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Don't forget about "the muslim problem" and the "international islamic conspiracy". I'm sorry to Godwin the thread, but it's pertinent. The push on "british va

Don't forget about "the muslim problem" and the "international islamic conspiracy". I'm sorry to Godwin the thread, but it's pertinent. The push on "british values" (nationalism) and "preventing non-violent extremism" (such doublespeak) and "combatting islam" is fucking terrifying to anyone even vaguely familiar with the events that preceded the holocaust and the second world war. The surveillance state we find ourselves under just makes it that much easier for atrocities to be committed and utterly hidden from view.

spingsprong 12y ago
I suspect something much more mundane. Politicians love to shout about their successes. Only, this government hasn't really got any to shout about, so they're falling back to the old standby that all governments do in situations like this. Wave the flag and be proud to be British.
- herghost 12y ago
  Sort of. The problem that the mainstream political parties have right now is that right-wing sentiment just scored high in the elections. They need a little bit of sabre-rattling and flag-waving to convince those on the left-most fringe of the newly-empowered right to come back towards the centre, and the only way they can do that is through winning the stupid, populist vote on simple issues again. That of course, coupled with the lack of real achievement from the current government, the ongoing and incredibly unpopular austerity cuts, and a long and drawn-out recovery that doesn't seem to be materialising for most people means that any way to make political hay right now needs to be grasped.
  - seren 12y ago
    The worrying part is : what happens in 10 years if the sabre-rattling was not enough? What is the next step? (And this is not specific to UK but most European countries)
  - arel 12y ago
    Charlie Brooker, brilliant as ever: David Cameron has responded to this crisis by declaring we need to celebrate "Britishness" with more enthusiasm. More enthusiasm? More? We've been celebrating Britishness with the strained determination of a man desperately trying to shit a cricket ball for the past five years. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/david-cameron-britishness-charlie-brooker http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/david-c...
- disputin 12y ago
  I don't see that - Cameron recently pointed out that he's a christian, and said that Britain is a christian country. He's bringing religion forward.
pling 12y ago
This. I'm a UK resident and I note that the propaganda machine is running on overdrive. The batshit sheep majority (sorry but it's true at least where I live) of the country is almost calling out for anyone with a beard and a turban to be hung and the armed forces are constantly in focus in the media and in public word. If you look around facebook it's terrifying some of the rants you hear yet at the same time these people are slating the Nazis for their prejudice. It's literally: "Kill all the muslims", "support our boys", "Nazi's bad m'kay". I will say that none of these people were alive when the Nazis had their gig. Those who were are suspicious and aware of the consequences of thinking and acting like this. I too am suspicious of anyone who holds a noose.
wolf550e 12y ago
Why would you think the UK would round up and execute its Muslim citizens? And if nothing like this has any chance of occurring, just finding out who is in contact with real terrorists and who isn't seems useful, whether they're Muslim terrorists or Breivik. It is of course vitally important that information gathered for this purpose cannot be used for commercial or political ends, which is the hard part (maybe impossible).
- pjc50 12y ago
  'Terrorist' is fundamentally a political label, so it's not possible to separate the political and security questions.
- simonw 12y ago
  How do you define a "real terrorist"?
- CWuestefeld 12y ago
  This comment is misguided, but it doesn't deserve a downvote. It vocalizes the argument coming from the authority, and so it needs to be examined - and we can't do that if we downvote it to invisibility. Taking away a person's privacy is a punishment. You can't do it because it might bear interesting information. That you don't know ahead of time whether that information will be important is no excuse: you can't punish someone unless you know they're guilty. Further, given the shroud of secrecy around the collection of the information, how can we be assured that it's not going to be used for commercial or political ends? Even if you trust the present keepers of these secrets, will the next batch be as clean? Why do you believe that it's so important to gather this information? Is there any real evidence that it's been used in ways that is truly important to our safety (not just for catching drug dealers), and that cannot be accomplished through conventional means? And how can you even know? If the government won't even own up to what they're doing, how can the electorate weigh the factors? Given that the nature of the problem renders democratic action impossible, how can it be tolerated in a democratic state?
rayiner 12y ago
Not every cultural clash should be compared to the Holocaust. There are plenty of historical examples of societies that got eaten from within when they couldn't maintain their culture in the face of aggressive foreign ones.
- spodek 12y ago
  Germany in the 30s wasn't the Holocaust. The Holocaust emerged from it. Had people known where things would go, maybe they could have stopped it. Today we have history to tell us where things could go. If we don't allow comparisons to the early stages, might we unwittingly make later stages more likely?
- quasque 12y ago
  Could you please elaborate on some examples of this?
- melvinmt 12y ago
  If you truly believe that "culture" is a fixed phenomenon, unable to transform itself, adapt and merge to new mixtures of people in society then I fear for our future.
- king_jester 12y ago
