National Post (National Edition)
Dog’s Nazi salute deemed hate crime
This is the story of one man, one gorgeous little pug, one alleged hate crime and more generally, the sorry mess that is the state of free speech in the Western world.
The man is Markus (Mark) Meechan, a 30-yearold Scot who was Tuesday convicted in Airdrie Sheriff Court (sheriff courts are to Scotland what provincial courts are in Canada, the busiest which handle much of the work) of hate crime for posting a YouTube video of his girlfriend’s pug, Buddha, apparently giving Nazi salutes.
Airdrie is about 20 kilometres east of Glasgow.
Meechan, known as Count Dankula on social media, is a self-described “shitposter” with a delicious heavy accent and beard and was, at least at the time of his arrest in May 2016 (the Sheriff ’s Court works at the speed of Canadian courts, it appears), a call-centre worker.
The two-minute, 23-second video has been viewed by more than 3,000,000 people; it’s easy to see why. It’s ridiculously funny.
It’s not quite as funny as the reason the depute fiscal (the equivalent of a prosecutor), Sheriff Derek O’Carroll and a witness, Ephraim Borowski, director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, all seem to have accepted hook, line and sinker — that Meechan must have spent effort hours training the pug to do his evil Nazi bidding.
Ergo, he was obviously serious about his Jew-hating and, as prosecutors said, the video was but “an odious criminal act that was dressed up to look like a joke.”
Clearly, none of them knows a damn thing about dogs, or ever seen one.
With the right highpitched tone and the same cadence, a dog responds exactly the same way to “Do you wanna go for a walk?” as to “Do you wanna gas the Jews?”, which is what, in fact, Meechan said in the appropriate voice to Buddha the pug.
And every time, Buddha immediately raised his head, or at least turned it (he’s a roly-poly fellow and doesn’t seem, shall we say, driven) whenever Meechan posed the question, which some people would find offensive.
Ditto the “Sieg Heil”: Meechan would ask for the Nazi salute in the same way he might have asked the pug for a paw, so the pug obliged and, like many dogs, when he shakes a paw, he straightarms the shake.
(I tested out both requests with my own lazy bull terrier. He responded with identical enthusiasm when I asked, “Do you wanna cookie?” and, “Gimme a paw” as he did to “Do you wanna gas the Jews?” and “Sieg Heil.” These lovely creatures are not brain surgeons; most of them have no freaking idea what the human is actually asking them to do, only that if the voice and other cues are right and they do what they’ve always done, they are rewarded.
At one point in the video, there’s a shot of Buddha gazing reverently at a screen that is playing a Hitler speech. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with dogs knows he would have gazed with equal fervour at a screen of children playing, or The Bachelor, or a commercial.
Too much about dogs, but the point is, Meechan wouldn’t have spent 10 seconds training the pug, and the fact that none of those involved in the trial (there actually was a trial) seem to have recognized that is troubling, because it seems to have been counted against him, as evidence of mens rea, or the “guilty mind,” that is supposed to be necessary for any criminal conviction, as well as the actus reus, the physical act.
He made the video because “I just really wanted to piss off ” his girlfriend; she testified to that, and though she was not amused, also to his generally good and antiracist character.
And the video is really funny.
I’m an absolutist about free speech: All or nothing, whether the Prophet in a cartoon, a man appearing to ask a pug for a Nazi salute, or Lindsay Shepherd’s Unpopular Opinions Speakers Series, which kicked off Tuesday night at Wilfrid Laurier University with the (in my view) fairly appalling Faith Goldy.
Yet when Police Scotland arrested Meechan (it’s unclear from the news stories if there was an actual complaint), it was perfectly in keeping with their current marching orders on hate crime.
Like London’s Metropolitan Police, Police Scotland divides offences into “hate crimes” and “hate incidents,” the latter defined as depending entirely on if the action “is perceived by the victim or any person to be motivated by hate or prejudice.”
As the Met says on its website, “A Hate Incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgendered.”
Unlike beauty, which is in the eye of the beholder, hate is exclusively in the eye of the beheld. Meechan will be sentenced on April 23.