CGTN News published a table this afternoon comparing America’s per capita spending on healthcare with the rest of the world. America tops it with over $12,000. The next most expensive is Germany with over $7,000. Britain is much lower down the list with over $5,000. Down at the bottom was Poland. Obviously, the list was confined to countries in the western, developed world. What is important is that America’s private healthcare system is far more expensive than the continental healthcare systems, which are either state-owned, like Britain’s and Sweden’s, or funded through a mixture of state and private insurance. The idea that somehow private healthcare systems are more efficient and less expensive, promoted by the Tories and swallowed whole by the Blairite right of the Labour party, is frankly a lie. One of my friends trained as a doctor. He told me that many American hospitals are being kept open because of discreet state funding. But you won’t hear that from the Torygraph, GB News, Tory MPs like Daniel Hannan and grubby right-wing internet hosts like Alex Belfield, now enjoying a well-deserved holiday courtesy of His Maj. This will not surprise anyone who’s read any of the great books against the privatisation of the NHS by people like Jack Davis and Ray Tallis.
Reject the lies. Defend the NHS, and stop the Tories.
Here’s further evidence of the Tory campaign to run down the Health Service until they can sell it off and introduce an American-style private healthcare system where people have to pay for their care through private health insurance. I’m ashamed and horrified that this man comes from own, fair city of Bristol. According to Sky News, Javid has an opinion piece in the Times (prop: the Dirty Digger) pushing the idea that the health service should charge people going to their doctors and Accident and Emergency with means-tested fees in order to cut waiting times. Javid says that this would follow Ireland, Norway and Sweden, and the appreciation of the Health Service should become a religious fervour blocking reform. The broadcaster also notes that Sunak himself wanted people charged for missed appointments, but was forced to withdrawal that nasty suggestion. Sky’s report says that the current PM till the next one says that he is not considering the idea. Wes Streeting, in a rare occasion of standing up for proper Labour values, said that it would violate the 75 year old founding principle of the NHS that treatment should be free at the point of delivery. Only Labour, which set up the NHS, could properly reform it, and that the imposition of fees would happen ‘over my dead body’.
Well said. I just wish I could believe him.
Of course the Tories hate the NHS as it’s a nationalised service. They don’t understand or sympathise with the principles underlying it and so want it privatised. We’ve already seen another right-wing maniac from their benches calling for it to be run ‘like a business’. These people have their voices magnified by appearing on GB News, where they spout the same nonsense, along with newsreaders and commenters like Nana Akua. As for the nonsense about this cutting waiting times, that’s really only a pretext. I went to a meeting of my local Labour party a few months ago in which the Tories’ attack on the Health Service was being discussed. Someone there said quite clearly that the health service was in particular danger because of the pandemic because the Tories never fail to exploit a crisis. And now Javid has raised his head above the parapet to prove it.
The Sky report states that Javid will not be seeking re-election at the next election. Which is why he probably feels free to make this monstrous suggestion. He has nothing to lose. Unfortunately, his mentality is still shared by his party, and will remain there long after he’s gone.
As for the Labour party, I very much doubt that Starmer will honour his promise to make doctors state employees. He has also said he wants to make a rational use of private industry to clear the backlog. Over the past decade, doctors’ surgeries have been acquired by private healthcare companies like Circle Health, who have then sought to maximise profits by sacking staff and making working conditions worse. The standard privatisation modus operandi. Blair was enthusiastic about privatising the NHS, and Starmer shares the same ideology. He also said something about making a rational use of private healthcare companies. I honestly doubt that he will stop the privatisation of the NHS once he gets his behind in No. 10. If he allows private healthcare companies to continue to acquire doctors’ surgeries, then obviously the doctors working there will not become state employees. Starmer has massive previous for breaking promises, and I think it’s very clear that he intends to break this one.
But the main threat meanwhile is the Tories.
Get them out before they privatise the health service and start charging for care.
Right-wing YouTuber Paz49 put up a piece this morning claiming that Alice Bah-Kuhnke, a Swedish Green MP, had called for the country’s Viking artefacts to be turned into scrap metal in order to show other countries that Sweden is friendly. Bah-Kuhnke’s mixed race, the daughter of an African father and Swedish mother. She was also a member, possibly the head, of an all-female government, whose members all wore pink hats, presumably as a feminist statement. Paz also reports that there are claims she wants the artefacts replaced with Islamic and African objects, but he thinks this may be just a rumour. He does, however, believe that this is a woke assault on White identity, and that it ignores the fact that other nations throughout the globe are also responsible for war and imperialism.
