ABUSE NAZIS

There is now a new but already firmly established culture in Britain today best described as the abuse culture. Something that’s been steadily growing in recent years and is currently all pervasive. To many observers society has become divided into two broad groups of individuals… abusers and victims. It’s evolution may best be described as a process, one that has developed over the last decade though with a particular virulence in the last five years. On the one hand it is comprised of those people who claim to have been personally abused in some way and regard themselves as victims. On the other are those said to be perpetrating the abuse, in a word the abusers. Although the distinction seems clear enough it may in truth not be quite so well defined as it seems or is made out to be. That’s because both words have undergone a kind of metamorphosis into notions or concepts whose meaning has changed and evolved, achieving an elasticity that incorporates all kinds of things.

With the weight of all too easy public condemnation behind it, egged on by a morbid media attention driven with sales in mind rather than truth, this current culture of allegation, accusation and rush to judgement is already displaying the kind of nastiness once prevalent in Nazi Germany. Indeed there are disturbing similarities between the social, economic and political circumstances that prevail in Britain today and those of Germany in the late 1920s in the years preceding the Nazi takeover whose aspects I will explore later in this Post. For now I want to examine these two groups of people, abusers and victims, and consider the culture in which they’ve evolved.

Ever since the time of the Jimmy Savile revelations, there has been an avalanche of publicity of cases relating to historical allegations of sexual abuse, especially those involving adults working in the entertainment industry or on its periphery against children. Alongside this there have been a number of well publicised incidents detailing the wholesale abuse of vulnerable girls by gangs of Muslim youths in cities such as Oxford and Rotherham. It is now well known that the police in both areas were aware of such occurrences but failed to act because of what they claimed to be a lack of evidence, despite being made fully aware of the circumstances by some of those girls who were abused. Alas, the same can be said of the social services and child welfare departments of both local authorities. In other words what we have here is a plain in sight failure to act, similar to the failure by the police to do anything throughout the long historical record of abuse by Savile himself despite receiving complaints and surely being aware that something was seriously wrong.

Because of what can be called grand scale failure to promptly act at the time of some these now widely publicised cases, the police are currently engaged in a headlong rush to investigate just about anything. Anything whatsoever that has the slightest taint of impropriety, such as complaints of harassment for example, deemed by the complainant to be sexual in nature i.e. conduct deemed to be abusive. The problem here, one that is too often pervasive, is the understanding of what kind of conduct it is, exactly, that constitutes abuse and a very real problem it has become. For example, someone working in a shop may think that a customer has been rude. The judgement may be entirely subjective, depending on the character and personality of the individual making it. Indeed, a colleague might make a judgement that is exactly the opposite! However, let us say that the shop worker thinks the customer is rude and because of that feels angry, even demeaned. Here, personality comes into play. They may judge the customer to have been aggressive, somehow even abusive. So feeling abused they tell their manager who speaks to the customer, tells him that he’s been abusive and asks him to leave the shop!

But the customer may not think they’ve been abusive at all. For example maybe they’ve only insisted on having a carrier bag for their purchase or asked why the store has run out of the item they wanted to buy! Yet they’re judged to be something they’re not and next thing they know they’ve had a complaint made against them, been told they’re abusive and asked to leave the shop otherwise security will be called! Cases such as these based on erroneous judgement, personal dislike or just plain malice have become commonplace in British society today. Another example with an altogether more sinister dimension might involve a man inviting a lady to dinner at some restaurant or other. He might be some senior political figure or other while she herself, younger than he is, has been active in his Party. They’ve chatted in his office, he finds her interesting, even attractive, and invites her out. Maybe she’s thinking about what he can or might do to help her develop her political career! He on the other hand, finding himself excited by her, might be considering the possibility of a sexual encounter! Now the aspirations of both are only too human enough, and while both are exploitative neither are criminally so. Yet having got her into bed and she the following morning learns that he can do little to nothing to further her political ambition, the situation suddenly becomes deadly. She can threaten to go to the media or the police and say he forced himself on her. If he indeed did then he faces a rape charge and ruin. If he didn’t and she was a willing participant she can still maintain that he abused her. Make a false allegation of sexual impropriety, in which case he still faces ruin!

One of the serious problems in a culture of victim and abuser as I have indicated above is that such notions have become elastic in definition. Rudeness, which can be highly subjective, can easily be conceived of as abuse, same as a pass or expression of interest made by a man at a women might be regarded by her as harassment. What one woman might find flattering another might regard as sexual impropriety, both abusive and threatening! So off she goes to the police to make a complaint. In this case a mild expression of interest suddenly turns into sexual harassment, progressing further into sexual abuse. It is the progression of judgement here that is problematic and dangerous in the complexity of interpersonal relationships. When what in reality is one thing quickly turns into another because of the febrile social climate in which such judgements and definitions operate and with it now a clear pressure on the police to investigate.

