LONDON LETTER: Things not always what they seem

A SURE-FIRE guide to assessing individuals and organisations is to look at what they call themselves and then conclude the exact opposite.

For example, Liberal Democrats here in the UK are not very liberal (you’re a bigot if you disagree with them), nor democratic (they don’t accept the majority Brexit vote).

The same is true with ‘male Hollywood feminists’.

If the gazillions of actresses now coming out of the Harvey Weinstein woodwork are to be believed, the men most ‘in touch’ with their feminine side are the most prolific abusers.

There’s even a new term for them: male feminist pigs.

Similarly, if someone calls themselves ‘anti-fascist’ – or Antifa in hipster argot – you can bet good money on the assumption that they are not-so-anti. Indeed, the Antifa movement sweeping American universities at the moment, where any conservative gets lynched if they have the temerity to put foot on campus, is using classic fascist tactics.

Antifa’s intellectual (I use the word loosely) guru is an America history professor called Mark Bray.

To give him his due, his words are pretty seductive at times.

See how he compares the rise of Hitler with permitting free speech: ‘We don’t look back at the Weimar Republic (the then German government) and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights,’ he says.

‘We lookback and say, why didn’t they do something?’ I’m a big fan of free speech and I must confess that worried me. I thought maybe Antifa had a point.

Until I did a few ‘Nazi hate speech’ searches on the internet. Once I had waded through all the ‘fascist’ slurs against conservatives in general and Trump in particular, I found that the Weimar Republic actually did ‘do something’. In fact, they did a helluva lot to try and stop Hitler.

That’s not me saying that, as unlike Professor Bray I’m no academic. But Alan Borovoy, a former Canadian civil libertarian, was and this is what he said. ‘Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law today.

Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour.

During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti- Semitic speech.’ Consider that for a moment: More than 200 hate-speech trials were brought against Hitler’s thugs possibly more than any other political organisation in history.

Big guns

Not only that, as Borovoy said, the Weimar authorities went after the Nazis ‘with vigour’. And it wasn’t just low-hanging fruit – the 1920s equivalent of racists tweets or drunk Facebook posts. They went for the big guns.

Both Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and the virulently anti-Semitic writer Theodor Fritsch were prosecuted, while Julius Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer, the Nazi mouthpiece, was

twice jailed for hate speech.

They even went after Hitler. In 1925, the state of Bavaria banned him from holding public rallies. The Nazis responded by distributing a drawing of Hitler with his mouth gagged and the caption, ‘Of 2 000-million people in the world, one alone is forbidden to speak in Germany’.

Fat lot of good that did. In other words, when there was the strongest argument ever for banning free

speech, it failed dismally.

Yet the Antifa hipsters today, so eager to micromanage our lives, are doing everything possible to stifle opposing views.

Unless we ban opinions we don’t like while simultaneously trashing opponents, we will get another Hitler. Or at least according to their bizarre logic.

History shows otherwise. Starkly so.

The ultimate irony is that when Hitler did take power, he barely had to pass new laws. All he did was keep the ‘hate-speech’ regulations intact and aim them squarely at his enemies.

Using legislation enacted by the Weimar Republic, he banned freedom of the press, freedom of

speech and freedom of association.

It’s a lesson learned by other despots. When Robert Mugabe took power from the Rhodesians

in 1980, he didn’t repeal any of Ian Smith’s terrorism laws. Instead, he used them to justify massacres against the Ndebele tribe.

He called it Gukurahundi. It’s taken 37 long years to bring him down.

So as I say, Antifa may be many things. But it is not anti-fascist.