Nazi UK 2010 onwards v. Nazi Germany 1930 & 40s: A valid and appropriate comparison of Hate Propaganda.

There have now been a number of times when I have compared the disability hate propaganda used by the right-wing press in the UK today to the disability hate propaganda that was used in Nazi Germany. This often attracts strong, but misplaced indignation from some quarters, with the favourite response being that ‘we are not gassing disabled people today.’ That may be so, but it is only the propaganda that is being compared, not the follow through. In any case, I do not consider causing disabled people to commit suicide in high numbers to be morally better than gassing disabled people. It is Social Darwinism for cowards.

The question of whether the Nazi comparison is valid is quickly and easily answered by looking at what is going on now and what went on in Nazi Germany. The papers mentioned below have been referred to Full Fact time and time again and found to be telling lies. It is extremely damaging to disabled people and the worst example I have come across is this:

Iain Duncan Smith on benefits Britain

Here, Duncan Smith states:

“What I cannot bear is the idea that this country was the workshop of the world. It gave everybody the free market, the industrial revolution. You think what we did to change the world. This was the place that everyone looked to.

“Yet we have managed to create a block of people in Britain who do not add anything to the greatness of this country.

“They have become conditioned to be users of services, not providers of money. This is a huge part of the reason we have this massive deficit. We have had to borrow vast sums of money. We went on this inflated spending spree.”

Compare that with:

Action T4

See the poster on the right of that link under the '[b]ackground' heading, which has the text:

“60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.”

The Government will try to limit or deny its culpability in all of this by saying that they are not responsible for what the press write. Yet their mode of operation casts doubt on this defence, with their constantly releasing, through their agents, the DWP, ‘twisted facts, manipulated statistics and distorted data to win support for its drive to cut costs..’ as Ian Birrell put it. They persistently release this information to all the usual suspects in the media – The Sun, The Mail, The Express and The Telegraph, even though they know perfectly well that these papers have a long and well-established propensity to stir up hatred against disabled people. They have their excuses; like they are legally obliged to give out such information at regular intervals, but the way they distort information and decide who they give it to mean that these excuses will not hold. I do not think it is any great exaggeration to say that the Government, the DWP and the right-wing media are engaged in hate crime against disabled people on an industrial scale.

Thankfully there are some decent and principled journalists out there who are saying enough is enough and a stop must be put to this cowardly bullying of disabled people. In my list of further reading below you will find some superb articles by Sonia Poulton and Ian Birrell, The latest written by Sonia is especially relevant to this topic.

Further reading:

Why does David Cameron insist on cuts that sickened his own party?

Welfare Reforms: Where is our national conscienchttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife?

We all want benefit reform, Mr. Cameron, but hiding the truth is not going to achieve it.

The demonisation of the disabled is a chilling sign of the times


A whirlwind of hatred against the disabled

If - by - cuts.

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about cuts. All right, here is how I feel about cuts:

If when you say cuts you mean taking meagre benefits and decent services away from the poorest and most vulnerable people in the land, cuts - a bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the cuts that destroy the NHS, the libraries, the public services and the pay and pensions of public servants, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say cuts you mean taking vast amounts of money away from pointless Trident renewal, away from foolish, bloody and expensive wars, away from wanton boundless privatisation, away from greedy bankers, executives and assorted wreckers, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

(With huge apologies to Judge Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_S._Sweat

State Television, BBC, Ignore complaints.

The BBC have issued the following response to my complaint about their misleading hate propaganda:

"Thanks for contacting us regarding BBC One’s ‘Britain on the Fiddle’ on 3 November.

We have received a wide range of feedback about this programme and feel it’s worth highlighting that considerable correspondence to us has been generated by online lobby activity. Bearing in mind the pressure on resources, the response below strives to address the majority of concerns raised but we apologise in advance if not all of the specific points you have mentioned have been answered in the manner you prefer. Please be assured we’ve raised your concerns with the programme and have done our best to issue a substantive response.

Panorama's ‘Britain on the Fiddle’ looked at a number of issues surrounding public sector fraud, including benefit fraud, the nature and extent of the unlawful subletting of council properties, the issue of identity fraud and the misuse of blue badges. The programme also followed the work of some local authority fraud investigators and by doing so revealed how time consuming and costly inquiries into suspected fraud can be.

The programme made it clear that fraud effectively takes money from all of us, especially those in genuine need. On benefit fraud, including incapacity benefit specifically, the programme stressed that most people on benefits really need them and don't cheat the system.

Far from concentrating on the economically deprived, the programme featured, for example, the case of a man claiming benefits to pay for a council flat whilst owning and running a pub business many miles away - travelling between both destinations in a luxury car.

Furthermore, the film featured fraud investigators tackling the misuse of blue badges. Many people have since written to Panorama to express their gratitude to the programme for highlighting the problem which causes them distress and much inconvenience.

We don’t agree that the cases featured in our film were extreme or were not broadly indicative of instances of benefit fraud. That is not the experience of the local authority fraud investigators who were kind enough to allow us to film their work. Dr Mark Button, from the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies said in the programme:

"I think a lot of organisations are not realistic about the levels of fraud that they face because in any organisation there are large levels of fraud that are undetected. So if they rely on detected levels of fraud they are not getting the picture of the levels of fraud within their organisation."

