Don't Mention the Nazis...

What tumultuous times we live in: in years to come people will doubtless look back and ask 'do you remember that weekend when free speech in the UK was saved by the BBC's football reporters and commentators going on strike?'  Not that it really was that dramatic, but this is how legends are born.  While it might not have been a vital turning point in either the protection of free speech or immigration policy in the UK, the whole Gary Lineker furore was still a satisfying exercise in watching an over reacting employer forced to back down in the face of collective employee action.  It also sent a salutary message to the Tories that, despite their brazen colonisation of BBC senior management, there are limits not just to how far they can force the organisation to align with their values, but also on how much, judging by the extent of the support for Lineker, the wider public will tolerate their blatant attempts to co-opt the public broadcaster as a Tory mouthpiece.  Perhaps the best thing to come out of it all though, was watching the usual right-wing bell-ends trying to justify BBC management's position and trash Gary Lineker or anyone else who had the temerity to point out just how right-wing the Tories are these days.  This culminated with Peter Hitchens' ludicrous piece for the Mail, where he trotted out that old chestnut about the Nazis being left-wing because of their use of the word 'socialist' in their name, which means that it is wrong to try and draw analogies between the Tories and Nazis - and by the way, you lefties are responsible for the Holocaust.

I'm not going to rehash why Hitchens and every other idiot who comes out with this tired load of cobblers is wrong, other than to point out that the inclusion of a term in a title isn't necessarily descriptive, but instead can be deliberately deceptive - after all, the former East Germany might have called itself the 'Democratic Republic of Germany', but I think we can all agree that it was anything but democratic.  But what this episode underlines, once again, is that just because someone speaks the 'right' way, went to the 'right' schools and universities and have their own byline in a national newspaper, (or a TV show), doesn't necessarily mean that they are either intelligent or honest.  Indeed, just look at the headlines of the various 'star' columnists who write for the right-wing press daily - they alone reveal a surfeit of willful ignorance, bigotry, spite, contrarianism and sheer stupidity.  I shudder to think what the actual content of these demented dribblings are - I long ago gave up reading them.  Along with the 'Nazis were really left-wing' trope, we also had trotted out, as ever, that other idiotic homily that if you reduce your argument to comparing your opponents to Nazis, then you've lost the argument.  Hmmm.  So what do we do when our opponents actually are behaving in a manner comparable to the Nazi regime in Germany?   The point that Gary Lineker was making was that the rhetoric and demonising of immigrants employed by the Tories in respect of their proposed immigration legislation is disturbingly reminiscent of that used in Germany in the 1930s in a similar context, (notice, he never used the word 'Nazi').  So, if we are to follow this nonsense about not making such comparisons, then we are depriving ourselves of the language required to properly critique such extremism. Which, of course, is what the extreme right want, to effectively silence any effective analysis of their policies.  Fucking Nazis.