The Daily Mail totally lost the plot over this Martin Rowson cartoon

The Daily Mail are well renowned for their bizarre front page tantrums (remember "enemies of the people" or "who will speak for Britain") but their latest bizarre editorial decrying the Guardian as the "fascist left" over the Martin Rowson Finsbury Park cartoon is absolutely ludicrous reality-denying nonsense that just shows how completely rattled the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre must be to have allowed such ridiculous drivel to appear in his propaganda sheet.

There's so mach wrong with this humiliating toddler tantrum of an editorial it's going to have to be broken down into sections.

The Daily Mail's history of fascism

You would have thought that a publication with a shameful history of propagandising for Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists would be somewhat reticent about calling other people fascists, but no. 

They have no sense of shame at the extreme-right leanings of their publication, and assume their audience to be so staggeringly ill-informed that they won't spot the irony of a propaganda rag that has championed Nazism, fascism and other extreme-right ideologies for the best part of a Century accusing others of being divisive fascists.

The unspeakable woman

It's only a few weeks since the unspeakable woman published a Tweet calling for a "final solution" to the Muslim problem. 

She was sacked by LBC for her deliberate use of Nazi language that could obviously be interpreted as a call for a modern day Holocaust against Muslims, but somehow the Daily Mail decided to keep her as a columnist.

Any publication that considers it appropriate for their columnists to provoke anti-Muslim hatred by using Nazi Holocaust rhetoric against them is really skating on thin ice when they try to accuse others of having "fascist" tendencies.

The big lie

Amazingly a propaganda rag with a history of promoting fascism accusing others of having "fascist" tendencies isn't even the most ridiculous thing about this deranged Daily Mail editorial. 

The most ludicrous thing of all is the part where they openly lie that The Daily Mail newspaper and the Mail Online website are totally separate entities, even though everyone knows they share almost identical content, written by the same staff, and are operated by the same publisher Associated Newspapers. 

You can see that they are sister companies just by looking at the Associated Newspapers accounts.

Why lie?

The fact that the Daily Mail newspaper has resorted to concocting the most transparent of lies in order to distance themselves from the unspeakable woman is an absolutely clear demonstration that they know perfectly well that they're guilty of radicalising people with their extreme-right propaganda, because why else would they invent such a silly lie to cover their complicity if they didn't feel they had something to hide?

People with nothing to be ashamed of generally don't make up obvious lies in order to shield themselves from criticism.

Unintentional satire

"Fake news" blares Daily Mail headline for an article in which they blatantly lie to their own readers that the Daily Mail and Mail Online are totally separate entities!

You couldn't get a better example of unintentional satire than an article entitled "fake news" that blatantly and brazenly lies to the reader.

The disgusting track record

The absurd effort to create a fictional firewall between the Daily Mail and the Mail Online is a clear indicator of guilt, but even if this lie were true and the Daily Mail had nothing to do with Mail Online content, there's still absolutely mountains of evidence that the Daily Mail spreads hateful divisive extreme-right propaganda on the front page of their newspaper.

Just look at the absolute state of this and wonder how on earth the editor who published all of this divisive (and often downright misleading) anti-immigrant rhetoric on their front page could have the brass neck to complain that there isn't "a shred of evidence" that the Daily Mail fan the flames of Islamophobia and racism, let alone accuse anyone else of being "purveyors of hate".

Offensive cartoons

One of the most incredible things about this Daily Mail tantrum over the Martin Rowson cartoon in the Guardian is that the Daily Mail have a track record of printing absolutely outrageous cartoons that ape Nazi cartoons of the 1930s by depicting refugees as rats.

Imagine the sickening hypocrisy of an editor who sees fit to publish Nazi-style cartoons aimed at dehumanising refugees who then has a massive tantrum over a cartoon that highlights this kind of extreme-right Daily Mail fanaticism as a potential causal factor in the extreme-right terror attack in Finsbury Park.

The Guardian letter

Aside from spewing outrage at the Martin Rowson cartoon, the Daily Mail editorial also lambastes Owen Jones for calling the Daily Mail an open sewer and quotes from a letter from a Guardian reader that claims that "if any actual person stood in the street shouting the sort of bile this paper produces daily, they could be prosecuted for hate speech".

