"Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" in Brexistential Breakdowns

There’d been a rumour going round that Thomas Mair, the man who shot and stabbed MP Jo Cox to death on Thursday, had shouted “Britain first” or “put Britain first” as he’d attacked her; if it’s not obvious enough here’s a handy primer on who Britain First are for those who don’t know. I couldn’t find anything to properly confirm it, and it wasn’t addressed in any official capacity by the police, so I simply hoped it wasn’t true, as it raised some serious and fucking terrifying worries that I didn’t really want to deal with.

Thomas Mair appeared in court today, to be formally charged with the murder of Jo Cox. It’s not a trial proper, rather it’s a pre-trial process that all court cases go through, it’s usually a pretty short event (usually minutes long) wherein the charges are laid out and the suspect simply confirms that they are who they are. When asked his name, Thomas Mair replied “my name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. So I’m pretty ready and willing to accept that he probably shouted “Britain first” as he killed her because, let’s be honest, after that response there’s no fucking ambiguity left. That is if the fucking Southern Poverty Law Center having his name on a list of subscribers to a white nationalist organisation wasn’t enough evidence that he might be of the fascist persuasion, so I might as well stop wondering if it really is him on that photo of a Britain First protest because it’s gonna be him, isn’t it? Fuck it, of course it’s him.

Those serious and fucking terrifying worries that I didn’t want to deal with? Yeah, I’m gonna have to deal with them, they’re real and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. I have to face the fact that I live in a country where a constant stream of right-wing narrative has so twisted the national perception that a man shouting far-right slogans can assassinate an elected MP outside a public library, and the media that’s inspired this will now spin the story around his mental health and use the phrases “lone wolf” and “angry loner” in fucking denial of the climate of fear and paranoia that they’ve created and whipped up into a foaming-mad fervour for the sake of shifting a few extra papers.

And that’s happening in my country! That utterly fucking terrifies me: we fought in a fucking world war to stop exactly this, there are even a few people who fought in that war still alive, how the fuck is this even a thing when World War II is still within living memory?

Because of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Sun, and the platforms they give to people like Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins, the powerful stranglehold they have on the direction of national discourse and the poisonous effect they have on our social attitudes towards others. The majority of our media being owned by just three men has enabled this, allowed this climate and culture of hatred and nationalism to germinate, ferment and grow, as the last generation to sacrifice everything in the fight to stop it are now, finally, almost all dead. No hyperbole here, the support of a newspaper can win you an election in this country, these three men have such immense power over the nation it’s fucking obscene. And they publish and promote ideas and beliefs that are toxic to our national interest, anathema to our social and cultural norms, and get to dictate how we approach and respond to events on both domestic and international stages with impunity thanks to their heavy bankrolling and back-scratching/stabbing of the upper classes and political elites. Press regulation in this country is a fucking joke and the BBC gets an absolute kicking on a regular basis because it’s the only media outlet that legally has to be impartial in its reporting, and even they can kow-tow to the government to an almost grovelling degree at times, given how the government holds the purse strings for Auntie.

As an example of how they lie and twist the narrative, the day before Jo Cox was assassinated, the Sun ran with this:

This was the day after the FTSE 100 (the share index of the 100 biggest companies in the UK) fell to a three-month low in the wake of opinion polls showing increasing support for Leave. In the wake of the assassination of Jo Cox - and yes I’m going to keep using that phrase, because this was a murder for political reasons and therefore a fucking assassination no matter how hard the “angry loner wolf with mental issues” narrative is spun - both Leave and Remain suspended their campaigns out of respect and the fucking markets went up again in response.

On the very same day that Jo Cox was assassinated, this was the front page of the Daily Mail:

Except that’s not what they say in the actual video at all.

They very clearly say they’re from Iraq and Kuwait. The day after Jo Cox was assassinated the Mail published a correction to the story at the bottom of page two, and tried to blame the source of the story instead of admitting they outright lied and didn’t even go to the effort of watching the fucking video they were reporting on.

On the very same day Jo Cox was assassinated, UKIP unveiled this campaign image:

Which not only actually shows refugees moving between Croatia and Slovenia, but also happens to bear a striking resemblance to actual Nazi propaganda footage:

And their fucking response is to call Godwin’s Law whilst the poster itself ends up being reported to the police.

These are not rare incidents, these go back just three days from today, this sort of thing isn’t even “disturbingly common”, it’s the fucking norm in the UK to have media and discourse like this. Last week, market research group Ipsos MORI announced that their latest research showed the British public were seriously fucking wrong about almost everything to do with the EU referendum, something that really shouldn’t come as any surprise given how utterly fucking warped beyond reality the surrounding discourse has been, and the historical precedence for, well, being seriously fucking wrong about most things in general.

And that’s the problem, because an event like the assassination of Jo Cox does not come out of nowhere, something engenders that feeling, that motivation: something feeds that feeling of being in a country under attack from swarms of migrants bringing us ruin, that delusion that our country is under constant threat, that desire to take direct action against a group or a person that represents whatever “them” is coming to fuck your country up.

That something is on the front pages of the majority of the newspapers daily, it’s on the news on the TV and on the radio, it’s on talk shows, it’s trending and being shared and commented on online, because those newspapers print fearmongering bullshit with impunity, ideologues will be interviewed because whatever lies they peddle will generate an audience and “debate” and they may even be given their own regular slot on talk radio, and a far right group can rise to prominence on social media through insidiously effective marketing and gratuitous use of patriotic imagery because the right wording can get you millions of shares and views and spread your message further and faster than you ever could.

To be clear, Thomas Mair’s hateful beliefs, the ones that drove him to assassinate Jo Cox, did not come from nowhere. They were fostered by the cultural and political climate we have here, a climate that has been deliberately cultivated by more powerful people than we, and we are about to see the machinery these people use twist the narrative again, push it towards “lone wolf” territory, shift the blame onto mental health issues, isolate an angle to approach the incident from - one that doesn’t require any indication of culpability on their part - and repeat that lie until it becomes the truth, because that’s what they do. The truth is what they want it to be, the story told will be the story they choose, and the lies they spread will fuck this country up for generations to come as their rhetoric is gradually pushed further and further right in response to the voices that they choose to give volume to.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that this guy was white, so he won’t be called “a terrorist” (even though he is), his actions won’t be referred to as “terrorism” (even though they are), whereas if he were an Asian guy you can bet your left bollock the first thing we’d know was that this was a Muslim terrorist atrocity. I’m also not mentioning that him being painted as a mentally-ill loner actually harms and demonises mentally ill people because you’re all adults and already knew that, nor am I even touching with a fucking bargepole the fact that it took mere hours for people to start referring to this as a “false flag” (because honestly, what the everloving shit is wrong with you people?)

But it fucking terrifies me that I live in a place where far-right beliefs and opinions are that fucking close to the mainstream.

I cannot cope with this.

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Last updated June 27, 2016