  > There are plenty of historical examples of societies that got eaten from within when they couldn't maintain their culture in the face of aggressive foreign ones. There's an implicit valuation of culture in this statement. Most cultures throughout history melded and adapted to other cultures, both in little and big ways. Xenophobia about cultural invasion is also throughout history, but the reality is that dominant cultures are never "pure" and diversity of culture was actively censored and/or ignored by some historians for a long time.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    > There's an implicit valuation of culture in this statement. Damn right.
  - madaxe_again 12y ago
pjc50 12y ago
There is certainly a slippery slope, but I think we need to recognise that there exist at least some organisations acting under the "Islamic" banner that are extraordinarily dangerous. 'ISIS' and 'Boko Haram' are the two most recent that come to mind. They already have a track record of mass execution of their enemies.
- eevilspock 12y ago
  There is also an organization operating under the "Democracy" banner that is extremely dangerous. Extremely dangerous to democracy, which is the thing we have to protect us from, amongst many other things, mass executions by the State.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    True that. I rate the UK Military-Industrial complex as a far more dangerous threat to free, open society. The English already have their extremist-enforced laws - its called the Official Secrets Act. If only folks would realize: all the things they're afraid "Islam" will do to them, have already been done in the name of "British safety".
- sfjailbird 12y ago
  Those groups are horrible and dangerous but they exist only in their regional contexts and so are hardly relevant in the U.K. There are Muslims in the West that sympathize with them, but they are (a) in the minority, and (b) fools who couldn't organize themselves out of a wet paper bag. Get three of them together and the third forms a splinter group. Which is why the over-focus on them is sensationalist nonsense; you could find 'shocking' views similar to theirs by trawling local pubs.
- makomk 12y ago
  Let me put it this way - one of the recent scare stories here in the UK involved a supposed "Islamic takeover" of schools in Birmingham that didn't get noticed by inspectors because the schools were delivering an impressively good secular education to deprived inner-city kids. Apparently a few teachers seated girls and boys seperately, though, which is un-British according to our prime minster and education minister who were both educated at exclusive boys-only schools and are proud of it (as were most of our other cabinet minsters). Funnily enough, the politicians and journalists making a big deal out of this scandal are strong supporters of replacing state-run schools with state-funded academies run by Christian fundamentalists, especially failing ones in deprived inner city areas. Some of those have been caught teaching kids in science classes that the scientific evidence says the world is 6000 years old like the Bible says, but that didn't cause a big controversy for some weird reason. In fact, our leader David Cameron has been using this to push for more Christian indoctrination in schools.
fit2rule 12y ago
The biggest problem in the UK is: groupthink. The national identity is oriented around just how conformant and pliable an individual is, in relation to their peers, and thinking what everyone else thinks is, fundamentally, at the core of what it means to be an Englishman. Don't rock the boat, don't go outside the boundaries of 'acceptable society', and so on. Well, I'm sorry to say, but you English deserve your oppression. It will be a long road travelled hard before the UK is anywhere near the free, spirited nation it claims itself to be. I can only imagine there are new breeds of dissidents in the British isles, and I can only hope they rise some day to shock British culture out of its utterly self-righteous stupor.
- madaxe_again 12y ago
  That's the human condition, and what you've just defined isn't "British culture", but all cultures. You can hardly have a homogenous whole without individual conformity.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    What you've basically said is "you can't have a compliant society unless everyone complies" .. but that's exactly the point I'm trying to make: compliant societies are weak and prone to immense amount of corruption. The right to express dissent shall not be infringed, if you want to live in a land not rendered useless by tyranny. As is the case in the UK.
- Jacobs 12y ago
  Sure many of them deserve it. But the problem is that they infect the rest of us with their disease.
- pling 12y ago
  British person here. Very astute observation. However I'm the opposite. I kick off regularly at people for being that pliable and conformant. What do I get in return? I am shunned for possibly being contrarian, despite the logic being flawless and have put up with a lot of shit over the years despite being right 100% of the time. This country is slowly descending into hell. Britain needs to look at war-torn Europe up to the late 1990's. It was a fucking mess. I mean a real mess. People sleep with an eye open still and everyone understands what nationalism and prejudice brings: death and suffering. Britain sleeps with its eyes shut, its fingers in its ears and it's identity in everyone else's business.
jiggy2011 12y ago
Are you equating promotion of "british values" such as democracy,freedom,rule of law with nazism? Or am I misreading your argument?
- skj 12y ago
  I believe the GP was equating "British values" as a dogwhistle for racists, in the same way claiming you're a "real American" is in the US.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    I assumed they were referring to this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27853591 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27853591 Which is a much more moderate message. I'm not really convinced that the UK is becoming any more racist overall, it's just that the internet has given those who are already that way inclined a platform.

