The modern extreme-right are just copying ideas straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook

There's absolutely no doubt that the extreme-right is on the rise. Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Israel have elected extreme-right ethno-nationalists into government.

In Britain it's not all Brexit voters were vile extreme-right fanatics, but there's no doubt whatever that the extreme-right demographic were numerous enough to tip the balance in favour of Leave in a very close 52%-48% referendum vote.

In the United States Donald Trump was propelled into power with the support of the KKK and the 'alt-right', and he returned the favour by appointing the alt-right ideologue Steve Bannon as his most senior adviser, and then actually claimed that the Swastika-carrying "Jews will not replace us" thugs and murderous extreme-right terrorists in Charlottsville included "some very fine people".

One of the most extraordinary things about this resurgence of fascism is that the modern extreme-right are doing little more than lazily copying tactics straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook, presumably because they don't actually have any new ideas of their own, and just want another stab at world domination via the methods that almost succeeded for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The censorship fallacy

One of the most blatant examples of the modern extreme-right ripping off Nazi propaganda tactics is the continual refrain that their ideas are being censored, often expressed through sound systems on stages and glitzy websites (where the money actually comes from to pay for all of this extreme-right propaganda is the subject for another article ...).

Even worse than standing on a stage to claim that you're being silenced is the extreme-right tactic of screaming "censorship" whenever anyone else dares to use their own freedom of speech to criticise what the extreme-right fanatic was talking about. 

Freedom of speech means that you're free to say whatever you like (within the bounds of the law), but it certainly doesn't provide freedom from criticism if what you chose to say was a load of absolute shite.

Just like Adolf Hitler in 1928 the modern extreme-right are pretending that their views are being unfairly censored, and if these dangerous fanatics ever did assume political power, we can be absolutely sure that their very first moves would involve launching their own clamp down on free speech and setting about the ruthless persecution of their political opponents, just like Adolf Hitler did before them.

Free speech and criminality

Of course extreme-right fanatics will immediately try to counter criticism of their victims of censorship posturing by citing Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

"But we are being censored" they'll wail "because our beloved Tommy has been jailed for free speech".

The problem with this "free Tommy" narrative is that it's pure deception. Yaxley-Lennon wasn't jailed for free speech, he was jailed for attempting to disrupt the prosecution of child sex abuse gangs as a personal publicity stunt.

He risked collapsing several linked trials and freeing monstrous child sex abusers, he did it as a publicity stunt despite having been previously warned to stop disrupting trials by judges, and he pleaded guilty to the crimes he was charged with.

The fundamental deceit here is the claim that free speech gives people a blanket right to say and do whatever they like, but that's not how free speech works. Nobody is free to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, nobody is free to threaten to rape or kill people when they disagree with them, and nobody is free to deliberately disrupt child sex abuse trials for their own personal advantage.

Anyone who pretends that free speech does cover these things is simply misusing the term to excuse criminal behaviour.

Victim complexing

One of the most effective extreme-right propaganda techniques is victim complexing, which constitutes an effort to instil extreme levels of self-pity within the victims of their propaganda.

Pretending that certain minority groups are receiving favours is one way of doing it, pushing the fiction that the most privileged people in society are the biggest victims of discrimination is another, and pretending that certain political views are being banned is another.

The whole point of victim complexing is to inflate people's levels of self-pity as much as possible, because once you've got your intended audience walking around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of wind to get them all floating in the desired direction.

Xenophobia and anti-Semitism

Stoking fear of foreigners has always been a core tactic of the extreme-right, as has anti-Semitism. It's absolutely clear that this kind of rampant xenophobia and bigotry is on the rise again.

Look at Donald Trump's use of grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric to whip up his extreme-right base (despite the fact that his mother was an immigrant, and two of his three wives have been immigrants!).

Look at the way both Brexit campaigns used anti-immigrant fearmongering to achieve their aims (the Nazi style Leave.EU posters & the recently exposed Vote Leave campaign of highly misleading anti-immigrant fearmongering targeted social media dark ads).

Consider the wave of racism and racist attacks in Italy that have accompanied the rapid resurgence of Italian fascism there.

Consider the use of anti-immigrant rhetoric and vile anti-Semitic propaganda by the extreme-right Hungarian government of Vikton Orbán to provide cover for his ever more tyrannical and anti-democratic political agenda. 

The parallels between Orbán's massive anti-Semitic poster campaign declaring the Jewish billionaire George Soros as an "enemy of the people" and the two minutes hate against Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's 1984 are impossible to ignore.

Cultural Marxism

The threat of "cultural Marxism" is another fascist trope pulled straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook.

The Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) was a way of railing against modernism and progressive values. 

In those days allegations of "Kulturbolschewismus" were lobbed at modern art, Bauhaus architecture, and anything resembling socially liberal values. Today the same allegation of "cultural Marxism" is used to disparage issues like gay rights, transgender rights, and gender neutrality.

Given that Marx's economic philosophy centred on exposing the inequalities and abuses of the capitalist economy, and steered well clear of architectural aesthetics and transgender issues, it's absolutely clear that the term "cultural Marxism" is just a way of invoking scary red bogeymen in order to fearmonger against progressive and modernist trends that the extreme-right see as threats to their traditionalist hyper-conformist mentality.

Normalisation of Nazi propaganda

One of the most shocking things about this resurgence of fascism is the way in which Nazi propaganda is being rapidly normalised within political discourse.

Donald Trump is the obvious example, with members of the Republican Party ever willing to excuse, or even parrot Trump's extremist rhetoric out of their desire to ride on the coat tails of his success. It's not necessary to rehabilitate the reputation of the hard-right warmonger George W. Bush to note that at least the previous Republican President never resorted to racist Trumpian anti-immigrant abuse to whip up support from the extreme-right, nor sought to impose constitution defying anti-immigrant legislation.

In Britain the story is the same. The once centre-right Tory party has passionately embraced the extreme-right, welcoming the fanatically right-wing ultranationalist blue-kip demographic into the Tory fold with open arms.

from Theresa May spewing vile anti-immigrant rhetoric, through the disgusting BNP-inspired fearmongering of the Tories' 2016 London Mayoral election campaign, to young Tories openly spreading Nazi propaganda tropes without fear of recriminations, it's absolutely clear that the Tory party has shifted so far to the right, that what was until recently the domain of the extreme-right is now considered perfectly normal and acceptable, not just among the Tory rank and file, but more worryingly, within the party leadership too.

The paradox of tolerance

We've already seen how the extreme-right resort to victim-complex crying over their freedom of speech when they are imprisoned for their lawless behaviour, or even when others use their own freedom of speech to argue back against their propaganda.

It's absolutely clear that the extreme-right want to exist in an unlimited tolerance environment where they are free from the constraints of the laws of the land, and free from any criticism of their views.

Essentially they're demanding absolute tolerance of their ever increasing use of Nazi propaganda, and their unquestionably lawless behaviour.

But as Karl Popper pointed out in 1945, "unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them".

It's hard to argue that he was wrong given that he witnessed Adolf Hitler's rise to power using the victim complexing narrative that his ideas were being unfairly censored, only to immediately set about silencing and executing all of his political opponents to create one of the most deadly and intolerant autocratic regimes in human history once he got into power.

The lessons of history

Now that the same process is repeating over again, with the modern extreme-right using the exact same propaganda tactics to spread their intolerant ideologies, it's worth remembering Winston Churchill's warning: "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

Now that almost all of the generation who witnessed the disgusting barbarity of fascism first hand (which obviously included Orwell, Popper and Churchill) are now dead, with the very youngest of the WWII veterans into their 90s now, it's becoming increasingly clear that the lessons of history are indeed being forgotten, and the extreme-right are perfectly prepared to use the exact same propaganda tactics as the Nazis before them in order to attack and undermine socially liberal democracy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Orwellian propaganda of the British establishment

When George Orwell wrote the phrases "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength" and "Freedom is Slavery" he intended them as a warning about the dangers of totalitarianism. Nowadays examples of this kind of "Black is White" Orwellian propaganda are alarmingly commonplace in establishment political discourse.

The Bullies are the Victims

In the wake of Theresa May's woeful January 2017 Brexit speech the right-wing propaganda rags went into overdrive to try to convince the gullible that her rhetoric laden speech was some kind of triumph rather than an excruciatingly embarrassing low point in British diplomatic history, utilising a load of Orwellian "Black is White" propaganda in the process.

May's speech sent the excruciatingly weak diplomatic message that unless our 27 former European allies cave into her pro-corporate demands, then she's going to turn the UK into a vast bargain basement corporate tax haven, and then they'll be sorry.

Resorting to such ludicrous threats before the negotiations have even begun was bad enough, but Boris Johnson (who is somehow Britain's top diplomat) followed it up by insulting the people we're going to have to negotiate with by comparing them to brutal Second World War prison camp guards.

The Express somehow twisted this Tory idiocy around completely in order to paint the ones making ludicrous threats and insulting people as the poor innocent victims, and the targets of these threats and insults as the terrible foreign bullies!