Emphasising this, it is important to note that just recently the Audit Commission released its most up to date figures for detected fraud against local government which explains that these figures are only the tip of a very large iceberg.

We believe the programme explored a subject which is clearly in the public interest and did so in a fair and impartial manner.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

Stuart Webb

BBC Complaints"

So, using "undetected" fraud as the basis of a theory that there is widespread fraud and then treating it as fact? Do you see a fraud in there somewhere? 'Undetected' means precisely that.

And notice that they did not answer either of the two points that I raised.

"It is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him."

Abraham Lincoln.

My complaint to the BBC about Panorama.

This programme had very serious problems with misleading information and reckless language. These problems are too numerous for me to set out in full, so I will provide two examples:

Firstly, the programme referred to a figure of 'twenty-two billion pounds.' This not only conflated fraud with error but also included fraud across all government departments. This is grossly misleading.

Secondly, the programme implied that disabled people cannot play sports such as golf and claim disability benefits. In fact, many disabled people, such as those with deafness, autism or diabetes, for example, can play golf and other sports.

Along with using inflammatory language such as 'on the fiddle' and 'swindle,' the misleading impressions given by this programme could contribute to the rise in hate crime against disabled people, which the Equality and Human Rights Commission recently reported as already a very serious problem.

Link to programme:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016lty2/Panorama_Britain_on_the_Fiddle/

Atos rebrand - a better look.

From: http://www.dpac.uk.net/2011/08/fightback-against-atos-censorship/
With more logos.

Atos - an Organisation that carries out its Business in a Deeply Shameful Manner.

Many years ago at school there was a small group of us in what was known as a PHU or ‘partially hearing unit.’ This was a specialist classroom for the deaf and hard of hearing kids. During playtimes and lunchtimes we would go out into the ‘general’ areas – the playground, canteen, etc, and mix with the hearing kids.

One day there was a minor incident in which a deaf kid was teased by a hearing kid. During the next assembly, the elderly head-teacher reprimanded this child, pointing out that ‘bullying is bad enough as it is, but bullying a deaf child is disgraceful.’ I agree with this principle set down many years ago by an educated and well-respected man with an old fashioned sense of right and wrong.

Now fast forward 30 years or so and we see that for once David Cameron is right about moral decay – except not in the way he made out. There are few things more immoral than the way Atos bullies disabled people.

It would make for too long a blog post to catalogue the main abuses committed by Atos against disabled people. Unfair and badly-done assessments. False information recorded. Non-accessible testing centres. All this has been well documented and widely reported.

Now this Atos corporate organisation has stooped yet lower (something which might seem impossible) by bringing out lawyers and trying to shut down parts of sites such as Carer Watch where disabled people and their friends and relatives find refuge to talk about Atos’ very bad behaviour.

Disabled people – the people whose opinion really counts – have little doubt that Atos carries out its business in a manner which is deeply shameful. Bullying is bad enough as it is, but bullying disabled people is disgraceful. It’s not enough for them to devastate our lives; they also want to prevent us from talking about the devastation that they cause!

Why Ed Miliband’s Speech was worse than any Tory Offering.

Just under a year ago I joined the Labour Party partly because I was clinging to the desperate hope that Ed was red and that there was still a truly left-wing element within the party. Although since then there have been various assorted things that have dealt mighty blows to that hope, none were more effective than Miliband’s recent speech on responsibility. Now numerous people have already conducted a more decent and thorough post-mortem on this speech than I could hope to do, for example over at HarpyMarx, but the disability angle alone is enough to exercise me.

Miliband opened:

“The issue I want to talk about today can be summed up in a couple of stories.

While out campaigning during the local elections, not for the first time, I met someone who had been on incapacity benefit for a decade.

He hadn’t been able to work since he was injured doing his job.

It was a real injury, and he was obviously a good man who cared for his children.

But I was convinced that there were other jobs he could do.

And that it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him not to work, when other families on his street are working all hours just to get by.”

What makes this more sinister than any Tory product so far churned out by their hate factory is that Miliband is quite clearly ‘going for’ a genuinely disabled person. He tries to sugar-coat it by calling him a ‘a good man who cared for his children,’ but he nevertheless effectively encourages the audience to scrutinise disabled people and second-guess their fitness for work. It is not difficult to see how this can lead to grotesque unfairness – it is a McCarthyist/Orwellian society that promotes such uninformed and unqualified guesswork. Disabled people have enough things to deal with without this nonsense on top.

This over-simplistic guess – ‘[b]ut I was convinced that there were other jobs he could do’ – conveniently ignores the following points:

Even if he was able to do the work Miliband thinks he should be doing, there is the small matter of actually finding this work. How many people can afford to be fussy about the type of jobs they can apply for in the present climate?

Even if he did find this particular work, there is the further small matter of whether the employer will actually take him on. A survey has found that only 8% of employers are willing to take on somebody on Incapacity Benefit.

This is why Miliband’s speech is worse than anything put forward so far by the Tories. He is stirring up hatred against disabled people for things that are not even their fault.