The story’s false, however. It’s several years old, dating from c. 2017, and comes from the American Alt-Right distorting reports of a perfectly reasonable law passed by the Swedish government to clear out artefacts of low scientific value in order to clear space in their national museum. I found this video below from the Archaeosource channel on YouTube, in which two professional archaeologists discuss what was really going on. They point out that archaeologists can’t keep everything they find, otherwise museums would be full of old Roman tiles. They rebury material that they can’t retain and conserve. The Swedish law is about throwing away poorly preserved Iron Age and Viking artefacts that don’t have much scientific value. It is not about destroying Sweden’s heritage. One of the speakers says he worked as a Viking for four years, six-hours a day, and has a profound respect for the ancient Norsemen. He takes issue with the way the Alt-Right and other extreme right-wing groups have appropriated them, especially regarding issues of masculinity, being a warrior and so on. The Vikings were open to other cultures, they had words for Blacks, Blamenn, and extensive trade contacts extending down to Africa and India. They were hired by other nations, and were hospitable to them. I think here he’s probably talking about Ibn Fadlan, the Arab traveller, and his observations of the Vikings on the Volga. They were hired by the Byzantines to serve as the emperor’s bodyguard. They also had bards and weren’t homophobic.
So, as commenters like Gillyflower suspected, this is a bogus non-story, an example of Alt-Right fearmongering.
Yes, I know this is Black American conservative Candace Owens of Republican youth activist group Turning Point USA. Yes, I know she made herself look massively stupid by denying that Adolf Hitler was a nationalist and stating that his policies would have been all right had he stuck to Germany. It’s a ‘no’ to both statements. Hitler was very much a nationalist and wanted to make the Germans the master race, Herrenvolk, of Europe. And the imprisonment of opposition political groups, the smashing of the trade unions, the sterilisation of those judged biologically unfit, the eugenic murder of the disabled, the imprisonment of the long-term unemployed, the mentally unwell and others in concentration camps, and the industrial murder of the Jews and Gypsies would still all have been wicked had they occurred only in Germany. But here she’s saying something genuinely liberal and anti-racist.
She reports that during the 60s and 70s, 4,500 Inuit women, including girls as young as twelve, were forcibly sterilised with the insertion of the IUD – the coil – by the Danish government. This was half the Inuit female population of 9,000 at the time, and was done as part of a programme by the Danish government to control their fertility.
This doesn’t surprise me. The Swedish government was sterilising those it considered biologically unfit until well into the ’90s. There were laws protecting minority ethnic groups, like the Gypsies proper, from sterilisation but they were overlooked when it came to the Tartare, another group of travellers, who were considered ethnically Swedish. This ruling was overturned in the 90s when the programme’s victims came forward. There was also an article a few years ago in the Independent reporting that the Czechoslovakian government had also been sterilising their Gypsy women against their will in order to control their numbers. My guess is that there was similar racist assumption that the Inuit were racially unfit and if their numbers grew too large, they would be a drain on resources. I’ve also heard of Gypsy children in Switzerland being given shock treatment in order to ‘cure’ them of their travelling culture and lifestyle. I don’t know if this will lead to human rights action and the payment of compensation, though it should.
I put up a post the other day about an early 20th century SF story from 1901, in which Jesus Christ is raised on Mars and sent to Earth by the Martians to enlighten us. They rescue Him from the crucifixion, and bring Him back to Mars. It struck me that the story may have been an influence or at least prefigured the idea that later arose among UFO contactees and researcher that Christ was an alien. The best-known of the various UFO religions that believe this is the Aetherius Society, founded in the 1950s by former taxi driver George King. King was into eastern mysticism, and became aware of his mission as spokesman for the Space Brothers when he heard a voice in his kitchen one day telling him to prepare to be the voice of interplanetary parliament. The Aetherius Society believes that King was the recipient of spiritual messages from Aetherius, an alien on Venus, and that Jesus is also there on the planet. Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Israel, also claimed that he’d been taken aboard a UFO and shown how Jesus and his predecessor as head of the religion, W.D. Fard, were also on Venus. Both Christ and Fard were Black, and Fard was directing and preparing for the coming apocalyptic war against the Whites that would free Black America.
