The correct response to Fascism is not compromise: QAnon and hate speech need to be attacked head-on

 

After the invasion of - and temporary suspension of - Congress, what is the correct response? As a peace maker, you might think I would opt for compromise, but that is not my position. A surgeon faced with a cancerous tumor does not wait until the tumor gets bigger: he cuts it out as soon as possible, and radiates the surrounding area to ensure the cancer does not grow back. QAnon is a cancer in the American body politic, and it needs to be treated like the Fascist Cancer it has become.

Gregory Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch, explains: “QAnon’s conspiracy theory is copied from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a conspiracy theory promoted the Nazi party that helped Hitler come to power in Germany.

Stanton argues that QAnon is simply the Nazi cult rebranded. “Two definitions of a cult are: a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister; and a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing: a cult of personality surrounding the leaders. QAnon’s strange and sinister beliefs qualify it as a cult, as does QAnon’s misplaced admiration for Donald Trump.”

 

Washington Post journalists have studied the history and social media of Ashli Babbitt, the fanatical, over-hyped San Diego woman who was shot by police as she tried to break into the Speaker's Lobby during the insurrectionist riot that took over parts of the Capitol, Ashli's profile fits that of susceptible people who find themselves "at sea" in society, unable to cope in our overly complex and fast-moving world, and who develop feelings of alienation that suck them into a Cult like QAnon, with its lurid claims of child-trafficking paedophiles including - among others - Hillary Clinton, Hollywood stars, Jewish financiers and Democrat politicians, and even (as highlighted in the unbelievably awful 'Left Behind' books that have sold 50 million copies in the USA), a wicked United Nations Secretary-General with a Rumanian name who covertly helps the paedophiles and financial manipulators to rule the world. Only President Trump can bring them to justice with his secret plan that will deliver what QAnon’s disciples refer to as “The Storm” or “The Great Awakening”.

Wit is one of the medicines against extremism and excess. But wit is not a cure.

Robert Johnson, who helps moderate the Qanoncasualties site after watching a relative fall victim to the movement, warned anyone can fall down the QAnon rabbit hole.

“How fast someone can be sucked in? If they are susceptible, I’d say five days to start believing. If they have an underlying condition, they can reach mania in a week.”

The question is: What do you do with a Fascist Cult?  

The answer from historical experience seems that you need to crush the Fascism before it crushes you. You do not compromise. You do impeach Donald Trump. You do imprison all those people who invaded the Capitol, breaching and looting the Temple of American Democracy. You forcibly remove electoral gerrymandering through the creation of an Independent Electoral Commission in every U.S. State to supervise elections, electoral registration and redistricting. You clean out the Capitol Police who appear to have been complicit in the invasion of the Capitol. You implement radical police reforms in America: not 'defunding' the police (which is a silly slogan), but removing their military weapons which are inappropriate to policing. You  insist that the thousands of different and often mis-managed police forces throughout America adopt community policing standards in place of their bullying repressive culture. Swat teams and repressive functions should be restricted to State Police.

The new Attorney General must ensure that IMPARTIAL JUSTICE is offered to all the people of the United States of America. Better police standards. Better coordination with and between courts

But that is not all. The Internet needs to be regulated to promote freedom of expression without insult and abuse, without hatred and racism. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google ..... all have been guilty of propagating - and indeed encouraging - hate speech. Their banning of Donald Trump AFTER the invasion of the Capitol is proof of their last-minute panic, once the Georgia Senate elections were decided in favor of the Democrats. Regulation is what keeps society safe. Corporations can never be trusted to make decisions that benefit society. They benefit only themselves. The First law of Capitalism is: "profit myself" and not society at large.

The biggest problems on the web seem to be anonymity and impunity. If people are traceable, accountable and prosecutable for their aggressivity - and if the hate-mongers are prosecuted - then we may be able to reduce to evils of the world wide web, return it to its primary purpose of promoting happiness. We must fight the Fascism major players have been promoting (unwittingly or knowingly). 

Many distinguished people have retired from public life because they no longer wish to face the threats and the insults. Civic discourse needs to be restored. Freedom of speech needs to be matched by the obligation to listen. Death threats should be unacceptable in any society:  people who make them should be forced into many hours of reconversion therapy in an institutional setting, + many days of anger management training at their own expense, + many months of community-service. 

No compromise. The Fascist Cancer needs to be vanquished.

The problem is complex and the solutions are complicated: so the sooner we start to attack the problem by outlawing hate speech and reforming those who promote it, the happier we shall be.

 

Dear Mrs Patel, enough torture by solitary confinement: please release Julian Assange NOW !

 

Julian Assange should be given his freedom

 

Dear Home Secretary

A British Judge has decided that Julian Assange had been punished enough, saying that he should not be extradited to U.S.A. Hoorah!  District Judge Vanessa Baraitser said: "I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm and I order his discharge."

 

Assange is a journalist who has been persecuted by Britain and the Americans. He has spent eight and a half years in solitary confinement, in an embassy sanctuary and now in Belmarsh prison, and without being convicted of any crime. In fact I believe very firmly that he has committed no crime.

 

Please, Mrs Patel, it is time to leave Mr Assange in peace. Liberate him NOW, and allow him and his partner Stella Morris, the mother of his small children, to find ways to recover from the last eight years of persecution, isolation, and mental torture for which you personally had no responsibility.

 

Do I like Assange? No. Do I admire him? No. But journalism and the revelation of truth are essential to freedom and democracy. Mrs May and her American allies have behaved like medieval tyrants in the case of these whistleblowers, and it is time to admit that Britain got it wrong in its persecution of Julian Assange. This is what he looks like after 8 years of confinement. Enough is ENOUGH !

 

Dancing is precious: we shall dance in 2021 !

 

 Happy New Year  -  Bonne Année 2021 - aw sanbé sanbé  -  Frohes neues Jahr  - Bloavez Mad! 

Would you believe that?  My New Year gift (actually Xmas) is a TREADMILL. In British and American history, the treadmill's miserable history illustrates the awfulness of English values.

In 1817, millwright/engineer William Cubitt saw prisoners sitting idle. Instead of training or useful work,  he invented the tread-mill to “reform offenders by teaching them habits of industry.” 19th-century penal treadmills were wide wheels fitted with steps. Prisoners sentenced to “hard labour” would climb the steps repeatedly, causing the entire wheel to rotate. The penal treadmill was “the perfect punishment” by Victorian standards: useless but exhausting task that fitted with Victorian ideals about atonement achieved through hard work. Merciless hard work. The "Workhouses" used them as well, creating "work" for the "idle poor" ..... never wondering whether the wealthy were responsible for their poverty, the misery of rickets, the brutality of child labor. Some treadmills were used to grind corn. Others were simply a waking, walking hell. I once tried it in a museum. It was horrible.

Oscar Wilde walked a treadmill in Pentonville Prison as part of his 1895 hard labour sentence and it almost killed him. He left prison in 1897 and died just two years later, aged 46. The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline called them a “preventative punishment” .... the priggish rich thought that no-one who experienced the treadmill would ever want to commit another crime. If they did - like stealing a loaf of bread to feed starving infants - then they were transported to Georgia or to Australia.

The ghastly penal treadmills were abolished in Britain in 1902. 

 And now I have bought a treadmill.  I prefer to call it a "skiing machine" but "a rose by any other name doth smell as sweet" write Shakespeare.

My wife thinks walking a treadmill will "serve me right" .... and if I a am able to lose some of my 'Covid Bonus' of 10 pounds, then she will be proved correct!  My kilt will tell me, whenever I am able to dance. SO LET US PRAY: for dancing and for losing some of those pounds.