The Establishment is the Anti-Establishment

When it comes to "Black is White" propaganda narratives The S*n went even further by trying to paint Theresa May (the leader of the millionaire-financed party of wealth and power) as some kind of anti-establishment hero intent on "ripping up the privileges of the elite"!

The attempt by the Murdoch press to twist Theresa May's "give our major corporations special privileges or we'll turn ourselves into a tax haven" threats into some kind of heroic anti-establishment stance on behalf of ordinary British people is an utterly absurd example of Orwellian propaganda, but it's hardly unusual these days. In fact it's possible to find examples of establishment politicians actually arguing the three Orwellian slogans "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength" and "Freedom is Slavery"!

Ignorance is Strength

Anti-intellectualism is of fundamental importance to any extremist political ideology because extremist ideologies cannot tolerate dissent, thus the importance of attacking and demeaning anyone with the critical faculties to subject the prevailing political ideology to any kind of intellectual scrutiny.

The Brexit campaigner Michael Gove exemplified this anti-intellectual "Ignorance is Strength" stance when he said that British people have "had enough of experts" when challenged to name some economic experts who actually thought that Brexit would actually be a good idea.

It's obviously no surprise that the man who vandalised our education system and filled our schools with totally unqualified teachers is an anti-intellectual who thinks people should make important political decisions based on ignorance and gut instinct rather than careful considered analysis of what the experts say. Nobody would expect anything else from him because there's no coherent argument in favour of this shambolic "let's make it up as we go along" Tory version of Brexit.

If there had've been an actual Brexit plan then it could have been subjected to intellectual scrutiny, but since there was no other plan apart from "let's all vote for Brexit and then let the hard-right of the Tory party make it up as they go along to suit their own interests", criticism and belittlement of critical expert opinion was absolutely vital for the success of the Leave campaign.

Freedom is Slavery

In January 2014 the former Work and Pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith gave an extraordinarily narcissistic and self-aggrandising speech in which he claimed that his welfare reforms were the modern day equivalent of the abolition of slavery!

One of the most absurd things about this ludicrous claim is that one of Iain Duncan Smith's flagship welfare reforms was a massive expansion in the modern-slavery Workfare system.

Under numerous Tory workfare schemes hundreds of thousands of unemployed people were stripped of their labour rights and compelled, under the threat of absolute destitution via sanctions, to work for no wages, often at highly profitable corporations.

Just imagine the scenario that you've worked your entire life since leaving school at 16, paying National Insurance contributions throughout your working life. Now you're 60 and you've lost your job. But instead of being allowed to access the unemployment benefits you've earned through your decades of National Insurance contributions, the Tory government has told you that you won't get a penny of it unless you complete a Workfare sentence of 30 hours a week of menial labour at Poundland for six months (significantly more hours of unpaid labour than the maximum community sentence handed out to actual criminals).

Faced with the prospect of absolute destitution you decide to do your sentence of unpaid forced labour at Poundland where you find that your boss is some jumped up Express-reading Tory fanboy who is less than half your age and considers you to be the kind of idle workshy scum Express columnists have indocrtinated him to hate, and treats you accordingly. No matter how much verbal abuse this disgusting Tory oik slings at you, no mater how much he demeans you in front of the other staff and the customers, you can't quit, because if you quit you know you'll be punished with benefit sanctions.

You get no sympathy at all from the other staff at Poundland. They understand the threat you represent to their jobs. Why would Poundland keep paying them actual salaries when they could just sack as many of them as possible to be replaced with an endless supply of free workfare slaves like you. The problem for the other staff members is that their employers and the Tory government are colluding to replace their paid jobs with forced unpaid labour, but you're the physical embodiment of the problem, so they hate you for it. But you can't quit otherwise you get thrown into absolute destitution.

During his tenure at the DWP Iain Duncan Smith forced hundreds of thousands of people into situations like this, yet he actually patted himself on the back for it, and even compared himself to the slavery abolitionists of the 19th Century, which is an astoundingly brazen attempt to equate "Slavery" and "Freedom".

War is Peace

During the siege of Aleppo a number of Tory revisionists attempted to create the narrative that David Cameron's failed rush to war in 2013 was some kind of glorious missed opportunity. Their argument was that had Cameron had his way, Assad would have been defeated, Aleppo wouldn't be happening, and Syria would probably have become a wonderful bed of roses by now.

The reality of course is that the destruction of the Assad regime in 2013 would have created an incredibly dangerous power vacuum, which would likely have been filled by ISIS, just like they filled the power vacuum in Iraq after our catastrophic intervention there.

Of course the ongoing civil war in Syria is appalling, but anyone who thinks that David Cameron handing the keys to Damascus to ISIS would have made the situation better than it is now, really is clearly preaching from the bonkers "War is Peace" handbook.

