Hate! Hate! Hate! It’s what fuels Britain’s media, you know. There always has to be someone to hate and loathe. Someone to blame all of your problems on. Someone who, you know, isn’t like us. Because that means that they must be evil. It doesn’t really matter what it is that makes them somehow different, just so long as it is noticeably different, so that the hate can be accurately directed. Sometimes the media’s objects of hate are quite bizarre, dictated by expediency – a new story has broken and has to be ruthlessly exploited in the battle for readers. In the wake of the Shoreham air show accident, for instance, The Sun decided to direct its ire at vintage military jets and the people who fly them, welcoming temporary CAA restrictions on their use at air shows – ‘not before time’ they shouted on their front page. Yeah, those vintage jet fighters – bastards, aren’t they? Been blighting people’s lives for decades now, eh? But the tabloid’s new found hatred of Hawker Hunters and their pilots was merely a temporary diversion from their usual hate targets: immigrants. To be more specific, illegal immigrants, or migrants, as they prefer to call them now.
Of course, by calling them ‘migrants’, the media are implying that there is a degree of choice in their travels across Europe, whereas a more correct description of them, such as ‘refugees’, runs the risk of them being seen for what they actually are: victims rather than villains. All those people crowding onto rafts and rusty boats to cross the Mediterranean to an unwelcoming Europe are simply trying to escape the chaos of places like Syria and Libya. Places which are in chaos in no small part due to US and European ‘interventions’ to destabilise and topple their governments. In both Libya and Syria, Europe and the US happily stoked up ethnic divisions and civil war, resulting in an unstable regime at the mercy of local militias in Libya and a weakened government in Syria desperately trying to fend off ISIS, which, as it turns out is even worse than the Assad regime we’ve been trying to topple. So, whether we like it not, we actually do have some kind of moral responsibility when it comes to the refugees now sitting in those camps in Calais. We created the situation which caused them to flee to Europe. Not that you would know anything of this by looking at the front pages of our tabloids, with their screaming, hate-filled headlines about ‘migrants’ trying to get into the UK, claim our benefits, steal our council houses and, no doubt, shag our women. So we have to hate, hate, hate them.
To be fair, the media are only following the lead of our political leaders, with public school bully, sorry, Prime Minister, David Cameron casually referring to the refugees in Calais as a ‘swarm’, like insects to be casually wiped out with a can of Vapona. Which would be convenient for Dave, as they are an uncomfortable reminder of his foreign policy failures. On the other hand, their constant presence on the other side of the Channel provides him with a useful group hate figures to use as scapegoats for the failure of his domestic policies. After all, the Tory government has already blamed their plans to cut benefits to young people on illegal immigrants – apparently too many of them are fraudulently claiming these specific benefits. So they have to be cut. Falling standards of living? Well, according to the Foreign Secretary, that’s down an influx of illegal immigrants as well – that’s why we have to fight them on the beaches, or at least, in Calais. Because if any more of them come here then we’ll all have to take pay cuts or lose our jobs and houses. Quite pathetic – just another set of scapegoats on the Tories’ seemingly never-ending merry-go-round of scapegoats. The fact is that these benefits cuts and this country’s falling living standards are an integral part of the government’s economic policy – it’s just their public rationale for it all which keeps changing. First of all it was because of the need for austerity which, in turn was because of the economic crash supposedly caused by the Labour government’s allegedly profligate spending. Then the disabled, the unemployed and other benefits claimants fault – they were are evil, idle and worthless according to Tory propaganda. Now it’s down to illegal immigrants. What next, austerity is essential because of the threat of alien invasion?
Sadly, a significant proportion of the public seems to buy this nonsense, never questioning why austerity’s raison d’etre keeps changing, instead just meekly accepting further misery and changing the focus of their hate. But with that drip, drip, drip of hatred constantly being poured into their consciousnesses by the press, it shouldn’t be surprising that so many people seem to think that all of their woes can be laid at the feet of refugees (or whoever else is the scapegoat of the day), rather than the government. It’s a form of brain washing. Obviously, all that hatred should really be directed at the Tory bastards who currently hold power in the UK. So how do we do it? Redirect that anti-immigrant hate back against the Tories, I mean? With the right-wing press resolutely sticking to its ‘hate everyone who isn’t like us’ agenda, it won’t be easy. But turning the Tories themselves into hate figures is, I fear, essential, if we are to achieve any kind of political change in the UK. With the opposition parties apparently incapable of articulating any kind of coherent alternative to Tory policy, winning people over with reasoned argument is clearly no longer a viable vehicle for change. No, we’re back to armed insurrection – and for that to work, you need hate figures.
That’s right, if the press can work up such an irrational hatred for refugees that large numbers of the British public would apparently support sending the army to Calais to ‘deal with them’, (they’re unarmed, underfed, completely dispossessed refugees, in another sovereign state, for fuck’s sake), then surely it isn’t conceivable that sufficient hatred for the Tories could be whipped up that people would accept assassination as a legitimate alternative to a general election? We have to go beyond the usual name-calling: it’s no good just calling them ‘fascists’, we have to show that they really are Nazis who want to euthanise the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill and immigrants. It’s like I’ve been saying to people recently; in the event of a revolution, if you find yourself getting a bit squeamish when you have Cameron or Osborne in the sights of your sniper rifle, just imagine that they are part of a Nazi occupation of the UK and picture them wearing SS uniforms. Squeezing that trigger will be much easier. The sad thing is that it isn’t too difficult to see this government and their corporate cronies as some kind of hostile occupying force, stripping the UK’s resources for the benefit of their ‘fatherland’. They certainly don’t feel like a government of the people, that’s for sure.
That’s enough for now so, until next time, (assuming that Theresa May doesn’t read this and decide that I’m an anti-democratic subversive), keep it sleazy!
Doc Sleaze
