West Belfast MLA Gerry Carroll has suggested that the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, should pay for the massive damage caused in Belfast by racist mobs. This is after the billionaire used his X social media to encourage the carnage.
Musk is a white supremacist vomited up by apartheid-era South Africa 54 years ago. He is currently using his wealth and X reach to ensure the continuation of that vile regime’s politics, only now on a global scale.
Carroll shared the following message:
How about he reaches into his very deep pockets to pay for the damages? For the lost pay, damaged public transport, burnt homes and displaced families. To say nothing of the widespread trauma.
He can afford it. But he won’t. Last night’s pogrom was carried out on the streets of Belfast, but it was encouraged and greenlit by the rich and powerful and stoked by well-known figures on the far right.
As they have many times in the past, capitalists are energetically trying to divide people here for their own ends. We live in one of the most unequal societies in Europe—with a failing NHS, a low wage economy, crumbling public services and a manufactured housing crisis. Trump, Farage and Musk laugh all the way to the bank, while the despair eating away at working class areas is directed against vulnerable migrants.
A second night of racist rioting
As previously reported by the Canary, Musk promoted the protests to his 240 million followers on the social media hell-site. People Before Profit man Carroll was speaking before a second night of rioting by hooligans in the north of Ireland.
The disorder was less severe than on Tuesday June 9, with the main flashpoint being in Glengormley, a suburban area to the north of Belfast. There, masked thugs attempted to conduct a further pogrom at the Chimney Corner Hotel. However, racists have frequently protested at the site in the past. This is due to it housing asylum seekers.
On this occasion, a heavy police presence prevented rioters from accessing the hotel. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) deployed a water cannon to push back would-be ethnic cleansers. This granted them their first shower of the year.
In Portadown, incompetent hoods might have wished for said hosing down. This is because they set themselves on fire while attempting to petrol bomb police. Pogrom enthusiasts Official Protestant Coalition provided footage of the mess their incitement helped produce. It showed a town centre strewn with broken glass and burning barricades.
The real state failure isn’t immigration
Musk has continued a relentless stream of messages fear mongering about immigration. This includes a thread from failed parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin. In it, Goodwin got perilously close to forming a coherent thought. He seemingly didn’t need machine doping to help him this time.
The walking charisma vacuum lamented that:
We’ve entered a new phase of ‘anarcho-tyranny’ where the state is now failing to perform its basic duties like controlling the borders while oppressing its own people.
Veering close to one of his twice-daily broken clock moments, Goodwin was correct to identify that the British state — to which the north of Ireland is still sadly tied – no longer functions properly. However, this isn’t the fault of immigrants. It’s the result of now almost two decades of austerity, kicked off in 2010 by the Conservatives. These policies have seen the lives of those within Westminster’s influence grow progressively worse. They have to put up daily with the very things Carroll cited:
…a failing NHS, a low wage economy, crumbling public services and a manufactured housing crisis.
While there has been deranged fury about a single act of violence from a single Sudanese man, the reality is you’re much more likely to be killed by a billionaire than a migrant. Structural violence is a far greater threat to the people of Belfast than any refugee or asylum seeker. That’s when harm is done to you by *systemic failures,*those created from political decisions shaped by the ultra-wealthy who buy off our politicians.
When those politicians underfund the NHS, you get fewer ambulances. You get fewer doctors, and nurses, and less up-to-date diagnostic systems. That means, when someone suffering a medical emergency needs an ambulance that never arrives, they die. When someone needs cancer treatment but their under-resourced hospital can’t provide it, they die. In both cases, the harm can be traced to a billionaire. This is just as surely as the wounds of the victim in Belfast can be traced to his attacker’s blade.
Musk aims to distract with race panic
Hadi Alodid, alleged to have been the assailant in question, almost killed one man. Austerity is estimated to have killed at least 330,000. Elon Musk is set to become the world’s first trillionaire. With a fraction of that wealth, and a similar amount taken from all other capitalist robber barons, virtually all those deaths could have been averted.
In a fairer economy, where wealth is collectively owned rather than hoovered up by the worst people imaginable, we could heal and house the entire native population of these islands, and generously welcome those who arrive from abroad.
Musk and his ilk want to continue hoarding wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice, rather than allow that reality to emerge.
In the meantime, the working class of Belfast and beyond, of all colours, will pay in myriad ways while the ultra-rich get off scot-free.
Featured image via Kevin Lamarque / Getty Images
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