Looking through the SF collection Born of the Sun again today, I found another early SF story with a religious or supernatural dimension. This was John Jacob Astor’s 1894 A Journey in Other Worlds, in which Saturn is inhabited by the spirits of the dead. I think this was influenced by contemporary spiritualism and trends in psychic research. The followers of the 18th century Swedish scientist and mystic, Immanuel Swedenborg, believed that he had travelled in spirit across the Solar System and that the various planets were inhabited, including by the spirits of the departed. This was also the same time, I think, that mediums like Helene Smith believed that they were receiving telepathic messages from Mars. The Surrealists were fascinated by these mediumistic accounts, and one collection of Surrealist writings contains a drawing, done automatically, of Mozart’s house on either Jupiter or Saturn. There’s definitely a religious element in much Spiritualist speculation about space and early Science Fiction, and I’m very sure that this has had an influence on the UFO phenomenon and its accounts of contacts with spiritually advanced, benevolent alien beings.
Simon Webb’s turn towards outright Fascism has puzzled me a little. Agreed, almost all the material on Video Debunked is deeply critical of Black and Asian immigration and the problems that have come with multiculturalism. So much so that his readers and commenters have implored him to join Patriotic Alternative. To his credit, he refused, and is deeply critical of its leader, His commenters contain people, who can only be described as real Nazis and anti-Semites. There are any number of them pushing the Great Replacement theory, which hold that the Jews are responsible for mass non-White immigration to the West. This is supposedly being done to destroy the White race. It’s American in origin but made its way into British Fascism where it mixed with certain native British strains of anti-Semitism from The Britons and Arnold Leese. Some of his commenters boast names like ‘Talmud ZOGberg’, after the Talmud, the second Jewish holy book, and ZOG, the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ of Nazis like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber. Webb isn’t an anti-Semite and is a staunch defender of Israel, which frustrates the Nazis on his channel no end, especially when he puts up videos debunking the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the arguments marshalled by the Holocaust deniers.
But these past few days he seems to have become overtly far right. Or at least, nostalgic for it. Yesterday he put up a video asking what was wrong with Fascism, citing Portugal’s former dictator Salazar as a benign Fascist regime in all but name. Salazar, he states, gave his country prosperity and didn’t bring it into the Second World War. In another video, celebrating the victory of Sweden Democrats as part of a right-wing coalition in Sweden and the increasingly right-ward turn of Italian politics, he looked back to the 1975 or so when the NF won 5 per cent in the British elections. He could have cited UKIP’s victory in the elections a few years ago, such as it was. That provoked various pundits in the media to speculate about Farage’s party becoming a major force in British politics. Channel 4 even made a mockumentary about what it would be like if the Drunken Financier took power, with immigrants confined in cages in the street. But Webb ignored the Kippers, and looked back to the boot-boys and hooligans of the NF instead. Why so?
I think the answer is that Webb is an authoritarian, who wants a specific political party for Whites. He’s a racial nationalist. He made a video a week or so ago discussing the rioting that has been going on in Leicester between Pakistani and Indian youths. This started after Pakistan won a cricket match against India. The rioting, which then had been going on for ten days, was obviously covered in the local papers but has received no national coverage. It has been covered in the Indian papers, as Harris Sultan and Nuriyah Khan have discussed on one of their videos. Webb suggested in his video that it wasn’t being covered nationally in Britain because it contradicted the narrative that people of Pakistani and Indian descent were as British as White, indigenous Brits. He also claimed that the cops trying to quell the violence weren’t British, citing one officer, who had an Asian surname. Actually, it seems to me to be eminently sensible to have Asian police officers trying to stop the unrest, if only to avoid the accusations of racism that would be directed at the White officers. From Webb’s description, you’d think that these Asian officers were men and women on loan from the Pakistani or Indian forces. But they’re not. They’re just British Asians. The fact that he calls them foreign, despite the fact that in many cases they may well have been here for generations shows his view of Britishness is based firmly on race, like the BNP. But unlike UKIP, who were national populist rather than racial nationalist. They were against immigration, but claimed they weren’t racist and had it written into their constitution that former members of Fascist parties were ineligible to join them. Of course, it turned out there were any number of former extreme rightists in it, but the image they wanted to project was of non-racism. Webb has also called for extremely authoritarian methods to be used against the Channel migrants. He’s pointed to the legislation defining entering the country illegally as an act of war, and asked why we couldn’t be like Poland and have armed soldiers guarding the frontier to makes sure no-one gets in illegally.
