Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
Its latest plans should worry everyone
Ricky
8 Mar 2024
It all started when anti-Zionism was successfully rebranded as anti-Semitism during the Corbyn years. The establishment realised it could rebrand any ideology it doesn’t like as extremism and use the power of the state to crush dissent. It realised it could get away with this by tricking enough of the public into thinking it’s protecting them from imaginary enemies.
By the time the government’s supporters realise they’ve lost their rights too, it will be too late. They might want to protest against the loss of their rights or speak out on social media or even just speak to their local MP and they will find they can no longer do these things. They will find they are being monitored by thought police and could be in legal trouble for being politically active.
The government’s Prevent program is capturing the name, religion, social media name, ethnicity, nationality, main language, immigration/asylum status, and additional family details of people it considers extremists. Even worse, it’s logging details such as mental health and neurodivergence because if you’re depressed or on the autistic spectrum, you’re obviously a terrorist.
We live in a time when only the most sheltered people are not depressed by the shambolic economy and environmental collapse, but that is enough for the government to log details about your mental health as though it’s any of their damn business.
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The government’s Prevent program has been used to target people it disapproves of since 2011, under the guise of tackling extremism. Before now, the criteria wasn’t so broad as to grab the attention of the wider population, but it seems that’s about to change because the government plans to broaden the definition of extremism and set up a new unit to enforce the rules.
Among the things the government is considering extremism is “anti-fascism”.
Okay, class, who can tell me what a person who opposes anti-fascism is? You at the back? What’s that you say? A moderate? Don’t be silly! This is a binary! Yes, you there. That’s right! A fascist!
If you are not anti-fascist, you are by definition a fascist. There is no middle-ground, just like there is no middle-ground between racism and anti-racism or murder and anti-murder. Some things have no in-between and this is why anti-fascists need to be stopped.
The British government is a fascist government. This is undeniable when you look at the non-stop attacks on our human rights since the day the establishment realised the internet was loosening its grip on power and making people like Jeremy Corbyn possible.
Some of us warned you where this was heading. We’ve called it right every step of the way so you’d better pay attention because if we’re right about what’s coming next, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
The government is not just rebranding “anti-fascism” as extremism, it’s rebranding “socialism” as extremism! Do you think it would be nice to have a society where the means of production was owned by the public and democratically controlled, instead of being owned a handful of billionaires? Do you support things like trade unions and an end to NHS privatisation? Do you want to see a society where no one is allowed to become hungry or homeless? Guess what? You’re a socialist, even if you don’t realise it. Most people are socialists, even many of the people who’ve been tricked into hating socialism. Polling data shows, again and again, that when you ask people if they like socialist ideas (without mentioning the word socialism), they answer yes about 2/3 of the time.
Socialist views are basic human values and they have to be mischaracterised by capitalists to make people turn against socialism.
If you express socialist views publicly, the government has defined that as a “warning sign” of extremism because your ideology is based on “grievance narratives” such as “school children should not go hungry” and “maybe we shouldn’t worsen this climate crisis thing”. Of course, the politicians who blame refugees for their failings don’t have any grievance narratives.
Worryingly, the government wants to focus on teachers and youth workers to ensure they don’t have socialist views because heaven forbid, the children might hear about alternatives to bloodsucking corporatism.
Thankfully, there is a chink in the government’s armour. In a sign they haven’t thought this through, they decided anti-abortion is another form of extremism. This means Jacob Rees-Mogg could be in trouble for his religious view that is so deeply held, he profits from the sale of abortion pills. Hopefully, Jacob’s hypocrisy will be enough to let him of the hook with the thought police.
The government is targeting animal rights and environmental activists and even talking about banning politicians from meeting with them. In other words, people who campaign about key moral issues will no longer be allowed to engage politically and will have their ability to protest restricted. Such groups could have their funding cut off and their members could be banned from speaking at universities. In case you missed it, cancel culture is good now.
Is all this what a government would do when it wanted to crack down on extremism? Or is it the type of thing a government would do when it wanted to silence its critics? I think we all know the answer.
Disturbingly, the government review of Prevent that led to these plans was carried out by someone with far-right and anti-Muslim views. No wonder the plans would class pro-Palestinian groups as extremists, including The Muslim Council of Britain and anyone who doesn’t like seeing children’s legs being blown off to make people in Tel Aviv feel safe.
The government’s data suggests 70% of extremism in Britain comes from “Islamism” and the other 30% comes from the “extreme far-right”, yet much of its focus is on people with left-wing views and peaceful methods. It counts the adoption of left-wing views as “radicalisation”, which is another way of saying the only acceptable views are conservative views.
I suspect Sir Keir Starmer would go just as far as the Tories, given he matches them on literally every other policy. In a recent interview, a Labour MP was unable to identify a single area where Labour differed from the Tories. In case you didn’t notice, our democracy isn’t a real democracy. All those democratic rights can be restricted whenever the establishment needs to ensure the public are no threat to the establishment.
If people don’t wake up to what’s going on, by the 2030s we are going to be living in a mass surveillance state powered by facial recognition, AI, digital currency and digital IDs that will make change almost impossible. The technology exists to make dissent a thing of the past. Do you really think the people who class everyone they disagree with as “extremists” wouldn’t use it?
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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