When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again
Alex Massie in the Spectator on a day of infamy. (The actual Roosevelt phrase is “a day that will live in infamy.”)
The poster unveiled by Nigel Farage this morning marked a new low, even for him.
The mask – the pawky, gin o’clock, you know what I mean, mask – didn’t slip because there was no mask at all. BREAKING POINT, it screamed above a queue of dusky-hued refugees waiting to cross a border. The message was not very subtle: Vote Leave, Britain, or be over-run by brown people. Take control. Take back our country. You know what I mean, don’t you: If you want a Turk – or a Syrian – for a neighbour, vote Remain. Simple. Common sense. Innit?
The Nazis gave us this one:
Back to Alex Massie:
Nigel Farage isn’t responsible for Jo Cox’s murder. And nor is the Leave campaign. But they are responsible for the manner in which they have pressed their argument. They weren’t to know something like this was going to happen, of course, and they will be just as shocked and horrified by it as anyone else.
But, still. Look. When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’
When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.
Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
And it does happen, it keeps happening.
Last quoted paragraph makes me think of Trump whipping up his supporters. Maybe I’m just naive, but it’s scary to see just how far he’s been able go on unvarnished hatred and mean-spiritedness.
Another pretty direct parallel is the “abortion is murder” crowd–who then feign shock that someone actually thought they meant it literally, and therefore that it would be a good idea to shoot a doctor or blow up a clinic.
When you sow fear and hate, you reap the whirlwind. The exact target isn’t going to be easily predicted.
But they are liars or fools if they didn’t know they were going to stoke violence somehow, somewhere.
And this, god help us, is the feculent arsewipe that our democratically elected government has bowed to giving us this utterly unnecessary plebiscite. This is the man who, despite living in a large house in a small village in the Home Counties (for non-UK residents that’s about as expensive as a living area gets) and having had a career as a Commodities Broker, is considered to be a “man of the people”.
Most of the time I like Britain. Most of the time I like being British. This isn’t one of them
The UK and US largely created the refugee flow out of Iraq and Syria by destabilising the middle east. They should not be taking in some of the refugees, they should be taking in all of them. And the refugees should live in the Bush home and Blair home and eat before they eat. Right now these close-the-border-campaigners are like little children who only want to go the sandbox to break everyone else’s toys and sandcastles. Those two countries are culpable and helping the refugees is the very lest they can do.