As sure as night follows day, whenever Maggie Thatcher falls ill, and some lefty columnist somewhere has harsh words about the day of her demise, there will be inevitably a column from a right wing pundit in the Mail or the Telegraph explaining how this gloating over the death of a frail old lady is cast iron proof that every left winger is a Stalinist / communist / secretly a genocidal maniac in the making. This time this trope has come from the Telegraph blogger Ed West. He argues that this kind of thing is down to the left and the progressive minded viewing all conservatives and people on the right as inherently evil. Whilst their side merely view the other side as misguided and ignorant, hence the reason why [he thinks] the right has moral and intellectual superiority, and would never stoop to gloating over the deaths of - say Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, even though a comment on the article says that they would gloat, and a letter to the Mail saying they would relish the death of the former.
It was with this in mind that I stumbled upon this piece by Tom Chivers a Telegraph guy who writes sciencey articles on his blog on their [Telegraphs] website, he appears not to be very right wing at all, and writes about the virtual incitement to homophobic violence that resulted in the headline in the Ugandan newspaper that is pictured above. Chivers is understandably appalled at the headline comparing it as a more extreme version of the News of the World "name and shame" headline a decade ago. In this case far; far worse, the NOTW article at least covered child sex offenders (I'm not saying that the article was anything but a reckless attempt to incite violence btw.) I would have thought that something like this may have proved Wests theory. A substantial number of comments to the Telegraph blogs are pretty right wing (putting it mildly!) after all. They aren't really going to be big on gay rights and the whole homosexual scene, but surely even they would have sympathy for the plight of people who will likely end up being the victims of mob violence? Surely this will prove Ed's point that these right wing guys will wear their nobility on their sleeves? Er.. no. Quite a substantial minority of them are either indifferent to those "outed", or even say that they deserve what they get. For Gods sake, I mean how much of a c**t do you have to be to so divorced from any sense of basic human decency in regards to people who will likely be lynched because of being outed like this. To give Tom Chivers credit he argues this very point with these people, and does a good job of the straw men they try to place at him (you know the "you wouldn't say this if it was Muslims doing it.." spiel). I ended up feeling sorry for him, a nice guy having to write for arseholes. The earliest comments on this article really do make you question human nature sometimes.
I don't think this is a glowing vindication for Ed Wests theory. I do think that those on the left who do do all this "piss on Thatchers grave" really do make a rod for their own backs (I wonder how many really will do it when the time comes?) when right wing columnists use this to demonstrate to their audience how horrible these "ungrateful socialists are". But let us remember that Thatcher was the prime minister of this country, and an awful lot of people paid a very heavy price on the alter of her "convictions". It isn't surprising many people loathe her. We might say that Richard Littlejohn is subject to pretty venomous abuse on - say; Mailwatch, but he earns a fortune spreading poisonous lies about vulnerable groups, so it isn't too surprising that those on the left won't like him too much. But what struck me about this story was that the people being attacked weren't leaders or newspaper columnist, but were powerless individuals in fear of their lives. And that I feel is an important distinction. Leftys can say stupid and unkind stuff, but this kind of kicking those vulnerable targets and the sheer inhumanity of some of the callousness written, seems a forte of the more right wing commentator, and I'm sad to say it is a pretty common theme on those kind of blogging sights.
No comments:
Post a Comment