There’s an old cliché about those who don’t learn from history – they are destined to repeat it. This always assumes that they would not want to repeat it. Increasingly I am inclined toward the idea that they do want to repeat it.
I’ve been somewhat distracted this past week, so am a bit late to the party on the Ciggy Busters debacle. For those of you who have not been paying attention, Ciggy Busters is the brainchild of media artist in residence at the Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive school, Margherita Gramegna. Sixth formers are filming themselves snatching cigarettes from smokers while shouting “ciggy busters” and then running away. Now, if this was a staged event with willing participants, apart from being on poor taste, there would be nothing wrong with it. However, they strayed from using willing participants to attacking real passers-by.
As others have noted along the way when discussing this, there is a real risk of someone lashing out and people getting hurt – not all of them undeserving.
However, I don’t particularly want to rake over what’s already been said. It’s just that following my musing on the willingness of the British people to embrace their own enslavement, we are seeing another manifestation of Orwell’s nightmare scenario unravelling before our eyes. Those of us who are able to recall the middle years of the Twentieth Century – either directly or via our parents – will be all too aware of the turmoil caused and the suffering endured as a consequence of the totalitarianism that spread across Europe. Whether Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR, common themes endured. The enemy without and within was one. There always needs to be an enemy. As Orwell put it, we have always been at war with Eastasia – if not them, then Eurasia. The enemy can be anyone; who, is of little consequence. Hitler chose the Jews. These days, we have smokers, drinkers, fat people, take your pick. The techniques are the same; demonise, denormalise, turn them into less than human, erode the basic human decency that empathises with others.
There is little difference in behaviour between what happened in Chatham High street last month and what happened in Berlin in November 1938. Okay, less widely orchestrated and less violent, perhaps, but the principle is the same. A group of people physically assaulted law abiding citizens because they were outside the control group. If you smoke, you are fair game to these zealots and they can behave as they please, because as everyone knows, smoking is bad for you and these days cigarette packets tell you it is bad for those around you as well (with not a shred of supporting evidence offered) – so assaulting a smoker and taking away legally purchased smoking materials isn’t assault and theft at all, it’s a public service. It’s “fun”, it’s a media project. Kristallnacht, it isn’t. Maybe not, precisely, it is however but a short step away.
The children doing this, know no better. Well, we like to kid ourselves that they are just children and are being manipulated by the responsible[sic] adults. Yet I recall when I was that age. I knew full well what had happened in Nazi Germany and the USSR. I knew because adults made damned sure I knew. They wanted me to be aware of and learn from the past. They wanted me to understand what it was that my grandparents’ generation went to war for, to defeat and keep from these shores. I had also read Nineteen Eighty Four and been chilled to read of the children encouraged by the state to betray their parents. That, I believed in the naïve nineteen seventies, could never happen here. Not in Blighty.
When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
Adolf Hitler
He was right, wasn’t he?
Here we are seventy years on from the sacrifice of the few and our children are being indoctrinated using the same insidious techniques of our erstwhile enemies. And, as Anna Raccoon reminds us, it isn’t just the indoctrination of the children that draws us closer to the cesspit of totalitarianism. Local councils and their officials delight in behaviour that would have made the Standartenführers proud. The Third Reich may not have lasted a thousand years, but its spirit lives on in Sandwell, West Midlands and my old stamping ground of the Medway towns. It almost makes me ashamed to be a Man of Kent.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is apparent that the blood-letting and losses of the preceding century have been forgotten and the consequent lessons failed to be learned.
As all these ‘Diversity’ and ‘activist’ non-job types take their wages from the local council, perhaps when the money runs out so will their non-jobs. Problem solved.
Failing that, some well aimed civil suits should do the trick.
Good post Longrider. Myself, l disagree that there is nothing wrong with staging an event like Ciggie Busters with willing participants. lt was done in public where they themselves were not willing participants … it was inflicted on them. This can be seen on the ‘still’ of the youtube post.
One wonders if a film called Burka Busters would have so easily been allowed to be made by the authorities? Since France has banned the burka, one could use the same reasoning as the ciggie film … running up screaming Burka Busters to a female wearing a burka and ripping it off.
Also it may have not been Kristallnacht 1938 but Hitlers Youth began in 1922. Who knows what Hundred of Hoo and it’s like can achieve in 16 years?