I believe that ethnically based parties are extremely dangerous. If nothing else, they fragment countries into competing ethnic groups, resulting in ethnic conflict and violence. This has been the case in many African countries. Robert Mugabe started his wretched reign of terror in Zimbabwe by terrorising and massacring the Ndebele, the traditional enemies of his tribe, the Shona, before moving on to other tribes and finally the White farmers. In Nigeria there was the Biafran War, when the Hausa and other Muslim tribes turned on the Igbo. In Uganda in the 1980s the dictator started massacring the largest tribe, the Buganda. And I’m afraid there’s a danger of ethnic specific parties arising in Britain. There’s the Aspire party in London, which resulted from a split in the Labour party after they deselected Lutfur Rahman. This party’s membership seems to be exclusively Bengladeshi Muslims, who were strongly favoured by Rahman in his administrations on the council. Sasha Johnson was setting up an ethnically specific party for Blacks, Taking the Initiative. This was supposedly because the major parties had done nothing about continuing Black poverty, and she denounced mainstream Black politicians like David Lammy in very strong terms. Whites could support Taking the Initiative, but its leadership could only be Black. From what I’ve heard, it had 40,000 members before Johnson met with a bullet in her back garden.
This is dangerous, because the BNP did well in the parts of London like Tower Hamlets where a section of the working-class White population felt marginalised and ignored by the major parties in favour of ethnic minorities. If Taking the Initiative had got off the ground and started winning elections, then there would have been a real danger of a backlash from some Whites seeking a party to represent them racially. And almost certainly if Johnson had had her way and founded a paramilitary Black militia.
As regards Salazar, he strikes me as having been a reactionary Roman Catholic, the Portuguese equivalent of a Spanish caudillo, or military dictator, rather than an outright fascist. There’s a chapter on his works in a book on dictator literature, and from this it seems that most of the books he wrote were Roman Catholic social doctrines, rather than the secular ideology of Italian Fascism. Webb has struck me as a right-wing Conservative, in favour of small government and private enterprise. I very much doubt he and his supporters would like Mussolini’s brand of fascism, which included state direction with private enterprise, and in which the trade unions were expected to sit in parliament with management to direct the economy. And this is quite apart from the overt militarism and warmongering of Italian Fascism.
What he seems to want, therefore, is a form of authoritarian, racial nationalist Conservatism, centred around the White British, rather than the overt, aggressive Fascism of Mussolini. This has to be opposed, along with other, ethnic parties that threaten to divide ordinary Brits and create more ethnic conflict while promising their people uplift and respect.
Simon Webb today went full Mosley and put up a video asking, ‘What’s wrong with Fascism?’ He wanted to make a distinction between Nazism and Fascism. Fascism, he said, had been tarnished through its association with Nazism. But if you wanted to see a benevolent regime that was Fascist in all but name, he directed you to that of the Portuguese dictator Salazar.
But it isn’t just the association with the Third Reich and its attendant horrors that has turned decent people across the world against Fascism. It’s the fact that Mussolini’s fascists were also militant imperialists responsible for brutal atrocities in the nations they conquered, as well as those committed by the various Fascist juntas in Greece, Latin America and Indonesia.
Yesterday or the day before right-wingers like Paul Joseph Watson were also celebrating the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition in Sweden’s elections over their socialist party. This coalition included with the centre right party the Sweden Democrats, a far-right outfit. They’re obviously anti-immigration, but have a very unpleasant neo-Nazi past. According to Hope Not Hate, they used to wear Nazi uniforms as late as the ’90.
