denied housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even vital medical care, scores of black British citizens were deported, and several died in exile overseas.

But the problematic behaviour of the liberal capitalist "centrists" didn't even stop there. During the 2019 general election this racist Tory discrimination and deportation campaign was barely mentioned by anyone other than black Brits and independent media left-wingers, when they quite obviously needed holding to account over their track record of deporting British citizens to their deaths overseas.

Compare this extraordinary silence with the absolute cacophony of faux liberal capitalist concern over Labour antisemitism, which never killed anyone, never deported anyone, never drove anyone out of their jobs or their homes, never denied anyone life-saving medical care ... and it's impossible to ignore the absolute hypocrisy of it.

One of the main reasons the liberal capitalist "centrists" refused to use this ammunition is that they knew their own complicity, so rather than risk the discomfort of admitting they were wrong to abstain/support it in the first place, they just lobbed the entire scandal down the collective memory hole.

Another of the main reasons is that they knew that highlighting examples of deliberate life-ruining systematic Tory racism would critically undermine their Orwellian project to portray the lifelong anti-racist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn as a nasty racist.

Of course the Tory racists who devised the "Hostile Environment" are utterly despicable people who deserve vehement condemnation, but it's also important to remember that their vendetta against black Brits could never have glided through parliament so easily without the deliberate collusion of the "centrists" who decided that throwing black British citizens under the bus was infinitely preferable to facing criticism from the right-wing propaganda rags for being "soft on immigrants".