In a febrile, nervy cultural climate in which individuals are daily subjected to social and psychological pressures, human personality becomes increasingly fragile and potentially damaged. In the face of increasing economic, social and political powerlessness which these days is accompanied by a growing fragility of moral compass, people become ever more likely to misinterpret situations and make faulty judgements. These in turn are only one step away from false allegation, accusation or claim. In such a climate the notion of abuser and victim becomes increasingly complex. Someone claiming they’ve been abused might indeed themselves be regarded as an abuser if their claim is malicious and false, a product of some motive such as revenge or simply that of a personality disorder, in which case the person being wrongly accused is no longer an abuser but now a victim. Suddenly there’s been a switch! Alternatively someone falsely claiming to be a victim of abuse which never occurred, maliciously pointing a finger at others, themselves become the abuser.

Abuser and victim! Here indeed we have a potentially symbiotic relationship, albeit one with devastating legal consequence and implication. Perhaps harmful in the extreme given an increasingly requisite police involvement in which, it should be remembered, they themselves with their often poor standards of literacy, are not immune from making serious errors of judgement. If they often get it right they’re also only too likely to get it wrong. Today they’re working under an avalanche of allegation and claim; made by those who claim they’ve been abused, historically or otherwise, along with those who claim they’re being victimized and abused by false allegation. Indeed by abusers! And it is ever increasingly the case that the legal framework is required to determine truth or falsehood in a fragile society full of powerless, damaged people who feel a need to blame on someone or other for their own misfortune whether genuine or not.

This is by no means to deny that there are people out there who have experienced abuse, whether sexual or otherwise, and have genuine cause for feeling aggrieved and damaged. Perhaps there are many. However even the existence of many does not account for the veritable avalanche of complaints of harassment, sexual abuse or rape in recent times. An avalanche indeed that has established itself as a culture in which every complaint, however mild, is thought worthy of investigation. It could be a new neighbor who isn’t liked for whatever reason and deemed not to fit in. Such a person might be seen to be trouble and worthy of complaint for whatever reason. It might be something said in all innocence that someone else doesn’t like… Right they’re being abusive so let’s call the police! Complaints made for just about any reason, judgements made because of personal dislike or prejudice, someone you now see in a street who’s new and wasn’t there before and suddenly there’s apprehension. What’s this man doing there on his own… we’ve never seen him before… he looks a bit strange don’t you think?  

It’s what a Bristol newspaper recently headlined as STRANGER DANGER… and before you know where you are you’ll have your friends going out with you looking for them, these people you don’t know. People who don’t belong in the area. Recently an entirely innocent Iranian immigrant to the above area was savagely murdered by two youths who thought he was a paedophile but wasn’t! Extremes, unfortunately, have a habit of becoming commonplace in a disturbed society full of insecurity and anger.

Interestingly enough there are other ways of interpreting this culture of abuse, this culture of the victim. Indeed it is perhaps right to ask the question, why are there so many people these days who claim that they’ve been abused one way or another? Could it be that the society we live in is of an abusive nature itself? Let’s consider the question. You don’t need to watch the Jeremy Kyle Show to appreciate that there’s a whole class of people in British society today who on an individual basis are disturbed and experience endless social and psychological problems. You only need to visit Underclass housing estates to witness social and economic deprivation operating in practice. Of people externalizing their anger and frustration all over the place. The Jeremy Kyle program simply demonstrates this on the level of personal relationships. On a much broader level we live in a society increasingly characterized by growing impoverishment, cheap youth labour, inability to pay rapidly rising utility prices, underemployment and economic hopelessness for millions of people on the one hand and the relative social and economic security and wellbeing of the professional middle class on the other. It’s not simply a north-south divide. The great economic catastrophe perpetrated by Gordon Brown and his Labour Government has created deep and fundamental psychological consequences in recent years. It’s ramifications are far more than economic and the divisions it has created run far deeper than class. I’m talking here of the creation of a society increasingly characterized by serious personality disorder. 

People who already have little to nothing have little to nothing to lose. Their daily abuse of each other is just a natural outpouring of frustration and anger. It is those who still have or are ambitious and want more who are most likely to live on the cusp of insecurity. Feel anxious and threatened at every turn by that which is different, unexpected and new. Whose interpretation of experiences and events is as febrile as the insecurity of their existence which in turn is a reflection of the society they live in. Hung over with a vast new national deficit which was not of their creation; hung over with economic uncertainty; hung over with the threat of mass immigration; hung over with the instability of family; with the problems of personal relationships; with the old securities and ties of what was once traditional extended family life broken up and disturbed in these times of one parent families, instability and changing values, fragile chaotic personality has become an only too common phenomenon.

