Political Policing Is Nothing New
The “Banal” Evil Perpetrated in the Name of “Kindness”
“Don’t mention the war!” The classic line uttered by Basil Fawlty had a reboot on Twitter this weekend. Fair Cop, the organisation I co-founded in 2019 to challenge the police in the UK, published a series of tweets that drew a comparison between the current politicisation of police forces across the UK and those of the Greater Germanic Reich.
We were prompted to do this following a particularly sinister week during which the Merseyside police had erected a piece of fatuous propaganda in an Asda car park which claimed that “being offensive is an offence.” Also last week, another group of police officers called the National LGBT+ Police Network operating on Twitter as @LGBTpoliceuk reported dissenting Twitter comments to themselves—to include reporting all those women who did not join their celebration of biological men being included in women’s sport. So, when a Twitter user sent us a picture of a parade ground packed with new officers, we decided to tweet a pictorial comparison.
“How it began” we wrote, above a historic picture of police gathered beneath the standard of the Third Reich. “How it’s going” we wrote above the recent picture of police standing at ease behind the Intersectional trans flag. After tweeting this, all hell broke loose.
“If you are going to mention a war, don’t mention that war!” was the message from those accounts which did not instantly block us. By making a comparison between today’s political scene and that of Nazi Germany, we had invoked the Holocaust and, thereby, shown gross disrespect to those who were its victims. The unspoken rule appears to be that no comparison to the SS should be made until such time as British constables commence hanging symbols around the necks of undesirables and marching them onto trains. In the eyes our critics, breaking this rule is at best unhelpful and, at worst, reveals Fair Cop to be anti-Semitic.
Both logic and history are absent from this argument. Death camps were the endpoint of the Third Reich’s journey, not its starting point. Collusion between local councils, local police forces, and political groups across the beer halls and public offices of 1920’s Southern Germany is where it all began.
I shall now say something which will be taken out of context; nevertheless, it requires stating. I have often wondered how I would have acted had I been a youth discovering adult life in the music halls and Bierkellers of 1920’s Munich. Against a backdrop of military humiliation, the perceived iniquity of an enforced peace, and a sudden, brutal jolt back into poverty as a result of a financial collapse taking place four thousand miles away on Wall Street, I may have found anti-capitalist identity politics appealing. Throw in a brown shirt and a sexy pair of boots and my young, blue-eyed, blonde-haired self may have swooned at the chance of being part of a “progressive” elite, ready to draw swords against historical wrongs.
By the way, that is what National Socialism was: a form of identity politics which elevated the German as special, as unique and as deserving of recognition. Other nationalities were okay but it was the Aryans (a made-up identity at the purest end of the spectrum) who were especially “stunning and brave.” By merging mythical past (King Arthur’s sword in the stone meets the knights of the Holy Grail) with the discriminatory present (the Treaty of Versailles), police were persuaded to afford special status to those at the beautiful end of the identity spectrum. As for Jews, blacks, gays, Irish, commies, capitalists and gypsies, these were the equivalent of today’s TERFS and it was expected you would give one a punch.
By 1929, anti-Semitism was as international as Antifa. Henry Ford, an analogue version of Elon Musk, had written a pamphlet in which the evils of short skirts, jazz music and international strife were traced to the global problem of Jewry. And by the end of 1932, Brownshirt numbers would swell to over 2 million under the guidance of the anti-capitialist radical, Ernst Röhm.
As an angry, impressionable teen hell-bent on social justice, I would have been impressed by the efforts of a dashing young Nazi called Rudolf Höss, a pioneer for prison reform and the humane treatment of prisoners. Had I known that he would later become the Kommandant of Auschwitz, I might have said, “Wow. Lucky inmates!”
Those screaming from the fringes, such as the German industrialist, Eduard Schulte, were dismissed as inciting “wild rumour inspired by Jewish fear.” Comparing the Brownshirts and SS to the Cheka demonstrated a false equivalence and a gross disrespect for the victims of Soviet brutality. In 1929, Germany was still a democracy after all, not a Communist dictatorship. So, given that the entry age for an SS recruit was 17, I imagine that my 1929 young, dumb self might well have been a Nazi. It’s why I have some sympathy for Shemima Begum.
