"There is today – even among intelligent and thoughtful people – a story of Muslims as there was, when my father was young, a story of Jews" – David Aaronovich today.
If the parallels don’t already strike you as obvious, I’d recommend reading the comments to this post and comparing them with classical antisemitic writing. This is not obscure BNP fringe lunacy, this is mainstream British conservatism…
Update: Peter C denies that the people making the stupid comments are mainstream British conservatives. Fair enough; for some reason I assumed the readers of one of the leading British conservative blogs would represent conservative opinion.
Who is? Guessedworker? WJ Phillips?
Who are the mainstream conservatives who bear any meaningful resemblance to Nazi anti-Semites?
GW and WJ aren’t the only people on that thread saying knee-jerk things about Muslims meaning pretty-much-all-Muslims.
The claim isn’t that they bear a meaningful resemblance to *Nazi* antisemites. The claim is that they resemble *classical British* antisemites – not suggesting that the relevant group are evil bloodsuckers who should be killed, but that they’re’s something "not quite right" about them and we should be reluctant to have too many of them in our society.
You might find it interesting and/or enlightening to research the Jewish refugee situation in Britain in the 1930s – especially the widespread opposition to letting more alien, foreign-speaking, un-British Jews into our country.
It’s also well worth comparing current editions of the Daily Express in particular – yesterday’s headline was something like ASYLUM: WE’RE FULL UP (I’m paraphrasing from memory: unsurprisingly, I didn’t buy it) – with what the popular press was writing about Jewish refugees in the late 1930s.
What I find truly obscene about that headline is the way it exemplifies how the term "asylum" has become demonised – instead of highlighting one of this country’s most honourable traditions, it’s become catch-all shorthand for "foreign scum", regardless of whether they have a legitimate reason for seeking sanctuary in Britain.
John, the thing is I can see some bizarre and stupid racial comments in that thread, and I can see some mainstream conservatives leaving comments in that thread. What I cannot see are mainstream conservatives displaying the sort of anti-Semitism equivalence you talk about. I don’t think there are any.
Re the Aaronovitch piece:
First, he makes no distinction between Europe of the 21st century, which has had over 50 years of peace, well-educated citizens and a wide range of political opinions, and Germany of the 1930s, where suspicion and xenophobia were rife and memories of violence only too present. Not very useful.
Second, he makes no distinction between Jews, who were persecuted for their apparent psycho-racial characteristics (ie ones that were claimed to be inherent in their very being), and Muslims, who not even the most insane columnist today would claim are genetically programmed to kill someone who commits blasphemy.
I’m not saying that Aaronovitch isn’t right to warn of the danger of collectively blaming ‘Muslims’ for the acts of a few. But lets keep this in perspective: we’re not heading for Holocaust Part II just yet!
I’ve got to agree with Peter (I know, I’ve suprised meself!). Because right wing loons gravitate to and feel comfortable about commenting at his site, doesn’t mean mainstream conservative opinion displays the anti-Semitism equivalence thing. In the same way, plenty of left wing loons display there own brand of anti-semitism at Harry’s place. What it does show is the divergence and (confusingly at the same time) convergence of right/left lunacy.
By the time we’re heading for it, it’ll be too late. The problem is that people like those at LGF seem to be shaping the political discourse of the American right, with their language of ‘moonbats’, ‘islamofascists’, ‘flip-flopping’ and the like being so easily adopted by mainstream commentators. But at the same time, they talk of Muslims as animals, vermin, subhumans, advocating everything from sterilization to genocide. This sort of undercurrent in our political discourse needs to be challenged, as with the demonisation of asylum, not accomadated as the Conservative, Lib Dem and Labour parties seem to have done.
With all the bombast about ‘appeasement’, and comparisons of Muslims with Nazis, we should remember World War Two with a little more clarity. Would an aggressive foreign policy in the mid-1930s have prevented World War II? No, it would simply have got it going sooner, and might very well have had a different outcome, with the Americans in the middle of a depression and the Russians still industrialising. When the liberals and the left should have intervened was in the 1920s, to combat nationalism, militarism and anti-semitism and to ensure that the harsh burdens of the past were lifted from the German people.
By waiting until genocidal Islamophobia spreads from the BNP and the web and into mainstream discourse, we’ll wait too long. Again.
Will, good to see someone being consistent. ;)
I agree with Michael’s point, which reminded me of a passage in Francis Wheen’s "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World."