I didn’t watch Webb’s video about the Swedish election, whose title said that the Swedes had turned against immigration, the Italians were waking up and when would Britain follow? Mark Pattie did, and wasn’t impressed. He writes ‘Dear God! I did watch his recent video on the Swedish election result where he said “Why can’t we have a similar party here?”- and the anti-immigration party he mentioned? Ukip, 2015? No, he mentioned the bloody National Front getting 5% of the vote in 1974. Makes me think he would vote for Britain First in the next GE.’
I remember the National Front when they goose-stepping about in the 1970s, as well as the various other Fascist and Nazi outfits like the British Movement. And they were overtly Nazi and extremely violent. Michael Collins in his book Hate describes one of the attacks he took part in on an anti-racist meeting in the local library. This had young Asian women leaping out of upstairs windows to get away from them. Monica Ali gives a fictionalised description of the gang fights between White Fascists and Asian self-defence groups in her book, Brick Lane. Just to remind people what British Fascism looked like in the 1960s and 70s, here are a few pictures from British Fascism, 1919-1985. and the W.H. Smith History of the World.
Colin Jordan, Fuhrer of the World Union of National Socialists, with his wife, the daughter of fashion designer Christian Dior.
Skinhead supporter of the NF in the 1970s
And this is what the Nazis did to the Jews, aided by their collaborators in occupied Europe.
The Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp
I don’t know about Portugal, but Franco only kept out of the Second World War because of poverty. Even so, I think he wanted to send a few token Spanish troops with the Nazis in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Not everyone who wants to cut down on immigration is a racist or Nazi. And despite the rhetoric, the BNP and NF as Fascists have a trouble hanging on to members. Lobster published a piece in the 90s which I think quoted anti-racist researchers of the movement as saying that although they boasted of having 2,000 members or more, they actually had a very high membership turnover. In reality they only had 200 or so core members. The simple reason for this is probably that people aren’t interested or sympathetic to fascist ideology. People joined not because they wanted some kind of new British reich or dictatorship, but probably simply because they wanted an end to non-White immigration. When they were subjected to the Nazi or Fascist ideology, they left. And political scientists have noted that this common in other countries with Fascist parties as well. They do better when they get rid of the jackboots, the right arm salute and the calls for a dictatorship. The Alleanzo Nazionale was formed from the Italian neo-Fascist party, the Movimiento Sociale Italiano or Italian Social Movement. But they jettisoned the Fascist paraphernalia and became instead, so they claimed, a centre-right party. As such they joined Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition with the separatists of the Liga Nord and Berlusconi’s own Forza Italia party.
Whatever people’s feelings about immigration, the majority of normal people despise Fascism and its British parties. There should be absolutely no nostalgia for these brutal thugs.
Hat tip to Gillyflowerblog, one of this blog’s many great commenters, for alerting me to a Zelo Street article on this, ahem, ‘person’. Earlier today I put up a piece about Correct, Not Political, a right-wing group who protest Pride Marches, Drag Queen Story Hours and Climate Change demonstrations, posting that teachers are being incentivised to tell the government if their pupils believe in any conspiracy theories, what they are, and how they are combating these beliefs. Well, it seems that GB News, much touted as the antidote to the ‘woke, wet BBC’ has been platforming one of the worst of the conspiracy crew: Peter Sweden. Sweden was invited onto Neil Oliver’s little programme to talk about declining birth rates. Apparently there was a massive decline in them last year, so that the programme asked if we were facing population collapse.
I think I saw the title to the video posted of this on YouTube, but didn’t watch it. According to some scientists, birth rates all over the world are declining to such an extent that there will be a population collapse in the middle of this century. This means that there’s going to be a shortage of people everywhere on Earth. I assumed they were going to talk about this, and so didn’t watch it. Unfortunately I was wrong. Apparently they were talking about a massive drop in British fertility that occurred last year. Peter Sweden, real name Imanuelsen, reckoned it may have been due to Covid vaccinations.
As General Jack D. Ripper says in Stanley Kubrick’s cold war black comedy, Dr Strangelove, ‘We must keep our bodily fluids pure’.
If such a drop did occur last year, I can think of a number of reasons for it which have zilch to do with the Covid vaccination. As I understand it, when animals are under stress they don’t breed. This is one reason why zoos are keen to look after critically endangered animals and make sure they are well and happy. Humans are animals, and an increasing number of us are stressed and very unhappy. The Covid lockdown, necessary as it was, meant that people couldn’t go to work and many businesses had to close for the duration. People therefore lost at least a portion of their income. Add to this Tory cuts and the problems they’ve inflicted on the Health Service and I am honestly not surprised people aren’t having so many babies.
