http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...ps-murder.html
The Assassination of British MP Jo Cox Has Intensified Britain's Political Crisis
In the UK, Thomas Mair has been formally charged with the shooting and stabbing murder of British MP Jo Cox, and the suspect gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” while appearing at the Westminster magistrates court on Saturday, the Guardian reports. “Bearing in mind the name he has just given, he ought to be seen by a psychiatrist,” the magistrate responded. Whatever Mair’s ailments or motivations, the killing of Cox, a well-respected activist and politician who was seen as a rising star of the opposition Labour Party, one week before the Brexit vote, has both exposed and exacerbated a deep political crisis in the country.
As the New York Times reported Friday night, the 52-year-old Mair is being investigated for ties to right-wing extremism, as well as a history of mental illness, and authorities reportedly believe the part-time gardener had targeted 41-year-old Cox for political reasons. They continue to investigate witness accounts that the suspect had shouted “Britain first” during the attack, a slogan which is also the name of a far-right political group in the UK that opposes both immigration and the country’s membership in the European Union, though the that group has denied any link between it and the attack.
Following Cox’s murder on Thursday, the campaigning for and against Britain’s EU membership, with a referendum vote on the so-called Brexit scheduled for next Thursday, remains officially suspended, though it appears that campaigning will resume sometime over the weekend. Cox was ardently pro-immigration and an active campaigner for the UK to remain in the EU, and her assassination has prompted calls for more civility from across the political spectrum in the country...
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mair had a history of purchasing material, including a neo-Nazi book, from a white supremacist organization in the U.S., and he also subscribed to a South African pro-apartheid magazine in the 1980s.
It’s still not clear how Cox’s death will influence public opinion and next week’s voting on the possible Brexit, but her brutal murder has shocked the country and highlighted how divisive the debate over EU membership, and relatedly, immigration, has become in the country. The Spectator’s Alex Massie, in his response to the attack, confessed that he “cannot recall ever feeling worse about this country and its politics” than he did on Thursday. He also succinctly summarized why many have grown to despair the tone of the Brexit campaign, and in particular decried the long-term tactics of those opposing EU membership on the right:
Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
We can’t control the weather but, in politics, we can control the climate in which the weather happens. That’s on us, all of us, whatever side of any given argument we happen to be. Today, it feels like we’ve done something terrible to that climate.
Massie adds that “if you don’t feel a little ashamed – if you don’t feel sick, right now, wherever you are reading this – then something’s gone wrong with you somewhere.”
As an example of how twisted the case to Leave has become, the Times notes that:
The official and unofficial Leave campaigns have suggested that Turkey and its 77 million Muslims are soon to join the European Union, which is untrue, and that despite Britain’s restrictions on free travel for European citizens, membership in the European Union has made Britain more vulnerable to waves of refugees and terrorism
While the claims may be unsubstantiated, pollsters suggest that the focus on Turkey and on regaining “control” over immigration was behind the movement toward a British exit, or Brexit, which is now narrowly leading most polls.
....
But at the New Statesman, Laurie Penny tries to take an aerial view how Cox's murder, and the reaction to it, is but the latest evidence of a much larger problem facing the Western world:
This is not simply a question of terrorism, or of mental illness, easy as either of those answers would be. It’s both, and more. It’s hate-groups preying on the broken and hopeless and fearful, and we are letting it happen.
Sometimes people break down. And sometimes societies break down, and if we are using the language of sickness, the sickness is inside us.
Something has gone badly wrong in this country. Something has gone badly wrong in America, and in the rest of Europe. The centre cannot hold; deep cracks of violence and suspicion crawl in from the fringes of public opinion to rend the heart of the political consensus. Ruthless shysters exploit the rage of the most vulnerable, of those cheated and tossed aside by austerity and inequality, and redirect it towards the marginalised, towards outsiders. ...
The sickness is already inside us. The craziness is chewing away at the heart of our society, of our politics. It cannot be explained away, and we owe it to ourselves and to the victims not to write it off as affectless terrorism or meaningless madness. It is hate. There is a logic to it. That logic is being exploited by unscrupulous scumbags, to everyone’s shame.
