Dear David Blunkett,
I was surprised and disturbed by your somewhat revisionist historical analysis. In case you’ve forgotten the speech you gave, these is the alarming sentiments you articulated:
“The Lib Dems in Glasgow debated this and decided they were against automatic protection unless people chose to over-ride it, in terms of pornography on the internet and the protection of children. I think they were wrong.
“I think we have a job in this country, in a civilised, free, open democracy, to protect ourselves from the most bestial activities and from dangers that would undermine a civilised nation.
“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin came as near as dammit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a disintegration of what you might call any kind of social order.
“People fed on that – they fed people’s fears of it. They encouraged their paranoia. They developed hate about people who had differences, who were minorities.
“There always has had to be some balance, in terms of the freedom of what we want to do, for ourselves and the mutual respect and the duty we owe to each other in a collective society. I think getting it right is the strength of a democracy.”
See, the thing is, David, I’m not convinced that Weimar was the worst era in modern German history. It was a pretty decent time to be queer, really; we were accepted. It also wasn’t too bad to be a woman: our sexual agency was accepted and abortion was actually legalised in some cases, almost a century ago! The music was cool: they embraced music like jazz. It was progressive, in short, and marginalised people were treated more like humans than the little bit of history that came later.
That little bit of history that came later, David, was Nazi Germany, the spectre you raise as a consequence of not treating marginalised people like shit. Those who were accepted in the Sodom and Gomorrah times suffered heavily under Nazi Germany. The queers were forced to wear pink triangles and herded into camps, murdered in droves by the state. The women were treated as breeding machines, nothing more than a means of reproduction. The rich art and culture made by people who were not white, once embraced, was now illegal, degenerate. It was a period of history which sucked absolutely enormously for basically everyone who was not a straight, cis, able-bodied white man.
For some reason, you think this was the responsibility of exactly the people who suffered the most. You know who else thought that? Hitler.
I am writing to you, David, to express concern because I am fairly sure that you have ripped a hole in the space-time continuum by twisting Godwin’s Law so much. I presume you’re decrying Nazism and saying it’s bad, while simultaneously using some rhetoric with a distinctly fascist flavour. Of course I’ll help out if some of the Sleeping Ones awaken and pass through the portal you have opened, but I’m a little annoyed that I have to, to be perfectly honest.
On the other hand, David, I’m grateful. What could I possibly be grateful for, when you are essentially blaming millions for their own genocide?
I am grateful, David, that you have laid bare the inherent authoritarianism in the moralistic attitude towards banning porn. I am relieved to see that you have managed to point out that ultimately this isn’t about porn itself, but it is far wider, and far more chilling. It is rooted in a hatred of all that is not straight, a rejection of sexual freedom for women. It reflects a disgust at the queer. You have demonstrated this with your words far more clearly than all of the commentary that comes from the marginalised.
So fuck you, and all who share your views. You frighten and sicken me, as do all who agree with you.
No love,
Stavvers
EDIT 02/10/13: I made Blunkett feel sad.
Another angry woman 
*applause* My first thought when I read his utterances was “Cover the piano legs mother there’s deviants being lined up against the wall”.
Maybe I’m paranoid – I often am, & to some extent this explains though doesn’t excuse my kneejerk reaction against being criticised sometimes – but I’m seeing a lot of similarities between Labour and the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in the run-up to their change of brand to the NSDAP. The social conservatism, the Blairite corporatism now turning to courting the small businesses. I haven’t heard any real opposition from them to Hollobone’s RAD-like civil National Service, and they’re talking constantly about “One Nation” (“Ein Reich”?). They seem determined to move away from trade unionism & treat the unions as an irrelevance. They follow the Daily Mail line rather than trying to educate the working class about socialism. The parallels are not exact, but it’s making the hairs on my scalp start to rise.
Absolutely!
Frankly I think Blunkett has made quite a lot of large logical leaps in that speech. How is pornography unicivilised? That’s not been demonstrated anywhere. For that matter, how are we defining “civilised, free, open democracy”? Because Blunkett’s definition does not match mine – whereby individuals have the freedom to act for their own pleasure provided nobody is harmed or disrupted.
And he seems to imply that liberal social attitudes directly led to reactive fascism and that thus it always will do – that society is predictable and that if we become too liberal then there will inevitably be backlash, fear and hate and ultimately genocide. Or am I misreading this? It’s very confusing. Is there some text you didn’t quote in the middle there?
Though perhaps for the sake of accuracy you should add “Christian” to “It was a period of history which sucked absolutely enormously for basically everyone who was not a straight, cis, able-bodied white man.”
Oh – almost forgot: their LOVE of creating reams of legislation & bureaucracy, and now they’re talking about making it a specific criminal offence to insult or attack a member of the armed forces. Putting the armed forces on a special pedestal is one of the signs we’re supposed to look out for that the country’s sliding into fascism.
Reblogged this on Emergent Behaviour and commented:
See my comments on Stavvers’ blog – I pretty much agree with everything she has to say here, and frankly I’m seeing some pretty fascistic tendencies in Labour these days. Maybe they’re after the EDL vote?
Wow. So he’s essentially twisted logic into a shit-pretzel to say that filthy, degenerate, non-straight, non-men will cause Aktion T4 MkII?
Fucking pig. You’d think he, of all people, would know what directly preceded the camps. Death vans, going from place to place and murdering children and adults with disabilities. Yes David, that includes sensory disabilities such as blindness.
As a disabled dyke I’m only too aware of what my fate would have been. I react with horror when people aren’t even aware, even deny, that More than eleven million people died during the holocaust, not just the six million Jewish people who were killed. My revulsion then intensifies when I’m inevitably accused of lying, of trying to somehow deny the mass slaughter of Jewish people, purely because I dared to mention the LGBT, disabled, Gypsy, feminist, activist, Polish, Slavic, and other victims of the camps. I have been told that this five million was “collateral damage”, accidentally targeted in the search for the Jews. It’s as if people don’t want the Holocaust sullied by queers, and crips, and Gypsies, as if my Jewish relatives were tragically persecuted victims, while my queer disabled “family”, and the other marginalised groups who were wiped out, were no great loss,
That’s why Blunkett’s vile tirade doesn’t shock me as it should, I’ve heard it all before. Don’t forget that his party started the current war on those with disabilities, painted us all as evil parasites who were bankrupting Britain. The same justification, virtually word for word, for Aktion T4.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those who blame the marginalised for their own suffering? It’s not so much a case of forgetting history, but outright denying it, almost gleefully so, I’m order to justify it happening all over again.
Thankyou for putting my seething rage into words Stavvers.
Seems all 3 main parties are scrabbling for the fascist vote, and truth isn’t relevant. I really really don’t like the way this is going.
I must admit I do find it hilarious that Blunkett has used a Nazi analogy in which he has, apparently without realising it, cast himself in the role of Hitler. I don’t think he really thought this thing through.
AAARGH:
“I think we have a job in this country, in a civilised, free, open democracy, to protect ourselves from the most bestial activities and from dangers that would undermine a civilised nation.”
This is pure double-think of the most pernicious and dangerous kind. The statement belies doublethink on Blunkett’s part, but also a far more insidious element of it in how it suggests that an ideal such as ‘free, open democracy’ needs be ‘protected’ by mechanisms that are inherantly opposed to freedom and openness.