Another example of this ludicrous "War is Peace" rhetoric is the Tory justification for continuing to arm Saudi Arabia despite their ongoing war crimes in Yemen, and the fact that over 2,000 Saudis are enforcing the savage ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

"We need to sell them £billions worth of weapons because they're helping us with the war on terrorism" the Tories plead, even when the proof of Saudi weapons, finance and fighters in ISIS have been proven time and time again.

The Tories would have us believe that "War is Peace"; that Saudi Arabia is not a vile Islamist regime that has been spreading terrorism and Salafi extremism throughout the middle east and the world for decades, but actually a wonderful global peacemaker!

Conclusion

It's considered rather trite to exclaim that "George Orwell's 1984 was intended as a warning, not a political handbook", but the regularity with which members of the political establishment actually try to argue that "Black is White" these days is pretty alarming stuff that Orwell would surely be criticising and satirising if he were still alive today.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The Daily Express definition of democracy

It's just a few weeks ago that hacks at the Express decided to update their definition of democracy to include the dictatorial insanity of imprisoning people without trial for the "crime" of holding the wrong political opinion.

On November 3rd 2016 the High Court ruled that Theresa May can't just make up the law as she goes along, and that her Brexit plan (whatever it is) should be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval.

The three High Court judges upheld the law that parliament is sovereign, and that Theresa May can't just go around acting like a squalid little dictator with absolute contempt for the law of the land. For anyone who even remotely understands the issues at play this ruling was a massive victory for democracy and a clear assertion that parliament, not the Prime Minister is sovereign.

The right-wing media reaction to this ruling was absolutely extraordinary to behold. The front page of the Daily Express featured an extraordinarily revisionist interpretation of events which included the extraordinary assertion that "November 3rd 2016 was the day democracy died".

As far as the fascistic hacks at the Daily Express are concerned, an unelected Prime Minister attempting to undermine democracy by completely bypassing parliament and inventing her own laws is "democracy" and three British judges ruling that actually parliament is sovereign and the Prime Minister can't behave like a dictator and just make up her own laws represents the death of democracy!

This is such a staggering piece of "democracy is dictatorship" revisionism that it wouldn't have looked out of place alongside George Orwell's terrifying revisionist slogans "war is peace", "freedom is slavery", and "ignorance is strength".

So now not only does the Daily Express definition of democracy include imprisonment without trial for thoughtcrime, it's also has essentially the same meaning as dictatorship!

It's easy to see why Theresa May, the hard-right fringe of the Tory party and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press are so upset about this ruling that parliament is sovereign. If they could have got away with making new laws without parliamentary approval it would have set them an incredibly useful precedent that the Prime Minister can do whatever the hell they like without seeking any kind of democratic approval whatever. Wouldn't it be so much easier for the Tory party to create their savage right-wing dystopia if Theresa May could just make up new laws to suit herself without having to seek parliamentary approval.

Hacks at the Daily Express weren't the only only ones to resort to revisionist wailing about the Hight Court ruling that Theresa May can't behave like a dictator, the Daily Mail declared the three judges "enemies of the people" and the S*n got in on the act too with a load of xenophobic drivelling.

The unfortunate thing about this deeply fascistic ranting from the right-wing press is that millions of gullible idiots will simply lap up the drivel they've read in their favoured right-wing hate comics, and actually believe that this ruling in favour of parliamentary sovereignty is the attack on democracy that the right-wing hacks are telling them that it is.

There are millions of angry and politically naive people out there who genuinely believe that Theresa May's dictatorial efforts to ride roughshod over parliamentary sovereignty (despite all of the expert advice saying she couldn't) is democratic, and that the judges who slapped her down and told her to stop behaving like a dictator are anti-democratic "enemies of the people"!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Charles Darwin and the price of fame

Charles Darwin was born on the 12th of February 1809. Alongside Alfred Russell Wallace he is credited with the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He is rightly considered to be one of the great thinkers of the 19th Century.

Unfortunately, due to his fame he has become a highly misrepresented individual. His name is used to categorise a number of vile social theories that he never would have supported, and his image has often been appropriated to promote a militant form of atheism he would never have wanted to have been associated with either. 

Social Darwinism

A warped interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution has been used to justify labelling ideologies that promote racism, elitism, competitive strife and eugenics as "Social Darwinism".

