SHUT DOWN LD50 GALLERY

So LD50 are gloating about their continued presence in Hackney.  Whether they intend to stay for a few more days or for good isn’t clear; but, then, neither is it important. Shut Down LD50 is perfectly happy to keep up its campaign to inform the community about the activities of the LD50 directors and will do so until either they recognise the brutality of the politics that they promote or leave the borough for good. Below is some information for anyone who needs to catch up on the events of the last months.       

Who are LD50?

The LD50 directors are promoters of a fraction of the extreme right that tends to define itself as ‘neo-Reaction’. By flooding their social media channels with racism (both overt and implied); by hosting racists and extreme misogynists; by relativising the statements made by the advocates of political murder; by defending them on the radio as ‘experts’; and now by posturing behind the mask of ‘science’, in the conventional manner of racist academics and intellectuals, the directors of the gallery space have made this crystal clear.   

Shut them down how?

As Hackney residents and cultural workers, it’s up to us to decide whether to provide LD50 with space, whether to offer them sympathetic media coverage, whether to ignore their events or actively contest them, and whether to give them a free pass or a rough ride.  If LD50 sense a marketing opportunity and choose to dig their heels in, so be it. But for so long as they continue to support racist causes while disclaiming responsibility for their outcomes, we need to show them that they aren’t welcome here. This is what ‘shutting them down’ means. It doesn’t mean calling the police and then burying our heads in our hands. It means coming together, as a community, including local residents, artists, journalists, feminists, anti-racist campaigners, anti-fascists, and trade unionists, in order to discuss ways to prevent racists from organising in the area.

And toleration?

In response to the campaign to shut the space down, the directors of LD50 will talk a lot about ‘toleration’. Their aim is for their ideas to go on being ‘tolerated’ until the point at which they no longer need to be presented in these terms because they are simply well established. But walk around Hackney, look at the Peace Carnival Mural, go to the Hackney One Carnival on Ridley Road. Think about the real, social freedoms that previous generations of our community were denied. How best to defend toleration in a place like this one? Do we do it by  welcoming racist middle-class gallery owners, as the proper successors to the National Front in post-gentrification East London, perhaps on the grounds that anyone should be ‘tolerated’ so long as they can pay commercial rents? Or do we do it by continuing the tradition of anti-racism without which an already diverse and tolerant borough like Hackney could never have existed in the first place?        

We think that tolerating LD50 is like tolerating the social cleansing of the Northwold Estate for the purposes of real estate development. The former makes manifest the basic tendency of the latter and arrives in Dalston on the back of the same kinds of urban displacement. And the more clearly we see the connection between the two processes the easier it will be to construct the campaigns that will shut down the one and reverse the other,  in the name of a freedom that is no longer the exclusive property of far-right gallerists, landlords, and property developers.              

Who would begrudge the New Centre for Research and Practice attempting to salvage a modicum of credibility after all the egg on its face for its association with Nick Land? It does look extraordinarily foolish, fashioning itself as a fulcrum of leftist innovation while singing the praises of a far right racist whose eugenic fantasies entrench the neoliberal status quo. We would have left it to its predicament, but in the New Centre’s desperate fire-fight it has shown itself to be more troubling than we first thought.

On one level, our broadside against Land’s racism, ‘No Platform for Land’, had the intended effect, provoking the New Centre’s public statement against future associations with Land and throwing light on the circulation of far right racism in cultural and academic scenes. But in the New Centre’s statement and associated social media postings, it has sought to rewrite its sorry history to position itself as a leading edge in the critique of Land, and to deflect attention from this shameless manoeuvre by positioning its anti-racist critics as vengeful and reactive ‘Red Guards’. Now it’s not only a matter of saving face. Attempting in this way to discredit and divert those who would challenge the content and circulation of far right ideas cannot but serve the agenda of the far right. Hence it’s no surprise to find that this trope of the ‘Red Guard’ is not the sole preserve of the New Centre but is integral to today’s far right, to be found, for example, every time Land loses his prized ‘coldness’ to Twitter-rave at those who would object to the spread of racism.

But at least the New Centre has finally cut loose from Land? Well, sort of. It was astonishingly reticent in doing so, and at least one of its Board of Directors seems to think the matter not yet closed, posting this on 30 March in reply to the New Centre announcement about ending relations with Land: ‘whatever decision we come to on this – and there’s been nothing like a consensus yet – i think we can agree that we shouldn’t in any way encourage the extortionary, red-guard tactics of these goons’.

In what way has it been reticent? The New Centre’s public position is that breaking ties with Land is due to his recent Twitter activity, that from early 2017 it was ‘displeased and angered by several tweets by Land in which he espoused intolerant opinions about Muslims and immigrants.’ Yet the New Centre has known since at least summer 2016 of the odious nature of Land’s ideas, which are far more extensive and integral to his philosophy than some ‘intolerant opinions’. We refer to an attempt by the New Centre to host Nick Land at an e-flux conference in July 2016, of which the organisational discussion stream on e-flux is eye opening (see the screen-grabs below). Three participants who opposed Land’s presence at this conference drew attention to his eugenecist and ethnonationalist screeds. New Centre director, Mohammad Salemy, took the opportunity to clarify, dismissing the ‘false accusations’ of one critic and claiming Land as some kind of double agent, his racist proclamations not to be taken at face value. Another member of the New Centre chimed in to argue that Land is in fact a rigorous anti-fascist and Marxist critic of media and economy. These are either delusions of grand proportion or acts of willful dishonesty. We think the former, but either way the two-fold effect is the same: blocking critique of Land’s racism, and camouflaging his far right ideas with leftist flavours, so aiding their circulation in scenes that would object if they spoke openly in their own name. 

