The Political Editor of the Daily Telegraph moaning about Labour "weaponising" Boris Johnson's inability to deliver a scripted speech is quite something.
Here's the Telegraph 'weaponising' a grotesque distortion of history & reality in order to demonise the Left - ironically, something which the Nazis also did.

Hitler allied himself with leaders of German conservative & nationalist movements, & in January 1933 became chancellor.
Hitler’s Third Reich was entirely #fascist.

In April 1933 communists, socialists, democrats, & Jews - along with other left-wing political activists opposed to the Nazi regime - were purged from the German civil service, & trade unions were outlawed the following month.
In July 1933 Hitler banned all political parties other than his own, & prominent members of the German left-wing Communist Party & the left-wing Social Democratic Party were arrested & imprisoned in concentration camps.

How very "socialist".

britannica.com/story/were-the…
The Nazi Party was an ultra-nationalist, socially conservative, anti-egalitarian & fascist ideology, Nazism falls on the extreme far-right. The assumption that because the word “socialist” appeared in the party’s name they must have been actual socialists is naïve & ahistorical.
What the evidence shows is that Nazi Party leaders paid mere lip service to socialist ideals on the way to achieving their one true goal: raw, totalitarian power.

Hitler & his party saw socialism, communism, & leftism generally as inimical to everything they hoped to achieve.
The National Socialists ignored socialism’s primary aim (replacing the existing class-based society with an egalitarian one in which workers owned the means of production), “replacing class with race, & the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader”.
The “National Socialists” wanted to unite the political camps of left & right into which, they argued, Jews had manipulated the German nation - an argument eerily similar to that made by the "anti-woke" about so-called "cultural Marxists" (a euphemism for left-wing thinkers).
Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process.

German historian & National Socialism expert Joachim Fest characterizes this repurposing of socialist rhetoric as an act of “prestidigitation”:
Nazi ideology took a leftist label chiefly for tactical reasons. It demanded, within the party & within the state, a powerful system of rule that would exercise unchallenged leadership over the “great mass of the anonymous.”
And whatever premises the party may have started with, by 1930 Hitler’s party was “socialist” only to take advantage of the emotional value of the word, & a “workers’ party” in order to lure the most energetic social force.
As with Hitler’s claims of belief in tradition, conservative values, or Christianity, the socialist slogans were merely ideological props used to camouflage & confuse the enemy. Nazis sent leftists identified as threats to the National Socialist program to concentration camps.
Next time the Telegraph publishes a grotesquely distorted article implying 'Nazis were lefties', or run a "significantly misleading" front page story making a left-wing politician seem like an antisemite, remember its own ideology is MUCH closer to the Nazis' than ANY "leftist".

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More from @docrussjackson

23 Nov
#THREAD

The Heritage Foundation is a dangerous & very influential US neoliberal free-market fundamentalist think tank that represents the interests of the 0.1%

Charles WL Hill: "given that the Heritage Foundation has a political agenda, its work should be viewed with caution."
In 2005, Heritage established the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

Thatcher herself maintained a long relationship with The Heritage Foundation. Shortly after leaving office, Thatcher was honoured by Heritage at a September 1991 dinner. Image
The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, & is one of many climate change denial organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil.

The Heritage Foundation strongly criticized the Kyoto Agreement to curb climate change.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Read 16 tweets
23 Nov
#THREAD

Tory MP Edward Leigh's views on the "migrant crisis":

“We told the people at the referendum we would 'take back control', it’s clear that in this we have lost control.. Will the home secretary bring in emergency powers act to override the Human Rights Act if necessary?"
Edward Leigh is a typical old-school-out-of-touch free-market fundamentalist Thatcherite dinosaur. He needs constantly appeasing, believes in "free enterprise, deregulation, low taxation & a smaller state”, & supports replacing the #NHS with an insurance based system.

#NHSBill
Edward Leigh signed the letter from the so-called "common sense group" of fossilised Tory MPs, which accused the National Trust of being "coloured by cultural Marxist dogma". 'Cultural Marxism' is the antisemitic conspiracy theory cited by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik.
Read 12 tweets
22 Nov
Toxic divisive ranting anti-@BBC culture war shithouse Paul Dacre has been appointed as the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail’s parent company because good sense & public outcry prevented him from becoming the next chair of the media regulator, @Ofcom.

theguardian.com/media/2021/nov…
A new guide from @StopFundingHate & Ethical Consumer @EC_magazine explains how you can help make Dacre's & Murdoch's divisive hate unprofitable.

#StopFundingHate

ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaig…
The Mail under Dacre has been criticised for an alleged racist attitude towards the stories it covers. Nick Davies recounts an anecdote from a former Snr news reporter who, en route to a murder scene of a woman & her two children was told to return because the victims were black.
Read 34 tweets
22 Nov
The Relationship Between Emotions, Politics & Populism:

'Populists, on left & right, have crafted their deeply affective accounts of who is the danger, who is in danger & who is to blame, to respond to contemporary affective requests.'

@GeorgeMonbiot

siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco…
"Populist narratives become the lenses through which meaning is constructed, attributed & transferred; they attend to affective requests through the further mobilisation of emotionality, creating the affective glue that can potentially translate grievances into support."
'Exclusionary populists define the people strictly as 'natives' & thus construct a large number of out-groups, whereas inclusionary populists understand the people more broadly, as those who have been aggrieved by neoliberal elites, regardless of ethnicity, religion or culture'.
Read 6 tweets
22 Nov
If Shamima Begum, the ISIS Bride, Is No Longer British, What Does Citizenship Mean? newyorker.com/news/letter-fr… via @NewYorker
Begum has never lived in Bangladesh. Last May, the country’s Foreign Minister, Abdul Momen, told the BBC that Begum has “nothing to do” with Bangladesh and would be refused entry. “The British government is responsible for her,” he said. “They’ll have to deal with her.”
A former MI6 official said that Begum’s fate was not being driven by security concerns or logic: “This is a purely political decision,” he said. “Why one would think that Bangladesh had any better capacity to deal with somebody? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Read 4 tweets
21 Nov
Well worth a read:

"On its best day, Centrism is a lazy reinforcement of whatever the current status quo happens to be. On its worst, it is a destructive force that wreaks havoc on communities through its sheer ambivalence towards them" - @theothercoogan

independent.co.uk/voices/centris…
'The centre, by its nature, is a constantly moving target, which shifts with the political extremes of the day. Today, the mainstream political discourse has moved so far towards Conservatism that today’s centre is yesterday’s right - a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.'
'We're told to debate, to strive for the middle ground, but we end up paralysed in a cycle of constant conversation with no outcome. That suits many just fine - we know the centre will ultimately hold & our lives will not change in any meaningful way regardless of who's elected'.
Read 7 tweets

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