Nothing in Darwin's work suggests that he would have supported social policies of demonisation, discrimination, impoverishment and even outright extermination against sectors of society deemed to be inferior by powerful minorities. In fact Darwin's theories are entirely compatible with the idea of community rather than ruthless "survival of the fittest" because it's beyond obvious that a tendency towards forming into community groups can provide an evolutionary advantage (think of shoals of fish, murmations of starlings, colonies of ants, and the more complex social groupings of higher mammals like primates, elephants, dolphins and whales).

In 1902 the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin provided a detailed explanation of how cooperation amongst species was not just compatible with Darwinian evolution, but actually essential to it, in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

The fact that Darwin never wrote anything to suggest that he would have supported racist or eugenicist policies of deliberately eradicating members of society that are deemed "weak" by the powerful didn't stop people from evoking his name in the blanket term used to describe such theories. It's appalling that the concept of actively cleansing society of so-called "weaker" members still bears his name. 

Militant atheism

Charles Darwin is also often used as a poster boy by militant New Athiest types, despite the fact that he was nowhere near as intolerant of theists and theological debate as they are.

The way Darwin has been appropriated by the militant atheists is actually very similar to the way the economist Adam Smith has been appropriated by the militant Laissez-faire economic hard-right, despite the fact that the most cursory examination of his work reveals that he was nowhere near as fanatically right-wing as they are.

Another example of this kind of appropriation is the way the work of George Orwell is often invoked by right-wing people to attack socialism, even though Orwell was a committed democratic socialist who criticised the Soviet Union for their authoritarianism, not simply because they were left-wing.

To provide a little proof that Darwin was no militant atheist here's a quote from a letter he sent to John Fordyce in 1879:

"It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist ... But as you ask, I may state that my judgement often fluctuates. Moreover whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note. In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."

The idea of invoking the name of a self-declared agnostic (who maintained civil relationships with many theists) in order to promote a rabid form of militant atheism is just as bad as using the name of an economist who supported state intervention (such as infant industry protection) to promote right-wing anti-state fanaticism, or using the work of a lifelong democratic socialist to promote right-wing political ideologies.

The price of fame

It seems to be the price of fame that all kinds of people who have little regard for what you actually believed in will latch themselves onto your work, and use your image to promote their own ideologies, irrespective of whether they're actually compatible with what you said or not.

The way that the names of thinkers like Darwin, Smith and Orwell are invoked in order to add a veneer of credibility to ideologies they would have been very unlikely to support themselves is bad enough, but Darwin had it even worse than most because of the way his name has been associated with a bunch of vile ideologies that are grouped together under the name "Social Darwinism".

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
The lamentable decline in the standard of public debate
           
David Cameron's Orwellian word games
                     
What value can be found in religious contemplation?
       
Michael Gove's Great War revisionism
                             
The JP Morgan vision for Europe

                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  

David Cameron's Orwellian word games

In February 2014 the Archbishop of Westminster spoke out against the so-called "welfare reforms" being conducted by the Conservative party (and their ever wiling Lib-Dem enablers). Vincent Nichols is the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, and has recently been brought into the inner circle of cardinals by Pope Francis. Here's a quote:

"The voices that I hear express anger and despair … Something is going seriously wrong when, in a country as affluent as ours, people are left in that destitute situation and depend solely on the handouts of the charity of food banks."

Nichols is by no means the first religious person to speak out against the immorality of imposing ideological austerity and cuts on the poorest and most vulnerable people in society whilst ever more wealth gets distributed to the tiny establishment minority. The Church of England has criticised "welfare reform"; At Easter 2013 a coalition of smaller churches spoke out against attacks on the poor by Tory ministers and the mainstream media; and other groups such as the Quakers have been constant champions of social justice. It's not just religious people that are complaining either. Countless charities, voluntary organisations, anti-poverty campaign groups and social activists have spoken out too.

David Cameron's riposte to this latest condemnation of his government's attacks on the poor and vulnerable was absolutely extraordinary. He claimed that the sustained attacks on the social safety net his government have been conducting (which affect far more working people than unemployed) are part of a "moral mission" aimed at giving "hope" and "opportunity" to "people who had previously been written off with no chance".

Given the appalling history of the Catholic church, even after Pope Francis has begun steering the institution towards the path of social justice, few people would accept a high ranking Catholic as an perfect moral arbiter. However, nobody in their right mind could accept the leader of a political party which is absolutely obsessed with their bankrupt "greed-is-a-virtue" neoliberal economic ideology speaking as a moral arbiter on their own brutal welfare policies.

If the religious organisations of the nation, charities and the voluntary sector are speaking with one voice to condemn Tory "welfare reform" as immoral, it is absolutely extraordinary that Cameron could attempt to defend his attacks on the poor and vulnerable by describing them as being part of a "moral mission".