In the UK, Thomas Mair has been formally charged with the shooting and stabbing murder of British MP Jo Cox, and the suspect gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” while appearing at the Westminster magistrates court on Saturday, the Guardian reports. “Bearing in mind the name he has just given, he ought to be seen by a psychiatrist,” the magistrate responded. Whatever Mair’s ailments or motivations, the killing of Cox, a well-respected activist and politician who was seen as a rising star of the opposition Labour Party, one week before the Brexit vote, has both exposed and exacerbated a deep political crisis in the country.
As the New York Times reported Friday night, the 52-year-old Mair is being investigated for ties to right-wing extremism, as well as a history of mental illness, and authorities reportedly believe the part-time gardener had targeted 41-year-old Cox for political reasons. They continue to investigate witness accounts that the suspect had shouted “Britain first” during the attack, a slogan which is also the name of a far-right political group in the UK that opposes both immigration and the country’s membership in the European Union, though the that group has denied any link between it and the attack.
Following Cox’s murder on Thursday, the campaigning for and against Britain’s EU membership, with a referendum vote on the so-called Brexit scheduled for next Thursday, remains officially suspended, though it appears that campaigning will resume sometime over the weekend. Cox was ardently pro-immigration and an active campaigner for the UK to remain in the EU, and her assassination has prompted calls for more civility from across the political spectrum in the country...
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mair had a history of purchasing material, including a neo-Nazi book, from a white supremacist organization in the U.S., and he also subscribed to a South African pro-apartheid magazine in the 1980s.
It’s still not clear how Cox’s death will influence public opinion and next week’s voting on the possible Brexit, but her brutal murder has shocked the country and highlighted how divisive the debate over EU membership, and relatedly, immigration, has become in the country. The Spectator’s Alex Massie, in his response to the attack, confessed that he “cannot recall ever feeling worse about this country and its politics” than he did on Thursday. He also succinctly summarized why many have grown to despair the tone of the Brexit campaign, and in particular decried the long-term tactics of those opposing EU membership on the right:
Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
We can’t control the weather but, in politics, we can control the climate in which the weather happens. That’s on us, all of us, whatever side of any given argument we happen to be. Today, it feels like we’ve done something terrible to that climate.
Massie adds that “if you don’t feel a little ashamed – if you don’t feel sick, right now, wherever you are reading this – then something’s gone wrong with you somewhere.”
As an example of how twisted the case to Leave has become, the Times notes that:
The official and unofficial Leave campaigns have suggested that Turkey and its 77 million Muslims are soon to join the European Union, which is untrue, and that despite Britain’s restrictions on free travel for European citizens, membership in the European Union has made Britain more vulnerable to waves of refugees and terrorism
While the claims may be unsubstantiated, pollsters suggest that the focus on Turkey and on regaining “control” over immigration was behind the movement toward a British exit, or Brexit, which is now narrowly leading most polls.
....
But at the New Statesman, Laurie Penny tries to take an aerial view how Cox's murder, and the reaction to it, is but the latest evidence of a much larger problem facing the Western world:
This is not simply a question of terrorism, or of mental illness, easy as either of those answers would be. It’s both, and more. It’s hate-groups preying on the broken and hopeless and fearful, and we are letting it happen.
Sometimes people break down. And sometimes societies break down, and if we are using the language of sickness, the sickness is inside us.
Something has gone badly wrong in this country. Something has gone badly wrong in America, and in the rest of Europe. The centre cannot hold; deep cracks of violence and suspicion crawl in from the fringes of public opinion to rend the heart of the political consensus. Ruthless shysters exploit the rage of the most vulnerable, of those cheated and tossed aside by austerity and inequality, and redirect it towards the marginalised, towards outsiders. ...
The sickness is already inside us. The craziness is chewing away at the heart of our society, of our politics. It cannot be explained away, and we owe it to ourselves and to the victims not to write it off as affectless terrorism or meaningless madness. It is hate. There is a logic to it. That logic is being exploited by unscrupulous scumbags, to everyone’s shame.