Yes, we were taken aback too! When the full stinking pile of Nick Land’s racism was rubbed in the face of the New Centre, it responded by: accusing Land’s critics of spreading false accusations; attempting to disavow the significance of this racism; and claiming, with half-hearted conviction, that Land’s racism is really an anti-fascist subversion from within. When an institution promotes a far right racist, regularly hosts a far right racist, and makes out that far right racism is actually something wholly other… one is entitled to be a little alarmed.

Roll forward to February and March 2017, when after the e-flux fiasco the New Centre once more hired Nick Land to teach a course – a series of eight, 2.5 hour online seminars on ‘accelerationism’, at a price per student of $400. When challenged on social media, the New Centre’s public statement (29 March) was no longer along the delusional lines of the e-flux dispute; instead, it now leveraged in its defense the value of hosting ‘controversial ideas’ and abstract notions of ‘freedom of speech’. Salemy was less self-controlled in Facebook posts around this time, at least once arguing that Land’s idea of ‘hyper-racism’ (i.e. eugenic selection for intelligence and new speciation in separation from the ‘refuse’ of the rest) was not in fact racist (see the screen-grab).

But, hey ho, eventually, on 30 March, the day after our broadside against Land’s racism and an extensive critique of the neorectionary scene in Viewpoint magazine, the announcement came: ‘The new Centre has stopped planning more seminars with Land’. It is worded a little too carefully: ‘stopped planning’ doesn’t preclude starting again. But let’s not quibble; it’s a public announcement against Land. The statement continued, protesting too much: ‘We want to stress that we have not reached this decision based on the pressure by Shutdown LD50 campaign (there has been none until now) but as a result of our own personal convictions, beliefs and plans’. What a craven racket! It rewrites its longstanding apology for Land’s racism in order to shore-up and project a marketable brand image at all costs.

But wait! The New Centre just can’t keep its obsession down, as Landism seems to return under cover of denial. The ANON text, ‘Against Nick Land and the Reactive Left’ (2 April), functions like a proxy for the New Centre as it feels its way forward, reintroducing the New Centre’s notion that there’s a useful Land to be retrieved from a bad, and with it a new turn of its earlier dissimulation, that Land could be a Marxist ‘deep troll’. Added to which, now the alt right as a whole may be an agent of anti-capitalism: ‘Land himself even remarked that the Alt Right is a mass political movement against capitalism incubating, unexpectedly, from the right.’

ANON will continue to glean gems like this as Land teaches his New Centre course through April 2017. After that, even the New Centre wouldn’t be daft enough to host him again. But we don’t doubt that elements there hanker to keep that option open and will be grumbling on Facebook about the Cathedral, Red Guards, and other neoreactionary bogeymen for some months to come.

We invite the New Centre for Research and Practice, if they are to retain any credibility as a critical institution, to end their course taught by Nick Land (ongoing through March and April 2017). That students have paid for this course is not a problem they should be burdened with; a refund, whole or in part, would be the appropriate recompense.

Nick Land promotes racism, in its eugenic, ethnonationalist, and cultural varieties, and yet he continues to be feted in art and theory scenes. As the crisis lurches into the Frog Twitter presidency, the New Centre for Research and Practice hosts Land for a suite of eight seminars; Urbanomic, the experimental small-press, announces a reprint of Fanged Noumena, the Land collection that hooked-in his philosophy fan club; and an academic conference is advertised, in terms all too flattering, on Land’s ‘ferocious but short-lived assault’.

Is it that these institutions and projects are wittingly racist? No, they strike us more as Land’s ‘useful idiots’, enhancing the reputation, credibility, and reach of a far right racist while imagining his presence in their scenes furthers different agendas. Sure, they make the odd noise against his racism, when challenged, but it peeves them to do so, their hackles rise; racism is an irritant, the assumed radicalism of their projects seemingly absolving them of mundane responsibilities to investigate further, to reflect on their role, to cut Land loose. Instead, their cutting-edge philosophy morphs into liberal commonplace as they deflect opposition to the content and aims of Land’s racism and the means of its circulation and traction into abstract defense of the free play of ideas, of ‘reflect[ing] the landscape of contemporary thought’, of ‘working with controversial thinkers’. One wonders if this kind of philosophy reaches any point at which the content of an idea provokes critical opposition?

It is suggested that lack of critical attention to Land’s racist scene allowed it to proliferate unchecked, that, as the New Centre puts it, ‘the political left’s dismissal of right accelerationism and neoreactionary thought [i.e. the Land camp] is one of the many reasons as to why we are seeing an unchallenged rise of fascism and white nationalism in Europe and North America’. Quite so, they are right to highlight this lapse of attention. Though they have missed the logical conclusion of their observation: that we should critically oppose all the means by which far right racists rise and gain credibility, including when the means locate themselves on ‘the left’ or within experimental philosophy.

We are accused of not reading Land, of a failure to understand him, but the only defense we can see of those who are yet to cut loose from Land is that this failure of understanding lies with them. So let us clarify a little with some brief exposition of Land’s far right racism. We hope it will also be of use to others concerned about the spread of the far right under cover of esoteric philosophy.