The idea that Tory welfare reforms bring "hope" and "opportunity" to the poor and vulnerable is yet another extraordinary assertion. Here are a dozen facts about this supposedly "hope" inspiring welfare system.

• The DWP admitted that between January and November 2011 at least 10,600 people died within six weeks of being declared fit to return to work under the Atos administered WCA regime.

• The DWP is currently stonewalling Freedom of Information requests to ascertain how many people have died in similar circumstances since November 2011.

• The DWP didn't even count how many people had died within weeks of being declared fully fit for work and thrown off benefits entirely.

• The Atos administered WCA regime has been condemned as discriminatory by the courts on two occasions, the DWP have ignored these court judgements and refused to abandon their discriminatory assessment regime.

• The number of people stripped of their social security entirely per year via sanctions  has soared to an all time record high of 897,690.

• Tory ministers and DWP officials repeatedly lied that there were no league tables for imposing sanctions until the league tables were leaked to the press in March 2013.

• Hundreds of thousands of people are being compelled under threat of absolute destitution to give up their labour rights and work for free on Stalinist style compulsory labour projects. Even though these people are still in receipt of unemployment benefits, the government excludes them all from the official unemployment statistics.

• Comparison between the official Labour Market Statistics published in February 2014 and the same period in 2010, we can see that the Tory welfare reforms have been an absolute disaster. The total number of people out of work for more than two years has skyrocketed from 250,000 to 448,000 and the number of 18-24 year olds out of work for more than two years has more than doubled from 55,000 to 114,000.

• 4 million children in the UK are growing up in poverty, and this number is increasing all the time as a result of "austerity" and "welfare reform".

• The number of people living in such dire poverty that they are reliant upon food banks has grown exponentially. Studies have linked this rise in food bank dependency to Tory "welfare reforms".

• The majority of people to have been made poorer by Tory benefits cuts are not unemployed, they are the working poor and their families.

• Between 2009 and 2013 the number of working people claiming benefits to keep their heads above water rose by a staggering 104%.

You may have noticed that I didn't even mention Bedroom Tax in these twelve points, so here are a few articles on that particularly vile demonstration of Tory malice against the poor and vulnerable:

• Driven to suicide by the Tories deadly "Bedroom Tax" blundering
• "Bedroom Tax": Impoverishing the poor to subsidise the rich
• The "Bedroom Tax" and Tory hypocrisy
• The flawed "Bedroom Tax" justification narrative
• Why I oppose "Bedroom Tax"

Returning to David Cameron's attempted justification for his so-called "welfare reforms", it is clear that he is using Orwellian language. Recall the slogans from 1984 "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength". Well David Cameron's defence of the Tory attacks on the welfare system are remarkably similar, the two over-riding themes being that "Morality is Immorality", "Opportunity is Destitution" and "Hope is Fear".

If we look through David Cameron's extensive back catalogue of lies and distortions we can find many other examples of this kind of Orwellian use of language. Cameron's pre-election lies about the NHS are some of his most famous, so we'll start there and move on to some of his other lies.

Cameron said that he'd cut the budget deficit, not the NHS, then imposed £20 billion worth of austerity cuts on the NHS: "Cutting is Not Cutting".

Cameron said that the NHS would be safe in his hands, then he carved it open for the private sector and fed £1.5 billion worth of NHS contracts to Tory party donors: "Safe is Not Safe".

Cameron promised "no more top down reorganisations of the NHS" then pushed through the biggest and most controversial top-down reorganisation in the entire history of the organisaation: "No More is Another"

Cameron claimed in a 2013 party political broadcast that the Tories are "paying down Britain's debts" when the reality is that they have increased the debt by more in their first 3.5 years than New Labour did in the previous 13: "Paying Down is Dramatically Increasing".

In October 2013 Cameron claimed in parliament that Labour "bankrupted Britain" even though the UK kept their AAA credit ratings until George Osborne lost them due to his blundering economic mismanagement several years later: "Bankrupted is Investment Grade"

David Cameon's long track record of subverting the meanings of words means that we shouldn't be surprised that he is at it again with his "Morality is Immorality", "Opportunity is Destitution" and "Hope is Fear" nonsense, but it is enough to make us wonder whether this is some Old Etonian game to test how much cognitive dissonance "the lower orders" can endure.

I can't help thinking that this is some kind of game, like the England footballers at the 1998 World Cup trying to sneak song titles into their interviews with the press, David Cameron is perhaps trying to impress some of his Old Etonian chums with his Orwellian word games.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

                   
 The Tory ideological mission
           
The Great Neoliberal Lie
                  
What is ... Wage Repression?
           

