The former EDL leader is one of a new breed of entrepreneurial activists who are bringing extremist myths into the mainstream – while also claiming they are being silenced.
By Daniel Trilling
In the last few years, a new kind of far-right activism has emerged. This new activism, comprised largely of online anger and offline protest, crosses borders yet is heavily nationalist. It has figureheads but no formal leadership structure. It asks for little long-term commitment from its participants, yet is able to mobilise large amounts of money and attention, throwing its opponents into fierce disagreement about how to respond. Its icons tend to be entrepreneurial social media personalities, celebrities of a sort, who use their following to exert pressure on mainstream politics. And nobody embodies the dynamics of this new movement more than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), who usually goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson.
Since the summer, thousands of people have taken to the streets in support of Yaxley-Lennon, who was imprisoned for several months in May for contempt of court, before being released on bail in August pending a retrial. These rallies, which were organised in part with funding from the US, were addressed by representatives of European far-right parties, as well as a US Republican congressman. A range of extremist groups were present in the crowds, and at one rally, on 9 June, several hundred demonstrators attacked police with bottles, cones and sticks in Trafalgar Square.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Re2wl5
No comments:
Post a Comment