One of the most striking elements about
last week’s riots in Southampton, watching back the many hours of citizen footage, was just what a brilliant time everyone seemed to be having commemorating the murder of an 18-year-old student. The booze. The laughter. The football songs. The music pumping out of a portable speaker daubed with a “Stop The Boats” sticker. The counter-cultural kink of reclaiming the knee, screaming “I can’t breathe” in the service of making Britain intolerant again.
By such means does white nationalism embed itself just a little further into our politics, our media, our shared spaces, our lives. And of course not everyone pushing this stuff will be an incorrigible racist. But many will do so anyway, because the sense of momentum and consternation feels exhilarating, because it may make their professional or social lives more comfortable, because “clash of civilisations” and “race war” sound like really cool mobile games.
And so one way we can honour the memory of Henry Nowak is by exposing some of the spiritual voids claiming to speak for him. To point out not just their hypocrisies and double standards, but also their proud ignorance, their joyriding vacuity, their basic
cringe. “What happened to Henry should never have happened,” a woman in Southampton
tells one of the live-streamers. In the background, a voice can be heard muttering: “Oh,
Henry. That’s his name.”
Jonathan Liew in
the Guardian skewers the fashionable followers of far right self righteousness.