A Citizen Concerned About Neo Nazis

I'm afraid that it is time to speak of that neo Nazi rally in London last week, organised by convicted mortgage fraudster and violent football hooligan Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, alias 'Tommy Robinson'.  You know, the one where Elon Musk, via the safety of a video link from the US, incited violence and, lo and behold, the Nazis obliged by assaulting a large number of police officers.  (Although, notably, there were far fewer arrests of these neo-Nazis than there were of people peacefully protesting about genocide in Gaza the other week).  Apparently, though, I shouldn't be calling these bastards neo-Nazis - they're just 'concerned citizens' and I'm some kind of leftie extremist making a fuss over a perfectly legitimate political movement.  Really?  So, I'm meant to ignore the evidence of my own eyes and just accept a rally organised by a right-wing extremist with form for violence and racism, which included an endorsement of violence by a foreign billionaire and which targeted, vilified and scapegoated a minority group, (immigrants, specifically non-white immigrants), as the new normal?  This is gaslighting on an epic scale.  (Which is what I really want to talk about).  It's trying to tell all decent people 'No, no, no, you were mistaken - there was no fascistic mob, it was just a legitimate meeting of 'concerned citizens'.  Just like those mobs outside hotels housing immigrants, threatening and intimidating the occupants - including masked 'vigilantes' trying to break into the premises to do God knows what to women and children - are all just peaceful protests organised by those self same 'concerned citizens' and misrepresented by the liberal media and lefty activists.  Look, it's really simple:  if it goose steps like a Nazi, 'Sieg Heils' like a Nazi and hates like a Nazi, then it's a Nazi.

But of course, I'm wrong because these people have been denied any legitimate means of expressing their views because, in the UK, we have a 'free speech problem'.  (As many have noted, the fact that a hundred thousand Nazis can gather in London and spew out their hate would seem to be conclusive evidence that there is no problem with people being allowed to express themselves publically.  Even when they are hateful Nazi scumbags).  As with most things unpleasant and utterly shit, this nonsense originates in the US - a country which is currently 'disappearing' people who say things the right don't like, getting people fired from their jobs for 'objectionable' social media posts (apparently Tweeting that you think that Charlie Kirk was a right-wing extremist with unacceptable views is now considered anti-American) and is currently firing TV hosts for expressing opinions that are deemed 'unacceptable'.  So I really don't think that they are in a position to lecture anyone.  Not that repression of free speech is anything new for the US - have we already forgotten the McCarthy hearings?  You know what?  I'm getting heartily sick and tired of being sanctimoniously lectured by the US about how they are a scion of free speech, a beacon of liberty, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Sure, we've humoured them in the past and put up with their holier-than-thou attitudes to us Europeans, ignoring how hypocritical they actually are, but now that they've devolved into full blown fascism, I think that it is high time we started to tell them to stick it up their collective tight arses and start telling them a few home truths.

I digress, but not entirely, because most of that gaslighting about neo-Nazis emanates from the US, not just from their politicians, but from those MAGA adjacent stooges who swallow all of their shit completely uncritically.  The fact is that if you are one of those people doing the gaslighting and telling me I'm just too 'woke' well, you are the problem.  You are the one who needs to be 'woke' in the sense that you need to wake up to what is going on, particularly in your own country.  Your gaslighting of people like me is simply an extension of your own deluded attempts to justify to yourself that what is happening in the US is normal.  All that you are doing is trying to normalise and legitimise extremist politics, the politics of hate, that were deemed unacceptable eighty odd years ago in the aftermath of the world war that they caused.  So, just stop it.  Stop it now.  Before it is too late.  Wake up and smell the Nazi bullshit.  So, moving from foreign Nazi enablers to our own homegrown neo-Nazis, just who are these 'concerned citizens?  How are their views formed?  Well, the Daily Star, of all places, recently provided a surprisingly insightful profile of one such individual.  This young woman, 'Little Miss Nazi' or whatever she calls herself online, featured prominently at the recent Nazi rally and freely admits that all of her opinions on immigration and UK politics generally are derived from watching TikTok videos from right-wing influencers - some of whom are holocaust deniers, including one so extreme that he was even kicked out of UKIP.  At no point did it ever occur to her to fact check anything she was watching using independent sources.  This is the problem: people swallowing decontextualised 'facts' hook, lime and sinker.  (The irony of this analysis being in the Daily Star is rich, bearing in mind that in pre social media times, these same people were getting their 'opinions' from biased and decontextualised stories in the tabloids).  On the one hand, this is a sad indictment of our education policy as it clearly isn't teaching people to think, while on the other it is a sad indictment of our media, which has conditioned people to accept what amounts to propaganda without ever putting it into any kind of context, by the way they 'report' the news.  Because, like I said a few posts ago, 'Context is King' and when you look at that rally of 'concerned citizens' in a wider context, then there's no choice but to call them what they really are: neo Nazis.