Normalising the unthinkable

"It only happened when the unthinkable became normalised."

Sounds pretty frightening doesn't it? Echoes of past descents into chaos, culminating in horrible atrocities that normally just would not happen. They are just, well, unthinkable.

Of course, this is fair comment because when we think of the unthinkable our minds cast back to events like Holodomor, the holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. All these things happened and they largely happened because we normalised the unthinkable.

Hyperbole (exaggeration) A very common use of language. For example 

"I ate a ton of food at lunch today so I think I'll skip dinner"

Obviously, I didn't actually eat a ton of food, otherwise I would be dead, not forgetting I would have been violently sick long before I managed to eat a ton of food, its an exaggeration (hyperbole)

Just keep this in mind, hyperbole will come up lots in this blog post (maybe even, a ton of times)

Other things worth remembering.

I shall be referencing mostly an article written by a fella who goes by the name of Richard Haviland. In fact, its sort of an appendum to an article he wrote in 2022 which he pastes in at the end.

Richard Haviland, a former civil servant, spent most of his life in the West Country, an area entirely untouched by huge levels of immigration. He has since moved to a highly diverse village in the Scottish Highlands know as Drumnadrochit. How do I know its highly diverse? Because I looked it up.

Of the 2,717 inhabitants of this sleepy, Scottish village, a grand total of 4 Indians live here, couple this with the incredible amount of 1 Pakistani, 2 Bangladeshi's and 2 Chinese people its clear to see diversity is alive and well here. But here's the real kicker. A titanic 4 black people live here! Insane numbers.

Here's what it looks like. I know what you're thinking, mega diverse, exactly the type of place asylum seekers are housed.

The first part of his article has him musing over a couple of interviews he has recently watched on The News Agents. For further context, The News Agents are 3 left wing, former BBC employees who have set up their own news site. It is here they regularly engage in hyperbole and throw around left wing conspiracy theories like they're confetti. In short, they're right up Havilands street 

He whines on exhaustively about the governments Rwanda plan and how immoral it all is, how very un-British it is, its pretty boring to read. But! I have an idea!

I have also found out that Drumnadrochit boasts a caravan park! It only has 1 but its a start. 

Why don't we set up some temporary accommodation on this park, it wouldn't take much to build some adequate accommodation to house 1,000 asylum seekers while we look for another location (I'm thinking those daffs in the above picture can easily be uprooted) another 500 could fit here easily.

Its a case of thinking outside the box, think how many sleepy villages like this, already richly diverse can benefit even further from hundreds of thousands of immigrants?

Haviland thinks a lot, he prides himself on it, he's been thinking about it for over a year now. The answer is so obvious, I'm sure Haviland has thought of this! He only has to say the word and I am totally on board.

He then includes his original meandering, waffling nonsense, claiming this is an original article from 2022. (part one of his disdain at things not going the way he wants them to)

Anyway, this bottom section begins with an all out attack on Alastair Stewart. This veteran ITN Newsreader has enjoyed a renaissance recently since his move to GBNews, Gone is the professional newsreader, now we have an Alistair Stewart able to explore any avenue he pleases, interview who he wants and he's free to invite fellow professionals onto his own show aptly entitled "Alistair & friends" Sadly, Alistair has recently had to retire due to poor health.

But at the time it was quite the revelation, very refreshing to see him unshackled, unafraid to ask uncomfortable questions which put people on the spot, yet always willing to give his guests every right to reply. It made him the perfect choice to interview potential leadership candidates at the Tory hustings leadership debate in 2022.

So very thorough in his prep for this hustings was Alistair, for weeks he was asking viewers on the kinds of questions they would like to ask the potential next leader of the conservative party. (which would obviously be the next UK prime minister)

But this isn't how Haviland frames it. 

"We saw a different Stewart"

No we never, we saw Alistair Stewart doing what Alistair Stewart does best, we saw Alistair Stewart being Alistair Stewart.

“Isn’t it time”, he asked Rishi Sunak, “to instruct Border Force and the Royal Navy to push those floating dinghies back?”

It’s a troubling word, “instruct”, with historical resonance; especially when you’re talking about the possibility of state-backed manslaughter.

Hyperbole! Now how do we know this is hyperbole? Ask yourself this, how would a Royal Navy Warship go about pushing a dinghy back across the channel?

Yes, instruct is a terribly troubling word, how dare a government instruct its armed forces to do something

"I instruct you to gather a task force to go and liberate the Falkland Islands"

Very troubling word indeed.

But then Haviland engages in his own hyperbole, garnered from hyperbole.

"State backed manslaughter"

Yes, because everyone is totally on board with the idea of killing people crossing the channel in a dinghy.

Of course the question is very obvious and direct. Lots of people want the government to get tough on the illegal crossings, I have seen no evidence that anyone thinks killing them is a good idea..

But it wasn’t just what Stewart said, it was how he said it. For those few seconds, he was more than mere interviewer.

Nope, he was the interviewer, interviewing in the way he has always done.

He was the star of the show, the performer, the rabble-rouser-in-chief.

The interviewer

One, two, three jabs of the finger. Four, five, six. A seventh for good measure. Not asking a question so much as playing to his audience. His voice full of righteous anger, his delivery immaculate, all building to that moment where the crowd, like a dam bursting, broke out in tumultuous applause.

Interviewing in the way he has always interviewed, Haviland doesn't seem to like his style, but to suggest this marks a change is laughable

Is this really Britain?

