Meet the Tory candidate who wants to euthanise the unemployed

We all know there are a lot of right-wing people out there who secretly think that the Nazi concentration camps were a great idea, but that few of them are actually stupid enough to actually come out and promote Nazi-style eugenics in public, because they know the idea of state-administered murder of political non-conformists, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and so-called 'degenerates' fills most normal people with horror and revulsion.

One right-winger who is actually stupid enough to publicly promote the idea that people on benefits should be sent to death camps is the new Tory parliamentary candidate for the Gower constituency in Wales, Francesca O'Brien.

We're all aware of how "poverty porn" shows like Benefit Street were designed in order to whip up public hate against people who rely on benefits to survive, and to justify the Tory ideological agenda of vandalising the welfare state.

O'Brien is clearly one of the shows' target audience, because after watching an episode in 2014 she went onto Facebook to declare that the people on the show needed "putting down", and then endorse a reply proposing a "twat a tramp Tuesday".

Someone actually proposed a campaign of public beatings for homeless people, and instead of calling it out as vile vigilante nonsense, O'Brien responded "I'm liking that idea ... ha ha. Made me laugh"!

O'Brien has subsequently deleted the vile comments in the pathetic belief that the Internet will just forget the fact that she's some kind of hateful far-right ranter from the Britain First school of social media discourse.

And the Tory party have indicated how far they've moved to the extreme-right by continuing to endorse this vile woman as their chosen candidate.

yes they've spent the last nine years driving millions into absolute destitution with policies like sanctions, the benefits freeze, wage repression, disability benefit cuts, disability denial assessments ... but now they're unapologetically standing a candidate who says the state should go even further than systematically hounding disabled people and driving vulnerable people into starvation and suicide, and actually just kill them.

Let's hope the people of Gower have the good sense to reject this awful woman, and elect someone who has never actually proposed Nazi style eugenics, or laughed about vigilante violence campaigns against the homeless.

If she loses her bid to become an MP and then falls on hard times because of employers' understandable reservations about employing someone with such vile views, perhaps one day she might learn just a little bit of humility and decency?

 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

Jacob Rees-Mogg's anti-intellectual fans want him purged from politics because he's got a degree!

Anyone who has ever taken a look through the various Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson fan pages on Facebook will be familiar with the racism, bigotry, anti-Muslim hate, xenophobia, anti-immigrant abuse, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lionisation of far-right ideologues like Tommy Robinson and the Britain First hate group, extremist rhetoric, threats of violence & civil war, and gleeful fantasies about the public execution of their political opponents [sources 1,2,3,4,5,6] ... but in this article I'm going to take a quick look at something that is somewhat less sinister because it's quite frankly hilarious.

 

Anti-intellectual purges of the political system are actually a rarity
on a page where abuse, bigotry, racism, threats, conspiracy theories,
and fantasies about the public execution of political opponents
are the norm.

 Between all the abuse, bigotry and threats of violence that can be found in the Jacob Rees-Mogg Supporters' Group on Facebook, there's an extraordinary thread in which numerous Rees-Mogg supporters fantasise about an  anti-intellectual purge of the political system where anyone with a university degree is thrown out of the House of Commons and barred from standing for election!

The obvious problem of course is that their own demagogue Jacob Ress-Mogg would be one of the victims of this anti-intellectual cull of MPs as a result of the undergraduate degree in history he obtained from Trinity College Oxford in 1991 (in the days before the neoliberal-fixated Westminster establishment club introduced staggeringly high tuition fees designed to enforce a lifetime 9% education tax on those with parents unable to stump up tens of thousands per child to cover the fees).

The absurdity of wishing their own hero out of parliament because he's fallen foul of their anti-intellectual standards is hilarious, but it's also illustrative of the way anti-intellectualism is spreading like wildfire on the political right.

Surely everyone remembers Michael Gove's extraordinary "we've had enough of experts" appeal to anti-intellectualism during the EU referendum debate, and how experts and academics were almost completely sidelined in favour of fact-averse rhetoric-spewing Tories on either side of the debate?

And there's a reason the political right love to tell people to trust their base emotional instincts rather than looking to the kind of facts, evidence, logic, and reason that people like experts and university professors tend to use.