In 2000 the Guardian reported the case of a woman from Mauritius who had worked as a nurse in Britain’s National Health Service for six years until being told by the Home Office that she would be kicked out of the country as an ‘overstayer.’ When she contaced her family back home to say that she might be returning, she discovered that the newspapers in Mauritius were full of adverts from the Department of Health in London – pleading for nurses to come and work in Britain.
(P257) While I can – sort of – square the "overstayer" position with the demand for nurses, it does seem like the Government is afraid of the public perception of issues like immigration, which is the inflamed by scare stories in the sillier papers. Alistair Campbell used to have some influence over what newspapers printed. I don’t understand why the government’s press office doesn’t work harder to correct the lies and misrepresentations of Littlejohn etc. Yes I believe in free speech, but that doesn’t extend to printing hateful mendacious tosh like the Sun’s Swan Bake story.
Dave; I am being consistent. Try re-reading what I’ve said above :) I’m saying that the evidence John supplies (i.e. loonie tunes commenting at a conservative site) for his assertion is not enough (and that’s leaving aside whether Peter himself or his blog represent mainstream conservatism or not; whatever the hell it is anyway).
Mind you, Peter does rather ask for this kind of thing, given his fondness for highlighting (on a reasonably regular basis) equally deranged ranting on forums hosted by The Guardian and implying by association that this in some way reflects the paper’s editorial line.
As far as I am aware, none of these people are unique to my site. WJ Phillips posted just as regularly on Samizdata and Edge of England’s Sword before he was banned, and he was a real regular of Adam Yoshida’s, he still posts at Harry’s. I have a more or less free reign system on my blog, so there are a few eccentrics. But I haven’t noticed any who are uniquely attracted to my own blog – they just post on any British blog that’ll let them.
Slightly off topic, but Michael "ASYLUM: WE’RE FULL UP (I’m paraphrasing from memory: unsurprisingly, I didn’t buy it) – with what the popular press was writing about Jewish refugees in the late 1930s." is not comparing like with like.
In the whole of the 1930s Britain accepted about 30,000 Jewish refugees – equivalent to about 4 months worth of asylum claims (which didn’t include dependents) when they were at their height. Mr Blunkett has also opened the doors via huge numbers of work permits and no checks on the ‘students’ and ‘visitors’ who arrive and don’t leave. Immigration from outside the UK is at historically unprecedented levels, and emigration of Native Brits is at levels last seen in nineteenth century Ireland.
The left take a two-pronged approach to asylum and other immigration.
1) the Sun’s figures (or migrationwatch or whoever) are wrong. Dangerous ‘cos it implies that were they correct, there just MIGHT be a problem.
2) anyway, we need lots of people to do the jobs that ‘we’ won’t do – (I find that approach a bit dubious anyway) but they never say what will happen when the incomers have integrated/kids grow up, and suddenly are like the natives and won’t work for a fiver an hour.
Presunmably at that point we import a load more, and so on indefinitely.
Although they attack the "WRONG" figures, they never do any research of their own. They’re scared of what they’d find. Easier just to say they’re wrong.
And when all else fails – shout ‘Racist!’ as loud as you can.
"emigration of Native Brits is at levels last seen in nineteenth century Ireland."
Could you provide the evidence for this? I’d be amazed if the numbers emigrating Britain reached the 1.5 million people that left Ireland in the years 1845-51 out of a population of 8 million or so.
Since Laban didn’t actually address the point I was making at all (which was to do with the language used by the popular press that has the inevitable effect of demonising minorities, whether or not that’s the stated intention), I’ll assume he was merely using my post as a leg-up to help him mount a favourite hobby-horse. I’m glad to be of service, but I assume a response isn’t expected.
(Though if it is, I’m sure I can come up with something equally tangential!)
Is that really necessary, Michael? I thought the points made were very relevant, and answered your emotive claims about Jewish refugees of the 1930s very well. I know an enormous amount about your family – married to a foul-mouthed midwife who wastes the time of Tory canvassers, one baby son who really likes Saving Nemo etc. – because of your own tendencies toward hobby-horse mounting in the course of blog-commenting. Nothing wrong with it, in my opinion, and that’s an attitude you’d do well to adopt. Laban Tall wrote about immigration because the post was about immigration. What’s your excuse?
And you, in turn, have also ignored the point I was making, though I’m grateful for the entertainment (it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to assert one’s "enormous" knowledge about someone else’s life and then introduce a blatant factual error into the very next sentence – two if you count the misremembered title!).