The funny thing is that they're so delusional that they actually think the majority of the population would disagree with the characterisation of the Daily Mail as the sewer press, or with the idea that ordinary people publicly inciting hatred in the way the Daily Mail do would likely be arrested.

How out of touch with reality must they be to actually publish such stingingly accurate criticism of the Daily Mail in their own newspaper?
  Austerity denialism

The Daily Mail editorial tries to claim that the only reason they continually whip up hatred against immigrants is that they want to "relieve pressure of numbers on school places, hospital beds, wages, housing, transport and infrastructure".

All but the most numbskulled amongst us know that the biggest pressure on all of these things isn't immigration, but actually Tory austerity dogma.

In seven years of Tory rule the Tories have shut down dozens of A&E departments, walk in centres and maternity wards, gutted social care, slashed mental health spending, and reduced the number of NHS beds by at least 12,000.

Since 2010 the Tory government have deliberately repressed the wages of millions of workers ensuring the most severe decline in the value of UK workers' wages since records began. Other countries with much higher levels of immigration, but less austerity madness, have seen the value of their workers' wages rise.

Between 2010 and 2017 the Tory government oversaw the lowest levels of house building since the early 1920s. The fact that the allowed the biggest influx of migrants in UK history at the same time obviously didn't help the situation, but the catastrophic housing policy failures of the Tory party are far more to blame for housing shortages than immigration.

Again, the main cause of problems with British transport and infrastructure are not caused by immigration but by Tory ideological extremism. The rail and bus networks are disgracefully over-priced shambles because of botched Tory privatisation scams, and since 2010 the Tories have been trashing the future economic potential of the UK and ensuring we get left behind in the global economic race by deliberately under-investing in infrastructure spending.

If the Daily Mail gave the slightest bit of genuine concern over any of these issues, then they wouldn't be blaming these issues exclusively on immigrants, they'd be supporting the Labour Party manifesto that proposes to take serious action to actually address these problems (as well as introducing a migrant impact fund to improve services and infrastructure in areas that have had high levels of immigration).

But no, the Daily Mail are nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Tory party that has caused all of this damage with their privatisation mania and their socially and economically ruinous fixation with hard-right austerity dogma.

The reason the Daily Mail continually blame immigrants for all of these problems is that it deflects the blame away from their beloved Tories.

Victim complexing

The extreme-right are increasingly reliant on the tactic of inflating people's senses of self-pity so that they end up walking around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons.

This bizarre Daily Mail editorial tries to make out that it's not the people killed or injured in any of the four terrorist outrages over the last three months who are victims, but actually the poor maligned readers of the Daily Mail for the way the nasty lefties accuse them of reading a divisive extreme-right hate comic.

The Daily Mail have worked tirelessly to create massive victim complexes in their readers, and this attempt to portray Daily Mail readers as the poor delicate victims of society is their attempted payoff.

Forget the victims of terrorism; forget the victims of Tory austerity dogma; forget the disabled people who have been systematically abused in disability denial factories; forget the UK workforce who have seen their wages eroded away worse than any developed nation apart from crisis-stricken Greece; forget the 400,000+ extra kids growing up in poverty since 2010; forget all the people who have had their local services shut down; forget the millions stuck in ever-growing NHS queues; forget the victims of Grenfell tower; forget the victims of the post-Brexit spike in violent hate crime ...

Forget them all - because the true victims are the poor maligned Daily Mail readers who must be so terribly upset that other people would dare to suggest that they might possibly be horrible people because they choose to read such an undeniably horrible newspaper.

Conclusion

I've been very critical of the Guardian in recent years over their lazy recycling of pro-austerity dogma and their relentless editorial attacks on progressive politics, but their cartoonists (especially Martin Rowson and Steve Bell) have continued to do fantastic work. 

So in conclusion I think we should all say a big thank you and congratulations to the cartoonist Martin Rowson for triggering the Daily Mail into publishing such a blatantly unhinged diatribe.

Follow Martin Rowson on Twitter here

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