The reason for this anti-intellectual propaganda is that facts, evidence, logic, reason, and observable reality tend to defy their far-right worldview.

The extreme-right need people to reject facts, evidence, reason, science, and logic because reality has a left-wing bias.

If people actually listened to the evidence then it would be obvious that quitting the largest free trade area on the planet with an unprecedented shambles of a Tory government running the show is bound to end up causing a socio-economic chaos.

If people actually listened to the evidence then endlessly giving away not-for-profit public services to private profiteers so they can rent them back to us at way above the original cost is a bloody awful idea.

If people actually listened to reason they'd pin the blame for declining living standards and collapsing public services on 9 years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, social security cuts, and deliberate under-investment in public services and infrastructure projects, and never buy the extreme-right snake oil explanation that immigrants, the EU, political correctness, and human rights are somehow to blame.

So in order to dissuade people from thinking along these lines the extreme-right have to continually spread mistrust of experts and academics.

They tell us "why believe the experts when you can believe your own gut instincts instead?"

And they tell us "don't trust academics because they're actually terrifying lefties spreading dangerous "cultural Marxism" in order to destroy white western civilisation".

The Nazis used exactly the exact same techniques to justify their ideological purges of academia and the business world, and in fact the whole "cultural Marxism" theory the extreme-right use to discredit expertise and academia these days is lifted straight from Nazi Germany where it was called Kulturbolschewismus and blamed squarely on the Jews.

So yeah, the absolute ignorance of anti-intellectual right-wingers calling for their own demagogue to be purged from politics because he's got a degree is hilarious, but the anti-intellectual ideology that underpins this absurd nonsense is actually quite concerning.

 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

Have Labour been too apologetic on anti-Semitism?

It doesn't seem to matter what the Labour Party does, some people will simply not allow the subject of anti-Semitism to be dealt with calmly and rationally.

This hysteria is clear on both sides. This is clear whether we're talking about:

• Tom Watson's outrageous Stalinesque threat to personally take over Labour's disciplinary procedures.

• Chris Williamson's latest crass comments about Labour being "too apologetic" (comments that have drawn me back into writing about this subject again).

• Margaret Hodge publicly bombarding the Labour disciplinary bods with dozens upon dozens of anti-Semitism cases to investigate 90% of which turned out to not even be Labour Party members, then having the absolute gall to complain that they're taking too long to investigate the actual genuine cases!

• Or social media conspiracists outright denying that there's even a problem at all.

Moral perspective

From a moral perspective it's obvious that Labour should be apologetic every time an example of anti-Semitism is found amongst the 500,000+ people in the Labour ranks.

It's obviously fair to add context too by pointing out the facts and evidence that partisan anti-Labour critics would never provide. Stuff like the fact that the rates of anti-Semetic views amongst Labour supporters have gone down dramatically since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015, the fact that disciplinary procedures have been sped up significantly since Jennie Formby took over from the Blairite Ian McNicol at the NEC, and the fact that anti-Semitism is and always has been way more prevalent in the Tory party than Labour.

However, it's beyond obvious that whenever anti-Semites are caught in the Labour Party, the party needs to apologise and demonstrate their continued commitment to combating all forms of racism and bigotry with disciplinary procedures and bans.

Realpolitik perspective

From a realpolitik perspective Labour is obviously getting the whole thing completely wrong.

Instead of apologising and seeking to actively deal with the issue, the mainstream media have educated us about what the correct response is with their absolute dearth of coverage about the Tory Islamophobia scandal.

The Tory party has been accused of tolerating despicable anti-Muslim bigotry by several senior Tory politicians, including Sayeeda Warsi. For over a year the Tories have been refusing to apologise, refusing to investigate, and outright refusing to listen to calls by the Muslim Council of Britain for an inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks.

The Tories have simply stonewalled the subject, and a result the mainstream media have rewarded them with an absolutely minuscule fraction of the negative coverage they've heaped on the Labour anti-Semitism issue!

