It's happening again

When I was a young, vibrant chap in the 1990's, lots of pretty, shiny things were happening. The Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall came down, and less shiny and less pretty right wing groups were on the rise. There were anti-fascist and anti-nazi rallies everywhere.

Sometimes I envy Gen Y kids who have grown up never seeing skinheads. They can't know the bewildering frisson of fear you feel seeing a guy stroll past with swastika tattoos.

I'm pretty guilty of Godwin's Law. The temptation to call someone a nazi is strong. But I've seen neonazis. I've seen them swagger around on Hitler's birthday. I've seen them seig heil each other. For me, calling someone a nazi isn't harkening back to pop culture imagery of a war that happened decades before I was born, it comes from things I've seen with my own two eyes.

The right's on the rise again. A fascinating article in NM here.

After Obama became President of the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that monitors hate organisations across the US, marked a drastic increase in racist hate groups.

As NM's article shows, there's been a rash of racist terror attacks across Europe. While Andreas Behring Breivik may have been little more than a complete loony, and the organisation he claimed to be a member of little more than a figment of his imagination, there are others just as dangerous, and a little less insane out there.

So, this is my question. Our governments have the will and capacity to spy on internet usage. Now if you personally had a choice between spying on someone whose biggest concern was what to write on a placard versus spying on someone building a bomb to detonate at a mosque or some other gathering of a different ethnicity, what do you think is the most pressing concern?

If you picked the bomb-maker, congratulations you're normal. If you picked the placard waver, congratulations - you now lack the sufficient common sense granted to the proverbial goddamn mule to be in government.

I don't know why this should be the case. I don't know why our government and surveillance agencies waste so much time and effort on people who do comparatively so little, while letting major scumbags and lunatics go relatively unobserved.

I remember what it's like to live in an era when people walked the streets, unashamed of nakedly fascist allegiance. I don't want to see it happen again. It's not just a different political opinion, worthy of equal treatment. These people bring assault and murder with them. That is the currency of their opinions, a verbal attack is always partnered with a bombing or a beating.

I've spent the last twenty years hoping this would never happen again. Guess I was wrong.