Nick Land advocates for racially based absolutist micro-states, where unregulated capitalism combines with genetic separation between global elites and the ‘refuse’ (his term) of the rest. It’s a eugenic philosophy of ‘hyper-racism’, as he describes it on the racist blog Alternative Right, or ‘Human Biodiversity’ (HBD). Here, class dominance and inequality are mapped onto, explained, and justified by tendencies for the elite to mate with each other and spawn a new species with an expanding IQ. Yes, this ‘hyper-racism’ is that daft – and would be laughed off as the fantasy of a neoliberal Dr Strangelove if it didn’t have leverage in this miserable climate of the ascendant far right. Regarding the other side, the domain of the ‘refuse’, Land uses euphemism to stand in for the white nationalist notion of a coming ‘white genocide’: ‘demographic engineering as an explicit policy objective’, ‘steady progress of population replacement’, is the racial threat he describes on the bleak webpages of The Daily Caller.

It is claimed Land has a superior philosophy of capitalism (‘accelerationism’ – you’ve heard of it – the topic of his New Centre course). But like the Nazis before him, Land’s analysis of capitalism produces and is sustained by a pseudo-biological theory of eugenic difference and separation: the redemptive productive labour of well-bred Aryans, for one, the escalating IQ of an inward-mating economic elite for the other. There’s no ‘philosophy’ here to be separated from Land’s far right ‘politics’; the two are interleaved and co-constituting. ‘More Capitalism!’ has always been the essence of Land’s supposedly radical critique, from his early philosophy at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) to now. Hence it’s little wonder that his philosophy is inseparable from the racism that has always accompanied capitalism as an integral dynamic – from chattel slavery and the blood-bath of colonial expansion, to the passive slaughter of migrants in the Mediterranean and Black populations at the hands of the police, their mundane exposure to death calibrated to the crisis of the labour form. Land’s oh so virulent assault on the ‘Human Security System’, as he framed it in CCRU days, thrilling those who thought him the transvaluation of all values, is revealed to be the latest in a long and monotonous line of tropes that would disqualify the life of particular humans – the working class, minorities, and other ‘refuse’. For hyper-racists can rest assured, the elite’s ‘Human Security System’ is to be bolstered, by capital accrual and the proliferation of hard micro-borders.

That Land’s chosen people are internally homogeneous global classes of high ‘socio-economic status’ and not exclusively ‘white’ should not be the distraction he intends; the physical and psychological violence of racism has its own sorry architecture, but it has always closely partnered with the production and perpetuation of class privilege and pleasure. And inevitably, more traditional racist tropes of fear, hatred, and ridicule of Black people and Muslims, of ‘cucks’ (as the alt-right call those who would live without ‘race’ boundaries), feature with enough regularity in Land’s blog and Twitter (Outside in, @Outsideness, @UF_blog) that his ideas can merrily slop around on social media with the full gamut of racisms.

Take an example, posted on the day Land gave his third seminar at the New Centre, as if to rub their noses in it. On 19 March he tweeted favourably to a rabidly racist blog that explained German crime rates as the result of the supposed innate propensities of ‘races’ (and not, as anyone with a critical philosophy of capital knows, a result of racism, insecurity, and poverty); ‘Blessings from the Maghreb’, Land captioned it, with a wit worthy of Nigel Farage. Another chimed in to this dreary taxonomy of racial types with the observation that the Chinese ‘are impeccably well behaved’, to which Land’s response: ‘90% of my racism is based on that fact’. Don’t be mistaken to think the latter is some kind of light-hearted humour, for Land adopts – and teaches his junior interlocutors by example – a calculated ambiguity to his racism, all the better to broaden the milieu within which his odious ideas can circulate unchallenged.

Then there’s Land’s broader neoreactionary scene. For instance, he converses with Brett Stevens on Twitter as interlocutor, not opponent, and the two spoke as part of the ‘neoreaction conference’ (Stevens’ description) at LD50 in summer 2016. Stevens is a self-declared white nationalist whose ideas influenced Anders Breivik and who, in turn, praised Breivik’s murder of 77 people for, in Stevens’ eyes, being an attack on ‘leftists’: ‘I am honored to be so mentioned by someone who is clearly far braver than I,’ Stevens wrote of Breivik. ‘[N]o comment on his methods, but he chose to act where many of us write, think and dream’.

It is surely apparent from all this that any appeal from Land or his advocates to ‘free speech’ is a dissimulation, willed or accidental, that aides his efforts to extend the reach of his racism. It’s only those at the greatest remove from the violent impact of racism who don’t see that ‘free speech’ is repeated by the alt-right to such a degree – always front and centre in their profile – that it has become integral to their reproduction and dissemination. As ever, the art scene and liberal media have trouble seeing what’s right in front of their eyes. Look at Frieze’s recent effort, the magazine’s will to promote ‘free speech’ taking the form of a stacked ‘survey’ about the anti-racist shutdown of LD50, with an unbalance of three to one of those unable to fathom why it’s ill advised to give far right racists and their apologists a free pass through east London, the art world, and the university.

It has been said that we should learn from Land’s purportedly well-honed critique of the cognitive ecosystem of ‘the left’, the rather limited view that those who would overcome the violence, exploitation, and tedium of capitalist society are all just whingers. But the readiness of people to be impressed by this point suggests they may already be on the slippery slope to the right. For it would take little effort to find a wealth of critical work from radical theory and practice – from feminism, post-colonial theory, anti-racism, queer theory, Marxism, critical theory, communism – on the limitations of our scenes. That has always been a feature of radical currents, the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, where ‘all’ includes the standpoints from which that critique is made (in contrast to the drab inviolate principles of the far right: bourgeois individuality, race, nation). Undoubtedly, this critical capacity needs honing. Sustained critical and experimental engagement with this conjuncture and our limitations is sorely wanted, for there is much worse in the world today than Nick Land. But part of that critique should be opposing the presence of Land and his ilk in experimental scenes, rejecting the idea that we have anything to learn from these narcissistic, racist identitarians – nothing except how they came to proliferate so unopposed.

