Reviewed by Stephen Webster
Frank Ellis
The Macpherson Report: “Anti-racist” Hysteria and the Sovietization of the United Kingdom
Right Now Press, 2001, $8.00, 47 pp.
The 1993 murder of black British teenager http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3440, allegedly by a gang of young white men, became a cause celebre for the British left. At various times over the years, police have brought charges against five men, only to see them dismissed because of insufficient evidence. Three white men actually brought to trial were acquitted in April 1996, after a judge ruled that eyewitness testimony against them was unreliable. British anti-racists refused to let the matter drop, and the election of Tony Blair’s leftist Labour Party in 1997 helped them keep it in the public eye.
Shortly after coming to power, the new Home Secretary, Jack Straw, launched a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3256 into the Lawrence murder and the police investigation. After 69 days of hearings, the chairman of the inquiry, former British High Court judge Sir William Macpherson, issued what became known as the Macpherson Report — an indictment of British society and the London Metropolitan Police as inherently racist. Its goal was nothing less than the total restructuring of British society to eliminate “institutional racism.”Dr. Frank Ellis of the University of Leeds is an expert on the former Soviet Union and its system of totalitarian control. In this important monograph he draws striking parallels between the rhetoric and tactics the communists used to enslave the Russian people, and those of the modern anti-racists as they seek to impose multiculturalism on the United Kingdom.
The bulk of the booklet answers the charges against British society and institutions made by the Macpherson Report. To Dr. Ellis, the report is little more than a Marxist fraud, the modern version of a Soviet show trial. Its central assumption is that racism is an exclusively white phenomenon, and that all social structures in British society are hopelessly racist. The police investigated the Lawrence murder with insufficient zeal because they suffered from a bewildering variety of ills: “institutional racism,” “unwitting racism,” “unconscious racism,” “collective racism,” and “racist stereotyping.”
The Macpherson Report says the police are racist because they treat blacks differently from whites — although in Britain, as in the United States, blacks commit far more street crime than whites. But the police are also racist when they treat everyone equally. Dr. Ellis quotes from the report:
“A colour blind approach fails to take account of the nature and needs of the person or people involved, and of the special features which such crimes and their investigation possess… t is no longer enough to believe all that is necessary is to treat everyone the same … it might be said it is about treatment according to need .” (italics in original)
In other words, the police are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
For Dr. Ellis, the Macpherson Report is further evidence of the Sovietization of the United Kingdom. Now that the social engineers who admired the Soviet system from afar have gained control of the courts, the schools, and the government bureaucracies — all without having to go before the voters — they can transform the country virtually unchecked. After noting how the Soviet Union experienced a period of violence followed by stifling bureaucratic rule, he wonders whether we are witnessing the process in reverse. Bureaucratic rule is now stifling, and it will be a wonder if it does not lead to violence.
What is at stake, in Britain and elsewhere, is individual freedom. One of the most insidious recommendations of the Macpherson Report is the elimination of the prohibition against double jeopardy, which forbids retrying a suspect for the same crime. British anti-racists are so determined to see Stephen Lawrence’s alleged killers in the dock again they are willing to take ancient rights away from all Britons. A bill to eliminate double jeopardy protection was before Parliament in 2001 and could become law this year. Another recommendation hopes to redefine racism as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person,” a definition so broad it can only be the tool of totalitarian oppression.
According to Dr. Ellis, with the collapse of the Soviet Union:
“Multi-culturalism has replaced class war as the preferred narcotic of the intellectual adolescent. One thing fanatics of both causes have in common is the desire to enslave us. Whereas the Communist International attempted to foment class war and put us in chains of equality, their successor totalitarians, the multi-culturalists, wish to drug us with the sickly-sweet milk of ‘the Brotherhood of Man’ so that oppressive legislation can be enacted. If we are not careful we shall awaken from our stupor to find that we are free men no more.” The communists brainwashed their subjects to hate the “kulaks.” Modern “race facilitators” use the same tactics to get whites to confess their wickedness. White, heterosexual men are today’s kulaks.
“One thing fanatics of both causes have in common is a desire to enslave us.”
Dr. Ellis has experienced first hand the totalitarian impulses of the anti-racists. In 1999, he was invited to address the 2000 AR Conference. His acceptance nearly cost him his job as a lecturer at the University of Leeds, an experience he describes in an introductory Author’s Note. The book also contains a preface by philosophy professor Anthony Flew, a postscript by the black American conservative Elizabeth Wright, and a short essay by Jared Taylor describing how Arthur Jensen, William Schockley, Michael Levin and others have run afoul of the thought police in America.
Dr. Ellis makes a convincing case that today’s anti-racists and multiculturalists are indeed the ideological offspring of Soviet communist totalitarians. Their methods are the same: indoctrination, distortion of language, public show trials, political correctness; as is their goal: total control of society. As the drive for more hate crime legislation intensifies, Americans who hope to preserve their historic liberties would do well to read this study, and consider the deeper motives of the people pushing for these laws.
North American readers can buy Dr. Ellis’ booklet by sending a check or money order to Right Now, 244 Fifth Avenue, Suite 223A, New York, NY 10001.
http://www.amren.com/ar/2002/01/index.html#article3