As far as the mainstream press are concerned Labour talking about and debating anti-Semitism in order to deal with the issue is worthy of inordinately more coverage that the Tories staying silent about anti-Muslim bigotry, and outright refusing to do anything whatever to deal with the problem in their party!

The ones who talk about the issue and take action are continually bombarded with criticism, while the ones who stay silent and refuse to take action are given a free pass.

Given these circumstances, from a realpolitik perspective it's obviously absolutely stupid for Labour to keep talking about anti-Semitism when the strategy of steadfastly refusing to engage has worked so well for the Tories when it comes to anti-Muslim hate in their ranks.

History

One of the main reasons Labour can't stop talking about the issue is that the party has a long history of standing up for minorities. It was the left who stood with the Jewish people at Cable Street to oppose Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1936 while the Tories we're signing up in droves to anti-Semitic pro-Nazi pressure groups like the Right Club.

And it was the left who stood with the Jewish community at Wood Green in the 1970s to face down the National Front thugs too.

Given this history it's obvious that any level of anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks feels like a betrayal that needs to be apologised for, and rightly so.

With the Tories it's a different story. In the 1930s they embraced the new fad of Nazism and joined up to anti-Semitic hate groups in their droves. In the 1960s they ran racist "If you want a coloured for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" leaflet campaigns in by-elections. In the 1980s they sided with Apartheid South Africa while the Tory youth were parading around in "Hang Mandela" T-shirts. And Theresa May is personally responsible for the introduction of sickeningly racist legislation in 2014 that was used to deny black Britons the right to housing, employment, banking services, social security, health care, and the right to return to Britain. This vile "Hostile Environment" legislation even resulted in black Britons dying in exile overseas.

The Tory party has a long history of racism stretching from their adoration of Nazism in the 1930s all the way to the present and their current policies of deporting black Britons and turning a blind eye to anti-Muslim bigotry in their own ranks.

Bigotry in the Tory ranks isn't a touchstone issue because there have always been loads of bigots in the Tory party. It's not news, and never will be, because it's just accepted as the norm.

Weaponisation

If you're the kind of person who can hold two thoughts in your head simultaneously then try this:

1. A tiny minority of Labour's 500,000+ members have expressed anti-Semitic views. They people should be weeded out because racism and bigotry of all types are unacceptable.

2. A lot of very bad faith opportunists are deliberately weaponising the Labour anti-Semitism issue for their own cynical political purposes.

There are no contradictions whatever between these two statements because they're both observable facts, however you have to be extremely careful stating the second fact because the very opportunists the statement refers to will attempt to misrepresent it as if it's a denial of the first statement that anti-Semitism is a problem.

There's obviously a huge distinction between pointing out the that Labour-opponents and mainstream media hacks like to use super-cynical tricks to weaponise anti-Semitism (like deliberately conflating the anti-Semetic abuse of jailed extreme-right thugs with the Labour Party, or taking quotations miles out of context in order to manufacture outrage), and outright denial that there's any problem at all.

But if cynical opportunists are prepared to mislead, manipulate, and lie in order to weaponise anti-Semitism for their own political purposes, why on earth wouldn't they use the same dishonest tactics to attack anyone who calls them out?

Tory glee

The weaponisation of anti-Semitism for political purposes is particularly galling when it comes from Tory MPs and partisan pro-Tory pro-austerity hacks in the mainstream media.

What's even more galling still is their barely suppressed glee whenever anyone tries to argue back that they're hypocrites due to the brazen Tory refusal to even address anti-Muslim bigotry in their own party.

They respond with glee because they know that not only are they winning from a realpolitik perspective by simply refusing to talk about or address their own bigotry issues, they also know that the perception that they're an anti-Muslim party actually plays extremely well with the sizeable extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic they've been openly courting and welcoming on board with open arms ever since the collapse of UKIP.

They know that anti-Semitism is a hugely problematic issue for Labour because of the left's history of solidarity with Jewish people, and they also know that accusations of anti-Muslim hate in the Tory ranks actually serve as recruitment calling cards amongst the far-right demographics they're actively targeting for support.

And they know they're being opportunistic hypocrites by banging on about Labour anti-Semitism when they have no intention whatever of dealing with much more serious problems of bigotry in their own ranks, but that's just how amoral opportunists roll.