And that is a lesson for the future too. As the crisis deepens, we will be seeing more of these far right ideas disseminated under cover of ‘controversy’ and ‘free speech’; right wing ‘solutions’ camouflaged with leftist flavours; reactionary conservatism masquerading as techno-futurism; left wing scenes adopting right wing metaphysics; fantasies of social collapse arming the status quo, etc. Not that we’ll have to look too hard. Nick Land openly declares his racism, and yet critical institutions continue to promote him. Can they ride out opposition to Land and sail again on philosophical waters untroubled by the realities of class exploitation and racism? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Instead, we invite them to ditch their positive association with Land, before their credibility is tested beyond repair.

SDLD50

The Shut Down LD50 campaign can happily disclose that the landlord of the LD50 Gallery has asked the tenants, Lucia Diego and Alexander Moss, to vacate the premises. The gallery sign has been taken down from the building at 2–4 Tottenham Road, Dalston, London, and there is no indication that any future events will be taking place in the space. As of April there will no longer be a racist cultural centre operating in Hackney.

Shutting down the gallery is the result of sustained campaign work by many political and community groups, Hackney residents, cultural workers and journalists. We thank everyone involved for their dedication. At the same time we have to recognise that this is only a first step. More needs to be done both to prevent LD50 and its organisers from restarting their project elsewhere, and more generally to ensure that our communities and cultural institutions are kept free of the influence of the far right.

We urge people inside and outside of the art world to refuse to work with Lucia Diego and Alexander Moss. They have actively supported the development of a fascist culture in London. The speakers they hosted often promote mass violence against oppressed peoples and political opponents. The LD50 representatives have done next to nothing to disassociate themselves from such views. There is every reason to believe that they will attempt to resume their public promotion of racist ideas if given the opportunity. Not giving fascism a platform or a voice is an effective non-violent means of stopping them.

It is also important to learn lessons from our activity up until now. As a loose affiliation of friends and associates the Shut Down LD50 Campaign worked collectively alongside established community groups. We have worked mostly anonymously in order to protect ourselves. This was especially necessary after Lucia Diego published the personal details of opponents for potential use by the online far- and alt-right (including open advocates of political murder). When we oppose fascists we need to protect ourselves from their tactics of intimidation.

We must continue to think about how to oppose racism and fascism more broadly. Whilst some of the events at LD50 were openly fascist, it is clear that the space also took inspiration from the more everyday forms of political authoritarianism that have proliferated during the last few years, including Trump. Shutting down fascists in the long term requires that we transform the culture in which they can begin to gain popular and institutional support (and the art world is not the neutral space it often believes itself to be). We need to be able to ask larger questions, such as how to oppose Britain’s own violent border regime.

One way is by working in and alongside the many groups who helped to support our campaign. All of these different organisations are doing exceptional work in the fight against racism, fascism and oppression. Their struggles are becoming increasingly necessary, and we encourage you to get involved with them. To that end, we include a list of groups who have supported us below.

Shut Down LD50

56a Infoshop, Anti-University, Artists For Palestine UK, Arts Against Cuts, Autonomous Centre Edinburgh, BARAC / Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, Base, BDZ Group / Boycott Zabludowicz, Black Lives Matter UK, Boycott Workfare, Cleaners and Allied International Workers Union, Cops Off Campus, Digs / Hackney Private Renters, Disabled People Against the Cuts, DIY Space for London, Goldsmiths UCU (University and College Union), Independent Workers Union of Great Britain,  Jewish Socialists’ Group, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, London Anti-Fascists, MayDay Rooms Staff Collective, Movement for Justice, Mute Magazine, Novara Media, PCS Union Culture Sector Group, Plan C London, Radical Housing Network, Roots Culture Identity Art Collective, Scottish Radical Library, Sisters Uncut North London, South London Solidarity Federation.

[headnote: LD50 will not be referred to in what follows as a ‘gallery’. The space did not function as a gallery. It functioned as an organising space for racists and as a media platform to infiltrate the London artworld.]

The present text is a brief attempt to analyse LD50’s intentions in organising a fascist conference in Dalston, Hackney, in July–August 2016. It responds to the lies of the space’s director to the effect that the event was ‘open’ and – as she expressed herself to Vanessa Feltz on BBC Radio London on 24 February – that ‘everyone [in the neighbourhood] was quite happy’ with a conference dominated by revolting bigots whose political views imply massive harm for the majority of Hackney residents. It also attempts to indicate how LD50’s coordinators functioned as useful idiots and their space as a testing-ground for a strategy of infiltration that has been devised by the more articulate representatives of their political tendency. It is hoped that this may be of use for other groups trying to resist the penetration of fascists and racists into their communities and social spaces.

Background information on the space can be found here.

I

[LD50’s May programme of discussions around genetics was publicised openly and featured a number of reputable speakers. An evensi.uk webpage is still available on Google for all three events. The director of the space was clearly perfectly happy to invite a wide audience. As will be shown, this is in direct contrast with her method of publicising the racist ‘neo-Reaction’ events that took place in the following months.]

