I’m usually nodding in agreement when I read Peter Hitchens, although his obsession with cannabis is a bit tedious. This one on Prevent started so well…
A British Stasi is quietly growing in our midst. Powerful arms of government have begun to see it as their right and duty to snoop on conservative thought and speech, claiming it is in some way linked to ‘Right-wing extremism’. How long before the snooping turns into harassment?
We have seen, in the past few weeks, Big Brother Watch’s fascinating probe into British Government surveillance of dissenters over the state Covid policy.
Almost everyone is by now aware that the organisation formerly known as ‘the police’ are now a radical Left-wing body, flyers of the rainbow flag, very ready to pounce on traditional street preachers or on social-media posters who don’t play along with the sexual and transgender revolution.
So far so good and the main thrust of the argument, that the organisation – and the media and state – obsess about the ‘far right’ as a risk when it really isn’t, is a valid one. Then we get to this:
There are no doubt some nutcase neo-Nazis in this country, like the much-pierced and heavily tattooed man who taught his poor dog to do the Hitler salute and was fined £800…
At this point, any credibility goes out of the window. If Hitchens had done even the most basic research he wouldn’t have made this blunder. Count Dankula is not far right and the Nazi saluting pug was a joke, nothing more. The case was an over reaction in exactly the same vein that Hitchens is complaining about in his article.
FFS!
Even when you know that the news is selectively reported and usually incomplete or wrong some people will only pay attention to the opinions that confirm their opinions. And on top of that the confirmation bias is incredibly tough to overcome.
Many Chinese restaurants have a National Socialist far-right model cat giving the offending salute.
It brings them luck.
My cats give that salute all the time.
I recall visiting a museum that had been built over the top of an excavation of a Roman bath house. There were a lot of swastikas in the patterns of the tiles on the floor. Presumably the ancient Romans that occupied England in the second century CE were Nazi sympathisers.
Going back to Hitch’s original point, this was always going to be the problem with an bureaucratic intervention against terrorism, since they cannot acknowledge that the majority is Islamic in origin (because “Muh Islamophobia” or such nonsense), they were always going to underplay, even undermine the Islamic aspect and exaggerate / overinflate the “Right Wing Terrorists” aspect.
This is not to say their aren’t a few right wing nutters about for Prevent to deal with, but they are tiny in comparison with the Islamic nutters.
Just saying “They’re all crazy”, while perhaps true, doesn’t help to address the problem.
I agree with his main point. The problem with Hitch is that he has these little prejudices that undermine his arguments. If he had bothered to do any research, he wouldn’t have made the blunder I highlighted.
Anybody who has actually watched any of Dankula’s videos will know that he is not far right. I think the thing with the dog was dumb, but he did it for a laugh, not because he’s a Nazi sympathizer. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who just love to take things out of context for their own nefarious reasons.
By their logic, John Cleese is a Nazi sympathiser. Mental. And even if he was, or Dankula, so what?
Surely, being a Nazi sympathiser is an opinion, a thought process.
Back in the days when we had free speech, saying you quite liked Hitler might have got you a punch in the face, but it wasn’t a crime (except during the war) and shouldn’t be now.
People should be in trouble for what they do, not their sympathies.
Don’t forget that Adolf was Time Man of the Year in 1938.
TIME MAGAZINE’S MOST SURPRISING PEOPLE OF THE YEAR