I'm sure there's plenty of wailing and rending of garments over Nick Griffin's refusal to return to our screens in order to debate the issues facing the constituents of Barking and Dagenham, but if you can manage to hear yourself think over the sound of an entire country gnashing it's teeth in tear-soaked rage at out loss, the news does raise one important question.
How can a man simultaneously argue that he is the spiritual successor to Churchill, destined to take power and sweep the multitudinous riff-raff from our proud nation in order to forge it into the steel-clad bastion of stiff-upper-lipped virtue it apparently always was until those swarthy colonials descended, and then go on to complain he won't slap his ugly mug back on TV to make his voice heard if he thinks it's unfair?
I have this thought about American conservatives a lot, as well. Just how long can anyone expect to push the line that their strength and resolve are too great for the "extreme left" to hold back, but also that people are cheating by making them look mean and it's not fair?
To be sure, the tactic seems to work; apparently because there are plenty of people in this country and across the Atlantic willing to believe that their superior strength and dedication would be obvious if only much weaker people weren't so totally oppressing them. And, as I've noted before (as have many other people, far earlier and far better, of course), entire nations have been run on this exact principle before (take the GDR, for example).
I guess it's just one more part of human nature that I don't get.
3 comments:
Where do you get the GDR idea from?
Mainly from the Stasi's insistence that the GDR was so unquestionably superior to all other countries ever that they had to make sure no-one destroyed it by being a bit mean to their leaders, or what have you. The usual nonsense doublethink from oppressive regimes.
I think you are confusing standard paranoia and totalitarianism with a victim mentality. The BNP claim they are being victimised and silenced. The DDR never claimed that. The leadership thought the DDR was the best, the strongest and they showed it off as much as possible. Excuses were very rare - admitting western influences had inhibited their progression would have indicated failure. These people didn't even admit that the jeans or cola they made were copied from the west. So people disagreed with the SED; those people disappeared quietly and with minimal public attention. They weren't pointed out as the cause of all the country's ills or the reason for lack of progression. The SED were mostly devout communists, who often believed their own schtick. They didn't think so called western subversion was 'unfair' or 'mean' or 'unnecessary', they probably thought it was to be expected - after all they were just as guilty of espionage in the west.
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