Party Vibe

my favourite fantasy is to have all of ‘them’ (fill in with appropriate term) sent off to live on some god forsaken island some where, outta sight an sound an let em get on with their miserable lives 😉

and exactly GL, us lot are prime targets for silencing and banning from a not altogether small section of society, could easily be us. “First they took the . . . . but that was alright because i wwasn’t a . . .” scary stuff

I think the argument for who got stitched the worst in WW2 is a bit ridiculous TBH. As far as Anglocentric myths go, you could as easily replace it with Francocentric, or Czechocentric, or any other centric you like, because pretty much everybody got a raw deal from WW2 and most like to claim they suffered more than most. The Russians had more dead, the Poles were first with their heads on the block, Jews got treated more savagely than anyone in the Holocaust, the UK got backed up against the wall and a spirited attempt made to bomb us back to the Neolithic, France took a pounding from both sides because it was in a bad position geographically – Blitzkrieg first, and the the return Allied assault later…… The list goes on….

Everybody got stitched, and none of it was good because that’s how intolerance and bigotry work.

I always find it interesting that when people look back on the rise of the Nazi party in 1930’s Germany there is a general assumption that the population were somehow less intelligent or switched on than we are now – that they were less able to spot the cynical manipulation that Hitler et al used, and that we wouldn’t fall for such things….

Trouble is we do every day – how many people believe the things they see on the news, or read in the daily mail, without really questioning the truth behind it? If they do question the facts then how come we have an “immigration problem”, or a problem with roving bands of “international terrorists” (and before you argue that there are terrorists bombing our streets etc, I would point out that there were before 9/11 and 7/7 too – we have always had terrorism, and the danger has always been real. What has been changed is the perception of that danger. It is, after all far easier to generate fear when the “enemy” has the good grace to come from a different culture and ethnic origin – much more difficult when it’s one of your own who decides god told him to do it….:crazy:)

All these things are easy to put down to the “way it is now”, or a consequence of life in our time – most people do. After all, the bombings have taken place, and we all know “foreigners” who’ve come here and made good lives for themselves (usually by working hard and enjoying the freedoms we take for granted, but those bits never make the news).

But if you read the history of the rise of the Nazi’s (and more especially the bits of Hitlers own writing on controlling large groups of people, and steering their reactions – something he was very adept at) the similarities are a lot more worrying than the obviously bigoted Nationalist pond scum (who are relatively easy to expose to most rational people as the unevolved idiots they are). Our mainstream political parties are much better at the manipulation, and have the same motivation driving them (the need to gain and hold power). So they make the population fear people who are (or can be made to seem) different from themselves. Populations who have an external target of fear are less likely to be looking for a danger from within.

And the art of making a population believe the unbelievable? Form your lies inside a shell of truth, make the lies simple, and then keep repeating them. The Holocaust started with “jews are taking up all the good jobs” (they worked hard in reality), and “they are taking over your country, and forcing you out” (They have a strong sense of their own community). Then it moved on to “they’re taking what’s rightfully yours, and giving nothing in return” (A meaningless statement in context – no qualification for what is rightfully yours, nor what should be given in return). Does this sound familiar to anyone other than me?

The next step is “they’re stealing from you, and you’re letting them” (outright falsehood, but qualified by the previous one). Until we finally get to endpoint – “Are you going to let them do that to us? We should stop them…..” and the move from half truth to outright lie is made – suddenly the idea is belief (no logic or thought need ever have entered into it), and the lie is now just “how the world works”. The previously unthinkable is now the only sensible solution to the invented problem – which can then be conveniently tailored to suit any aim you have in mind (currently the aim seems to be doing away with any laws that could stop those in power from doing exactly what they please – which is how we have Tories promising to abolish the European convention of human rights if elected while labour give their police and civil service the kind of power that most 3rd world dictators would impose if they thought they could get away with it (but we can be trusted not to mis-use it, can’t we? We’re only trying to help you stay safe from the evildoer’s of the world after all? It’s all for your own good…:you_crazy:you_crazy:you_crazy)

Censoring the likes of the BNP is a waste of time, and counter productive (after all, fear relies on ignorance as a general rule. And censorship creates ignorance by default). What bigotry and racism need is confronting – like the monster under the bed, if you turn on all the lights and flip the bed onto it’s side, they melt away with the light. Leave them in the dark and you’ll end up with monsters in the cupboards, behind the curtains, and waiting at the doors and windows….

If you don’t agree with racism, then why do you think this country is getting what it deserves? People taking revenge on a race for what “their” ancestors did to “mine” is by definition a racist act. How do they deserve to avenge themselves on people who weren’t alive (and are therefore by definition blameless) when the offenses were committed. This kind of thing doesn’t fuel the hatred groups, it belongs to them.

While I don’t defend the colonial British empire (like most of the rest of the world at this point, people weren’t terribly humanitarian in their behaviour), I’m also not taking the blame for it, or the things it did. In much the same way I wouldn’t expect the French to take the blame for the injustices after the Norman conquest, or the Scandinavians to take blame for raiding and taking slaves up and down the British isles during the 200 or so years previous to the Norman conquest….

Holding someone born hundreds of years after the offences were perpetrated to account for them is fairly ridiculous (but not as ridiculous as apologising for them is – if we’re going to apologise for our ancestors barbarity we’ll all be at it a while as we’ll all have fairly long lists:crazy_diz)