Though there is a certain irony here, since Laban was bewailing the fact that certain issues are being swept under the carpet – he refers to immigration statistics, while I’m referring to a popular newspaper blatantly whipping up fear and loathing of minority groups on its front page on a more or less daily basis (and don’t let’s pretend there’s any other game plan operating here: people who glance at bold-print headlines aren’t going to be swayed by more nuanced leading articles).
If anything, what the Express is doing now is worse than what its counterparts were doing in the 1930s, as the tabloid format, with its correspondingly much larger headlines, creates a much greater visual impact. By comparison, although it’s famously true that the Mail ran ‘HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS’ on its front page in 1934, it was one relatively small-type headline amongst many on a crowded broadsheet.
Laban Tall wrote about immigration because the post was about immigration.
My post was specifically about racism in the media, which followed on entirely naturally from John’s original post, which was about rather more blatant racism in a popular blog’s comments threads. And I’d like to get this back on track, as Andrew Bartlett in particular made some very good points about the dangers of extremist rhetoric becoming mainstream discourse, which is exactly what happens if we allow this kind of language to go unchallenged.
(Just out of interest, Peter, how often do you challenge it? I seem to recall that you’ve mentioned having had private words with W J Phillips, but has there been any time when you’ve actually stood up in public and unequivocally denounced the more flagrantly racist posts by Phillips, Guessedworker and others? Maybe you do – I don’t read your blog often enough to be sure – but I certainly can’t recall any particularly memorable examples. For the record, I entirely agree with Will that it’s unfair to attack you personally over this, as you merely provide the conduit, not the content, but it also seems to me that the likes of Harry et al are rather more assiduously vocal when it comes to countering the looney-tunes brigade. Especially when they’re ostensibly coming from the same side of the political fence).
What Michael said. With nobs on.
If you accept someone isn’t responsible every time someone posts silly things in his comments, I think you also must accept it isn’t his job to denounce them at every turn when they do. Yes, I’ve posted in disagreement with WJ, and with Guessedworker, as I do in the linked thread – the first time he’s posted on my site in ages, BTW. But frankly I rarely even read of WJ Phillips’ formulaic rants, having seen enough of them I could write them in my sleep and knowing how unlikely it is he’ll have anything new to say. As a general rule, if I am going to post on my site, I prefer to do it by making an actual post, not leaving a comment where fewer people will see it. That goes for double when it’s just stating the sane about Jewish conspiracy theories being false and so on.
If you see him as being on the opposite side of the political fence because you disagree with almost everything he says, I can only say that’s my very same reaction.
I guess the point of this thread is I really don’t see such a "brigade" at my site. If it was like the Guardian forums – brimming with bigots and morons with scarcely any exceptions – I’d understand why it reflects badly on mainstream conservatism that my site would attract such people. What I have are a few communists and a few nazi types who in fact post all over the place, my site being just one of their haunts, and then dozens and dozens of normal people of varying political stripes.
Oh, and looking at this site’s archives just before the election, I see a serious statement that our very own host would throw a party if the US President were to be murdered. I don’t remember anyone posting anything as extreme and disgusting in my comments as John B posts on his front page. If the statement wasn’t some sick joke I have missed, I can now see it was beneath me even to answer criticism from such a person.
Oh, and looking at this site’s archives just before the election, I see a serious statement that our very own host would throw a party if the US President were to be murdered.
You don’t provide a link, but I’m assuming you’re talking about this post, as it’s the only one that seems to fit your accusation. And those following the link will discover various details that you saw fit to omit:
1. The heading "Not to be taken seriously".
2. The unequivocal statement that killing President Bush would be "utterly terrible and wrong" (and also counterproductive)
3. The footnote saying that he’d also throw a party in the event of the death of Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, et al.
4. The general point of the piece, which was posted in the wake of the ludicrous Charlie Brooker/Guardian Guide row, which is that one’s personal opinions don’t always run concurrently with one’s respect for morality and the rule of law (indeed, we’d be a nation of the most dreadfully po-faced tight-arses if they did!).
For instance, would it be tasteless to throw a party the very second when Thatcher finally carks it? Undoubtedly, yes – grotesquely so, and it would fly in the face of all notions about respecting the memory of the dead, letting the family grieve, and so on. But how many people do I know – indeed, how many people do you know – who will almost certainly be doing precisely that?
"indeed, how many people do you know – who will almost certainly be doing precisely that?"
*ahem*. I’m saying nowt…