From a realpolitik perspective they'd be idiots to actually investigate accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry in their party and root out the worst offenders because they know that doing the right thing like Labour have been doing would just invite media scrutiny and lots of negative commentary.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that the moral thing to do is to fight anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry, and apologise whenever bigots are exposed in your own party's ranks.

But the behaviour of the Tories and the mainstream media proves that from a realpolitik perspective any kind of apology whatever is "too apologetic" because why apologise when the media give you an infinitely easier ride when you just stonewall the bigotry problem like the Tories have?

So the answer to the question of "have Labour been too apologetic on anti-Semitism?" depends entirely on whether you believe in doing the right thing, or you've got such a tribal win at all costs mentality that you'll steadfastly ignore evidence of bigotry within your party purely for party political advantage.

 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

Why do liberals and 'centrists' so often end up supporting the extreme-right?

First things first, this article is not intended as a defence of the Maduro government in Venezuela. Anyone who attempts to present it in such a way is simply lying in a desperate attempt to discredit what they don't like reading, and don't want other people to read.

Whether you like Nicolás Maduro or not, whether you understand the multitude of internal and external factors that have created the current situation in Venezuela or not, whether you even know anything much at all about the Venezuelan political system or not, there's one thing that's undeniable: Anyone who sides with a guy who appoints himself President of a country without standing in a Presidential election is displaying utter contempt for the concept of democracy.

This is exactly what's happened in Venezuela with Juan Guaidó appointing himself President of the country despite the fact he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, let alone win it.

Thus Venezuela now has two Presidents. One who won the 2018 Presidential election and the other who didn't even participate in it and simply appointed himself because he didn't like the outcome of the ballot he didn't even contest.

The United States immediately backed this anti-democratic coup and recognised the self-appointed coup-President, just like they rushed in to back the spectacularly failed 2002 coup in the country too.

Back in 2002 the US were the only country to recognise the coup leader Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela before the coup rapidly collapsed and Hugo Chávez returned to power within two days.

The international reaction to this 2019 coup is very different, with numerous other countries rushing to throw their support behind this unelected self-appointed fake President.

The UK foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that the human rights defying Tory government support the unelected coup-President.

Another leader to have immediately thrown their support behind the coup-President is the recently elected Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro.

Several other hard-right governments in Latin America have backed the unelected coup-President, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay.

None of this is remotely surprising given Britain's increasingly pathetic subservience to US foreign policy, and the massive historic divide in Latin America between US-backed right wing governments and US-opposed left-wing governments that has existed since the United States began their outrageous campaign of toppling left-leaning Latin American governments in the region decades ago.

What's ostensibly a lot more surprising is the way European liberals and self-declared centrists have been rushing to support the US-backed "regime change" that's happening in Venezuela. 

Take the leader of the Liberal grouping in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt. His reaction to the coup attempt has been to personally recognise the self-appointed coup-President, lie that he's elected when he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, and then call for the EU to join Trump and Bolsonaro in recognising this coup leader as the legitimate President!

The very same guy who was furiously attacking Donald Trump as an "autocrat" and "a threat to Europe" back in 2017 is now wilfully sitting on Trump's knee like a yapping imperialist poodle!

Another Liberal to jump on the extraordinary 'this is a good coup' bandwagon is the centrists' darling Emmanuel Macron, who even had the gall to praise the bravery of the anti-government protesters in Venezuela as the French state brutally attacks and systematically represses the gilets jaunes protests against his own government!

Everyone knows that this US-backed coup is all about access to Venezuela's oil reserves (the biggest in the world) because Donald Trump's already publicly declared that US interventionism should be used to steal the natural resources of other nations.

It's extraordinary that so many trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are openly supporting this US imperialist "regime change" agenda while Trump's people openly talk about the prospect of making the already desperate situation even worse by launching military action in Venezuela.

They can't pretend to not understand what the motivation actually is after Trump's spelled it out for them so clearly. And it's especially alarming given the way that these people really should have learned all about the appalling consequences of imperialist "regime change" agendas after the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the destruction of Libya in 2011.

