Over the past couple of weeks, @DMReporter and I (@BestoftheMail) have been getting more and more aghast by the tone of some of the coverage of the migration in Europe. This is especially apparent in newspaper comment sections where it now seems that literally anything goes.
You can fantasise about how you want to kill them:
You can rejoice in their death:
Or you can compare them to pests, dogs or filth.. (thanks Katie Hopkins)
So as a social experiment, @DMReporter and I wanted to see what level of support the comments would get if we took some famous pieces of Nazi propaganda and changed the word ‘Jew’ with ‘migrant’. For disclosure, a few of the comments we made were blocked by the Mail’s moderators however most of them made it through.
So here’s the original Nazi quote, the updated comment and how it fared when we put it up”
“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
MASSIVELY UPVOTED — this was even the highest rated comment at one stage!
“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
UPVOTED!
“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
UPVOTED!
“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
UPVOTED!
We had four more similar submissions (including Hitler’s famous quote ‘Humanitarian is the expression of stupidity and cowardice’). They were all also highly rated, receiving way more green than red arrows.
At the most recent count, we had a total of 480 up votes (and rising) against 16 down votes, across eight adapted Nazi comments. It seems the migration debate has evolved to a place where even certified hate speech can pass for popular political opinion!
Mashable has produced a fantastic mythbuster about the migrant crisis; but whatever your views on the solution let’s try and remember we’re dealing with people and keep the debate free of hatred!