We may be living through Brexit hell, but it’s hardly 1930s Germany
Last weekend, flicking through a Sunday broadsheet, desperate for a break from the Brexit omnishambles, I turned to the magazine, where a writer I admire has a weekly column. There, staring out in bold, red type was one of the most shocking pieces of writing I’ve seen in recent years.
The columnist was talking about the indignity and insecurity she feels being a Belgian national right now. Resident in the UK since the age of nine, she has had to pay £700 to an immigration lawyer to be granted indefinite leave to stay in this country. “I now carry a letter from the Home Office on my phone,” she wrote. “In case I need to show it to someone, like a Jew in Thirties Berlin”.
I was horrified – as were many other friends, both Jewish and Gentile. Not at the columnist’s plight, but that she should dare to compare her situation to that of Jews in Thirties Germany. As I then tweeted, is she likely to be sacked from her job as a highly qualified professional? Not allowed to ever find a new one, even a menial one? Have her property confiscated? Will she be thrown into a ghetto with other Belgians? Arrested randomly on the street? Beaten? Carted off to a labour camp? Shoved on to a cattle train, to be unloaded on a snowy platform in Poland and kicked into a gas chamber?
Unlikely. But her column plays into the bigger picture of what is happening in political discourse. Now, this writer was referring to being a “Berlin Jew”. She did not use the word “Nazi”. But the implication, as far as how she thought she was being treated, was there.
And the word is now cropping up all over the place. “Nazi” has become a byword for someone who you disagree with – particularly, it seems to me, in two controversial areas.
The first is in discussion
around the state of Israel. It is a ludicrous notion ( just think about it for a second) that Zionism = Nazism.
The second is in the context of the Brexit debate, where Nazi slander has entered mainstream political discourse, whichever side of the debate you’re on.
In January, the Tory MP Anna Soubry was accused of having über Right-wing tendencies while being interviewed on the BBC news. Protesters shouted that she was a liar, then chanted: “Anna Soubry is a Nazi!”
In July, similar abuse was hurled at Brexit Party MEPS who turned their backs during the playing of the EU’S national anthem at the European Parliament. Former newsreader Gavin Esler said that the Brexit Party-ers had “shamelessly copied the Nazi party” because the latter had once turned their back on a Jewish speaker in the Reichstag.
Back in 2015, Iraq-born Nadhim Zahawi said of a comment made by Nigel Farage on LBC radio: “It is a remark that Goebbels would be proud of.”
I’ve never voted Conservative in my life, let alone for Ukip or the Brexit Party. I am a Remainer, although what you might call a pragmatic one. Definitely not at all costs, and definitely not to lump people who don’t agree with me in with the most despicable monsters ever to exist, in recent times.
And this is the point. Calling people Nazis, or likening oneself to a Jew in Thirties Berlin cheapens what was the most convulsively terrifying period in modern history. At the very least, is it is lazy; at the very worst, morally reprehensible.