Comments | liamp: Democracy and fascism

liamp

Democracy and fascism

Jun 10, 2009 01:42

In the wake of the appalling news that I now have a fascist thug representing me in the European Parliament, I had an interesting conversation with ms_lilith and teadaemon about democracy and human rights and stuff ( Read more... )

politics, activism

Comments 6

dandelionclock June 10 2009, 08:31:47 UTC

I have no idea, you know.But it's hard.

You can get this on a t-shirt by the way: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spinneyhead/3606165747/

That's a start. A crap one, granted.

Personally, I sat down on Monday and tried to write an analysis of the current political situation. In whole, all I got was: "we're all completely fucked."

teadaemon June 10 2009, 09:14:34 UTC

Ok, quite a few points there, and I haven't properly woken up, but I'll try to address them all, in no particular order ( ... )

liamp June 10 2009, 10:13:08 UTC

Morning! Thanks for the response ( ... )

teadaemon June 10 2009, 11:08:00 UTC

1) I think we should always leave everything open to question, as if we don't then we will eventually end up with a system that doesn't work, as it's based on outdated dogma (very much like religions that rely on books written hundreds if not thousands of years ago ( ... )

liamp June 10 2009, 12:53:11 UTC

1) Perhaps I wasn't entirely clear - I'm very much in favour of questioning things generally. But I think there are some other fundamental values that are equally important and that we could get agreement on, and I think the Declaration of Human Rights is a step in that direction. Is there not some way of safeguarding those rights, other than being prepared for war once we've allowed the fascists to get into power and trample on them ( ... )

Banning the BNP from standing scaryjim June 10 2009, 13:45:09 UTC

I'm pretty sure (as is Muriel) that the power already exists within English law to do this. In fact, powers exist to do all sorts of things including suspending democratic elections altogether (should Gordon Brown be so attached to power that he wanted to abuse his existing majority). The question is how you justify using that power. The BNP apparently represent the views of at least 2% of the country's population, rising as high as 3% in some areas. They're still some way behind the Greens, who also saw a bigger % increase in their vote this time around ( ... )