In such an socio-economic vortex, with so many barely able to hold on to anything let alone their emotional stability, there’s a certain inevitability that within the national psyche there has developed a great search for blame and it is only too often that claims of rudeness, along with allegations of harassment and abuse are simply an emotionally disturbed corollary for this far broader psychological malady. With large numbers of distressed people looking around for somewhere to point a finger at, politicians are an easy enough and potentially justifiable target closely followed by immigrants. However on a more instinctively personal level it is other individuals who become a much easier target. A generalization unconscionably whipped up by a baying mass media, themselves only too irresponsible in stirring up public emotion and sentiment. Quite frankly, if they want to talk of abuse, the worst of these rags could do no better than look to themselves when considering abusive conduct such as phone hacking and smearing, printing biased accounts of political events seriously lacking in balance while on a level approaching absurdity, promoting a culture of celebrity in which trivial individuals are given a status they barely deserve.

There are now many different kinds of abuse and abuser, ranging from the institutional down to the personal. On the personal level some may be justifiably regarded as criminal and harmful. Much other abuse however is practiced on a daily basis in what is increasingly considered as acceptable but which is quite frankly often as vile, such as making false, exaggerated allegations or claims of misconduct. All are a form of psychopathy one way or another. A kind of widespread cultural malaise on a continuum of indecent personal conduct. A broad social and psychological sickness that only too often characterizes a society in crisis. Indeed, this culture of victim and abuse should be regarded as a clear sign of a society close to moral collapse. One indeed where social malformation and mass personal maladjustment dance together in an ever sickening ethos that requires a fundamental moral recasting. People unjustly blaming others for little or nothing because of erroneous judgement are on a dangerous slippery slope to fascism. I call them Abuse Nazis because of the harm they cause in order to satisfy themselves. Some personality problem they have that needs to be worked out on others. Abuse Nazis because that in truth is what they’ve become. Creating and operating in a climate of fear.

Nazi Germany emerged from and perpetuated such a psychopathy. It was a situation that as I have indicated above had certain similarities with those pertaining to Britain today. Throughout the 1920s Germany experienced catastrophic economic crises. Initiated by its defeat in the First World War, the cost of making war reparations to the Allied Powers caused hyper-inflation, a situation where money became worthless. This was deepened in the extreme by the Wall Street Collapse of 1929 which plunged the economy into chaos. While its causes were different this was a similar situation to the collapse and huge burden of debt suffered by the British economy from 2008 onwards! During both periods the population of both nations experienced substantial hardship and impoverishment, and furthermore within both, a new social class had emerged. In Germany it became known as the lumpen-proletariat. In Britain today it is known as the underclass. Both to all intents and purposes are identical, as is their origin in an impoverished working class.

Of great interest however are certain extraordinary cultural similarities that suddenly arose within both nations as if out of nowhere. One is the disturbing appearance of instances of child abuse. In Germany, singularly morbid cases of child sex abuse suddenly became widely publicised from the mid 1920s gripping the psyche of the nation. Indeed a famous film was made openly portraying the theme entitled ‘M’ for murderer. Prior to its emergence, both subjects along with paedophiles were barely heard of. Now they shifted to the center of the German nation’s widespread anxiety and became a focal point for Nazi propaganda. In Britain, prior to 2005, such issues were of little national concern. Today, originating around the time of our own great economic crisis, the mass media seems obsessed with little else and we find ourselves right in the middle of the sudden appearance of an abuse culture, particularly that involving children that’s with us almost on a daily basis! The similarities of appearance in 1920s Germany and 2000s Britain are hardly coincidental.

The economies of both nations in each period show striking similarities. Both were governed by parties of the labor movement at the time which helped to foster their crises. The issues of child abuse and paedophiles both appeared out of nowhere for the first time, becoming a focus of national attention and distraction furthered by the morbid attention of the mass media. In Germany the Nazis were steadily emerging from the shadows, ready to begin their historical rise to power on the back of a desperately anxiety ridden population. The German people didn’t need Asian immigrants. They had the Jews ready made for the Nazis to turn into aliens!

Personal anxiety and insecurity are solid psychological planks for an abuse culture. When the Nazis took over in Germany they encouraged the evolution of such personality maladjustment in the shape of informing. Informing on others as a kind of abuse. You just anonymously wrote to the local Nazi chief  alleging that someone you didn’t like was this, that or the other! Jew, communist, trades unionist, social democrat, what did it matter? The Nazis encouraged the practice. It made millions of Germans feel good! That they’d done their bit for society. Exposed some bad person or other so that quietly, within themselves, they felt that they’d done something worthwhile. Suddenly they felt important. In Nazi Germany, informing became a national duty. All those people hiding away under their rocks who’d abused the nation were now being dragged out into the open! You’d always wanted to do something about them and now you have!

We don’t yet have this kind of informer culture in Britain. Instead we’ve got something else. Something in a way similar that’s a symptom for something equally nasty waiting there in the shadows.