No Platform For Racists

I hate racists. They're the reason I can never, ever, get a No1 razor cut. Thanks to Combat18, the NF and the BNP I have bumps and scars beneath my hairline that will only see the light of day when I need chemotherapy for terminal cancer. They're the result of countless Anti-Nazi League and Rock against Racism events and rallies in the 1980s when a Billy Bragg or Joe Strummer gig wasn't complete without blood running down your forehead.

But that's not the only reason I hate racists. My old man, god rest his soul, who joined the British Army to fight fascism, was involved in the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. He spent his remaining years tormented by what he saw there and what he was called upon to do in the aftermath: bulldozing the emaciated bodies of thousands of people into mass graves and marching German civilians at gunpoint from a nearby town to dig those graves. The pure hatred he felt for those civilians was the only aspect of his war experience he would ever talk to me about and the moral was clear: blind hatred isn't good. The same man would chuckle and smile when he remembered stoning Oswald Mosely's blackshirts of f the streets of Liverpool in the 1930s. His motto then was as mine is now: No platform for Fascists. Forget liberal platitudes about free speech. If the only speech you have to make consists of lies and hatred for people you don't even know, then you don't deserve the privilege for which thousands of people fought and died.

But I digress, my mate Bock (I hope he doesn't object to me calling him that) pointed me towards this site. In my view it's one of the nastiest Irish blog sites I've ever encountered. It's particularly nasty because it disguises blind, irrational, keep-em-out racism in the form of seemingly rational argument in a manner reminiscent of Josef Goebbels at his best. I'm not going to discuss it further than that other than to say VISIT THIS SITE. And when you do click on the 'Flag This Blog' icon. You know it makes sense.