The Nazis are coming!

It’s begun. But don’t panic – you haven’t missed anything. Watch as, day by day, every incident which can’t be pinned on migrants or muslims will be dubbed the work of neo-Nazi groups. Far right extremism is now in open season and any weapon to hand may be used to attack it, real or imagined. Not that I condone extremism of any kind, of course – far from it - but just watch the media feeding frenzy, now that their new target has been officially designated. Went to a fancy dress party as Hitler in the 1970s? Nazi. Quoted Goebbels? Nazi. Read the Daily Mail? Literally Hitler.

Notice that I am not defending Nazism in any way here, but the mere fact that I am not excoriating it, merely observing how others react, is tantamount in the fevered machinations of the politically attuned brain, to tacit approval. You are either a hooded, masked, Molotov cocktail lobbing, free speech trampling, book burning ANTI-Nazi, or you are the actual thing. The other day somebody told me that because I was antipathetic towards the brown-shirt antics of the antifa rent-a-mob, I must therefore be a fascist myself. Why, even  Jacob Rees-Mogg is being dubbed a Nazi sympathiser now.

Why? An old adage says that if you are taking flak it is because you are over the target. Brexit day draws nigh, the desperation is palpable and operation discredit is in full swing. The many contradictory thought strands of distressed Remainers have coalesced and distilled down to this one thing: forget the vague and dithery ‘old people didn’t know what they were voting for’ trope and the ‘believing lies on a bus’ malarkey. If you voted for Leave you must be the worst kind of Nazi because look at the hell you have unleashed.

The sainted souls of Far Right Watch, unblemished in thought and deed and doctrine, are actively searching all stories of violence and finding ways to brand them as actions of the right. Aiding and abetting them are the carefully implanted notions that only white people can be racists and that all Nazis are white. Self-defence by a white man can easily be spun as neo-Nazi violence if the other party can be shown to have the merest tint of BAME ancestry. And only the very bravest, noblest of white people dare speak up against their own.

The irony is not lost on me, however, that by decrying all of islam for their failure to reform the worst violent excesses of their religion the door has been opened to blame all white people for Nazism. The difference, however, is that it is largely white activists, employing the propaganda tactics of the Nazis to label other people as dangerous fanatics. Indeed, Anna Soubry is currently riding that deranged wave in Westminster. 

Brexiteers are, literally Hitler...

Where does it end? I don’t know, but we can all see early how it begins. Be temperate in your language, measured in your reactions, but don’t back down. They are looking to goad you into giving them ‘evidence’ that you are part of the problem they are creating. Don’t let them. And particularly don’t allow yourself to be silenced for fear of being labelled. And just in case their fictions gain real traction and begin to win moral ground, you may wish to consider keeping those jackboots polished and ready for when you have to escape South America.