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.

 

UNIDIR - HAPPY BIRTHDAY !!!! Yes, it is 40 years since President Giscard d'Estaing created UNIDIR in Geneva.

 

UNIDIR is 40 years old.      HAPPY BIRTHDAY UNIDIR !

It is 40 years since President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing created UNIDIR.  

Giscard created the Institute inside the Palais de Nations in Geneva, because he did not want all the disarmament work to be kept in New York where the Secretary General lives. The French president was standing up for French values: and quite right too!

 

I work for peace, and I worked for one of my favourite peace organisations: UNIDIR in Geneva, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. 

 

Disarmament does not just happen!  It requires a great deal of hard work and patience as you persuade armed rebels or armed governments to give up their arms, to immobilize them or even destroy them.

 

During the 1990s, while my wife Michelle ran the European office of ChildFund and chaired the NGO Committee for UNICEF, I became a Research Fellow (and later a Senior Fellow) of UNIDIR working for micro-disarmament in West Africa and publishing books about how it is done.

 

UNIDIR studies different types of disarmament and offers new solutions. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are well-known weapons of mass-destruction regulated by international conventions; micro-disarmament concerns the small arms and light weapons that kill thousands of people every year, and which need a different type of regulation in each country; recently UNIDIR has been focused on new emerging issues like the Arms Trade, Swarm Robotic weapons, Ammunition, Cyber-Space and Weapons in Outer Space.

 

The whole range of UNIDIR’s work makes fascinating reading, and in the 40^th Anniversary Report you can discover the evolution of our research work over the decades. See:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ZOenDv7Y

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=read+the+UNIDIR+40th+anniversary+report

 

If you would like to know more:  https://www.unidir.org   If you would like to read more:  https://www.unidir.org/publications

If you would like to meet the Director, @Dr Renata Dwan (from Ireland):

https://twitter.com/RenataDwan

 

 

One of my micro-disarmament successes in which UNIDIR was involved, was disarming the Khmer Rouge after thirty years of war in Cambodia. One day I might write the whole book, but meanwhile I wrote a short story:

 

  Peace is Possible: Exchanging Weapons for Development and how we disarmed the Khmer Rouge with wit, bluff and balloons

This amazing short story is fun to read. Robin Poulton takes you into rural pagodas along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along tracks threaded between fields of landmines and rice paddies. Here you can read peace journalism at its best, and peace anthropology at its most creative: an uplifting and amusing story proving that even after a civil war, Peace is Possible.

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