David Cameron's internet censorship plans
     

The economic case against tax-dodging 
   
George Osborne's economic blunders
                    
The Tory "War on Justice"

             

The JP Morgan plan for Europe
         
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy

Common sense & neoclassical pseudo-economic nonsense
               
The "All in This Together" fallacy

The mainstream media oligopoly
           

A political awakening

Number 3: A political awakening

 Richard Walsh explains how a debate over the August 2011 
riots led to his political awakening. 
 

One of the iconic images from the August 2011 riots.

It was August 2011 and across the major towns and cities of the United Kingdom youths were running amok. Violent battles with police, arson, looting, disorder and mayhem were a nightly occurrence. I didn't know it then but it would be a time that was to have a profound effect on the way I looked at the world and would awaken within me a political side to my personality that I didn't know existed. I was 25 years old and working as a gas mains engineer with my dad, as I had since leaving school at 16. Born and bred on a council estate in north Liverpool, the son of an Irish immigrant, I was always proud of my hometown and working class roots. One thing us scousers have is a strong sense of identity and community spirit. We look after our own here, like in many old industrial northern cities. There's nothing like being shat on from a great height by your own government to foster camaraderie and togetherness.

        

Anyway, I thought I had a fairly good understanding of the way the world worked. Not that I’d ever taken an active interest in politics, but I read the paper most days and watched the news when I got home from work so I felt myself qualified to discuss world affairs with work colleagues and friends down the pub. Sometimes if I was feeling particularly adventurous, I'd even stay up to watch BBC Question Time, so I firmly believed I had a knowledge of current affairs to at least match most people. When coverage of the riots reached me I felt an overwhelming sense of anger. Who did these scumbags think they were, going out causing mayhem and vandalising other peoples property like that? The police seemed far too soft on them, unorganised and undermanned, it looked like a shambles to me. Get the bloody water cannon out on the little wankers, I thought to myself. Why are we not bringing this flagrant lawlessness under control?

         

Enraged, I took to social media to vent my frustrations. While flicking through my Facebook news feed, I stumbled across a friend of mine with a very different attitude to my own. He was making the point that the big shops use sweat shop labour, mark their products up 3000%, employ people on poverty wages (that need to be topped up by the taxpayer) and then break their necks to avoid paying anything like their fair share of tax on their profits so good luck to the looters! I couldn't believe his attitude. What about the innocent people caught up in the melee? The cost to the taxpayer? These hooligans were causing chaos for kicks, not because they were championing some justifiable political uprising. In Egypt they riot for freedom, here its for Adidas trainers and flat screen TVs. So we became embroiled in ideological debate over the next few days, both obstinately standing our ground. I knew I was right but I was also aware that there were gaping holes in my knowledge which needed filling in with some research. I wasn't even sure what left wing and right wing meant in a political context, I mean I’d heard of right wing fanatics like the BNP who fantasised about rounding foreigners up like cattle and putting them on the first boat home after giving them a good kicking but I couldn't explain what left wing meant. We hadn't covered anything remotely political at school bar George Orwell's animal farm and that was to examine the literary techniques used, not the political connotations (although I do remember the teacher nudging us towards the notion that communism was bad, and can never work as people are inherently greedy). Any other political understandings I had learnt came from the media, either televised or the press. With hindsight, I now realise that I was very intellectually lazy during that period of my adolescence. Most of my spare time was spent out partying, drinking, mucking around or trying to get my leg over. It's true what they say, youth is wasted on the young and wisdom on the old!

      

Anyway, determined to improve my arguments against my friend (and pull his to bits), I decided to read the Communist Manifesto. I didn't really understand what communism was so it seemed like a good place to start. Anytime I'd heard communism mentioned in the media it had been in a derogatory manner, either in conjunction with human rights abuses, paired with the message that people in communist countries live in abject poverty while the ruling elite live in luxury or referring to some politician as a “crazy old commie”. I didn't know exactly what communism was but I knew it was bad and that was enough for me.