Added you to my bloglist 🙂
“By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is apparent that the blood-letting and losses of the preceding century have been forgotten and the consequent lessons failed to be learned.”
I would say that the losses and the blood-letting have not been forgotten, and lessons have been, if not learned, instilled or inculcated into the national psyche. The problem is that this has not educated us, but rather it has created a myth, or has Peter Hitchens has it, a cult of Churchill, and you can see it every time the England side plays Germany and every time our political leaders want to send our troops to some fly-blown wasteland to ‘defend democracy’.
I had also read Nineteen Eighty Four and been chilled to read of the children encouraged by the state to betray their parents.
I also read that and yet at the time we were reading and discussing it and agreeing that it was fundamentally wrong. I was sitting not 3 desks away from a child who would later become a Nu-Arbiet Government minister (now fortunatley kicked out as an MP as well as a minister)
There were no signs at that age, I still wonder when the brainwashing took place.
SH – I made the distinction between willing participants and members of the public because, much as I might disapprove of the content, with willing participants, the filming was no different to any other piece of drama being filmed and bystanders seeing a snippet out of context would be unable to make a judgement on content. And, providing no harm was done and no laws broken, there’s not much that can be done. We would merely confine ourselves to criticising the indoctrination.
TT – your point about the cult of Churchill reminds me of the film Idiocracy. Important events remain in the cultural memory but the significance and context has long been forgotten. People recall Churchill and beating Germany, which is why the cretins wheel it out at football matches, but forget what it was we were fighting against and why.
PC – even people of our generation fall for it. They think that because they are doing it for the public good or to protect us from terrorists, it suddenly becomes okay. They cannot see the parallels – or don’t want to. Besides, the levers of power have a poison all of their own. You only have to listen to Alan Johnson patronising us with the line that we should have the liberty not to be blown up by a terrorist.
I’m not sure that I’ve seen any evidence that they did inflict ‘Ciggy Busting’ on innocent bystanders….. could someone show me where they did?
Otherwise this is all a bit Daily Prole isn’t it?
This quote from the organiser in This is Kent:
So, yes, definitely tried out on bystanders.
“there is a real risk of someone lashing out and people getting hurt.”
And the sooner the better I say.
But then again I am one of those unbelievers who commit the thought crime that naughty children should be given a thick ear.
“Otherwise this is all a bit Daily Prole isn’t it?”
Missing the whole point of the post and yet demonstrating it?
—-
Longrider,
I don’t want to come over as dismissing the sacrifice that so many made for this country, including those in my own family, but I think we, as a nation, need to look more critically at the two world wars. As far as I can see, the First World War was an unmitigated tragedy, which wiped out the best part of a generation of men, as well as destroying what was left of the liberal era, insofar as there ever was a liberal era. The Second World War, which is held up whenever we want to reassure ourselves that we did the right thing was a consequence of the first war and the settlement that ensued, and largely this ‘just war’ theory is based on things we only knew after the war was ended.
I mentioned Hitchens, because he was recently in protracted dispute over what he sees as the blunder of declaring war on Germany due to the invasion of Poland, and the game of ‘call my bluff’ that caused it. The points he makes are very interesting and strike me as valid, including that Hitler didn’t believe Britain’s guarantee to Poland would be honoured, so he ignored it, ergo it didn’t serve the purpose it was supposed to. The argument went on for quite some time (on his blog), illustrating, if nothing else, how touchy people still are about it. (btw he doesn’t argue we shouldn’t have gone to war at all, only that to do it when we did was a mistake, cumulating in Dunkirk, that great triumph, or so I’ve heard.)
No one’s defending the nazis, but we did some terrible things too (I’m thinking of the total destruction of certain cities). To some people, saying this is like urinating on a war memorial, which is not my intention.
I hope you see the point I’m driving at..
TT – I do see your point. It’s arguable that Versailles was a prime example of my point about the failure to learn.
Fascinating though Hitchens’ point is – and it would make a whole discussion on its own, frankly – we were in a position by the end of the twentieth century to have rid Europe of two particularly nasty ideologies that behaved in the same way as we are now seeing in Chatham and Sandwell. Which was really all I was saying – same old, same old and we ignore it at our peril.
