What Is Happening To This Country?

Jo Cox is dead and I am so sad, and so angry.

I am sad because she was a campaigner, she was passionate, she was one of the few women in Parliament, she was principled, she was genuine. I am sad because she was a mum of two little boys who aren't old enough to know what murder is, nevermind where their mum has gone.

And I am fucking furious, incandescently angry at the media spin on this tragic culmination of weeks of right wing propaganda and hatred.

Yesterday, just hours before she was murdered, Nigel Farage unveiled his latest campaign poster. Behold:

Does it remind you of anything? Does it, perhaps, remind you of this?

via @zcbeaton on twitter

This is a clip of a Nazi propaganda film, giving much the same message in an identical fashion.

Just a week ago, fifty men were murdered at a gay bar in Florida, by a man called Omar Mateen. Because Omar happened to be brown, the massacre was immediately hailed as a terrorist attack

and within twenty four hours, used as Leave propaganda:

Sack your subeditor, Leave. 

Alas for those who would like to blame everything on ISIS that Omar Mateen had no links to them, and wasn't religious. This was an act of terrorism, but it wasn't an act of international, Islam-extremist terrorism. 

Several years ago, Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in Sweden because he hated Islam that much. But, before any information about the terrorist was revealed, The Sun ran this as their front page:

Once it was revealed that Breivik was both white and not a Muslim, the tide quickly turned:

Now, he's just a maniac with extremist links. 

And so it seems in the case of Jo Cox, the same will happen. The murderer is widely reported to have shouted Britain First as he attacked her, while she was running her local constituency surgery. This is a lady who actively campaigned for Syrian refugees and against Islamophobia. She was everything Britain First claim, VOCIFEROUSLY, to despise. And yet...

A crazed loner! Salacious details from The Sun, as you might expect. But no reference to claims that he might have been a British right wing extremist. If she'd been murdered by someone with even the faintest of tans, the headlines would be very different. The media keep spinning us this line that immigrants are terrorists who want to kill us, and then this happens. A left wing member of parliament gets killed at work by someone likely fired up by weeks of increasingly right wing propaganda and lies.

When every time you go to the shop, you're faced with front pages like this:

Plus every single non-weather related frontpage of The Daily Express.

how can the media act shocked that this sort of thing can happen? How can they blame mental illness and look no further? You have to be at least a little bit unstable to murder someone, but normally, when someone is murdered, the papers are quick to splash details about how their upbringing, their religion, their race, their experience with school, their obsession with porn or video games was to blame. Why can they not apply that same logic to being bombarded with hysterical lies about immigrants and Muslims? Britain First, with an irony that would be hilarious in less tragic circumstances, have been quick to distance themselves from Jo Cox's murder, but how can they not see how they might be complicit in driving someone to kill? The Remain and Leave campaigns both stopped yesterday, although for how long, I don't know. But do they, particularly Leave, not see how their constant bewildering panicked lies and half-truths might drive someone to extremism?

As a nation, we cannot take this assassination as a one-off, lone-wolf, freak event. We have to look at the context, because it is a symptom of a much wider disease.

Nobody should be cut down in the street because of their political conviction.
We lost a good woman yesterday, and we should all be sad, regardless of political leaning.

pic.twitter.com/mPOaytowxN

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) June 16, 2016