Both of these countries have been reduced to lawless terrorism breeding grounds with humanitarian conditions far worse than they ever were under the authoritarian governments of Hussain and Gadaffi.

Of course it's understandable that European liberals are no great fans of Maduro (neither am I, and I'm a leftie), but what does it tell you about their political principles when they're clamouring to align themselves with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to support a brazenly anti-democratic coup?
Even if you believe the 2018 Presidential election in Venezuela was rigged, supporting a self-appointed coup-President who didn't even stand in the election is utterly nonsensical from a democratic point of view. 

And what does it tell you about their bone-headed refusal to learn the lessons of history when they wilfully ignore the unspeakable levels of death, destruction, and suffering that imperialist "regime change" policies have caused in Iraq and Syria to support the exact same imperialist agenda in Venezuela, only this time orchestrated by an even more unstable, profit-driven, and fanatically right-wing US President than George W. Bush was?

It's beyond question that anyone supporting the self-appointed and unelected fake-President Guaidó is siding with extreme-right ideologues like Trump and Bolsonaro, refusing to learn the lessons of history about the horrific consequences of imperialist "regime change" policies, and displaying their absolute contempt for the concept of democracy.

One of the most extraordinary things is that many of these liberals and centrists pledging support for the Venezuelan coup were the ones crying the loudest when Donald Trump won the US Presidential election, and bitterly decrying the rise of far-right populism when Bolsonaro won the Brazilian Presidential election in October 2018.

But scroll forward just a few months and these same trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are now wilfully stepping in line with the extreme-right demagogues they decried when they won power to actively support the transparently anti-democratic coup they've orchestrated in Venezuela.

This farce in Venezuela is far from the first time that liberals have ended up supporting and enabling extreme-right demagogues. We can delve into history to look at the way the liberal German establishment wilfully handed power the Nazis in 1933 by making Adolf Hitler Chancellor, or we can look to current day Italy to see how the trendy liberal MS5 party have enabled the fascist Lega Nord into power by joining them in a coalition government.

The fact is that given the choice between moving leftwards towards socialism, and rightwards towards fascism, an awful lot of self-declared centrists and trendy liberals will chose the fascist option because they understand that fascism goes hand-in-hand with corporatism meaning that their financial interests will be protected.

As long as corporations and their personal financial interests are protected, a lot of liberals and self-declared centrists are willing to overlook the obvious dangers of enabling the extreme-right into power, or siding with the extreme-right axis when it comes to global politics.
 

This centrist willingness to overlook the dangers of fascism most often comes from the position of extreme privilege.

Most wealthy, white, westerners know they have the least to fear from fascism (unless they have leftist political sympathies) because it's always the political left, minorities, the vulnerable, and people in the developing world who bear the brunt of the persecution and suffering under extreme-right rule.

Of course people should be able to recognise the thin end of a wedge, and they should be aware of Martin Niemöller's warning about the danger of escalating fascism (see picture), but in reality these coddled liberals and centrists keep making the same mistakes over and again.

Liberals and centrists will have tantrums for a while when fanatical right-wing ideologues like Trump or Bolsonaro are elected because they hate not having things their own way, and because deep in their hearts they know the extreme-right is wrong, but when push comes to shove they repeatedly fall into line and quickly start supporting them.

The gleeful reaction of so many self-declared centrists and trendy liberals to the anti-democratic US-backed imperialist coup in Venezuela is yet another perfect illustration of their outrageous tendency to wilfully align with and support the extreme-right thanks to the shared belief in corporatism.

 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 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

Why is the leader of the Scottish Tory youth movement spreading recycled Nazi conspiracy theories?

In the grand scheme of things James Bundy isn't an important figure. Yes he heads up the Scottish Tory youth wing, but he's hardly a household name. However in one vile Tweet he's managed to perfectly illustrate the appalling ideological decomposition of the Tory party, and the outright complicity of the media who have allowed this to happen right in front of their eyes.

In his Tweet Bundy decided to rail against a BBC article about gender stereotyping of children by invoking a truly sinister anti-Semitic conspiracy trope straight from the Nazi propaganda playbook.

