A Practical Example of How Fascism Takes Hold
So I listened to the entirety of the Shire Network News’ interview with Filip Dewinter of Valaams Belang (mirrored by LGF), and I admit I wasn’t paying total and complete attention throughout (it’s a half hour long, for crying out loud), so I’m not entirely sure what it is that he said that was so “shit”, as Tom Paine says at the end.
Perhaps someone can parse it for me cuz I ain’t listening to it again.
So here I am, a microcosmic example of normal people, going about their business, not paying too much attention to what’s going on but figuring that things sound alright, don’t they, and soon enough 72 million people are dead in a World War.
Now we come to the media, both kinds, and their role in all this. Responding to my post yesterday, RC2 had this:
Related in a different way: 77% of the American people agree with me: Report something!
The public pines for substance. A separate survey found that 77 percent of the respondents said they wanted more solid information on candidate policies and ideas. The press did not deliver.
Instead, almost two-thirds of the coverage focused on the “game” of the political horse race and candidate “performance.” Accounts of their marriages, health and religion followed in importance in 17 percent of the stories — with just 15 percent examining domestic and foreign policies. A mere 1 percent shed light on candidates’ public records.
So, the MSM is so wrapped up in their insular little world that they’ve completely forgotten their roles and their audience, thinking that everyone else just cares about “the game”. So the New Media, the blogs or whatever, decide that what they need to do is to fix things is by, paraphrasing Mr Paine, asking questions, giving the person all the time in the world to answer them, never interrupting, and putting the whole thing out there for people to listen to.
And we’ve seen how that worked out. Hitler could have just passed his Enabling Act for all I’d have noticed. And all I did was get some orange juice, email Peter once or twice, check if any of my blogs had updated, and played some solitaire. What about people with real jobs?
So, really, the point isn’t that we need complete, unfiltered information, we just need our filters to be someone other than the self-obsessed idiot dumbasses running the media.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
SNN are finally get the recognition from the big blogs that they’ve been crying for - and now they shut down?
Of course one of Bertie Wooster’s main antagonists is Roderick Spode, the character modelled on Hitler’s “brown shirts”. It is interesting to read fiction from this era, knowing what happened soon after, and see the insouciance. Not that Wodehouse’s poking fun at them was an example of that - quite the reverse.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
ninme, I just got through listening to it myself. I am really split in two over this. I have no use for Nazi or Nazi apologists or their like-minded ilk. I also, however, know European politics quite well. If you are looking at it from a USA or Australian POV without having either lived for a time in Europe with your ear to their politics - or have made the effort to study their parties and systems both large and small - then you are inviting confusion. The Right Left is just different - with less flavorful parts on both ends that are nonetheless important to the political process.
If you are an anti-Islamists, it is hard for many to find a political home as the Islamists have fallen in politically with the Socialists, the Islamo-Socialist Popular Front if you will. The Christian-Democrat parties in Europe, the Center-Right (more like Center-Left US Democrats) are not on average making a stand one way or the other. Who, therefore, is going to fill the vacuum? The quasi-Far Right. The smarter Far Right parties in the last 15 years have moved away from the Extreme-Far Right more towards the normal Right, at least in their policies and platforms. That is where VB is. That is why a lot of Europeans are supporting parties like VB and Swedish Dems.
Where do I stand in the “blog civil war” that Tom Paine talks about? Ungh. I am a big fan of LGF, but also Baron B. at Gates of Vienna.
If you get a chance, read about the Brussels Conf and the links at Atlas Shrugs.
I think Tom Paine did a good job in the interview. The discussion that started with 13 minutes left I think address the new-Nazi question quite well. I think the “sh1t” comment has to do with the “my girls” conversation at the 06:30 point. It was a fair interview, and what a loss if ShireNetworkNews goes away.
ninme my dear, if there is a Civil War going on in the anti-Islamists blogosphere - can we stay neutral?
Hmmm, may have to post.
October 30th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Phib, my darling, with you at my side I can be like Switzerland and Sweden together.
Okay, I completely missed the “my girls” thing.
And having listened to it, what the heck is so shitty with that? Maybe I needed to listen to more but for crying out loud.
Look, the whole thing with the Nazis, it’s easy for us to say, but in Europe they actually had to live with the Nazis for a long time before the war even started. This same “Collaborateur!” thing is the same thing that people pulled out when they found out the Pope was in the Hitler Youth, and that Schwartzenegger’s father was in the party, but we don’t know what the situation was and making life difficult for a bunch of people in their nineties, or attacking people who don’t want to do that as Nazis, is just silly.
On the other hand, if you’re so upset about what the guy said, rather than turn on the guy asking the questions just don’t support the guy.
October 30th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
This question has been going on for some time. Here is Lord Acton’s (1834-1902) take:
“At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws.”
October 31st, 2007 at 2:10 am
I think Spode owed rather more to Oswald Mosley, leader of the Blackshirts, than to Hitler. Wodehouse got Mosley’s deranged quality very well.
Mosley was very popular among some dockers in Hull. I’m told that,during the Depression work on the docks was assigned by a bunch of Communist shop stewards, and a bunch of Blackshirts took them on. This story does not feature in any known work of labour history, so I don’t know how true this is.
October 31st, 2007 at 3:44 am
You’re right of course, Red. Perhaps I should have said “by proxy via the British Fascists” (not exactly a large movement, by all accounts).
I just listened to SNN. It was an excellent interview, pretty much in the original style of interviewing (which started in Melbourne) of just prompting the person with a few questions to get them talking.
Tom Paine (real name Bruce!) needs to read up on his Acton, though! The path he is taking will lead to a pure, perfect alliance purged of all wrong thought and attitudes. An alliance of one.
He has also swallowed the American idea that holds racism up as one of the cardinal sins. However, more than 99% of people have a preference for their own race. The most racist people on earth? Probably the Japanese. Really, it’s not a big deal, Mr Paine.
October 31st, 2007 at 3:53 am
One story which has been purged from Union History, but not from real history, is that of the Dockers Union in Australia going on strike to stop supplies to Australian troops fighting the Japanese in New Guinea during WWII. Why? This was before Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin and so the Germans and Japanese were fighting on the side of the Communists. The Dockers were communists. The union movement was very strong in Australia up till that point.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:11 am
“Up till that point”.
I hope there are veiled references to fisticuffs in there.
The whole thing about “my girls”, though, I mean, the whole point of that is that people DON’T tend to get along with people from another culture in a long-term-marriage-and-kids relationship sort of way. Which is I think why interracial marriage is still so rare even here (leaving aside the stories you hear about black people, women especially, saying they would never marry a white person), because there’s just such a cultural difference to growing up black, still. So if you have a culture that your girls aren’t going to be able to be happily married to, then you’re going to have two different sets of people that are never going to intermingle. (which was also kind of the idea behind the old medieval primae noctis, so, you know, let’s all sit back and remember what truly regressive measures look like (and, in fact, who, statistically speaking, is doing most of the, ah, defiling, here).)
And this business about how every country in the world needs to be tolerant and welcoming and all this, that’s what we’re for. We wrote a big long constitution about it from the beginning. I don’t see how some people can just wake up one 60s morning and decide “We’re gonna do that too, now”.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a big seller in Japan, but while we in the west read that book and say “There’s a conspiracy here! Let’s get ‘em!” they’re really quite impressed and treat it almost as a self-help book.
October 31st, 2007 at 2:29 pm
At the moment the danger of fascism rising is because the left have (through multiculturalism) rendered our institutions incapable of responding to an aggressive, intolerant immigrant culture. Thus the fascists are looking to step up into the breach.
I wonder how this compares to the intellectual situation in the 30s?