Fighting Age Men
From the army to the mob
These men look for ecstasy not in embraces, but in explosions, in the rumbling of bomber squadrons or in brains being shot to flames.
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1 (1977)
Between the Brexit referendum and the pandemic, people in Britain seemed to long for martial law. In Empire’s Endgame, we wrote about the call to ‘send in the army’ as a totem of order, a desire for some authoritarian presence to whip the country into shape. This was a funny sort of militarism, more Keep Calm and Carry On than jackboots and rifles. As austerity snipped away at the social fabric and the state seemed to govern by neglect alone, the army was a cipher for authority and patronage, for the Big Other who could step in and take charge. Of course, there is always a lurking menace behind the fantasy of order — the queue, rationing, and VE Day kitsch are never merely nostalgia.
The far right have taken careful advantage of a generalised longing for authority, re-orienting it towards their own petty demagoguery. Their war games are a fantasy of anarchy, brutality, carnage and chaos. They don’t want to send in the army, they want to arm themselves. They still want to be saved, but for now, they’ll settle for licence to take matters into their own hands. And they are given that licence by a global network of hucksters, techno-fascists, and AI bots on the one hand and by a simpering, hollow, flailing national government on the other.
The murder of Harry Nowak in Southampton and the brutal attack on James Ogilvie in Belfast have sparked riots across the UK, with the most sustained and harrowing scenes coming from Northern Ireland. This week dozens of people, mostly working class and racialised, were made homeless in a Belfast pogrom, burnt out of their houses by masked men. Many residents locked themselves and their children inside hoping that the violence would pass them by. Starmer can can offer no story at all for what is happening or why, and so the far right continue to refine their narrative. This time, a new verbal motif is threaded through – fighting age men. X is awash with the phrase — small boats full of fighting age men, fighting age migrants, men of fighting age, third world fighting age Muslims, HMOs full of unvetted fighting age men. As it appears on social media, so too does it trickle into the language people use when speaking to journalists. The phrase goes uncontested, and so legacy media helps the far right’s outlandish claims become common sense.
The implicit claim is that these men, these fighting age men from distant, war-like, uncivilised lands, have been ‘placed here’ to replace the white population. The far right have seized upon Hadi Alodid’s nationality. The obvious fact that people must attempt to flee the brutal violence in Sudan is reoriented as bringing the conditions of Sudan to Britain. Some half-heard snippet of news detailing the central role of mercenaries, the mass rapes and killings, the abjection being visited upon the people of Sudan is being metabolised via conspiracy theory and Islamophobia. Of course, these agitators do not trade in rational geopolitical arguments but in dreamlike concatenations. The fact that the RSF are backed by Britain’s Gulf allies is immaterial. No history, no context, no facts can be admitted. Even the Powellite story of migrants undercutting wages or jumping the queue for housing is now distilled into a potent self-justifying conspiracy: they are the invading army and they need to stopped.
The warrior fetish of the manosphere – Andrew Tate’s War Room, evolutionary psychology, the normalisation of combat-ready physiques – exerts real cultural power. So too do the kitsch aesthetics of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom Marches. But singing Sweet Caroline in Trafalgar Square, dressing up as a centurion, or joining a life coaching pyramid scheme offers only flickers of the promised martial brotherhood. The Freikorps this ain’t. Nonetheless, digital contagion raises the tolerance for violence and big-day-out demonstrations lower the barriers to vigilante action.
Of course, there are some specificities to the situation in Belfast. As Michael Magee observes ‘loyalist mobs rampaging through the city is nothing new.’ A spokesperson from End Deportations Belfast said the tactics (such as using roadblocks to stretch police resources) are familiar, having been perfected in Northern Ireland since the 1970s. Organised racists have been circulating lists of addresses that house migrants, and though the Accountability Project Norther Ireland made the PSNI aware of these hitlists, nothing was done. But each summer that we see another racist carnival, another protest turn riot, or riot turn pogrom, more and more people across the UK get their first taste of street violence. The claim that migrants are fighting age men is a call for fighting age men to fight back.
Fighting age men is a justification for acts of war. And wars are, by nature, chaotic and dangerous. So the white Northern Irish man who stands outside the smoking carcus of his home saying they did this to one of their own can be dismissed as a casuality of friendly fire. War talk sanctions sexual violence, making incidents such as the racially motivated rape of an Asian woman in Walsall last October more likely. This is not a war, but it matters if people believe it is. War against internal enemies is the tunnel that leads from a loose, authoritarian far right into the wilds of fascism.
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I was on a panel at an event at Pelican House a few months ago, and someone asked whether I thought anti-fascists should be training to beat back fascists on the street. They mentioned various anti-fascist fightclubs, self-defence sessions and boxing classes and wondered why they were not more popular. I was sceptical about this idea. I’ve trained in boxing gyms and I’m not persuaded being in the ring is anything like fighting on the street. People who are good at scrapping on the street tend to like doing it. Doing it makes you want to do it more. I don’t think that’s a disposition we should cultivate. Of course, there are particular conditions in which I would mount a defence of political violence. But far right aggression is not the same as colonial occupation, and we are not in a revolutionary situation. Training for combat when the left is on the retreat tends to go badly – take a look at the history of The Weather Underground or the Angry Brigade. That doesn’t mean abandoning street politics, far from it, but it does mean taking seriously that a handful of well trained leftists are no match for a fascoid mob. The fantasy of being bigger and tougher and stronger is a distraction at best and, at worst, takes us into psychic territory that damages our capacity for caution, care, love, sorrow and humour. We need these more than we need brute force, however carefully directed. Our job is to build a mass from all walks of life – young, old, able bodied and not. Community self-defence tends to happen through sheer force of numbers combined with the creativity and ingenuity that emerges when people gather to protect their neighbours. We fight fire with water. The stories we tell should begin from here.
We’ll continue to hear talk of fighting age men. It will join small boats, grooming gangs, vulnerable women, innocent children, YooKay, two-tier policing. They are minting a vocabulary for their story. Our own story must sound a different note entirely.