Dumb stunt plays perfectly into hands of extreme right
IF YOU really want to prove that right-wing extremists are racist morons you don’t have to take them to court. You only have to do one thing.
“SO,” said my friend the other night, “since when did the job of defending free speech get left to the Nazis?”
It was a question I ended up asking myself this week as I watched the supporters of three guys charged over the mock beheading of a mannequin in Victoria wave placards claiming they were defending free speech, while counter-protesters waved crossed out swastikas.
First, since all politics of the far-right and far-left seems to be about people’s “identity” these days, let me tell you a bit about my friend. He is a lifelong left-winger who despises the anti-PC brigade. He is also half-Jewish, even though he didn’t know that until he was an adult. And he’s also an atheist.
In other words, he doesn’t identify as Jewish but the Nazis certainly would have identified him as such — which in itself tells you everything you need to know about the idiocy of identity politics. Either way, it’s fair to say he’s no great fan of the Third Reich.
I myself am not Jewish — at least as far as I know — but that hasn’t stopped plenty of neo-Nazis from outing me as such, along with various half-arsed attempts to get me fired or find out where I live while I was busy exposing them.
For the record, my grandfather was born in Germany but went to America and ended up enlisting in the US Army in an effort to fight the Nazis. My dark good looks were said to come from some gypsy blood in the family that was little spoken of, especially given that gypsies too were despised by the Aryan folk. However a senior German journalist told me this was almost certainly a family cover-up for the fact that I was, in fact, part Jewish because, in his words: “It is bad to be gypsy, yes, but is better to be gypsy than to be Jewish.”
In other words, it is highly likely that during World War II members of my extended family killed and were killed by each other. That also tells you everything you need to know about identity politics.
So now we’ve got the “privileged white male” shit out of the way, let’s get back to the Nazis.
It is also worth noting that the d***heads at the centre of this court case don’t identify as neo-Nazis but plenty of other people identify them as such, not least of all those carrying the crossed-out swastikas. Either way, they are certainly extreme right-wing nationalists and it’s fair to say the Nazis were too.
And that is what makes it so pinch-yourself-am-I-on-the-Planet-of-the-Apes-and-is-that-the-Statue-of-Liberty jarring that the diluted descendents of an ideology that celebrated book-burning are now painting themselves as the defenders of freedom of expression.
This is even more nauseating given the very reason the three guys ended up in court was because they were protesting against freedom of religion. The group, a pathetic fringe front which I won’t bother naming, is fiercely anti-Islam and was opposing the construction of a mosque.
In short, their logic is idiotic and their hypocrisy is nauseating.
But the real problem is that the court case, and their conviction on Tuesday, has given them exactly what they want.
The men were the first to be charged and convicted under a new Victorian law which came into effect in 2001.
As the Herald Sun reported, their crime was “knowingly engaging in conduct with the intention of inciting serious contempt for or revulsion of a class of people, namely Muslims, under the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act”.
The three claimed the trial — a relatively minor matter in the Magistrate’s Court which resulted in a fine of just $2,000 each — is a political witchhunt and have now indicated they are going to appeal.
As a result they have got plenty of publicity for their initial dumb stunt, acres more for the coverage of the first case and hectares more to come.
For a minuscule handful of fringe nutbags with zero mainstream political support it just could not be a better result. A law designed expressly to suppress their moronic message has instead given it a boundless national platform that no amount of money could buy.
Worse still, it plays perfectly into the hands of the extreme right.
The entire narrative of white nationalists or right-wing nationalists or whatever you want to call them is that they are the victims. That there is some kind of global or multicultural conspiracy to suppress the poor old Caucasian proud Aussie and the system is trying to silence them.
So what does the system do in response to this? Try to silence them.
Honestly, how dumb can we get?
And how dangerous a precedent when we start prosecuting people for political statements or ridiculing religions. Will Kathy Griffin be prosecuted if she pulls out her severed head of Donald Trump on her Australian tour? Could the creators of South Park be taken to court for a musical based entirely on ridiculing Mormons?
It’s not even hypothetical. In Germany, where the swastika is banned, police once raided a record label and seized pictures of crossed out swastikas — just like those wielded by the left-wing protesters in Victoria this week. Eventually it took a whole separate test case to make it legal to depict images that were anti-swastika. And that was in 2006 — more than 60 years after the end of the war.
Meanwhile, it is painfully ironic that an ideology that is built on the notion that some people are more superior than others and whose adherents just happen to be born into that race or class of people can at the same time paint itself as an oppressed underclass.
Yet it is even more painfully ironic that so-called “progressive” laws championed by those who claim to fight such absurd and abhorrent notions in fact end up sending precisely that message.
If you really want to prove that right-wing extremists are racist morons you don’t have to take them to court. All you have to do is let them open their mouths.