Harry’s Place, Free Republic for Brits
Guest-posting at Lenin’s Tomb, Justin Horton examines Harry’s Place, the British version of Free Republic, and finds it has very similar rabid wingnut tendencies, although it’s titularly a Labour blog:
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HP’s writers are, briefly, McCarthyites. Their practice and purpose is to support the Iraq War, Israel, and general warmongering, by throwing mud at their opponents: by slandering those who oppose them as terrorists and anti-Semites. Their squalid means of achieving this squalid goal, I’d narrow down to two: a game called We Are Fighting Terrorists, Therefore You Are One and a slightly different one called Links.
In Links, or Two Degrees of Separation, you say this: because X is connected with Y who is connected with Z – who is apparently an anti-Semite – therefore X is an anti-Semite too. It is an easy game, because nearly everybody is connected with nearly everybody else, especially in a broad movement (the movement against the war being, as it goes, pretty broad, encompassing as it does most of the population of the world). Curiously, though, it is never played with the war’s proponents: we do not say, for instance, “Tony Blair is best mates with George Bush whose best mate was Ken Lay who was a prodigious crook”. Nor do we go via Lord Levy, or via Tessa Jowell’s husband, or straight to Silvio Berlusconi.
You Are A Terrorist bids us trace a similar connection: because some of the people fighting the US in Iraq are terrorists, you are one with them. (It has a corollary, roughly stated “because the enemy are bad, that means that we are good”: it is the same Certificate of Perpetual Immunity that Israel is awarded by its admirers and which is currently being used to justify the slaughter of civilians in Beirut.) It is, quite simply, traitor-hunting. It sniffs out and identifies fifth columnists, complicit with the enemy and acting on the enemy’s behalf. And this is, pretty much, what Harry’s Place is there to do. It smears the opponents of the war. To read, takes a strong stomach: to agree, takes an absent sense of right and wrong. Its arguments could not be more ad hominem: except that the objects of their attack are imaginary, devils of their own devise.
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But nobody is listening. Which is, I understand – I finally understand – the whole reason why they have such a hysterical tone. What tone do you adopt when people believe you and your cause appears to be prevailing? Dismissive, perhaps. Triumphant. Perhaps most common, smug. But this sort of hysteria? It’s true, it can belong to triumph, or at least to the temporary triumph of the witch-hunt, the search for traitors, Joe McCarthy’s America, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Torquemada’s Spain. But this is not the hysteria of those who persecute the Unbelievers. This is the hysteria of the Unbelieved.
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A bit overwrought, perhaps, but he makes a valid point. The rump of Blair’s supporters are growing increasingly shrill as the public’s credulity drops away with each new horror.
What I think Justin underestimates though is the actual, physical danger these people could conceivably pose to those they consider ‘traitors’. They aren’t on the political fringe – these are the core supporters of a government that doesn’t think twice about suppressing dissent, that has already colluded in rendition and torture and that wants to lock people up indefinitely without charge or trial, for trumped up crimes like the ‘glorification of terrorism.
The New York Times had a hoax anthrax attack from people who called the paper traitorous, and HP’s writers and commenters are those attackers’ spiritual kin. But it’s unlikely that something similar’d happen to a UK journalist or publication, in my opinion. Too crude. Labourites are a little more subtle than that, though there are some in Labour Friends of Israel that can be particularly vicious when it comes to those they consider traitors to the zionist cause.
Actual physical violence is unlikely, as I said, but if it does occur it’s much more likely to happen by proxy – one phone call could be all it would take to turn someone’s life into a Kafkaesque hell or even end it, and the putative HPer would have clean hands.
Remember Forest Gate and Stockwell?
