Why the headlines didn’t say: ‘Fascist Terrorist Assassinates Elected Politician’

That is what the headlines should have said when Jo Cox died. The man who killed her was a Fascist – that was clear from the fact he shouted the name of a prominent Fascist organisation – Britain First – as he shot her, and has since become even more clear.

It was also, clearly, an act of Terrorism. It was something done for a political purpose, and the tactic chosen was one intended to cause fear in the hope that this would achieve that political end.

It was also an Assassination- it was the targeting of a specific figure in the public eye who represented something that the killer wanted to see destroyed – white non-Muslim people having solidarity with Muslims of different skin colours or at the very least British Citizens having solidarity with non-British Citizens.

But the same media organisations that are usually happy to use the word ‘Terrorism’ as soon as possible if the suspect is believed to be Muslim, were very reluctant to use this word, or the word ‘Fascist’, or even the word ‘Assassination’.

In the British flawed ‘Representative’ democracy, the only way an ordinary citizen stands a chance of influencing the affairs of State is by writing to your MP or talking to them at a constituency surgery. Constituency surgeries are perhaps the greatest claim the British state has to actually being any kind of democracy at all, rather than the plutocratic oligarchy that it appears to be to the untrained eye.

It was precisely this event that was chosen as the seat of the attack by a man who does not believe in any kind of democracy whatsoever, to carry out the murder of an elected official. It may have been chosen simply because it was an event she was guaranteed to be at, but nonetheless the symbolism is powerful – this was an attack on democracy by anti-democratic forces.

Again, the same media organisations that normally love to use this kind of language utterly failed to do so. If a government far away chooses to allow it’s oil to be sold in a different currency to the US dollar, as Saddam Hussein and Colonel Ghadaffi  did, this is grounds for war to ‘protect democracy’, even though the US dollar is the property of the completely unelected Federal Reserve Bank, which even American citizens have no say over, let alone British ones.

So is the British army going to be sent to war against Britain First and other Fascist groups? It seems unlikely. Just the other week in Bristol I witnessed what must have been tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds being spent on policing and fences to allow a group of 14 Fascists to have access to one of the most popular parks in the city, safe from the hundreds of anti-fascists who gathered to oppose them.

Such things are very common. The British State allows Fascists to march regularly and is prepared to spend an awful lot of money to protect their ‘freedom of speech’ to do so, even though under Fascism the rights to freedom of speech and protest would not exist. We are often told that this is because of the State’s democratic liberal values – that they are so principled as to defend someone’s right to say something even if they disagree.

Yet under an Anarchist or Democratic Socialist system, there would be much greater democracy, much greater freedom of speech, and yet the Anarchist, Socialist and similar-minded movements in the UK are rarely given this expensive police protection (quite the reverse!) even when we are on the streets trying to ‘protect democracy’ from Fascists.

We also have the disadvantage that we do not have sympathetic newspapers being sold in every newsagent in the country, blasting out propaganda for us for free.

Imagine is for every news story attacking immigrants, people on benefits, squatters, travellers and Leftists there was a corresponding one attacking corrupt bureaucrats, violent police thugs, rapacious transnational corporations or bigoted lower-middle class racists.

Imagine if for every article suggesting we should scrap the human rights act and put more people in jail, there was one saying we should give people more rights and take more people out of jail.

Imagine if when an Anarchist smashed a bank window or dared to use self-defence against a cop trying to smack them in the face with a steel baton, the newspapers asked the public to be sympathetic to their mental state rather than immediately labelling them a terrorist or trouble-maker.

Of course, anyone performing any kind of act of violence is probably not in the best mental state. Of course, it is wise when someone attacks you or someone you care about to try to hold yourself back from immediately judging them as ‘evil’ or dehumanising them in some other way. It is difficult to do so, but it is wise, and through meditation and much reflecting on the ways in which deep down all humanity is one and the same, I believe it could be possible.

So I am not criticising the media for looking into the mental health of the Fascist Assassin and Terrorist. I am criticising them for not also calling him a Fascist, Assassin and Terrorist at the same time. It’s easy to write a sentence doing both, e.g. What mental health factors drive someone to become a Fascist Assassin and Terrorist? See, easy.

I am also criticising them for not applying the same sympathetic considerations in other cases of Terrorism. Do they consider Muslim Terrorists to be completely mentally stable?

The Terrorist who killed dozens of people in the club in Orlando was also suffering from mental health problems. It seemed he was attracted to men and was repressing it, possibly due to being brought up with homophobic beliefs, causing him to lash out against openly gay people. This is a common psychological phenomenon and the cause of much of the homophobic violence in the world.

A media organisation that wanted to help the public understand violence and how it could be avoided might want to invite it’s readers or viewers to consider such things.

However, a media organisation that actively wants to promote racial and religious hatred among white working class people in the Western world to encourage them to support imperialistic wars in the Muslim world and be indifferent to the human cost, might report any act of violence carried out by someone who may be Muslim in such a way as to dehumanise them (and their entire religion) to make them appear evil and worthy of death.

A media organisation seeing a white working class person with mental health problems whipped up into a violent frenzy through years of its own propaganda to the point where he assassinates an elected politician, might not want its readers to think about whether or not it was to blame in any way for it. It might therefore not use the same language it uses in the case of Muslim terrorists. It wouldn’t want other white working class people to stop and consider that it is not a good thing to be a Fascist, essentially.

Of course if media organisations were behaving like this, this could be considered a threat to democracy in itself. If instead of impartially and unbiasedly reporting on similar crimes in a similar way regardless of the ethnicity or religion of the suspect, they were in fact using a double standard and protecting the fascist movement while continuing to stir up hated against ethnic minorities to encourage more people to become fascists – it could be considered that these organisations were actually pro-Fascist ones themselves.

How lucky we are that instead of living in a plutocratic oligarchy with a strong and thriving Fascist subculture and media protected by the power of the State, we instead live in a liberal democracy where power rests with those who are elected by the people rather than whoever has access to a gun.

Boris Johnson, a charismatic right-wing populist leader who is obsessed with ancient Rome and who could become the most powerful man in the country without having to stand for election goes around speaking on podiums that say #TakeControl . Nothing fascist about that at all, is there?

Let us not be afraid though. Truly, that is letting the Terrorists win. Jo Cox stood for Britain remaining in the EU, for letting more refugees come in, and for Peace. Let us continue to fight for these things, knowing that by doing so we are acting out of love for all humanity, rather than fear for whoever the Fascist media say we should consider our enemies.

Let us also consider the mental state of other prominent Fascists, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and not dehumanise them as they dehumanise others. Perhaps one day they will learn to be comfortable in their own skin and not feel they have to constantly make spectacles out of themselves to get attention.

Speaking of spectacles and being comfortable in your own skin, here is a video of some naked people, trying to inject some positivity back into the referendum campaigning after all the doom and gloom last week.

Stay positive, and never give up