The reaction from the extreme-right former BNP nutters who run the Britain First hate chamber is always to jump on any atrocity in order to spread as much hatred, division and discord as possible.
Some-time leader of the ragtag band of fascists Jayda Fransen quickly uploaded a bizarre video in which, to a backdrop of patriotic music, she repeatedly exhorts the British people to "rise up" for the sake of our children. However she explains nothing whatever about how such an uprising would be organised (Britain First usually struggle to get more than a few dozen nutbars to attend their marches) or what the actual endgame of this fascist uprising would be.
The video has an astounding 29,000+ shares (obviously al lot of them through their paid clickfarms in Turkey and India) but still, vast numbers of people have seen the video, and over 16,000 have left comments.
Of course there are some people trying to stem the tide by talking a bit of sense (the invasion and occupation of Iraq created the power vacuum in which ISIS grew - bombing Libya and Syria has only increased Islamist fanaticism in those places - Saudi Arabia funds, arms and supplies Islamist fighters but Theresa May and Donald Trump lick their boots - blaming all Muslims for ISIS is like blaming all Christians for the KKK ...) but the overwhelming majority of comments come from people who are openly and publicly yearning for terrorism.
Here is a selection:
Who is responsible?
Primarily Facebook are responsible for allowing their website to be used as a platform for the encouragement of fascist views. They've been allowing Britain First to cleate a closed ideology echo chamber for years, in which people are encouraged to write bigoted and fascist diatribes through positive reinforcement (lots of likes).
Huge numbers of these comments break Facebook's terms and conditions, yet they do nothing to clamp down on this hothouse for bigotry and fascism.
beyond Facebook, at the root cause of the problem are the government and the media.
The UK government has developed a top down rote learning style of education that produces millions of adults that are basically incapable of critical thinking. Put extreme-right hate comics like the Daily Mail/S*n/Express in front of these people and they'll learn all the bigoted scapegoating tropes about immigrants, Muslims, the unemployed, refugees, lefties, and liberals are to blame for the consequences of almost four unbroken decades of hard-right neoliberal economic madness from the Westminster establishment.
Both the Tory and New Labour governments felt they would benefit from a crude and uneducated lumpenproletariat, who are too cognitively stunted to properly question their actions, so they dumbed-down the education system, making the exams ever easier to pass, and keeping stuff like philosophy, economics and critical thinking well away from the national curriculum,
The problem is of course is that if you under-educate people to keep them stupid and reactionary, there will always be someone who comes along with an even simpler narrative to appeal to the stupefied population.
The Britain First hate chamber doesn't just encourage people to blame immigrants and Muslims for all of society's ills as the Westminster establishment and their chums in the media encouraged people to do, it also encourages them to yearn for fascist solutions to "the Muslim problem" like discrimination, ethnic cleansing, mass killings, asset confiscation, and cultural eradication.
The people openly and publicly yearning for fascism in this way aren't crazy cultists who hang out with Britain First nutters in real life, they're ordinary people who live, and walk, and work amongst us.
If fascism does rise in the UK these are the ones who will vote it into power, and whoop with delight every time it erodes and destroys another part of British democracy, British culture, or the British rule of law.
They're our work colleagues, checkout workers in our supermarkets, the drivers of our busses, Zero Hours Contracts labourers in our factories and warehouses, nurses in our hospitals, assessors at our welfare offices, builders of our homes, and teachers in our schools.
The threat of Islamist terrorism is real, and it is terrifying to think something like the Manchester atrocity could happen to our loved ones, but the growing threat of latent fascism is much more terrifying, and it's growing like a huge cancer in the middle of Facebook.
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