But that isn’t all. While Sweden hails from that country originally, he currently lives in Northallerton on this side of the North Sea. He’s also appeared on Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube videos, which is an indication of how far to the right he is. That the same Paul Joseph Watson who was Alex Jones’ British buddy on Infowars, although to be fair he was never as raving nuts as Jones.
Worse, Imanuelsen has some extremely unpleasant views about Jews and gays. He is apparently a Holocaust denier and that the concentration camps had swimming pools, theatres and cinemas. Which is very obvious grotty, horrible nonsense. He’s also said admiring things about the Third Reich and Hitler. And as well as having negative views of the Jews, he has also said that LGBT people should be put in concentration camps. Which is what the Nazis did to gay men. They didn’t imprison lesbians, apparently, because they thought they could or would eventually turn straight. Which is prejudiced, but fortunately it served to protect people rather than lead to their persecution.
Looking at this, Imanuelsen should never be allowed anywhere near a TV studio to give his views whatsoever. And Neil Oliver should never have invited him. As one of the commenters here has said, it’s a pit what has happened to Oliver as he was good on Coast. He was. And now he’s become a spokesman for the far right and bonkers conspiracy theorists.
One of the pieces of news that came up on the internet news feed last week was that bug-eyed Liz Truss had been empty-chaired by farmers at a political meeting. Truss had either been due to speak or had been invited to speak at a rural hustings and had not appeared. So the farmers had their revenge by having her represented by an empty chair. Well, it could have been worse. When Roy Hattersley didn’t show as promised for an edition of Have I Got News For You in the ’90s, they simply replaced him with a tub of lard. Now what could have replaced Truss, I wonder? Possibly a lump of all that cheese she’s told us we’re going to sell to the Japanese, the majority of whom are lactose intolerant.
Most of England’s rural constituencies seem to be dominated either by the Tories or the Lib Dems, but I think Labour has missed an opportunity there. Firstly, one of the books I was reading about the origins of the welfare state said that the system of subsidies Attlee’s government introduced to support the farmers after the War actually saved them from bankruptcy, thus allowing them to pay their subscriptions to the Conservatives. Which sounds unkind, but is probably true. But it also shows that the Labour party isn’t just an urban party hostile to the countryside, as some have claimed.
Former MP Jim Callaghan is an example. Although he represented an urban constituency, he liked the countryside. He became a partner in a farm, finally taking full ownership. When he wasn’t in parliament or active in his constituency he was down working on his farm. This is in the book I got through the post the other day on the former Prime Minister. The writer of that particular chapter lamented that this enthusiasm for the countryside didn’t allow Labour to challenge the Conservatives on the image of the countryside as a rural idyll. Perhaps it didn’t. But I also feel that there was a lost opportunity to challenge the Tories in the countryside. Having a prime minister who actually worked as a farmer could have shown rural voters that far from removed, indifferent or hostile to rural Britain, Labour was actively involved out there and understand the concerns of farmers and the countryside. Of course, Callaghan had other issues on his plate, not least industrial unrest and the Winter of Discontent that finally brought him down. The Swedish socialist party were able to get the support of their country’s peasant farmers by taking their side during an agricultural crisis in the ’30s. They would turn up en masse to protest against farm repossessions. Perhaps this is a tactic Labour over here should consider when our farmers start going bankrupt thanks to the Brexit deal Johnson and his cronies have pushed through, which will damage our agriculture.
Oh no, that’s it! We’ve no need to worry, ’cause Truss has negotiated the cheese deal with Japan, and a pork deal with China.
Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell 1992).