By invoking "cultural Marxism" as a threat to our way of life, Bundy has recycled a the Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) which posited that modern culture (art, architecture, music, literature, groundbreaking television shows, anything the Nazis disapproved of really) was the result of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Western way of life.

Once Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power they outlawed modernist styles in music, architecture, literature and art, began the systematic persecution of Jews and leftists, and imposed their own strict ethno-nationalist standards.

After the defeat of Nazism the concept of "Kulturbolschewismus" was kept alive by fringe extreme-right ideologues and their supporters, largely flying under the radar in British political discourse until the rise of UKIP, Brexit, and the sudden blue-kip takeover of the Tory party.

In a desperate post-Brexit bid to unify the Tory vote with the UKIP vote to deliver a hard-right landslide, Theresa May and the top Tories began openly courting the extreme-right demographic, and welcoming them into the Tory fold.

Unfortunately for Theresa May her blue-kip gamble failed as Jeremy Corbyn rallied the beleaguered Labour Party to an unprecedented electoral surge which almost matched the combined vote share of the Tories and the mass influx of extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kippers fleeing the wreckage of UKIP.

The loss of her majority has rendered Theresa May absolutely and desperately dependent on continually appeasing the dangerous extreme-right fringe that she welcomed with open arms, otherwise she knows they'd just flock back to UKIP, or to the next extreme-right fad.

The fact that the leader of the Scottish Tory youth wing now feels absolutely comfortable sharing propaganda tropes crudely recycled from the Nazi playbook just goes to show how rotten the Tory party has become.

The use of this kind of anti-Semitic recycled Nazi propaganda must be increasingly commonplace within Tory circles if their Scottish youth leader is openly spouting this shit in public.

Anyone would have thought that traditional "one nation" Tories and even economically hard-right pro-privatisation Thatcherites and Majorites would be absolutely disgusted at the way their party is being usurped by extreme-right lunatics openly spouting fascist propaganda. 

But no, you barely hear any complaints about it (except for the honourable exception of Sayeeda Warsi who will not drop the issue of extreme-right anti-Islamic bigotry in the Tory ranks), so presumably because they consider welcoming fascists on board as "a price worth paying" just to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power and stop him from renationalising the railways, water companies, and national grid, implementing an actual industrial strategy, and introducing a £10 minimum wage.

Then there's the news that three very senior Tories (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove) have been colluding with the dangerous extreme-right white-supremacist Steve Bannon, who told the French extreme-right Front National to embrace their racism "as a badge of honour".

James Bundy is the Scottish Tory youth leader and he's left free to spread anti-Semitic Nazi conspiracy tropes on Twitter, and Michael Gove is an actual government minister openly cavorting with an ideologue of the "Jews will not replace us" extreme-right. Yet Theresa May does nothing to discipline them, and virtually nobody in the mainstream press gives a damn about it.

Te mainstream media have endlessly reported the Labour anti-Semitism debate in outraged tones, yet they choose to ignore a Tory government minister cavorting with a dangerous extreme-right fanatic, and a Tory youth leader spreading Nazi conspiracy tropes. In light of this double standard there's little doubt whatever that their outrage is highly selective, and politically motivated.

Just imagine that Bundy was a Labour youth activist and he was caught spreading recycled anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda tropes on social media.

Do you really think the mainstream media would refuse to cover it despite people all over social media trying to goad them into providing a tiny bit of balance. Or do you think they'd already be all over it like a pack of snarling dogs*?

The fact is that they don't give a shit about the ongoing extreme-right takeover of the Tory party, because providing any coverage of this ideological decomposition of the Tory party runs entirely counter to the over-riding groupthink agenda of undermining any alternative to the four decade hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that most mainstream media hacks have done very nicely indeed out of thank you very much.

So if keeping orthodox neoliberals in power requires outright collusion with actual fascists like Steve Bannon these days, and the normalisation of fascist conspiracy theories and extreme-right hate speech within mainstream political discourse, as far as most comfortable mainstream media hacks are concerned, so be it.

 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

* = And rightly so because all anti-Semitism, bigotry, and fascist propaganda should be vehemently condemned on sight.