On the volley

Hmm.

This is the gift that goes on giving.

From the variety of comments it’s received, it seems obvious to me that there’s more to this story that just my usual lazy “Liberals are stupid on account of liberalism is stupid” meme. My views are tentative, exploratory, and also definitely reflect the official views of the management.

Julia muses:

Of course, in Germany, the swastika is banned. Several computer game companies have had to replace their rampaging Nazis with zombies in Oder to sell them in Germany.

What difference has such a ban had? Hard to say, but I can't see them lifting it anytime soon...

Case in point [assuming for the sake of argument that I support a ban on the burqa, which I do].

Between 1939 and 1944 the Nazi State was all-powerful throughout Western Europe and it originated and organised the deliberate murder of around 12,000,000 ‘undesirable’ non-combatants, half of whom were Jews, under cover of the war. That was power; there was much conviction there behind such a monstrous evil, with deep and broad [though far from universal] public support for some of the openly oppressive aspects - the core - of Nazi policy. That’s a big heap of nasty.

Germany was thoroughly de-Nazified during and after WW2 by a process that involved: defeating the fascist powers in a bloody and brutal war; executing their captured leaders down to quite low levels in the hierarchy; running a ruthless propaganda campaign throughout all of Western Europe to make even the slightest expression of sympathy with the Nazis wholly unacceptable, and finally banning all outward sign of the authentic political movements.

Even to talk about nationality and immigration is taboo throughout much of the Continent and even here for fear of something like that happening again. (You can have too much of a good thing, or a good thing goes stale, perhaps.)

There's a ban in several western European countries of Nazi and fascist uniforms and flags and, until it got really crazy with the EU and multiculturalism assaulting all authentic and wholesome European patriotisms, there was precious little in the way of neo-fascism or neo-Nazism beyond the fringes of each country’s politics.

Perhaps the ban worked.

Left-liberals seem to think so, as they rarely attack and usually uphold such laws, though there are some exceptions to this, and so it seems they have some well developed notion that freedom isn’t everything (!) and how right they are in principle.

Anonymous:

You want to ban something because some unspecified men may make a female wear the something which she may possibly not care for.
Make sense.

But why were the Nazis reviled so much Anonymous?

Because they killed millions of individual non-resisting people whose race, religion, and politics they didn’t like – read they were pretty nearly uniformly xenophobic.

I’d like to avoid any kind of violence on this matter. Perhaps banning the outward uniforms and symbols of a present enemy that declares and acts upon a belief that people whose race, religion, and politics they didn’t like are abominations and fair game for violence might prevent similar madness taking hold here?

Since Islam’s founder was anti-Semitic and violent promising world conquest and dominion to his followers for all time.

Perhaps, therefore, forbidding the latest – and very nearly nuclear-armed – version of this might help to reduce some of the triumphalism of Islamists in our streets, who manage through a number of techniques to cow freedom-loving and law-abiding people into submission.

I suggest that we should stop tolerating this intimidation; paired as it is with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, as a matter of policy.

As Dumb Jon refers to it, there is, perhaps, no right to wear the enemy’s uniform in wartime.

Oh, and how much voluntarism is there in wearing this new, politically-motivated invention; this all-over-body condom?

I mean: really?

It’s a concern of mine, too, that Muslim women and girls here are being forced into this absurd and sinister costume just as their co-religionists in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran have been downgraded to subhuman status over decades of radicalization. I don’t want to risk that for Cheshire girls or Lancashire lasses, and a few angry imams and even more infuriated big brothers can just suck it up or ship it out as far as I’m concerned.

I’m reminded of anti-Abolitionist politicians arguing that black slaves didn’t really mind their chains – and actually preferred the structure and security of plantation life to the warlike existence of African nomads when people talk about Muslim women’s freedom to be ‘covered.’

Craig said...

Some German women undoubtedly choose of their own free will to dress up like Helga from 'Allo Allo' (and damn the discomfort it causes not only many non-Germans but quite a few Germans too), but I bet there are many more, like the fraulein who works at our place, who are told to dress up like that in public and daren't refuse.

A law like the one passed in Belgium would rescue her - and others like her - from all those German men who are still trying to foist their extremist beliefs on her, and on our country and much of the rest of Europe (and, indeed, the world).

Really? If it is still going on like that as that comment seems to indicate, well, it’s never too late to hate and fear fascism in all its forms. And remember that authority can be respected, if at all, inasmuch as it exerts itself to help the weak or even powerless to lead their lives free of bullying on a scale a long way milder than the obvious ones of genocide and slavery.

But my real target is woman-hating Islam, and I’m prepared to be called a fake fascist to protect this country’s less forceful women from the subhuman status that dressing them up like corpses is likely to bring.

Anybody noticed yet the ‘As long as you don’t do it in public and frighten the horses’ deficit in liberals’ tolerant attitude to girlie-head-bagging?

Kinky bondage in private might just be acceptable as long as it’s, well, truly voluntary and mutually respectful (good luck with that) but these poor girls don’t strike me as having much fun at home or outside where they’re exposed to suspicion and (secret I hope) ridicule.

And finally :

James Higham said...

Don't quite know what to make of that one.

I know James – there’s so much stupid to go round in this piece.

But let’s bullet-point a couple of questions, shall we, just for a taster, under the general heading “What the liberal missed”?

From the teacher’s edition, then:

Belgium has a significant minority Muslim population -- about 3 percent of a population of 10 million. Like those neighbors, it has done a poor job of integrating Muslim immigrants, and many cluster in ghettos that can be breeding grounds for extremism.

# So it’s the State’s responsibility to integrate people into the local way of life, is it?

What responsibility, if any, do immigrants have to fit into their new homeland?

# How come the half dozen people I know who are of German descent or of the Nazi German generation or the three who actually served in the Nazi forces are as integrated as all get-out, and why is it that none of their children have decided to rebuild the Third Reich here in England?

All they had to do in 1945 was to obey the laws, put up with some nasty, spiteful comments, and get on with it becoming British. Visits to their native lands for them involved taking food parcels and other western luxuries back out to the East and to attend actual weddings – and never ending up bombed to death at ‘weddings’ in the Black Forest or outside Gdansk by NATO air forces.

Is there something about Islam, perhaps, that promotes inter-generational non-conformity with the adoptive homeland that Nazi Germany lost in a single generation?

I think that there might be.

Still and all, at least the original Washington Post article explains how it is that, of all the countries in the globe, it should be the United States of America that gave the language that well-know expression saying or phrase Dumb-ass motherfucker.

Picture from here.