II

[This is the first Facebook announcement of events relating to the Neo-reaction conference. Note that this is six days before the talk by Iben Thranholm, whose presentation the space chose not to promote (this of course raises the question of where it did choose to promote it). This is important because Land, although an avowed racist, possesses a certain artworld cachet, as a result of his work from the early 1990s. He was regarded as an acceptable if problematic interlocutor. Thranholm by contrast is known mainly as a proponent of the argument that abortion rights lead to school shootings and for her belief that feminism ‘destroyed Europe’. Already an intention to withhold information can be inferred.]

III

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: LD50 <info@ld50gallery.com>
Date: 24 July 2016 at 14:26
Subject: A conference of NRx and Rx thought
To: xxxxx

      You are cordially invited to a conference on Reactionary                               and Neoreactionary thought.

      These events are by invitation only.
      Follow this link to access further details
      http://www.ld50gallery.com/        neurohealth
     
      password: YhfV^2zC
     
       

      LD50
      www.LD50gallery.com

[On 24 July, an invitation to a ‘conference on Reactionary and Neo-Reactionary Thought’ was sent out to LD50 subscribers. In contrast to the earlier conference on genetics, this provided no straightforward details about the speakers at the conference, the conference’s aims, structure, relationship to the local community, or intellectual purpose, and the invite obstructed wider access to the events by means of password-protection.

The relevant webpage on ‘neurohealth’ has since been removed by the LD50 webmaster.]

IV

[Five days later, the ethno-nationalist and Anders Breivik-supporter Brett Stevens posted an open invitation to the event, keeping the name of the venue a secret. Collusion with the gallerists is evidenced by the provision of an email contact that Stevens says ‘forwards to the organizers’. Stevens’s post quotes from what is presumably the now-deleted page on the LD50 website, stating that the event is aimed at ‘open minded progressives’ who wish to ‘explore’ neo-Reactionary ideology. At first glance this seems congruent with Lucia Diego’s statement in response to the demand that LD50 be shut down: that the role of the event was to ‘explore contemporary discourse’. However, the sentiment is contradicted by three facts:

(1) the invitation to the exhibition was more openly available on the blog of a known extreme right activist, advocate of repatriation, and admirer of a mass murderer than it was on LD50’s public platforms;

(2) ‘open minded progressives’ has become a piece of neo-Reaction jargon made famous in the scene by Mencius Moldberg’s ‘An Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives’, first published in 2008. Its usage in what was presumably the (password-protected and now deleted) LD50 invitation only indicates that Lucia Diego was already a believer in the basic tenets of the ideology and reasonably well versed in its recruiting tactics;

(3) the idea that progressive non-white people from Hackney can ‘openly explore’ the idea that they should be ‘removed to their place of origin or cordoned off with their own state’, as one of the conference speakers has argued, is unutterable bullshit.

To conclude, the evidence indicates that Lucia Diego was already a supporter of the extreme right and was helping its members to organise themselves in London. Her aim was twofold: to aid figures of this tendency in meeting one another and networking; and to win converts among susceptible members of the wider London art community. This involved a strategy of coordinated semi-publicity in which members of the extreme right were briefed on the conference agenda (they can be seen discussing accommodation issues on Stevens’s blog), while at the same time information concerning the conference was deliberately withheld from the Hackney community. There are good reasons to believe that this strategy will be used again in the future.

Further information on LD50’s method of strategically withholding information will be supplied below.]

V

[On 6 August, an announcement on the LD50 Facebook page indicates that Nick Land will be speaking at the space. No event page is visible. None of the other speakers are mentioned.]

VI

[Three weeks after the event LD50 reposts the presentation by Brett Stevens. It is not stated that the presentation actually took place at the space. Nor is it related to a sequence of events (a ‘conference of Neo-reaction’). Further evidence that LD50 was trying to conceal its own programme is the choice of speaker. In contrast to the anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow and Thranholm (whose intellectual orientation is already mentioned above), Stevens, although himself a public supporter of Breivik, seems at first glance comparatively esoteric. The intention of gradually releasing information – of testing the water – and at the same time of habituating an artworld audience to far-right materials, could hardly be clearer.]

VII

[The Mark Citadel talk given as part of the neo-Reaction conference was not released on social media until 14 December, after the Trump electoral victory. Its relationship to the summer conference was not mentioned.

Again the talk seems to have been chosen on the grounds that its topic is relatively abstruse: ‘Progressivism and the Occidental Soul’ sounds initially less threatening than ‘Immigration, Ethnicity and Economics’.

Anyone who searches for the author will nevertheless soon find that Mark Citadel is another proponent of repatriation for non-whites. In a recent blogpost he asserts that ‘large minorities shouldn’t be here in the first place, and ought to all be removed to their place of origin or cordoned off with their own state’ . He also writes that ‘The right wing position, the Reactionary position, is that the high-time preference [sic] of women is justification for removing from them the agency to make big decisions, like abandoning the purpose they were designed for’.

Note that by this time LD50 has acquired a far-right following: Edwin Harwood, seen commenting on the post, is associated with the Traditional Britain Group, the vice president of which is the Nazi-sympathiser Gregory Lauder-Frost. Edwin Harwood’s Facebook page poignantly lists his occupation as ‘Commander in Chief of the Rhodesian Light Infantry’.]