spingsprong 12y ago

I suspect something much more mundane. Politicians love to shout about their successes. Only, this government hasn't really got any to shout about, so they're falling back to the old standby that all governments do in situations like this. Wave the flag and be proud to be British.

herghost 12y ago
Sort of. The problem that the mainstream political parties have right now is that right-wing sentiment just scored high in the elections. They need a little bit of sabre-rattling and flag-waving to convince those on the left-most fringe of the newly-empowered right to come back towards the centre, and the only way they can do that is through winning the stupid, populist vote on simple issues again. That of course, coupled with the lack of real achievement from the current government, the ongoing and incredibly unpopular austerity cuts, and a long and drawn-out recovery that doesn't seem to be materialising for most people means that any way to make political hay right now needs to be grasped.
- seren 12y ago
  The worrying part is : what happens in 10 years if the sabre-rattling was not enough? What is the next step? (And this is not specific to UK but most European countries)
- arel 12y ago
  Charlie Brooker, brilliant as ever: David Cameron has responded to this crisis by declaring we need to celebrate "Britishness" with more enthusiasm. More enthusiasm? More? We've been celebrating Britishness with the strained determination of a man desperately trying to shit a cricket ball for the past five years. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/david-cameron-britishness-charlie-brooker http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/david-c...
disputin 12y ago
I don't see that - Cameron recently pointed out that he's a christian, and said that Britain is a christian country. He's bringing religion forward.

pling 12y ago

This. I'm a UK resident and I note that the propaganda machine is running on overdrive. The batshit sheep majority (sorry but it's true at least where I live) of the country is almost calling out for anyone with a beard and a turban to be hung and the armed forces are constantly in focus in the media and in public word. If you look around facebook it's terrifying some of the rants you hear yet at the same time these people are slating the Nazis for their prejudice. It's literally: "Kill all the muslims", "support our boys", "Nazi's bad m'kay". I will say that none of these people were alive when the Nazis had their gig. Those who were are suspicious and aware of the consequences of thinking and acting like this. I too am suspicious of anyone who holds a noose.

wolf550e 12y ago

Why would you think the UK would round up and execute its Muslim citizens? And if nothing like this has any chance of occurring, just finding out who is in contact with real terrorists and who isn't seems useful, whether they're Muslim terrorists or Breivik. It is of course vitally important that information gathered for this purpose cannot be used for commercial or political ends, which is the hard part (maybe impossible).

pjc50 12y ago
'Terrorist' is fundamentally a political label, so it's not possible to separate the political and security questions.
simonw 12y ago
How do you define a "real terrorist"?
CWuestefeld 12y ago
This comment is misguided, but it doesn't deserve a downvote. It vocalizes the argument coming from the authority, and so it needs to be examined - and we can't do that if we downvote it to invisibility. Taking away a person's privacy is a punishment. You can't do it because it might bear interesting information. That you don't know ahead of time whether that information will be important is no excuse: you can't punish someone unless you know they're guilty. Further, given the shroud of secrecy around the collection of the information, how can we be assured that it's not going to be used for commercial or political ends? Even if you trust the present keepers of these secrets, will the next batch be as clean? Why do you believe that it's so important to gather this information? Is there any real evidence that it's been used in ways that is truly important to our safety (not just for catching drug dealers), and that cannot be accomplished through conventional means? And how can you even know? If the government won't even own up to what they're doing, how can the electorate weigh the factors? Given that the nature of the problem renders democratic action impossible, how can it be tolerated in a democratic state?

rayiner 12y ago

Not every cultural clash should be compared to the Holocaust. There are plenty of historical examples of societies that got eaten from within when they couldn't maintain their culture in the face of aggressive foreign ones.

