I decided last week to change how I operate on Steemit. As much as I want to make some money on here, my attempts to appeal to a large audience have, by and large, not been successful. It could be that the combination of my newbie status and the huge increase in membership on here means that I just need to be patient, but I have never been any good at that, so I have decided to get involved in threads that really interest me and see what happens. It might be a mistake, but I must do what feels right to me. So, I have been getting involved in political threads.
It’s not easy. The problem with politics is that it evokes strong passionate opinions, and also that many people with such opinions don’t like to be challenged. And people often aren’t very good at debating in a structured, civilised manner. The personal insults have abounded. Not from me though. I may not be perfect, and I may even be wrong with my political outlook, but I try very hard not to descend to this level. I have, in the past, and I have always regretted it.
I should say that I have had two enjoyable conversations with two posters about guns (ignoring my own advice to avoid the topic!) and the notion of equality. We did not agree, but the conversations were constructive and civil, and left me much to ponder. This is how it should be, and how it can be if the people having the exchange are decent and lack insecurity.
I have been having a long, drawn out, increasingly petty and unpleasant conversation with a poster who wants to “reclaim London”. What that actually means is that he wants to force out the vast majority of foreigners who have legally settled in London. He says that he wants to find a political way of doing this, but that appears to entail installing a new, hard right Prime Minister in place of the current one, and then “incentivising” foreigners to return to their homelands. He hasn’t expanded on that, so I don’t know what he really means; presumably he wants to pay them off. I can’t see this working on so many different levels.
I don’t think he does, either, which is why the post that provoked our snippy exchange was a You Tube video, encouraging white Londoners to take up arms against the foreign “threat”. It is fascist propaganda, pretending not to be.
He himself has admitted, quite openly, that if the democratic process he suggests trying fails, that the only solution is “violence”. He justifies this by stating that the British way of life is under attack from these foreigners. He even likens it to fighting Hitler, in a sentence that made my irony meter explode.
I find this more appalling that I think I can express.
I should state that as much as I find this solution abhorrent, that I wouldn’t advocate the censoring of such views. Legally, he is on dodgy ground, as it *could* be argued that in encouraging white Londoners to take up arms against foreign people legally living in the UK, that he is inciting racial hatred. I am not a legal expert, though, so I cannot be very certain if a law is being broken here. However, if he is happy to stand up and be counted (albeit under a pseudonym), then let him. If there are consequences to deal with for espousing such views (I am not so sure there are), then he can deal with them.
In various conversations I have had over the weekend, it appears that a lot of people on the right believe that mass immigration is a construct of a liberal/globalist elite. People like philanthropist George Soros, who use their money to fund political causes that they support. I am doing some digging in all this. I start from a position that struggles to accept that someone would use their billions to abuse the political system to encourage mass immigration. Why would they want this? What is in it for them? How could they infiltrate, for example, the British political process and wield this incredible power? It doesn’t ring true to me, and from what I have seen at this early stage, there is next to no evidence to back up such a claim.
There is plenty of insinuation and plenty of rumours, but very little concrete proof. It sounds like conspiracy theory bullshit to me, but I will keep investigating and reading around. To be frank, it seems to me that it is just as likely that ultra-rich people with a right-wing outlook will use their funds to try and exact changes that they want to see, which might explain why the richest eight people in the World have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion.
For the record, I do think that the mass immigration that has seen the demographics of London shift so dramatically could be a mistake. I have a little sympathy for someone who has watched on, helplessly, as the social landscape of the city they grew up in has changed so significantly. I think that such a concern is not unreasonable, and nor does it necessarily follow that someone like this is by definition racist.
They are often called this though, especially by a certain type of liberal/left-winger who throws in the term with gay abandon in an attempt to control the narrative, and to demean and insult people with a perfectly valid worry. And it is this particular type of left-winger that has help feed the beast that has given rise to Brexit and Donald Trump, which is hugely ironic, and very sad.
These are politically charged times. And I am sorry if this makes me sound like a bleeding-heart, snowflake (sigh), SJW (double sigh) liberal, but we are all people. We all have hopes and dreams. We all want to be happy. We are all fallible. And not every immigrant will be decent and a pillar of the community. Some will not be nice people. The majority though, will be like most of us; trying to find a place in life, and trying to find happiness. I am sick of people who think that their patriotism makes it okay to look at someone who is different to them with suspicion and hatred.
Patriotism should not involve hate. Should it?