JK Rowling’s wizarding world of Harry Potter is an exquisitely drawn study of bigotry.
It starts at the very beginning: the four founders of Hogwarts, the school of magic, disagreed about who should attend. Salazar Slytherin believed only those who came from magical families, known as “pure bloods”, should learn magic. The other founders thought otherwise and Slytherin left the school he co-founded. But his exclusionary ideology lived on. It resulted in frequent acts of discrimination, violence and death throughout the saga.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It should. This is not so far removed from extremist behaviours in our own world.
In The Nature of Prejudice, social psychologist Gordon Allport described a continuum related to prejudice in society. It begins with verbal rejection of individuals or groups then graduates to avoidance, discrimination in its various forms, physical attack and — in extreme cases — extermination.
“Most barking does not lead to biting, yet there is never a bite without previous barking,” Allport said.
This seminal work came out in 1954 — almost a decade after the conclusion of World War II — and contains an analysis of the way in which the Nazi Party in Germany created a situation before and during the war that made the Holocaust possible.
“Verbal attacks at the time of Bismarck were relatively mild,” Allport observed. “Under Hitler they had become ferocious: the Jews were loudly and officially blamed for every conceivable crime from sex perversion to world conspiracy.”
The bigotry that ultimately led to the death of Jews in concentration camps is not a relic of history. Anti-Semitic propaganda is still circulated among white supremacists and other discriminatory groups. Last year, a report from the Simon Wiesenthal Center found that far-right extremists were frequently using Telegram to spread misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism including the denial of the Holocaust.
That same report noted that various channels and groups sought to deify individuals that had been sentenced for heinous hate crimes and acts of mass murder.
The United Nations and governments around the world are now taking a closer look at far-right extremism, but there is also still great concern about the threat of Islamist extremist movements in this toxic online environment. These groups are well practiced at spreading hate through propaganda.
Then al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, for example, issued several statements throughout the late ’90s calling for a war with the United States. The displeasure bin Laden and other hard-line al-Qaeda operatives expressed regarding Muslim-led governments that permitted American forces on their soil was well known.
Bin Laden frequently invoked the Crusades to make his arguments against Israel and Western nations.
“The Arabian Peninsula has never … been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations,” bin Laden said in 1998. This statement was issued bearing the title “Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”.
Bin Laden also used phrases such as “Satan’s US troops” and “devil’s supporters” to further reinforce the negative positioning of Americans in this document. He decreed a fatwa to kill Americans and their allies, and his followers listened. American embassies were bombed in Africa, the navy ship USS Cole was bombed and then New York and Washington were targeted in the horrific September 11 attack.
As Allport points out, this kind of extreme political violence does not materialise out of thin air.
There is always bark before a bite.
Of course much of what bin Laden said was basically true. The west stole everything the Arab word had, their oil their lands. They set up a land stealing theocratic state called Israel which had not existed for nearly 2000 years.
Ironically Hitler’s only legitimate decoration, his Iron Cross was the result of the lobbying of his Jewish Captain. The anti Jewish propaganda owes much to the fact that the Allies never hit Germany’s heartland, so the likes of Marshal Erich Ludendorff could say that Germany was defeated by a conspircay at home rather than the collapse if its army (which he led in the west). Ludendorff fled to Sweden he was such a craven, returning to be a figurehead.
While I despise bin Laden, the US created him by backing his ilk in Afghanistan and funding the Pakistani ISI in the creation of the Taliban. We also forget the shooting down of the Iran Air plane by the USS Vincennes. The process of meddling in the middle east since WWI when Britain’s Arab allies were betrayed by Balfour and everyone else, when arbitrary boundaries were setup and the west conspired to secure the oil has led to much of the present day strife. The blind acquiescence to Israel not matter what they perpetrate, the coup in Iran when they dared to want to control their own oil, the boosting of Saddam Hussein because he was not Iranian. The overthrow of Saddam which brought the Shia to power, given Iraq is majority Shia, how amazing, thereby providing a religious alliance with Iran that any moron could foresee. Bin Laden is like Trump, the result of something sick.
Any more talk like that mate, and you’ll be hauled before a secret court for spreading extremist conspiracy theories.
It must have been such a relief to manage to find a space for Osama – while ignoring the criminal and illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States and pawns such as Australia that created ISIS.
I’ll bet Sturmbahnfurer Der Ton will be doing lots of howling snarling and wimpering at Scotty (from marketing ) for a shedload more money, on the strength of this article.
I used to think that SBS was getting desperate for historical content with it’s returning to the Nazis era series of some extended period – more than a decade it seems.
I now understand that absolute necessity to abandon the old idea that revisiting that era rules you out of order. To the contrary, it’s sadly more relevant than ever to wake up to what is now around us.
Follow the literature…… much of the far right shares old extremist screeds with ISIS and many Christian conservatives (plus Anders Breivik); anti-semitism based upon myths of ‘blood libel’, Rothschilds/’globalisation’ and over a century ago the hoax document (Moldova/Russia inspired by the Tsar?), ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’.
The latter has now been transformed and updated to represent to many, including in power, the ‘Soros Conspiracy’ and the EU.
It’s of all times when societies are in disarray. Follow the literature, in this case the bible; Pontius Pilate to ask whether Bar Abbas should be freed or Jesus.
The extremist gets to play, sometimes on his own, sometimes as a group.