............ said Nick Griffin of the BNP in the controversial Question Time programme last night.
Oh yes, I'm thinking, you probably pretty much are.
But there's a problem.
Pouring venom on you, shouting you down, censoring you, and using anger and hatred as the weapons against you make your critics look as much, or maybe even more guilty of the hatred and bigotry of which they accuse you.
And that's what happened. Understandable, very understandable. But, in an open public arena, unfortunate.
It would have taken a statesmanlike leader to have calmly given you the space to hang yourself as a closed minded, nasty and brutish fear monger. It would have taken a real leader to have properly acknowledged the real human fears and injustices upon which you prey, and better still to be constructing and executing policies that address them and the dangers inherent in them, so that you have no political ground to hold. Sadly, there wasn't one present.
Watching someone getting publicly reviled, no mattter how odious they are, is a brutal and freakish form of entertainment with the danger that the object of revulsion actually becomes a figure capable of attracting sympathy.
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Totally disagree with this HB. Facists preach hate, they preach violence, they preach anger. Like the school ground bully, the only way to fight facists is to stand up to them.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't matter whether they are wearing a suit or a bomber jacket and doc martins. They are exactly the same animal.
The BNP win votes by pretending to be a different animal. As Griffin admitted he can't explain why he said the things that he said. What he means is, he doesn't want to repeat them on live television.
They need to be tackled face to face and shown for who they really are every time they raise their ugly heads.
Dear HRD
ReplyDeleteWe don't disagree about the vileness of fascism (or any other politics of hate, I don't doubt).
But who looked the most hating on that show last night?
One rather pathetic shifty inarticulate bloke (very far from innocent I grant you) or the jeering shouting crowd, and the sneering vehement other pannelists, in combined force with the Chairman?
The BNP should be fought. Of course. But fought to win.
If winning can be measured by a growth or decline in target group support for the BNP, I rather suspect the game was lost.
Had Griffin been manouvered into appearing as a ranting extremist the outcome might have been different.
As predicted:
ReplyDeletehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8323638.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8322626.stm
All they need is a platform, and it doesn't help when Jack Straw denies the existence of social unrest in the country.
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