      

So I set to work reading the Communist Manifesto expecting to find a few fundamental flaws to expand upon and criticise but I ended up finding much more than that. Lots of the themes hadn't occurred to me before and although it was written over 150 years ago I found it strikingly relevant to the modern world I saw around me. People slaving away all their lives just to subsist while a chosen few inherited capital and power and lived lives of luxury on the back of others' misery and hard work. Children starving to death while food is simultaneously wasted or stockpiled, class divisions, the value of labour. This book got me asking a lot of questions that it had never occurred to me to ask before. Questions about myself, my own life, my job, the world I was a part of. Why had I never asked these questions before of my own accord? I’d always thought of myself as reasonably intelligent, I passed an entrance exam to a top secondary school where I was always in top sets, found schoolwork easy (although I only studied up to GCSE level), so why had I never thought about any of the issues Marx raised, rather than just accepting things at face value and carrying on with my life? It was a sobering thought, and really quite a frightening one. I think the main reasons were distraction and disinformation. After spending all week working long hours to pay the bills, in my spare time I wanted to do thing I enjoyed, relax, watch football, go out with friends and let a bit of steam off. I never had the time nor the inclination to question the status quo or seek out different political viewpoints and alternatives. Thus I only ever received a very narrow, one sided point of view from the mainstream media which I had gradually assimilated into my own thoughts through continual exposure. I hadn't searched out many alternative political viewpoints because I had no reason to distrust the ones I was already following. I suppose I had a subconscious trust in the integrity of the media and the uttering of politicians and so called “experts”. You just assume that they are in their job because they are intelligent and have the relevant education and experience to know better than the average person, such as myself. I wasn't naive enough to believe that all public figures could be trusted but there were systems and procedures in place to remove people whose moral integrity was questionable, so surely most must act to promote the common good?

      

After the Communist Manifesto put a crack in my rose tinted glasses I began to search out other alternative political literature and media to clarify my own opinions and broaden my political horizon of understanding. The ragged trousered philanthropists, George Orwell, Ernesto Guevara, Noam Chomsky and Seamus Milne were all valuable steps on my journey of enlightenment and before long the rose tinted glasses were off and I was seeing a much bigger picture than the one I'd seen before.
   
When you understand that governments actively try to keep unemployment high enough to suppress wages and inflation you have a different perspective on benefit claimants and welfare austerity. When you understand the shocking absence of social mobility in this country and the continuous efforts to kick the ladder away further, you can see how generations of teenagers become alienated from a society that ostracises them and offers them no future. You realise that from infancy our eyes and ears are bombarded by corporate advertising campaigns, inseminating our minds with the insatiable urge to purchase and consume to the point where we measure our social standing by the possessions we have, the clothes we wear, the money in our pockets, the car we drive, the house we live in. These things all too often take precedence over our achievements, our personalities, our morals and our humanity. Little wonder then, when you create a forgotten generation, detached from society with no prospects, surrounded by nice things they're indoctrinated to worship but can't afford, that they will steal them or turn to other acts of criminality to make themselves money, when society has long since washed its hands of them. Of course there are myriad contributory factors to the problems of society and outpourings of violence such as the 2011 riots, but to properly treat an illness you must target the root cause rather than just try and alleviate the symptoms with doses of police brutality and hasty imprisonment. This was what I came to realise after taking the time to educate myself.
  

Another Angry Voice has also been a fountain of great information for me, the incisive direct journalism on current affairs was like a breath of fresh air and the “what is ... ?” tutorials really helped me to fast forward my knowledge of economics, which is a must if your going to back up your political arguments. Right wing fanatics love nothing better than arguing with someone on a simply moral agenda because they can dismiss them as hopeless idealists, as a soft lefty, who believes in an unworkable cloud cuckoo land utopia. When you can back up your arguments with cold hard facts and economics they can't negate them, not if they're honest anyway. It gets really frustrating now for me personally, watching the mainstream media consistently repeating and giving credibility to information which is either misleading or simply not true, especially when I think of how I was taken in. If people were more aware of the real facts, I’m sure there would be greater resistance and hostility towards government policy, as most people value fairness and don’t like to see others suffering unnecessarily. The beauty of the truth is that it is true whether you choose to believe it or not. You cannot banish it no matter how many lies you shout from the rooftops, it is always there waiting to be found. It’s the moral responsibility of everyone who understands the crimes being committed against good decent people in this country and around the world to stand up and resist it, whether it is by protesting, organising or spreading the word to others. The more people who are helped to see through all the bullshit and lies, the greater the potential for positive change. Hopefully with Neo-Labour now seemingly intent on distancing themselves from the last tie they had with ordinary people, the trade unions, the left can stop flogging the Labour party dead horse which quite frankly is beginning to stink out the joint, and consolidate to form a new party.

I believe the next few years will be a pivotal time in British politics and its time for a swing back towards the left. The ever increasingly top heavy distribution of wealth in this country is bad for the economy, and relying on endless credit to paper over the cracks is unsustainable, as we keep finding out. It’s up to each and every one of us to get off our backsides and make the effort to do something positive, lead by example and build a better future for ourselves, our children and everyone else. As Margaret Mead once said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has".

 About the author
 

Richard Walsh is a frustrated political observer and social activist from Liverpool.

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