Mainstream use of ‘Nazi’ jibes is worrisome

IWISH I could see inside your head. Because – and this is a promise – when you read this column your brain is going to light up like a Christmas tree. Alas, not necessarily in a good way. That is because I am about to do my level best to tick off your orbital frontal cortex, the bit of your grey matter that processes emotions.

Let’s try an imaginary experiment. I want you to think of Jim Murphy. He is standing on an Irn-Bru crate, red-faced and yelling at a crowd.

Got the image? Good. Now think of Sean Clerkin, the one-man angry mob who kept bawling back at the outgoing Scottish Labour leader during last month’s General Election campaign. How do these guys make you feel? Now if I had an MRI scanner and a friend with a working knowledge of neuroscience, I could have a good long look at your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the bit of your head that does all your reasoning, your heavyduty logical thinking.

Hopefully, right now it is throbbing like the Blackpool illuminations on my imaginary MRI. Chances are, if you are the kind of politically-committed person most of the rest of us would call a zealot, that it’s giving off nothing more than a dull glow.

Why? Because, as US psychologist Drew Weston showed more than a decade ago, people with strong political views make emotional, not rational, judgements.

Take Twitter. Or the kind of comment threads you will find at the bottom of this articles like this.

A foreign colleague whispered something to me recently that put a chill through my bones. Scotland, he said, is getting like Israel: whatever you write about the place, some obtuse weirdo is going to get on your case. He didn’t just mean cybernats. True, this band of wackadoodles has been pestering journalists and opponents for years in what must amount to one of most counterproductive online campaigns ever.

But, for me at least, the big story on Scotland’s social media has been the swift rise of a new breed of angry ultra-Unionist.

Cybernats – at their worse and more rarely than some newspapers would have you – can call their foes “Quislings”. Ultra-unionists like their Second World War slurs too. The SNP, they’ll tell you, are Nazis.

Scarily, these are both genuinely-held views. Some Nationalists really do think Unionists are traitors. Some Unionists really do think Nationalists are fascists. Both positions are as stupid as they are offensive.

But what really concerns me is this: that “Nazi” insults fired at Nationalists, unlike their “Quisling” equivalent, are bubbling in to the mainstream.

Consider, if you will, the remarks from David Starkey, a television historian whose views on Scots verge on the racist, about the “Nazi” SNP. Or the Fleet Street columnist who compared the SNP’s manifesto launch to a Nuremberg rally. Or all the makeyuppy stories of English-born Scots fleeing the country to escape bullying xenophobes.

If you happen to share these views, you might want to pop your head in an MRI. My guess is your orbital frontal cortex would glow in the dark. But maybe you’d think the same of mine.

A foreign colleague said to me: whatever you write about the place, some obtuse weirdo is going to get on your case