Life

Mary Kelly: Slogans and us-and-them politics straight out of the Nazis' playbook

It’s instructive that both Trump and Cummings are extremely hostile to journalists. And while Trump and his supporters rail against ‘fake news’ for every inconvenient truth, Hitler similarly had ‘Lügenpresse’ – lying press – to attack journalists

While Trump’s slogan was 'Make America Great Again', Dominic Cummings came up with 'Take Back Control' which arguably delivered victory in the Brexit debate
While Trump’s slogan was 'Make America Great Again', Dominic Cummings came up with 'Take Back Control' which arguably delivered victory in the Brexit debate While Trump’s slogan was 'Make America Great Again', Dominic Cummings came up with 'Take Back Control' which arguably delivered victory in the Brexit debate

THE most alarming thing I heard this week was an interview with a Yale Professor of history, Timothy Snyder, on Channel 4 News. He told host Krishnan Guru Murthy that democracy was under threat because some politicians were using tactics that closely follow a fascist playbook used by the Nazis.

What Snyder referred to as a notorious manual on political propaganda composed in a Munich prison in 1924 – Hitler's Mein Kampf, presumably – urged the use of simple slogans, repeated over and over again with the effect of dividing listeners into us and them.

The professor noted that the tactic had clearly been revived on both sides of the Atlantic, turning politics away from reasoned debate towards constructive policy and making it fundamentally about friends and enemies. It is most obvious listening to President Trump who is cynically using the violence that has followed the shootings of unarmed black men by police officers into "us" and "them"… the rioters and anarchists who he paints as Democrat supporters and the lawmakers and law abiding 'us', ie Trump’s own base.

And while Trump’s slogan was 'Make America Great Again', the Tories’ Svengali, Dominic Cummings came up with 'Take Back Control' which arguably delivered victory in the Brexit debate. He produced another, 'Get it Done', to sweep Boris Johnson into power with an-80 strong majority.

Slogans are useful because they are simple, and ultimately meaningless. But they are also dangerous because they have the effect of denying nuance and stifling debate.

It’s instructive that both Trump and Cummings are extremely hostile to journalists. And while Trump and his supporters rail against “fake news” for every inconvenient truth, Hitler similarly had “Lügenpresse” – 'lying press' – to attack journalists who were trying to report the facts.

The second alarming news was a report that there are competing efforts under way to launch an “opinionated” TV station in Britain in the style of Fox News, with the aim of rivalling the BBC. One is led by GB News, whose founder Andrew Cole has described the BBC as a disgrace that “needs to be broken up”.

Similar views are shared by one Dominic Cummings and others on the right of the Conservative Party. These are the people who are keen to provoke “culture wars” over singing Rule Britannia at the Proms and accuse the Beeb of being “anti-Brexit” or left wing.

This is the same constituency that Nigel Farage tunes into with his sloganising about an “invasion” of illegal immigrants when the actual number coming to Britain is dwarfed by those arriving in Greece and other European countries.

But don’t let facts stand in the way of a good slogan, eh?

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I WAS disappointed at the decision of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights organisation to criticise the author JK Rowling for “using her remarkable gifts to create a narrative that diminishes the identity of trans and non-binary people”.

The comments, by the late senator’s daughter, Kerry Kennedy, led to Rowling returning the human rights award she’d received from the organisation only a year before. The Harry Potter author had kicked over this particular wasp’s nest by expressing annoyance over a headline on an international development website which used the phrase “people who menstruate” instead of “women”.

And the RFK organisation is not alone in heaping opprobrium on Rowling. The stars of the Harry Potter franchise, who made millions off the back of her books, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson et al, all scurried to tweet their criticism of her and their support for trans women.

Call me a Terf (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) if you must, but I don’t see how denial of the existence of women whose gender is female excludes anyone else or rejects their desire to live as they choose.

And what ever happened to the Voltaire maxim “I disapprove of what you say, but I defend to the death, your right to say it”?

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WHAT I learned this week: It’s probably not a good idea to wonder in a neighbourhood online forum if a particular cycle lane is a good idea. It unleashed the fury of the cycling fraternity who, rightly, complained that the problem on Belfast's Park Road is the motorists who park their cars alongside the path, causing traffic to be reduced to a single lane.

Motorists are often selfish, lazy and inclined to think the car is king. But I still think this random path which leads to nowhere and suddenly stops half-way down the street, does no-one any favours.

I agree that cycle paths are generally a good thing and we need far more of them if we are to encourage people to get on their bikes. But they need to be better planned and part of the sort of sensible infrastructure that we see in Dublin and other parts of Europe. And that should also include bike racks outside cafés and shops. Lamp posts don’t cut it.