VIII

It is necessary to go into this level of detail in order to refute the assertion by LD50 director Lucia Diego that the events were ‘open to the public’; that ‘everyone [in the neighbourhood] was quite happy with them’ at the time of their occurrence; and that her intention was principally to ‘open dialogue’, rather than to promote political viewpoints that are traditionally associated with Nazism and fascism. It is also necessary to go into detail in order to refute her claim that the opponents of LD50 are ‘spreading fear’, rather than trying to oppose a political agenda that minority groups have unquestionably good reasons to be extremely afraid of. All of Diego’s claims are false. Her own social media usage shows a clear recognition of the fact that the theory and practical proposals of ‘neo-Reaction’ (variously eugenics, racism, repatriation, the extra-judicial killing of ‘perfidious’ liberals, punishment of women for the exercise of their reproductive rights, and extreme homophobia) are unwelcome in Hackney, for the straightforward reason that they pose a real and direct threat to tens of thousands of the borough’s residents. It also evidences a determination to promote those ideas using the marketing methodology devised by the fascist right and a strategic attempt to legitimise them by association with other discourses whose political content is both less violent and less obvious.

What the LD50 case proves is this. It proves that there are sections of the racist far-right who believe that their best chance for expansion is to convert white middle-class ‘progressives’ to their cause by means of lies, subterfuge and distortion, in addition to the only slightly more sophisticated resources of quasi-irony and ham-fisted implication. It proves that this method is beginning to be implemented outside of the online communities in which it first emerged; and that the use it makes of the legitimating discourse of ‘free speech’ is not only one important means of diverting attention from a racist agenda, but that it is in fact the principal means by which that agenda is introduced and made familiar, on the grounds that it appeals to an already existing sense of white middle-class entitlement (and one form of entitlement leads to another). And finally it supplies a more practical lesson. The six-month period following the neo-Reaction conference in which LD50 was able to continue to operate unperturbed in spite of growing evidence of its politics, proves that unless racism is stamped out in practice and denied the means to insinuate itself, to euphemise itself, or to pretend to be nothing but talk, the method that we have just described is likely to succeed.

Shut Down LD50

Lucia Diego’s responses here are a tissue of lies and evasions. LD50 needs to be closed. Below are some detailed refutations.

1) The gallery’s programme was not public from the summer. It was organised in secret. This has been confirmed on the website of the Breivik supporter who spoke at LD50 on 6 August (link [1] below). The same person also seems to have been involved in co-organising the talks series (see discussions of London accommodation at link [2]).

2) All of the speakers are well-known racists and misogynists on the fascist/neo-nazi spectrum. A fuller overview is given at link [3].

3) Diego lies about the content of the talks. For example, the Peter Brimelow talk that Diego says ‘mostly discusses economics’ features a question from someone who wishes to create a 'new elite’ led by David Duke. Duke was a leader of the Klu Klux Klan and remains a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier (see link [4]). Brimelow does not repudiate the proposal and only questions Duke’s 'personal life’.

4) This is not even casual racism. It is racism *organising itself* politically.

5) The audience for the events was not, as the gallery claims in its statement, 'very liberal’. This is a lie issued for the purposes of damage limitation. The way in which the events were organised indicates this. The questions posed to Brimelow confirm it. The outlook of the audience is very clearly right wing where it is not openly racist. See also The Guardian article published today (link [5]).

6) LD50’s social media is full of propaganda of the far right and the gallerists made a habit of deleting comments that questioned this material. Diego’s claim that she was 'opening discourse’ is a nonsense evasion. She was promoting hate speech. The institution with which she is associated was advancing a worldview that has caused and will continue to cause real-world harm to minority groups. It was also trying to move this agenda into publicly funded educational institutions such as Goldsmiths, University of London.

7) The issue of Diego’s national origin is another diversion. Promoting speakers who argue that some groups make up a 'sub-species’ (see link [6]) will legitimate violence against those groups. Whether the ideology is articulated from the perspective of a British ethnic-nationalism, from the perspective of a pan-European ethnic-nationalism, or on any other grounds, is irrelevant.

8) Diego may 'have moved on from this’ but the two-thirds of the population of Hackney that is BME cannot do so quite so easily. Racism for them is a standing threat. It cannot be tolerated under the heading of the 'exploration of ideas’.

9) It needs to be said again: Secretly co-organising a conference with fascists in order to facilitate dialogue between them has nothing to do with exploring ideas. The vocabulary is utterly diversionary.

10) A free society in which social justice can be achieved must also be an anti-racist society. LD50 needs to close. The people of Hackney need to come together to make sure that it happens.

Please share this information. Join us to leaflet against the gallery on the corner of Tottenham Road and Kingsland Road next Saturday (25 February) at 11am.

Links and info:
[1] http://www.amerika.org/politics/from-the-neoreaction-conference-in-london/
[2] http://www.amerika.org/meta/neoreaction-conference-to-be-held-in-london/
[3] Over the summer the gallery coordinated talks by and for members of the extreme right, including (in order of appearance) a Danish anti-feminist known for her argument that school shootings in the US are the result of abortion rights; the founder of web journal VDARE, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ‘an anti-immigration hate website’ which ‘regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites’; a member of the alt-right notorious for his public statements of support for the mass killings carried out by Anders Breivik; an author associated with Return of the Kings, the ‘manosphere’ website owned by Roosh V, mainly known for his argument that rape should be legalised on private property; and a speculative philosopher who, among other things, endorses as ‘race realist’ the idea that there exist human ‘sub-species’.
[4] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-duke
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/22/art-gallery-criticised-over-neo-nazi-artwork-and-hosting-racist-speakers
[6] http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2014/10/hyper-racism.html

In the last week it has come to light that an art gallery and project space in East London is being used to promote fascists, neo-Nazis, misogynists, racists and Islamophobes. LD50 Gallery is based at 2-4 Tottenham Road in Dalston, in the middle of one of London’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Over the past year the gallery has hosted high-profile speakers from the American “alt-right”, including people who promote white supremacy, eugenics and violence against immigrants. Materials produced by the gallery have consistently drawn on fascist traditions ranging from 1930s Nazi aesthetics to contemporary “neo-reactionary” politics.

