Welcome To Zelo Street!

This is a blog of liberal stance and independent mind

Wednesday 27 January 2016

Cameron’s Holocaust Memorial Shame

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we in the UK remember the millions who died in the Holocaust. It is the date when the then USSR’s armed forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945, one of several such liberations in the last days of World War 2 that showed the world just what had been done by those serving the Third Reich. Such events seared themselves on the consciences of entire nations.
I say, you Labour cheppies over thyah! You be jolly good plebs and let one tell a load of porkies about you! Jolly good sheow!!

What, so many asked themselves after seeing the scale of the deprivation, the callous disregard for life, the genocidal wiping out of so many millions of lives, the sheer horror of what had gone on, might have been changed for the better if they had only taken in many more of those who wanted to flee the twisted ideology of the Nazis? Could some of those deaths have been prevented? Why didn’t they realise earlier?

Many of those shamed by the discovery of camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau worked in the press: during the 1930s, the Daily Mail made a name for itself promoting Adolf Hitler and spreading panic among its readers about the influx of Jewish refugees into Britain. The Mail’s incendiary headlines were typified by “German Jews Pouring Into This Country”, to which it seems, even then, no hack was willing to put his or her name.

So when the British Prime Minster stood before the Commons today, only a few minutes after leading the House in recognition of Holocaust Memorial Day, and described those living in despair and squalor in refugee camps near Calais as “a bunch of migrants”, it was not just opposition politicians thinking Cameron might have stopped and thought first.
Indeed, Jonathan Freedland observed in a Comment Is Free piece that “No one is suggesting that the plight of those at Calais is comparable to the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. But the common thread is this. One of the lessons of the Shoah – one tirelessly urged by, for example, the Holocaust Education Trust, an organisation praised today by Cameron – is that it is all too easy to dehumanise other people, to turn them from human beings with lives and needs and hopes into a problem to be repelled”.

And it gets worse: Cameron’s use of the “bunch of migrants” phrase was not some spontaneous, off-the-cuff gesture. It had been devised deliberately, as what the Tories’ election guru Lynton Crosby terms a “dead cat”, to deflect attention from the expected furore over his next-door neighbour’s apparently unduly lenient tax deal with Google. Worse, the remark had been trialled with several Tory MPs - who liked it.

The Tories knew that today was Holocaust Memorial Day. Cameron is not stupid: he is well aware of the sensitivities involved. Yet he and his team had no compunction in using the occasion to deliberately dehumanise thousands of desperate people for a cheap laugh - and so they could sling their dead cat on the table at PMQs.

On top of that, Cameron then claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had said they should all be let into the UK regardless, which he did not. So he’s a liar as well as a shit. But he’s in power, and for the Tories, that, it seems, is all that matters.

7 comments:

Andy McDonald said...

It seems that for the Tories, and for the right wing media, the lesson of the Holocaust is that we should never again allow the German Nazi party to mass murder Jews in concentration camps in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 40s ever again.

Hence the flurry of recent articles saying that those people caught up in the red door case in Middlesbrough, or the wristband case in Cardiff should 'get over themselves', missing out the point that what starts with signs on buildings and un-removable badges ends in much much worse.

Anonymous said...

What this indicates is THE TRUE NATURE OF TORYISM.

It was on open view from the (dead) Thatcher gang onward. And it infected all the other susceptible right wingers on all sides of Parliament. So far we've had 37 long, rotten-to-the-core years of it. The results are all around you in a divided society, impoverished areas, legalised kleptocracy and warmongering. This is a society with almost no conscience, all of it concocted and administered by scoundrels and thieves of the lowest sort, all of it performed behind a curtain of bullshit and lies generated by media liars and cowards.

To Cameron and his like no doubt they are indeed just "a bunch of migrants." But what do you expect from the people who framed the laws that allow scumbags like Google and the other multinationals to walk away laughing?

Toryism constitutes an assault on everything decent and fair in life. It will never be any different. How many more examples are needed before the whole house of cards implodes?

Shawlrat said...

It was absolutely shameful and this from a "man" with immigrant ancestry that he is supposedly proud of.
No one should be in any doubt as to what sort of person he is : no empathy and no thought for anyone outside his little bubble.

J said...

I think we should rename "dead cat" politics, to "dead pig" politics when used by the pig f*cking PM; after all it would be appropriate to keep rubbing in the fact that his Jolly japes involved face f*cking dead pigs while at Eaton - which sums up the level of his politics as a whole, only we are the pigs!

Philip C James said...

When we see how his government treats the vulnerable among the citizens of his own country, why are we surprised at the names he calls the vulnerable from other lands?

Iftikhar Ahmad said...

DAVID CAMERON faced calls to apologise after sparking a row with Labour MPs by branding refugees camped out in Calais a “bunch of migrants”. PM speaks for the majority of Brits. The common Brit does not want to see even a single immigrant but without constant flow of immigrants, British society and economy would bleed to death.



The people who make me the most ill are the people who decry immigration, then employ immigrant cleaners on crap wages. Yes, it's much like the Republicans in the US, who stoke hostility against Latino migrants, while all the time depending on them as nannies, cleaners and gardeners. Well of course, they will support any policy that will strengthen their own position whilst damaging the rights of indigenous people and any politician wanting to retain British Values and Liberal values will fall by the wayside. So, the banker from Germany the cleaner from Colombia who cleans his/her office will all vote to strengthen their 'own' position, because of course their interests precisely coincide. Its almost as if you think they are all the same. And what on earth are 'British values"? If you are talking about the kind of crap spouted by UKIP and the Tories.

The debate in Britain is becoming more and more polarised on the issue of immigration. Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are all vying with one another to appear more and more anti-immigrant.

Yet it is clear that immigrants are vital to the life of this country, and have been instrumental in creating much of what we now value most. Much of what the big parties are doing is to distract from the real threat to people’s standard of life and to our culture – the capture of our state by the interests of the wealthy and big corporations.
Your car is German. Your vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian.

Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers are Arabic, your letters Latin. And you complain that your neighbour is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!
Most of Brits do not want immigration on this scale. That is shown by every poll. But at the same time they want someone to serve them in a bar and clean their hospitals and make cheap clothes. They want someone to drive them across town. Birth rate is declining and old population is on the rise. Migration is on the rise. Mass immigration has caused problems, but it is the fault of the politicians. In education, migrant communities should have their own state funded schools with their own teachers so that native teachers could concentrate on their own children. It is never too late to set up schools for different communities. Muslim community suffer more than others in the field of education.
IA
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk

Anonymous said...

The Daily Heil has lost a lot of advertising revenue recently. As a result it will cost bitter and narrow minded people another shilling to buy the rag.
Oswald Moseley must be turning in his grave