The media coverage of migrants fleeing poverty and war has managed to bring out the inner-Nazi in a lot of people, stoked by inflammatory comments in the media, and even from the Prime Minister.
When the guy in charge of the country is calling human beings looking for a better life a ‘swarm’, what hope do we have?
In the media, the Daily Mail is really at the forefront of right wing fear mongering. And they have a long tradition of right wing sympathies, having openly supported Hitler and the Nazi party throughout the early 1930s. The person with Hitler in the picture below is Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Mail at the time.
So this social experiment is quite fitting.
The people behind the @bestofthemail and @DMReporter Twitter accounts decided to post actual Nazi propaganda in the Daily Mail comments section, on articles about the migrant crisis, to see what kind of response it would get. They took quotes from prominent Nazis and replaced the word ‘Jew’ with ‘migrant’.
Turns out actual-real-life Nazi propaganda fits in quite nicely on the Daily Mail, as seen by the upvotes the comments got.
Check out the green upvotes on these comments:
In this struggle against Judah, there’s only a clear either/or. Any half measure leads to one’s own destruction. Judah and its world must die if humanity wants to live; there is no other choice than to fight a pitiless battle against the Jews in every form.
The Pestilential Miasma of the World by Robert Ley
If the Jew wants to fight, it is fine with us. We have wanted that fight for a long time. There is no room in the world for the Jews any more. The Jew or us, one of us will have to go.
The Jews or Us by Robert Ley
The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself. The principle applies here.
Adolf Hitler: Broadcast to the German People On The Winter Help Scheme
This battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God,
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Incredible. In an email to i100, @BestoftheMail explained:
In recent weeks we were both fairly shocked by the tone of much of the migrant debate, especially the dehumanising and hateful nature of the language used to describe them. We wanted to illustrate how easy it is for hate speech to become normalised and show the importance of focusing on the people and the facts rather than resorting to prejudice.
@DMReporter told them:
What really interested us was the amount of support these comments were getting. Every website gets comments like this submitted but what struck us most was the enthusiastic manner in which they were accepted. They were just knee-jerk approvals instead of any considered thought about what sort of comment they were actually agreeing with.
At a recent count they had 480 upvotes to 16 down votes, across eight fascist comments.
Of course, it’s not just the Daily Mail website that harbours comments and opinions like this, but they are a prime example.
And as a response to this experiment, @DMReporter was subsequently banned from posting on the Daily Mail.
Glad to see the spirit of authoritarian justice is still alive at the Mail.