The gallery is using the cover of the contemporary art scene and academia to legitimise the spread of these materials and the establishment of a culture of hatred. LD50 even managed to infiltrate Goldsmiths University in South-East London, just before the gallery’s events and shows became openly racist. In the past year, LD50 has been responsible for one of the most extensive neo-Nazi cultural programmes to appear in London in the last decade.

Last week a number of artists in London exposed what has been happening at the gallery. The gallery has responded by leaking the identities of these artists and their supporters to far-right neo-Nazi websites and issuing legal threats. It continues its production of far-right materials.

It is imperative that this is not allowed to continue, that the gallery is shut down, and those responsible for it understand that their views are not welcome in our diverse city. The materials produced by the gallery, and the culture they promote, are a real threat to many of the communities living in Dalston.

Please share this information. Join us to leaflet against the gallery on the corner of Tottenham Road and Kingsland Road next Saturday (25 February) at 11am.

The LD50 gallery in Dalston, London last year ran this series of talks featuring 6 high profile far right reactionary speakers:

#9 Sunday – 7th August 2016– 12pm
NICK LAND on
Techno-Commercial NRx

#8 Saturday – 6th August 2016 – 6pm
MARK CITADEL [as virtual avatar]
‘Christianity, Progressivism, and the Occidental Soul’
watch here

#7 Saturday – 6th August 2016 – 6pm
BRETT STEVENS [as virtual avatar]
‘The Black Pill’
watch here

#6 Sunday – 31st July 2016– 6pm
PETER BRIMELOW on
Imigration, Ethnicity and Economics
listen here

#5 Sunday – 24th July 2016 – 6pm
IBEN THRANHOLM on
The Sanctuary of Traditionalism in Russia and the West
listen here

#4 Saturday – 28th May 2016 – 6pm
Dr PETER SAUNDERS
‘Epigenetics and Evolution Theory’
screening: The Monk and the Honeybee (1989)
listen here

#3 Saturday – 21st May 2016 – 6pm
Dr FLORIAN PLATTNER
‘Can we enhance memory?’
screening: TransHumanism ( h+) / Genetic Modification of Life (2010)
listen here

#2 Wednesday – 18th May 2016 – 6pm
‘Autoimmunity’
(hosted by Goldsmiths university)
watch here

#1 Saturday – 7th May 2016 – 6pm
Dr SILVIA CAMPORESI
‘CRISPR Genome Editing Technologies: Which possible futures?’
screening: Gattaca (1997)
listen here

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.ld50gallery.com%2Ftalks%2F

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

The talks programme mixes straight up fascists and reactionaries with other innocuous seeming figures with no known right wing affiliation or convictions.

Peter Brimelow is hardcore fascist: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/peter-brimelow

As is Brett Stevens: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2011/07/26/american-blogger-praises-oslo-shooter

Mark Citadel seems to be part of the 'Return of Kings’ manosphere blog, so is clearly another reactionary voice. (‘Return Of Kings is a blog for heterosexual, masculine men. […] men should be masculine and women should be feminine.’ – to quote their own philosophically self-undermining self-description.)

Iben Thranholm is a proponent of racist, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, homophobic and misogynist politics. She routinely discourses on the need to resurrect strong ‘european’ gender binaries and ‘strong men’ to ‘protect women’ from 'male immigrants’ who she presents as a violent sexual threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaOLgy3YKtA

Nick Land: One can split hairs by saying that Nick Land isn’t a white supremacist and is just into eugenic selection for intelligence so we can survive the coming AI singularity. However, a close reading of his recent writing reveals he just doesn’t like immigrants and black people. He likes Asians because they are deemed to be smart and polite, and he likes Japanese because they’ve resisted immigration. Racism is an aura around all his other pronouncements.

The first three named speakers in the talks series – Peter Saunders, Silvia Camporesi, and Florian Plattner – are all reputable scholars. The topic of epigenetics (Saunders’ subject) is a hot button one for the new biological racists, because it shortens timelines over which evolutionary change can potentially happen, meaning that changes in historical time can have significant effects on human populations. This is usually used to argue that evolution within NW European populations has led to the wonders of the Enlightenment and enhanced IQ, while everyone else are just cousin-marrying knuckle draggers who are resistant to democracy because they haven’t selected for non kin altruistic behaviour. The fact that HBD (human biodiversity) proponents use and sometimes misuse epigenetics doesn’t mean anyone talking about it is necessarily fascist.

Considering the rest of the line up, however, it seems these figures fulfilled a kind of legitimating function for LD50’s project. Openly reactionary speakers could enjoy credibility by association with reputable academics. However innocent, they became tools in what appears to be a conscious and extended attempt to promote extremely reactionary ideas by introducing them, uncritically and indeed enthusiastically, to an art world and art educational context.

