Base Camp is where visitors go to relax, unwind, and get familiar with an anthology of earlier material.

The Threat Of Thuggery

This article is part of a special on psychological bullying with particular focus on political-religious supremacism.
Previous article – Spin Doctor: The Threat Of Submission

There is something so valuable in these words, so potent, that it would be shame to forego them, or be driven away from them on account of the thickness of thuggery that has attached itself to them.

Like I mentioned in a previous article, Winston Churchill’s speeches are popular with the BNP (British National Party), the EDL (English Defence League), and other far-right wing nutters, who are dead set on kicking everyone foreign out of Britain.

What foreign really means to these groups, I don’t know. Would they limit themselves to Asians and Africans, the usual scapegoats, or would they throw Europeans into the sea, too? How about Brits with a French father or a Danish grandmother? Are they, too, not foreign? How about people with darker skin? They may not be foreign, but they look different, so why not throw them out as well, keep Britain (England?) Albion-worthy.

Clearly, the BNP and the EDL are led by racist idiots who have
 taken a few valid arguments on the perils of rampant immigration and blown them out of proportion to stoke unwarranted fear and hatred among their supporters. They thrive on a culture of discrimination and bigotry, the venom of which is stoked by mindless, jingoist rhetoric.

It’s an unfortunate and dangerous phenomenon. These extremist arguments are idiotically one-sided, lacking fact and reason, marching to the tune of populist mantras, such as ‘British jobs for British people,’ as if the jobs that immigrants hold were stolen, or taken with force, from hard-working British individuals.

It’s a grim, populist fairytale, designed to stoke anger and hatred among the population. Everyone knows that immigrants hold jobs that Brits are reluctant to take. There’s a reason for the influx of immigration in the first place, and that was the number of jobs up for the taking at the time, jobs the Brits were not snapping up.

Evidently, the BNP-EDL nationalists ignore this fact. They fail to understand how immigration is a great asset, which is not only key to a country’s/nation’s growth, but also conducive to its greatness, if managed wisely.

Two Wrongs Make An Extreme Right

Granted, immigration has not been managed wisely over the past two decades. But the fact remains. Kicking people out on account of their skin color and/or ethnicity is not the answer. Ante-ing up on the short-term gain of ‘patriotic’ (see racist) populism is a bad investment, a move that gives rise to a culture of fear and destitution. Trading rationalism for jingoism takes society down the road against which Churchill warned in the first place.

Irony yet again. There, wherever one looks, especially in politics and religion, doing numbers on those who take themselves too seriously.

The Fact We Have To Face

The BNP and the EDL are led by thugs. Very little separates them from God-fearing Islamists who believe that God is great…

Or from big financiers who think that the world is their playground…

Or from crazy socialists who think that they’re entitled to things just because…

Or from any group that believes ‘its is the only true way,’ etc.

They’re all, in their totality, odious.

See, at the end of the day, wherever you come from and however you dress yourself, if you’re mindless and supremacist, whether a nationalist fanatic, a religious fanatic, or a plain old thug, you tread on dangerous ground. The future will not be kind to you, and neither will history. The world will be wary of you and will stop you at the first opportunity.

Does this make me an Islamophobic, Christianophobic, anti-socialist, anti-feudalist, anti-bully, anti-racist, rational bastard?

I’ll take it as a compliment.

Eyes open, mind sharp.