Sixteen years later, Nuremberg happened. At the trial, the Chief Prosecutor General, Telford Taylor, implored us to heed “the ideas and motives which moved physicians to treat their fellow men as less than beasts,” likening Nazism to a cancer, spread across the breast of humanity. We were told we must be vigilant and never let it happen again.
When is the optimum moment to address the issue of cancer? Is it when it has spread throughout the lymphatic system and taken command of vital organs? Or when the evidence that you see may prove to be nothing more sinister than a liver spot? History says to speak early. Even if we are wrong. Even if we offend.
Consider the physician, whose pledge to first do no harm has similar weight to the constable’s pledge to serve without fear or favour. As Michael Grodin, Erin Miller and Johnathan Kelly write in “The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and ‘Euthanasia’: Lessons for Today”: “The atrocities justified and performed by the health practitioners serving the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs exemplify how small steps along a slippery slope can lead to crimes against humanity.”
Genocide, like eugenics, is not born full-grown. The time to catch it is during the baby steps. Such steps, I suggest, include a police force taking instruction from a politicised, private security firm (the College of Policing), championing political ideology through its formal alliance with Stonewall, creating a blacklist of those accused of committing non-crime crimes, encouraging the use of snitches whilst granting them anonymity, wearing uniforms and carrying riot shields emblazoned with ideological insignia, conducting a propaganda campaign of false history and fake law, advocating for the prosecution of those who reject coercive language change, limiting recruitment to true believers, supporting a charity which advocates for the mutilation of children, criminalising kids who have expressed a wrong opinion at school, and denying employment via disclosure of non-crimes via an enhanced DBS check. Torture and summary shootings may not be on the list. But only a fool ignores the baby steps or the subtle skin change forming on the brow.
Much of the resistance to comparing our police force with the SS is because most people would never say, “Yeah…I might have been a Nazi.” Many imagine Nazis to have descended, fully formed, from the Planet Evil whereas the unpalatable truth is that they were just like us. It is pointing this out which so boils the blood.
So too is the will for others to make wilful misinterpretations of my tweet last week. For instance, Fair Cop has just been cancelled by Spreadshirt, a company based in Leipzig, Germany, because we warned that Nazi policing should have nothing in common with modern policing, be that being kitted out in Hugo Boss uniforms or gathering by a political symbol. We are now classed as a “hate group” because we mentioned the Nazis in a negative light.
If one considers that comparison between the Nazi police and the British police is offensive hyperbole, then one must first explain why in “Miller v Humberside,” the High Court began its ruling with Orwell before throwing in not one, but three examples of totalitarian state policing: the torturous brutes of Stalin (Cheka), the thought police of East Germany (Stasi) and the secret police of the Nazis (Gestapo). Not only did the judge write this into the ruling, he chose this paragraph to read aloud to the public and press, thereby indicating that the comparison is not only valid but necessary.
While genocide need not be the end goal for today’s totalitarians, the tactics being employed in recent years ring a terrifying historical bell. “Never Again” is the easy part of the lesson. The far more challenging lesson is learning to recognise the baby steps that allowed it to happen in the first place.
We would be foolish to pretend that there is only one arch-evil moment in history. Recent excisions from public and professional life may be infinitely kinder than genocide but they are excisions, nonetheless. Police using dark Twitter accounts to label dissenters as “non-crime criminals” is to travel in the footsteps of Nazis. Jackboots with rainbow laces are still jackboots and cancelling dissenters is a forerunner to making enemies disappear. A modern police force that attempts to control and direct all aspects of political and private life may yet be a million miles from the gas chambers, but we follow a familiar road and would be well advised to get off it.
In “Why Historical Analogy Matters,” Peters E Gordon writes of the imperative to place historical crimes within a human landscape:
Hannah Arendt’s description of Nazism’s evil as “banal” was not meant to diminish its horror but to magnify it, by reminding us that its perpetrators were not monsters but ordinary men. She feared that, in the public mind, the sheer magnitude of the Nazis’ crime would remain so opaque that it would be depoliticized and lifted free of political history, as if it had not been perpetrated by human beings at all.
For what it’s worth, my 55-year-old self would have been a saboteur, but that is a different story.