I’ve been meaning to blog about this book, off and on, for a little while now. This is largely in response to the right-wing, Tory and Blairite Labour racists, who screamed blue murder at any chance they could get to smear Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, but who had absolutely no qualms about whipping up hatred against Roma, Sinti and other Travellers for their own political benefit. Anti-Gypsy hatred has become topical once again thanks to Jimmy Carr’s wretched joke about their genocide in the Nazi Holocaust somehow being a ‘positive’. Mike’s written extensively about that tasteless joke, as have very many others. He’s pointed out that it came just when Boris Johnson was passing legislation very similar to that of the Nazis, which would allow the cops to close down Gypsy encampments, move them on and impound their vehicles simply for suspecting they might be about to do something illegal. And when you get to eastern Europe, the prejudice against them is even more extreme and really does approach the genocidal hatred of the Nazis. A decade or so ago doctors in Czechoslovakia were caught operating a programme of involuntary sterilisation of Gypsy women very much like the Nazis’ eugenics programme against those of mixed race and the biologically unfit. Czech politicians were also very keen to have the Gypsies emigrate to Canada after a documentary was shown on television about a Czech Gypsy family finding a welcome in the land of the maple leaf and beaver. This was, like anti-Semitic and Nazi plans to force the Jews to move to Palestine, simply a way of forcing the Gypsies out of Czechoslovakia. One female Czech MP made this very clear when she screamed ‘They will go to Canada or the gas chambers!’ Such naked, genocidal bigotry means that Carr’s joke really, really isn’t funny. Respect, then, to the Auschwitz museum for taking the moment to offer him some of its courses on the murder of 27,000 Gypsies so that he could learn about the horrific reality.
The book’s blurb runs
‘Since their unexplained appearance in Europe over nine centuries ago, the Gypsies have refused to fall in with conventional settled life. They remain a people whose culture and customs are beset with misunderstandings, and who cling to their distinct identity in the teeth of persistent rejection and pressure to conform. The book describes their history.
The book opens with an investigation of Gypsy origins in India. The author then traces the Gypsy migration from the early Middle Ages to the present, through the Middle East, Europe and the world. Through their known history they have been recognised for their music, metal working, fortune telling, healing and horse-dealing, but from the outset they outraged the prejudices of the populations they encountered; they were enslaved, harassed, outlawed and hunted. Yet against all the odds the Gypsies have survived, preserving a distinctive heritage and culture that transcends national boundaries. How they did so is the compelling them of this book.
This new paperback edition has been revised to take account of recent research and of the political changes in Eastern Europe, which have sadly been followed by a resurgence of Gypsy persecution in a number of countries.’
The book has chapters on their origins, then subsequently traces their migration through Persia and Armenia, Greece and the Byzantine Empire, Serbia, Bulgaria, Wallachia and Moldavia, the provinces that are now part of modern Romania; Germany, Austria and Switzerland, France, Spain and Portugal, the Low Countries, Italy, Hungary and Transylvania, now also part of Romania, Scotland and England and Scandinavia. It also discusses images and stereotypes, the pressures placed on them to assimilate, and persecution, including expulsion, transportation and extermination, both in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as their survival. It also discusses changes in Gypsy society and culture, including their music, and their genocide under the Nazis – ‘The Forgotten Holocaust’. The final section discusses modern Gypsy society and culture.
It should be clear from this that the Gypsy Holocaust is, like that of the Jews, absolutely no joke. Carr has been defended by various members of the media set, including Victoria Coren. They’ve defended him as being good and kind. I don’t doubt he is. The problem is that there are some subjects that are too terrible to be the subject of jokes, as well as moral consistency. Carr clearly balked at telling jokes about the Jewish Holocaust, as he should. But if the Jewish Holocaust is unfit as a subject of humour, so should the Nazi murder of other racial groups, especially those still experiencing persecution.
The Lotus Eaters have run to Carrs defence, posting up a video of him as a ‘free speech berserker’. Now I don’t believe that Carr should be prosecuted for his joke. It was outrageous, but, in my opinion, not hateful. He wasn’t intending to stir up racial hatred, although I don’t doubt that some others, who would tell the joke would have definite malign intentions. In my view it’s really a case of a moral problem discussed by John Stuart Mill in his classic book On Liberty: just because something’s legal doesn’t mean that it’s moral. He put it in the following terms: just because there’s no law against chasing a Jew up an alley waving a piece of pork doesn’t mean that you should do it. I don’t believe that Carr has broken any law or should be prosecuted. He just shouldn’t have told the joke. The best thing now is for him to apologise and Netflix to cut the joke. Then perhaps we should move on to combatting some real Nazis.
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