Yes

How have we come so quickly to the point where people will think and then say out loud the previously unthinkable

It worries me more that to get tough on illegal crossings was ever thought unthinkable to be honest

But look back over the last few years, and you realise it’s not so surprising that this is happening in today’s Britain. Because the politicians have shown how easily some people will follow the crowd, even in a country where we’ve always liked to tell ourselves these sorts of things could never happen.

"The crowd" rarely relies on politicians on which way to go. In fact, with todays wall to wall news reporting and the rise of social media, the very last thing "the crowd" does is listen to politicians.

It’s worth thinking about the counterfactual here. If you know people who think it’s fine to “push back” boats in the Channel, or send asylum seekers to Rwanda to be processed with no prospect of return, ask them if they’d have been prepared to parade these views had politicians not made them current.

I asked myself, I also asked a few of my friends. Most of them had no idea on what politicians were saying.

Some might give you a bit of guff about fighting wokery or asserting their freedom of speech. But most would never have come up with such ideas because they are so plainly immoral and inhumane that they needed to be led there by others.

Or! They have seen evidence with their own eyes, they have witnessed unthinkable crimes happening, they have seen who is committing them and formed an opinion. So no, this paragraph literally makes no sense.

This is what happens when you normalise the unthinkable. First it becomes thinkable. Then sayable. Then – rapidly for some – ‘desirable’, ‘the only option’, ‘common sense’. Once out there, it cannot be unthought, unsaid, unnormalised. It’s what we do in this country now, isn’t it? And, bit by bit, it gnaws away at our souls.

Haviland appears to think we're on a path to accepting state sponsored murder. Again, I turned to my friends, none of them are in any way interested in state sponsored murder

When you normalise the unthinkable, Rishi Sunak can tell you “no option is off the table” when another way of putting that is “there’s nothing we wouldn’t do”.

This is getting insane, when a governing politician in a democracy says something like "no option is off the table" No sane person actually thinks that detonating nukes in the channel is on the table because that could also be considered an option.

"There is nothing we wouldn't do" 

Obviously, there are tons of things we wouldn't do! Setting up machine gun nests on the beaches of the South Coast is something we wouldn't do for example.

When you normalise the unthinkable, some people express their disgust but tell you they believe that everything goes in cycles. And you wonder if people also said that in 1930s Germany.

Everything doesn't go in cycles, historically, almost nothing goes in cycles, occasionally history may rhyme, current events may seem like an echo of the past  But if history tells us one thing. it tells us that life is just completely and utterly random. For example, 1930's Germany is very different to 2023 Great Britain.

When you normalise the unthinkable, some people start to forget that our humanity towards others must always come first, wherever they may be from. Because if it doesn’t, honestly, we might as well all give up now.

But this isn't about our personal humanity. The number 1 priority of an elected government is to protect its people. Something which they are currently, epically failing at.

More lies ensue, designed to dehumanise people: that those in small boats are all economic migrants; that they’re all young men, and therefore terrorists or rapists in waiting.

Well, video evidence tells us that (mostly) those in small boats are economic migrants and they are mostly all young men. We also know that known terrorists are abusing the small boat crossings, criminal gangs are making thousands of pounds every week, the black market is booming as people just hide in the cracks of society and we also know that many have then have gone on to commit rape. 

I have spoken to zero people who think that ALL of them are terrorists and rapists.

In this political landscape, cruelty and gloating, encouraged by a cruel, gloating, government, are worn by some as a badge of honour. If you object, it’s you who is being unreasonable. You don’t care about people in your own country. It’s you who is siding with the people smugglers. It’s you who wants these people to risk being drowned at sea, all for the sake of your highfalutin liberal values. It’s you who should be ashamed.

Yes, you should feel ashamed

What can you do if you see all this and feel that constant, ever-present sense of dread? You are stuck between the rock of your own sanity and the hard place of acquiescence. You want to scream “Stop!” at the top of your voice. But if you do it all the time, people will start to look askance at you. You want to tell them it’s not you whose values have changed, it’s them.

No, its your values, they haven't changed, you have always been an open borders activist. But, its great being an activist safely tucked away in a quiet, sleepy village, free from the consequences of uncontrolled migration. Safe in a village who's biggest crime last year was someone nicked a sandwich from the local Tesco.

But where would we be without idealism? What will happen if we all keep quiet? Over the next few years, we will lose the last of that generation born long enough ago to remember living through the Second World War

Yes we will, the ending of an era indeed

learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, to remember Hiroshima, to remember the post-war idealism that led to the creation of so many imperfect but vital global institutions

Well, we don't actually need them to remind us, there are hundreds upon hundreds of books, thousands of hours of documentaries which include them telling us their stories in their very own words. I will miss them though, they lived through some astonishing times, they built a whole new World and gave it to us.

That generation’s departure will leave a void that scares me.

This is the same generation that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, if not for them, we would still be in the EU. As an ardent Remainer, I find Havilands position here confusing (not for the first time)

We will no longer have them to remind us. But rather than accept with resignation that our old ideals are outdated, surely it’s those very lessons learned and ideas formed with the horrors of war and genocide fresh in the mind that we need to nurture, to hold close, to fight for. Isn’t it?

Yes, but Haviland appears to be confused by the lessons they imparted to us (yet again)

Because history teaches us that, when you normalise the unthinkable, anything is possible.

Very much like this piece of crap you just wrote.