Extreme political rhetoric has become mainstream – and we know where this can lead
Toxic language has always been a necessary, though mercifully not sufficient, precursor to more physically coercive means of oppression. George Orwell taught us about that. So Amnesty International’s warning that extreme political rhetoric is seeping into the mainstream of conversation and dialogue deserves to be taken seriously. Perhaps we have become so inured to it, and its presence so ubiquitous, that we have to an extent grown accustomed to it. This is the real, insidious danger that, Amnesty rightly reminds us, threatens universal human rights. The case of Diane Abbott, who has been the subject of more insults than most, has highlighted how social media can often facilitate and encourage the spread of hateful political rhetoric and turn it distinctly personal.
We have become familiar with the soundbites. “Make America Great Again” has a more sinister tone to it when it drops from the lips of Donald Trump than when Ronald Reagan used it as a purely economic slogan. “America First” also has unfortunate overtones, and is firmly xenophobic when coupled with policies such as President Trump’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.
Closer to home, phrases like “Taking our country back”, “Taking control” and “Breaking point” – the title of a distasteful poster unveiled by Nigel Farage in the EU referendum campaign – have, in part, created an atmosphere where hate crimes have risen. Without being silly or alarmist, it is sufficient to say that this sort of rhetoric is hateful and disturbingly reminiscent of the 1930s.
There is no need to press the point home further than that. No one seriously believes that Donald Trump is the new Hitler – and it is disrespectful to the victims of the Nazis to fall into that type of hysteria. But what Donald Trump, his allies and imitators all around the world can do is to turn vibrant free societies with solid judicial independence and a free media into sickly, cowed, deadened semi-democracies, whose national morale is sapped by the constant attacks on a non-existent “liberal elite” establishment.
Calling judges or the press “enemies of the people” is just a newspaper headline or a presidential quip, maybe, but, as someone once said, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself. Repetition is the secret of fine propaganda, and contemporary political debate is full of it, all too often with evil intent.
Elections are the battlegrounds in this war against toxic politics, at least in the West. If Ukip is defeated in the Stoke by-election, then that will be one small victory for decency in public life, just as the defeat of a hardman of the nationalist right was in the Austrian presidential elections. In the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere there are vastly more significant challenges. At least those battles can be won.
In its latest report, Amnesty details across some 400 pages cruelty in virtually every nation. In a sort of gazetteer of human rights abuses, the obvious hellholes are well covered – Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, much of Central America, the Central African Republic, Burundi, Iraq, South Sudan and Sudan. More depressing are the entries on countries which are not failed states, where governments still have authority – rather too much, in fact, and even democratic or “socialist” societies where we might expect better.
In South Africa, then, we see that hate crimes against LGBT people are grossly underreported by police. In Cuba they have their own variety of toxic rhetoric. Human rights defenders are labelled “anti-Cuban mercenaries”, “anti-revolutionary” and “subversive”, all of which helps justify keeping the judicial system under political control. In Germany – surprisingly, given its excellent record on refugees – Amnesty reports that “the authorities continued to fail to effectively investigate allegations of ill treatment by the police and did not establish any independent complaints mechanism”.
In Britain, too, we fail on abortion rights in Northern Ireland, on state surveillance and on hate crimes. Perhaps we can’t do very much about the atrocities in North Korea or Saudi Arabia; but we can do something about our own abuses, and the language we use in political debate.
