Dan Deals with the Big Stuff

Never let it be said that the left can’t deal with the important stuff. After all, America may be collapsing into impoverished violence, with soaring inflation, spiralling gas and food prices and armed thugs attempting to assassinate Supreme Court justices, but Joe Biden did pass an anti-lynching law. That’s right, the Democrats have finally found the time to outlaw what was already outlawed, and hasn’t happened in the USA in 40 years. As if we needed reminding that lynching is simply a non-existent problem in modern America, the bill was named for a crime committed 67 years ago.

But Joe Biden is hardly the only leftist swamp monster fiddling with pointless virtue-signalling while the state collapses and burns around his ears.

Victoria this week become the first Australian jurisdiction to ban the Nazi swastika, with those who defy the ban to face jail and a hefty fine.

Well, I guess that means the Mongrel Mob will have to strike Melbourne off their holiday bucket list.

So, why the sudden urgency to ban the symbol of a regime from the other side of the world that was obliterated over three quarters of a century ago?

I recently spent a weekend driving around Melbourne’s east and west without seeing a single swastika. I lived in for Queensland 31 years and never saw a Nazi symbol.

Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Maybe Nazi symbols are so prevalent I’ve just become blind to them. Or maybe Australia doesn’t have a swastika problem so much as a ‘progressive politicians in need of grandstanding’ problem.

I’ve literally seen a swastika in Tasmania once. Walking down the street one day, I passed some grub sporting a big, black swastika tattoo. I was almost as startled as the time I passed a woman in full, black chador, her entire body covered except for a letter-box slit for her eyes.

Now, here’s the odd thing: I felt nothing but contempt for the idiot with the swastika tatt.

The fact is that if Nazi hatred exists in my street, I want to know so that I can tackle it. Banning hate symbols doesn’t disappear hate, it merely hides it. And hidden hatred is far more problematic than publicly expressed hatred since it cannot be countered. Moreover, it only serves to make the haters feel like martyrs, causing them to double down.

Even supposing that there were enough nongs who felt the urge to display the swastika, presumably because of a hate-boner for Jews, will banning them from waving their little Nazi flags suddenly stop them hating Jews? It certainly didn’t work when there were real Nazis, in numbers big enough to be a real problem.

The Weimar Republic had some of the Western world’s first restrictions on hate speech. But their speech laws helped rather than hindered Hitler.

When the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Adolf Hitler from making public speeches, the Nazis responded by distributing a drawing of their leader with his mouth gagged and the caption, ‘Of 2,000 million people in the world, one alone is forbidden to speak in Germany.’

Hate speech laws did diddly squat to stop the Nazis, but they proved very useful when the Nazis took power. The laws created to suppress Nazis ended up being used by the Nazis to suppress everyone else!

As Mark Steyn once observed:

“Liberals always seem stunned when supposedly ‘liberal’ laws are subsequently used for illiberal ends.”

Spectator Australia

Banning swastikas will also do jack to stamp out anti-Semitism, when the most virulent and numerous anti-Semites aren’t waving swastikas. Instead, they’re wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian and hammer-and-sickle flags.

So, Dictator Dan, let’s see you ban those. After all, as you say, “In our state, nobody has the right to spread racism, hate or antisemitism.” Better let the anti-Semitic loons in GetUp, the Greens and the BDS movement know that you’re onto them. While you’re at it, ban the regalia of the Ukrainian Azov movement, too. Their badges literally are Nazi symbols.

Or is the agenda really something else entirely?