spodek 12y ago
Germany in the 30s wasn't the Holocaust. The Holocaust emerged from it. Had people known where things would go, maybe they could have stopped it. Today we have history to tell us where things could go. If we don't allow comparisons to the early stages, might we unwittingly make later stages more likely?
quasque 12y ago
Could you please elaborate on some examples of this?
melvinmt 12y ago
If you truly believe that "culture" is a fixed phenomenon, unable to transform itself, adapt and merge to new mixtures of people in society then I fear for our future.
king_jester 12y ago
> There are plenty of historical examples of societies that got eaten from within when they couldn't maintain their culture in the face of aggressive foreign ones. There's an implicit valuation of culture in this statement. Most cultures throughout history melded and adapted to other cultures, both in little and big ways. Xenophobia about cultural invasion is also throughout history, but the reality is that dominant cultures are never "pure" and diversity of culture was actively censored and/or ignored by some historians for a long time.
- rayiner 12y ago
  > There's an implicit valuation of culture in this statement. Damn right.
- madaxe_again 12y ago

pjc50 12y ago

There is certainly a slippery slope, but I think we need to recognise that there exist at least some organisations acting under the "Islamic" banner that are extraordinarily dangerous. 'ISIS' and 'Boko Haram' are the two most recent that come to mind. They already have a track record of mass execution of their enemies.

eevilspock 12y ago
There is also an organization operating under the "Democracy" banner that is extremely dangerous. Extremely dangerous to democracy, which is the thing we have to protect us from, amongst many other things, mass executions by the State.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  True that. I rate the UK Military-Industrial complex as a far more dangerous threat to free, open society. The English already have their extremist-enforced laws - its called the Official Secrets Act. If only folks would realize: all the things they're afraid "Islam" will do to them, have already been done in the name of "British safety".
sfjailbird 12y ago
Those groups are horrible and dangerous but they exist only in their regional contexts and so are hardly relevant in the U.K. There are Muslims in the West that sympathize with them, but they are (a) in the minority, and (b) fools who couldn't organize themselves out of a wet paper bag. Get three of them together and the third forms a splinter group. Which is why the over-focus on them is sensationalist nonsense; you could find 'shocking' views similar to theirs by trawling local pubs.
makomk 12y ago
Let me put it this way - one of the recent scare stories here in the UK involved a supposed "Islamic takeover" of schools in Birmingham that didn't get noticed by inspectors because the schools were delivering an impressively good secular education to deprived inner-city kids. Apparently a few teachers seated girls and boys seperately, though, which is un-British according to our prime minster and education minister who were both educated at exclusive boys-only schools and are proud of it (as were most of our other cabinet minsters). Funnily enough, the politicians and journalists making a big deal out of this scandal are strong supporters of replacing state-run schools with state-funded academies run by Christian fundamentalists, especially failing ones in deprived inner city areas. Some of those have been caught teaching kids in science classes that the scientific evidence says the world is 6000 years old like the Bible says, but that didn't cause a big controversy for some weird reason. In fact, our leader David Cameron has been using this to push for more Christian indoctrination in schools.

fit2rule 12y ago

The biggest problem in the UK is: groupthink. The national identity is oriented around just how conformant and pliable an individual is, in relation to their peers, and thinking what everyone else thinks is, fundamentally, at the core of what it means to be an Englishman. Don't rock the boat, don't go outside the boundaries of 'acceptable society', and so on. Well, I'm sorry to say, but you English deserve your oppression. It will be a long road travelled hard before the UK is anywhere near the free, spirited nation it claims itself to be. I can only imagine there are new breeds of dissidents in the British isles, and I can only hope they rise some day to shock British culture out of its utterly self-righteous stupor.

madaxe_again 12y ago
That's the human condition, and what you've just defined isn't "British culture", but all cultures. You can hardly have a homogenous whole without individual conformity.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  What you've basically said is "you can't have a compliant society unless everyone complies" .. but that's exactly the point I'm trying to make: compliant societies are weak and prone to immense amount of corruption. The right to express dissent shall not be infringed, if you want to live in a land not rendered useless by tyranny. As is the case in the UK.
Jacobs 12y ago
Sure many of them deserve it. But the problem is that they infect the rest of us with their disease.
pling 12y ago
British person here. Very astute observation. However I'm the opposite. I kick off regularly at people for being that pliable and conformant. What do I get in return? I am shunned for possibly being contrarian, despite the logic being flawless and have put up with a lot of shit over the years despite being right 100% of the time. This country is slowly descending into hell. Britain needs to look at war-torn Europe up to the late 1990's. It was a fucking mess. I mean a real mess. People sleep with an eye open still and everyone understands what nationalism and prejudice brings: death and suffering. Britain sleeps with its eyes shut, its fingers in its ears and it's identity in everyone else's business.

jiggy2011 12y ago

Are you equating promotion of "british values" such as democracy,freedom,rule of law with nazism? Or am I misreading your argument?

skj 12y ago
I believe the GP was equating "British values" as a dogwhistle for racists, in the same way claiming you're a "real American" is in the US.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I assumed they were referring to this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27853591 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27853591 Which is a much more moderate message. I'm not really convinced that the UK is becoming any more racist overall, it's just that the internet has given those who are already that way inclined a platform.