LD50’s Fascist Conference in Hackney, Secrecy, and the Attempt to Introduce Racist Ideology into the London Artworld: A Brief Overview and Chronology
[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.
[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.]
[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.]
———- 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.
[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.]
[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.]
[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.]
[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.]
[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’.
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’.]
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.
