Seeing The Light

There was something going on. Traffic was slow and we could see a small crowd near the island, yellow banners and placards, people walking among cars with handouts.

Was it an industrial dispute?

Funny place to have it, at Birmingham’s Five Ways. Long time since there was any manufacturing so near the city centre.

I wound down the window and took what looked like a newspaper - nice quality newsprint. It was the latest edition of The Light.

The front page article was headlined “Were 55,000 killed by NHS?” and included this startling graph:

I’ve seen medical execution at first hand, and wrote about it two years ago. The dying ward was brightly lit, the nurses cheerful - not rushed off their feet as in other hospital areas. In their heads they will have been doing the right thing, otherwise they would not have told me so calmly that they were withholding fluids from my friend; that is, letting him die of thirst while so heavily sedated that he couldn’t complain if he wanted to, while his organs were collapsing.

I didn’t ask what the drugs were, but like as not it was the cocktail I call “M+M” - midazolam and morphine. There’ll be a lot more of this when Kim Leadbeater MP’s assisted suicide Bill becomes law; already Parliament is snipping off safeguards.

Back to the protest. It takes a lot to make white middle-class people (for that’s what they appeared to be) take to the streets.

The Light is a reactionary publication. The r-word is one of those that stops you thinking - it carries associations with other terms such as '“far right”; but it simply describes a reaction and there’s a lot to react to now, and with rational justification. The current issue also discusses digital ID, Net Zero, combatting official misinformation, lawfare and so on.

And the reaction to these reactionaries?

If you look around the internet you’ll find that quite a lot of Nazi propaganda has been preserved for study, so we can see how a religious and law-abiding people could be turned into bloody-minded lunatics. It wasn’t just posters, newspapers and rallies, it was movies too; fiction as well as slanted documentaries.

We have the same today, though in different causes, and run by people who once again think they are doing the right thing - just as German policymakers and influencers thought of themselves, four generations ago.

Now we are in the age of the internet, so the struggle goes on there too, to corral diversity of opinion. The people are in danger of getting out of control!

Twitter/X used to be full of right-thinking gauleiters and now works far better since 80% of its employees were laid off; so well in fact that many of the righteous have decamped to alternative social websites so as to avoid being contradicted. Scratch a hippy, find a fascist, as the saying goes.

However Wikipedia is still going strong. I use it a lot but when it comes to contentious subjects you quickly feel the iron fist in its velvet glove. I looked up The Light and the result should be permanently retained for future generations to wonder at: “The Light is a… far-right and conspiracy theory newspaper… which primarily claims the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax…”

The pseudonymous writer warms to his theme with every kind of boo-word (“far-right” appears 13 times!) and throws in the kitchen sink with a side panel: “Part of a series on Antisemitism.”

Read the latest issue and decide for yourself how far it resembles Julius Streicher’s “Der Stürmer” (published weekly, 1923-1945.) But that’s not the idea of the Wiki article, which clearly wishes to poison the well so thoroughly that no-one would come near it because of its stink.

The trouble with the Leftists is that they seem to have little idea of what real fascism is like. My mother could have told them.

Mum grew up in East Prussia in the 1930s. A keen reader, she entered the school library one day to find big gaps in the shelves, which had been cleansed of Jewish and socialist writers. The history teacher was sacked and replaced by the janitor. The teachers all joined the Party, knowing which side their bread was buttered (I seem to recall the Inner London Education Authority was like that vis-à-vis Labour in the 1970s), and tried to browbeat Mum into following suit; she resisted, since her father (a gentleman farmer) despised Nazis as low-class scum and forbade her. The children - wretched conformists, as the young usually are - fought her in the playground, but she was athletic and beat them. But everywhere, propaganda, as the National Socialists fixed the foundations of the country’s economy and society.

Golly, if we tried hard we could draw some parallels! Even our farmers are targeted these days. And the new education Bill is a piece of work - you may even not be allowed to keep your children out of State indoctrination centres. The new Online Safety Act, with its ill-defined terms, is already scything through social media comment threads; pub landlords will have to police customers’ banter.

Dylan said it as long ago as 1964:

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand 
At the mongrel dogs who teach 
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy 
In the instant that I preach