The live streams still available on the gallery’s blog testify to LD50’s gushing reception of and advocacy for racist, white supremacist, misogynist and homophobic views. If we can learn one thing from the above, it is the need to stop assuming everything programmed by small or large galleries is at worst ‘exploratory’, ironic or even critical – either an intellectual provocation or contribution to ‘discussion’. This programme appears to have been part of a wider far right push to infiltrate academic institutions, and to normalise and promote extremely reactionary ideas.

THE ART OF ENTRYISM

As well as the talks programme, LD50 also mounted a gallery show, 'Amerika’. Dedicated to the so called alt-right, and featuring wall to wall Pepe memes, kek, 'neoreactionary’ esoterica, and misogyny, the same structure of plausible deniability allowed some at least to view the show as a kind of enquiry into a cultural phenomenon rather tha a direct act of political infiltration. Any illusions about the disinterested or critical ambitions of the gallery have been dispelled by the recent public revelation of the gallery’s politics. A brief review of the gallery’s blog reveals a show brimming with sympathy for affluent white male mass murderers of of women and muslims, but nothing that would pass for actual critique – let alone the visceral disgust this material evokes in those who side not with abstractions ('free speech’) but human victims of violent oppression.

A similar standard of fascist entryism is seen in artwork still displayed on the gallery’s website: a pseudo-critique of consumerism by replication (look, Taylor Swift!) exuding a will to distinction and superiority, at the same time functions to run fascist ideas (text by Hitler) and symbols (the Afrikaner white supremacist flag) past the un/knowing art consumer:

https://www.ld50gallery.com/exhibitions/

Some further background and analysis from the Horrible Gif blog’s piece on the LD50 debacle:

'LD50, a small project space in dalston junction, had some exhibitions of questionable taste and arrangement in recent months. The alt-right exhibit it staged using scavenged parts of the aesthetic and philosophical matter online wasn’t immediately partisan on the surface. It could have been bad satire, it could have been one of those things many adult-child digital artists do where they incorporate the very thing they critique. Obviously the depraved chasm which 4chan and allotments of reddit are located in is morbidly fascinating, to someone who feels they’re on an important media archaeology tip even moreso. Despite the Hitler quotes coupled with anime motifs and other bizarre conflations of alt-right imagery, the show itself didn’t offer a concrete position. This is a commonplace exhibition model that allows “racy” subject matter to be presented with critical immunity, because the art moves to within a viewers praxis. More often this is used with cultural appropriation, where a white artist will extract reference points and framing devices from culture they do not belong to and situate the art itself on the intersection of their gaze, etc etc. So the art is about the white gaze on other culture, that way it removes itself from, at best, being accused of ignoring postcolonial theory or, at worst, just being mildly racist. Very meta though, and you can extract 2000 words from meta quite easily. With the benefit of hindsight plus a screenshot of a private fb conversation, it became obvious the curiosity with the alt-right wasn’t coolly detached in the LD50 show. Given the social media output of LD50 runs along moaning lines about the apolitical nature of net artists and glib rejoinders to political/social occurances, strangely they might have found the blazing political net art they were looking for… just the bad kind of politics. HEY, bad is a construct in art that is irrelevant after postmodernism and pop art, so who is to say it is bad? It’s just neo-reactionary. Sounds like the working title of a group of Final Fantasy rebels. These dodgy politics weren’t always so clear, even in that classic uncertain/ironic way, so it’s possible it was a slippery slope slodden down.

As said in the beginning of this longform rant, the social media microdramas of the art cottage industry aren’t very interesting in themselves beyond the sorry online appearances of calculated hostility and contrived artjoke acumen. But with artist Sophie Jung posting in a public way a ‘call-out’ to a curator of a gallery holding quite dodgy fascist views, the fallout is more interesting than the usual bruised/inflated egos or comment flame wars. The gallery itself has responded by “archiving” the post and all the comments on the main page, as doxing (a strategy of online shaming perfected by the alt-right) bait to sentient pepe memes and twitter eggs. It’s an obfuscatory and aloof reaction, one that shows particular acumen to online psychological skirmishing. Take away the veneer of irony and you see only a few slimy individuals toying with repugnant ideas that most good artists would give no merit, even as illusory discourse.

Is it right to call out someone by posting private convos? Well, check the gallery events and talks - they were pretty public (albeit small and within purposely obfuscating platforms) call outs to those neon genesis authoritarians. A lighter discourse than “is it ok to punch a nazi?” but no less annoying. Of course the answer is yes. Do you argue the inverse that the alt-right should be given platforms? Do you agree with the BBC giving airtime to UKIP but not the Green Party, who have existed for longer/have more members/more elected MPs/have actually run a fucking area of the country? Logic has associations, and while you can spin them away, we fucking see you. The alt-right would legislate for the structural, hidden bureaucratic violence against non-white/foreign people but it is not OK to punch them? They’d happily punch you. It can be so easy if it doesn’t affect you, or to think it wouldn’t, to think that exposing their bullshit is better. Hindenburg thought Hitler wouldn’t be as evil when he finally was given power, the tories seemed to think appeasing the UKIP types was the best way to keep themselves in power. Fuck m9, punch tories AND nazis if you can get away with it. Yeah, if you can back it up, calling people out on something as basic as nazi sympathies is OK. Why did it take so long to be called out on? The alt-right are super zeitgeisty right now and net art dorks are into that because it can be processed into smug “political” diatribe and gestural academica. Things within the art gallery mechanica are afforded un-anchored critical protection at least until the management are revealed to think the muslim ban is fine.’

http://horriblegif.com/post/157189463814/level-drama-50