The Crusade

It’s now a ‘Crusade’. Note the capital C. A newspaper is launching a ‘Crusade’ against people (in headscarves) from the East of Europe.

Let’s talk about the paper-thin justification. The Daily Express’s emblem is a Crusader. Yes. I get that. Which is bad enough anyway, when you think about it, but fine, history and tradition and branding and all of that. OK. In the past it’s launched Crusades against all kinds of things, not just borderline Little Britain xenophobia. But calling a campaign against people from one group a ‘Crusade’… there is a whiff of something else.

Crusade… flood… as I said yesterday, there’s a dehumanisation going on here. These people are being portrayed as less-than-people, as under-people, as people who it’s OK to lump together in one globular mass, a flood, a tide, a mass of headscarved people coming over here and taking our benefits.

Time and again, you have to look at the images used to illustrate the stories. Yesterday it was the image of a woman in a headscarf ‘being moved on by police’, with the subtle implications that brings. Again and again the same kinds of images are used.

These people, these less-than-people, are often seen from behind – we don’t need to see their faces. They’re outdoors, with the implication that they’re not working. People aren’t coming to this country to work; they’re coming to hang around in parks and be down-and-outs and troublemakers. And to claim benefits, of course.

If that’s too subtle, the Express today reports that its own readers overwhelmingly back what the paper tells them to – at least, those readers who could be bothered to express an opinion. This sort of thing is statistically meaningless, naturally, but is reported as if the whole of the nation rather than a few readers of a newspaper – backed and abetted by the usual ultra nationalists and knuckledraggers – is backing the ‘Crusade’.

Things are getting unpleasant. The demonisation and dehumanisation continues. All people from Romania and Bulgaria are depicted as layabouts, wasters, shirkers, malingerers, scroungers…

And in a few weeks’ time, when the stories come in about attacks taking place against immigrants, being beaten up (or worse) for their appearance, because they matched the demographic we’re being told to hate, a newspaper like the Express will look the other way, and pretend it had nothing to do with it, and continue to peddle its lies.

 

Daily Hate

New hate today from the Daily Express. Today’s Halloween bogeyman is… immigrants.

“Britain is full up”, they say, echoing the rhetoric of the ultra nationalists, racists, knuckledraggers, scumbags and bastards of the BNP, EDL and other ‘patriot’ organisations. But look at the picture they’ve used to illustrate the article: a Romanian woman being ‘moved on’ by police. The implication is, I suppose, that there’s something criminal about being a Romanian. The SAY NO TO NEW MIGRANTS might be unsubtle, but the picture is a little more of a dog whistle.

The picture the Express used online is similar:

More faceless immigrants. We can only see the faces of some of them; the rest have their backs turned. Because their humanity isn’t important; they are just silhouettes; they are stick figures – somehow a little less than human.

This is part of how immigrants are depersonalised by the gutter papers as some kind of giant globular mass. They are a ‘tidal wave’, not individual souls with lives and families and dreams.

But under that picture is a sad truth: whereas once this kind of article didn’t represent the mainstream, now it’s firmly in the middle ground. The post-2010 Labour Party is just as miserably inept at battling this kind of rhetoric as the others; the arguments have been lost and it’s just not popular on the doorstep to try and argue that immigration is in any way A Good Thing.

In the meantime: blame the Bulgarians, blame the Romanians, blame the EU, blame everyone else.

 

It lives!!!

Yes, after all these years, Winterval is back! Just look at the URL: winterval.ie!

The PC Brigade have literally gone mad once again.

Sure, you might call it alliteration. You might say it’s simply something to go along with the W in Waterford. You might even say it’s a tongue-in-cheek nod to the publicity surrounding the yearly rumours about the secular evil of Winterval having replaced Christmas, and an attempt to gain more interest a rather ordinary Christmas festival.

You might say all of that, but I say: the powers-that-be, the bien pensant liberal-left do-gooding bastards who are sucking all the Christ out of Christmas, are deliberately making us all ashamed of Christmas, the most magical Christmassy and lovely time of the year.

So there.

 

Blue eyed girl

This is where we are, then.

The Daily Star used the amazing technique of putting ‘Maddie’ in inverted commas the other day to describe a little girl who was found with a Roma family in Greece. The age of the child was wrong so it was never going to be Madeleine McCann, yet they said “Maddie”. You know “Maddie” in inverted commas, the way inverted commas mean “you can say anything you fucking want to inside, it doesn’t matter”.

There’s something especially despicable about newspapers exploiting a missing child to flog a few copies; there’s something even worse about it when they think they can justifiably say “Maddie” in inverted commas to mean “any missing child”. It’s as if “a Maddie” is now shorthand for a missing child. What a lame, miserable, dirty little shambles. What a disgusting, tawdry, sick joke. Perpetrated by amoral fucks to try and sell a few sleazy inky rags.

Oh, and by the way, the “Maddie” found in Ireland wasn’t “Maddie” (or even “a Maddie”). It turns out the blue eyed child of Roma parents was… the child of Roma parents. “SHOCK AS BLUE EYED GIRL FOUND WITH ROMA PARENTS”. Shock! How dare they have a fair child! They must have STOLEN it. Except… they didn’t steal the child. It was their child all along.

But this is where we are. It’s fair game to shop Roma families to the cops if the child they haven’t isn’t dark enough to satisfy our prejudices. Fair enough for newspapers to report wild speculation as fact. “Maddie” found in Ireland. Except it wasn’t Maddie. It wasn’t a missing child. It was a couple’s own child, taken from them because of racism. Go on, Daily Star. Fucking report on that and how you enable that kind of prejudice to thrive; I dare you.