“People were watching and following us and at the end we tried with some other people and they were very happy”
Given the ability of the press to misconstrue events I’m not overly convinced they were unwilling bystanders. They simply may have wanted to ‘be in the film’.
Given that Ms Gramegna hasn’t seen fit to contradict that quote, we have to take it at face value, that they did involve members of the public. Whether they subsequently decided to go along with it willingly or not is neither here nor there. They should never have been placed in that position in the first instance.
Longrider, while you have a valid point about coercion and complacency, this local newspaper article does not seem to be a particularly sensible platform from which to launch it. Too vague and too insubstantial.
Er, I was using two sources – This is Kent and Kent Online. It is perfectly clear that after using plants initially, they moved onto members of the public. Ms Gramegna was quoted separately in both sources confirming this. She has not subsequently contradicted the quotes. Therefore, I’d say that it is far from insubstantial. Indeed, it’s pretty conclusive.
People do not always convey their unwillingness to participate as peer pressure comes into play. If they thought that the right thing to do was go along with it, many people will do just that even if they are upset about it. They don’t like to make a fuss.
You are talking about smokers being filmed by school children? Sure, they might be ‘unwilling’ to ‘convey’ their ‘willingness to participate’ – but I’m guessing that is not the case, which is as a good as your guess that a story the only ‘evidence’ you have for is from what appears to be two related websites.
Far from guessing, I’m following the evidence trail. And I’m not sure why you think they two sites are related. One is part of the Kent Messenger Group and the other is part of the Northcliffe Media Group. I’m not aware of any links between the two.
Margherita Gramegna is a media professional who has exhibited work at the Cannes Film Festival. We can be reasonably sure that she is used to dealing with the media and is aware of the pitfalls inherent in speaking to journalists, so will, therefore, be careful in what she says. She has not rescinded any of her comments; so again, I’m inclined to believe that she meant what she said. The two sources offer different quotations saying pretty much the same thing. This suggests that she gave more than one interview to at least two journalists. One of the pieces looks pretty much like a press release while the other at least offers some quotes that are negative. On balance, though, both pieces are positive and do not draw negative attention to Margherita Gramegna’s stated intention of using members of the public.
What is interesting is the reaction of the organisers to the hostile reception. Interesting because anti-smokers are not known for backing down and in this case, the hostile reaction was, frankly, small beer – around half a dozen bloggers leaving negative comments on websites and emailing the school, police and organisers. Yet the cameraman distanced himself from the project, withdrew the video and altered the comments on his profile. Why? If it only contained footage of willing volunteers, why not just say that and stick to his guns? That’s what I would have done.
Rachel Noxon withdrew behind a password protected site. Again, if she was so sure that this was nothing more than a jolly caper, why run away from it? Why not defend what they did?
The police have stated that they were told that only volunteers would e used. I’m inclined to believe them, given the sheer stupidity of the alternative.
While subsequent events may be circumstantial, when combined with Margherita Gramegna’s quotes in the media, they paint a clear picture of events. Those being:
a) That whatever was originally planned and agreed with the police, by the time filming took place there was a plan to use members of the public.
b) This happened and the footage was withdrawn because it was incriminating.
c) The organizers and supporters realised in the face of a hostile reaction that they had not only committed a criminal offence, but that the cat was well out of the bag.
Sure, you can argue that I’m speculating incorrectly and you may be right. The evidence, however, says otherwise and until I see some contrary evidence, I’m going where it leads me.
All of that said, I would still have been critical regarding indoctrination, but would have taken a different tack.
Ah huh, such a vitriolic response for those who are so wrapped up in themselves. Open your mind, get out the front door and live a little. These are young people who have yet to form coherent arguments, give them a break. With the freedom of speech we are allowed in this country who knows what they may achieve in the future. This is not 1930 -45 no blackshirts around now. Stop reading the Daily Mail and think for yourself. One who is so wrapped up in oneself makes a very small parcel. I am a self confessed fascist and I certainly do not find this behaviour in any way ‘outrageous’. But then I guess I would? That’s an expert talking, get off the band wagon. Methinks you are amateurs. Go out and fight a real war.
Nice little straw man there. Ever thought of applying for a CAP subsidy?