Arguing with a bigot

It's normally a compliment when another website chooses to link to this blog. This morning, though, I was less than happy to discover that Robert Lindsay, whose geography is as bad as his politics, had included me in a list of 'Axis of Good Brits' on his blogroll. Lindsay's website is one of the most unpleasant I've ever seen: his posts are full of nasty jibes at dark-skinned peoples, Jews, and 'Crazy Leftists', and he links to even more extreme sites like the creepy Jewish Tribal Review. In the last week or so Lindsay has written two especially nasty attacks on indigenous Pacific peoples in general and the 'disgusting' Maori people in particular.

Bizarrely, Lindsay's blog includes links to a range of left-wing websites, including the archives of the massive international Marxmail e list, the US-based Monthly Review and, alas, this blog. After I sent a message to Marxmail to try to work out why Lindsay would try to connect himself to Reading the Maps, the man himself began e mailing me (he's not allowed to join the list, but hangs about reading the open-access archives). Lindsay challenged me to write a longer critique of his views, but I think he convicts himself with his own replies to my e mails. I've added a couple of photos I took last week to the bottom of my second message.

Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:52:43 +1200 (NZST)
From: "Scott Hamilton"
Subject: Info on Robert Lindsay, 'left-wing' racist blogger
To: marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu

Hi folks,

do you any of you know about this bloke Robert Lindsay?
http://robertlindsay.blogspot.com/
He links to me and a lot of other left-wing bloggers, but the material on his site is very unpleasant. He's just lately been attacking Maori people in racist terms. I was going to write something about him, but wondered if somebody else had already done the same.

Cheers
Scott

Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:03:25 -0700
From: "Robert Lindsay"
To: shamresearch@yahoo.co.nz
Subject: Who are you?

http://www.marxmail.org/msg31535.html
Give me your webpage addy, so I can delink you. I don't link to enemies, certainly not Cultural Marxist fools. Stalin would have never put up with you guys and your BS.

Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:22:30 +1200 (NZST)
From: "Scott Hamilton"
Subject: Re: Who are you?
To: "Robert Lindsay"

Hi Robert,

I believe that you should not only delink my site, but every legitimate left-wing website listed on your blog. The values of the left have nothing to do with the vilification of indigenous peoples, the recycling of anti-Gypsy and anti-Semitic myths, and the advertisements for white power websites which seem to be your stock in trade. If you don't remove links to the likes of Green Left Weekly and Daily Kos from your blog, then I'll certainly be letting those sites know about your (mis)use of their names.

Cheers
Scott

Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:20:38 -0700
From: "Robert Lindsay"
To: "Scott Hamilton"
Subject: Re: Who are you?

The article on Gypsies references a scholarly paper referring to extremely high crime rates and associated cultural pathology using hard scientific evidence. Show me how this is mythology. Pls give me evidence anywhere on my blog of any anti-Semitic myths. AFAICT, my site is concerned with International Zionism and its colonial-settler state in Israel.

Please indicate anywhere on my Blogroll, or in any post, where I "advertise" for white power - nationalist - supremacist websites. Isn't it interesting how 99% of the Jews in the US get a free pass on their Jewish ethnic nationalism, but even one White promotes (the identical) White ethnic nationalism, and the White-hating Left (represented by YOU) bashes them to no end. Meanwhile, you clowns promote Mexican fascism (Aztlan), Black fascism (Black nationalism), Arab nationalism, and other monstrosities. As long as they hate White people, they get lotsa love for your likes.

What vilification of indigenous people? Pointing out that they are not cutting it in modern Western society and advocating a return to traditional life is vilification? In what mad cultural Marxist universe?

Green Left Weekly is gone. That's obviously you. No one else is leaving unless they request it. Go spread my blackened name far and wide. I dare you! No cheers for you.

Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:53:56 +1200 (NZST)
From: "Scott Hamilton"
Subject: Re: Who are you?
To: "Robert Lindsay"

Hi Robert,

what makes your site racist is its constant attributions of monolithic ideas and abilities to whole races and cultures. You generalise about Jews, blacks, Mexicans, and other groups as though they were species of animal with universal traits. This sort of rhetoric has a long and unpleasant history which takes in Nazi Germany and the worst crimes of the twentieth century. The fact that your blog links to a beheading carried out by Russian neo-nazis only heightens the unease caused by your language. Do you honestly think any of the left-wing weblogs you link to - Daily Kos, Crooked Timber, and so on - would have anything but revulsion for the material on your site? What you are saying has nothing to do with the left.

By your own admission you know almost nothing about Maori culture and have never met a Maori person, but after watching a video allegedly created by a handful of young Maori gang members on youtube you feel able to generalise about a 'disgusting degeneration' of Maori and Polynesian culture. There are plenty of non-Maori New Zealanders in gangs, too - for instance, there are white youths in racist skinhead gangs. It doesn't follow, though, that the antics of skinheads represent the state of the culture of non-Maori New Zealanders.

You say that Maori are not 'cutting it' in 'modern' society, and that they should be forced to live pre-industrial lifestyles in isolated regions. Yet some of New Zealand's finest artists, writers, academics, and sportspeople are Maori. Maori are a large part of the working class that built the cities, power stations, and railways of this country. There are problems which Maori suffer disproportionately, like poverty and incarceration, but these are in many cases linked to the theft of their land and resources at the point of a gun in the nineteenth century, and the institutionalisation of this theft in the twentieth century.

Before they suffered dispossession, Maori had already showed that they could 'cut it' in competition with European capitalism. In the middle of the nineteenth century they created highly productive agricultural economies in the North Island of New Zealand which were the envy of white settlers. These economies were based on a fusion of traditional methods of organisation - collective labour and land ownership, for example - and modern technology and markets. Parihaka, one of the biggest centres of Maori resistance to colonisation, had massive cultivations and electricity in the 1870s. The settlers broke up Parihaka and similar communities at the point of a gun because they wanted to appropriate what Maori had created. Last week I visited a cave in the southern city of Dunedin where some of the Maori who were deported from Parihaka were imprisoned. The deportees, whose only crime had been a refusal to surrender their land to settlers, were forced to shelter in the cave when they were not working to build bridges, roads and walls for the settler city of Dunedin. More than a few of them died of exposure and diseases caused by poor sanitation, and were buried in unmarked graves in north Dunedin. Standing in the cold southern rain and peering into the miserable cave-prison, it was impossible not to feel the great weight of oppression which Maori have suffered at the hands of European 'civilisation' in New Zealand. Acknowledging this fact does not make one anti-white, anymore than acknowledging the disastrous effects of the US invasion of Iraq makes one anti-American. You seem, though, to have a pathological inability to acknowledge that the crimes of Western imperialism might have something to do with the problems of peoples like the Maori, African Americans, and the Saipanese, as well as modern-day Iraqis.

Cheers
Scott

Richard Seymour, the proprietor of the popular British blog Lenin's Tomb, has also had problems with Lindsay. He writes that:

Robert Lindsay visited my site for a while, leaving comments that were increasingly anti-semitic until I told him to take a hike. Subsequently, he wrote a long and whining piece which was reproduced on the Jewish Tribal Review (an anti-semitic site run by Christian fundamentalists, which he links to). He made a number of claims about his background which seem implausible (being a member of the Green Party and CPUSA simultaneously, belonging to a CPUSA 'cell', whereas to my knowledge the CPUSA has 'branches' and not 'cells' etc), and in my view he is a racist provocateur. Also, he so happens to have adopted the name of the actor who played 'Citizen Smith' in a condescending British television comedy about Tooting-based revolutionaries.