'If Suella Braverman is a fascist, she's the worst sort - a stupid one'
In 2017, the US lawyer Mike Godwin renounced his rule that the longer any online discussion rages, the more likely it is someone will compare someone else to the Nazis.
The rise of Trump made him say: "By all means, compare these s***heads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."
For too many people, the Nazis are what Hollywood made of them. Murderers. Sado-masochists. Leather fetishists. Not people in suits, not democratically-elected, and far less likely to hold a public meeting than they are to stage a public execution.
So when someone told Suella Braverman that she was acting a bit like a Nazi, she responded politely, discussed her parents fleeing from Kenya, and absolutely failed to grasp the point.
After all, it's not as though Joan Salter, 83, doesn't know what she's talking about. She fled Belgium in 1943 and it took her four years to get to Britain, "across war-torn Europe and dangerous seas", in her own words.
'It's never the dog's fault - it's stupid bloody humans who make killer dogs'
She told the Home Secretary, at a constituency meeting: "When I hear you using words against refugees like 'swarms' and 'invasion', I am reminded of the language used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others. Why do you find the need to use that kind of language?"
The exchange was posted online by a refugee charity. The Home Office has demanded it be taken down, as it's "been heavily edited and doesn't reflect the full exchange".
The charity responded by posting the full 3mins 52 seconds on YouTube. And it doesn't make Braverman look any better, or brighter.
Is it the Home Office's role to defend the Home Secretary? Asking for a taxpayer... (Getty Images)1. Braverman was asked to explain why she says the same thing about immigrants in small boats as Hitler said about Jews, homosexuals, Communists, and the disabled.
2. She didn't answer.
3. She used her parents as a shield.
4. Dad was a refugee, mum an economic migrant, and both were given legal routes to enter the UK with the minimum of trauma and expense.
5. She praised British generosity, decency, and sense of fair play, while demonstrating none herself.
6. She ended by saying refugees and illegal migrants other than her parents were "exploiting that generosity, breaking our rules, and undermining our system".
7. She did not mention, at any point, that those people are on small boats and breaking the rules because that's what the Tories MADE them do.
'Rishi Sunak delivered their medal - but broke his promise to nuclear veterans'
The ghost of Christmas past coughs offstage (AFP/Getty Images)Remember Theresa May? How cross she got about migrants coming through the Channel Tunnel? Then perhaps you can also remember her leader, David Cameron, first using the word 'swarm' , and how TV crews filmed them climbing over Eurostar fences.
What you've probably forgotten is that when he said 'swarm' in 2015, he was dragging your attention away from train and Tube strikes, an unseasonal heat wave linked to climate change, 250,000 people protesting against austerity, and an announcement that George Osborne wanted to make another £20bn of cuts.
What better way to detract from your own government's ideological chaos and economic idiocy than to point at an easily-identifiable group, and say it's all their fault. There were 2,000 people a day trying to stow away on lorries, we were told, let's stop them coming through the tunnel.
They were warned that if they did that, they'd come on boats, and we wouldn't be able to count or catch them. They were warned the poorest and most desperate people in the world would die, without a legal, safe route to apply for visas and asylum. They did it anyway.
Luckily he went off to make millions, so that's all right then (Getty Images)The worst sort of politician is one who does something that'll be awful in a few years, in return for a good headline today. One who ignores the lessons of history to start down that path again.
Cameron, May, and Johnson all dipped a toe in the aren't-migrants-awful stream of consciousness that flows through the darkest bits of humanity's soul. They did it for votes. Braverman is in there splashing about like a particularly dim Labrador, because she doesn't know what else to do.
The Nazis did not start with genocide. They began in suits, with complaints that the disabled were too expensive, then the Communists too disruptive, the homosexuals too damaging to order. They held massive public meetings, they got democratically elected, and then they legislated.
In a programme called Aktion-T4, the Nazis got doctors to sterilise the disabled for their own good, then moved on to killing them. They developed a gas technique to murder dozens at a time in lorries, then found ways to dispose of large numbers of bodies, and hey presto - the Holocaust became possible.
Hollywood has never been interested in that bit. But it's the bit that matters most, because without it, ordinary, feeling, thinking human beings, would never have used a rifle butt to shove a child into a gas chamber.
When someone who survived all that says you sound the same, you should answer the Jewish lady.
When you have achieved wealth and power, as the child of a refugee and an economic migrant, then you accept those who take the same path today are capable of the same.
If your family had a legal route, and you've got evidence legal routes work, control numbers, remove people from the clutches of people traffickers, and enable them to arrive with a minimum of trauma and expense so they're in a better position to build a new life, then by all that's holy you SET UP A LEGAL ROUTE.
And if you really believe that today's migrants are more criminal and dangerous than previous migrants, perhaps you should ask yourself if that's because you're abandoning them to trafficking gangs, sexual abuse, and the shadow economy from which you will never be able to extract them.
All Nazis are bad, but if there's a type which is worse than all the others it is someone too stupid to understand what they're doing. The ones who just say what others said, and normalise the sort of things that in any other circumstances would be atrocious.
Because they're the ones who make Nazis of others.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
