Things that make me lose faith in humanity

Please watch this video without reading any of the comments or the rest of my blog. Do so with an openish mind.

Now, the video itself is quite pleasant, other than occasional cinematographic hints which imply content and judgement, like the camera resting a little too long on words like immigration and money transfer. It is a video showing an apparently happy, lively community, with people working and contributing to the economy. It is the annotations that make this disturbing. Firstly, simple factual errors and lies, like the idea that only 8% of the world's population is white, which is clearly and quickly disproved by a google search

But there are more disturbing claims, like Peckham being a hotbed of crime. We do not see ANY crime in this 10 minute video. Another quick search does show Peckham as a bit of a dangerous place, but this is a) put in better perspective by comparison to other city centres rather than national averages containing rural statistics and b) more of an argument against ghettos than immigration. Yes, problems can arise when people band together rather than integrating - this is my only problem with the multicultural system as we run it, that I don't believe there is sufficient desire for or pressure on first generation immigrants to integrate into British society. I think people living in Britain should at least be able to speak English, and should speak it wherever possible, in the interests of courtesy, fairness and integration. While I recognise that some things are not translatable, or that it's rare to be able to express yourself as freely and readily in a second language as in your mother tongue, people who have come to live here will never improve their English if they default to speaking their own language because it's easier.

But language aside, there is little else problematic with multiculturalism. Certainly, my father and I, who probably fall under that bracket of "middle class liberals" or whatever the horrific annotations brand us as, went to Harringey last week to "celebrate" the multiculturalism in the form of the amazing Turkish restaurants they have there. It's a Turkish sector, but it hasn't descended into a ghetto, because the inhabitants recognise the need to be part of the greater society which surrounds them. This is part of the key to stop ghettos forming - you can't force people not to live near each other, but you can educate or show them that there is no need to seek out familiarity and safety, or that, if they do, that they are still part of a wider network. It's precisely marginalisation and attacks like those of the BNP on Peckham and other 'ghettos' that will force them to become more and more insular from the world they perceive as a threat.

Further to this is the implication that only immigrants commit crime. Now I've been beaten so badly by a Colombian who was trying to steal my phone that I ended up in hopsital. But I've had as much if not more problems from white chavs as any other racial group. There's an assumed causality here by the BNP, that black people commit crimes because they are black, rather than because they are marginalised or poor, often because of the colour of their skin or the language they speak.

All this comes on the back of further small-mindedness in the States. Last week, if you didn't know, voters in Maine repealed state legislation allowing gay marriage. In a virtual rerun of Proposition 8, right down to ridiculous claims and outright lies like "Gay marriage will be taught in schools", idiocy and bigotry prevailed again. Such tactics are also to be found across the fight for healthcare reform, with lies about death panels and compulsory insurance, tying healthcare to the Nazis, or in the White House's War on Fox News, and their phantom ratings spike.

Seeing as my political beliefs and affiliations are complex and manifold, I will say this: as long as the right continues to use the tactics of fear, hate, half-truths and lies, they will undermine any genuine credibility that they may have. It is sometimes a malaise of the left too, but oh so much more rarely. So you can spout your figures on how many people listen to the Limbaughs, the Becks, the Hannitys, and the Griffins of this world, but until they cut the bullshit and start talking in simple truths, they are simply doing a disservice both to the truth of there arguments, such as it exists, and the people who follow them. It's bonfire night, people. 404 years ago, a man with a revolutionary spirit built a bomb to kill a King. Tonight, it is probably too much to hope for that the same revolutionary spirit might overcome those who blindly follow the shit-stirring demagogues of this world. But we can console ourselves with this - since a lot of the BNP and Republican support is elderly, the sound of the fireworks might cause a spate of heart attacks, clearing the way for gays, immigrants and healthcare reform across the world...

If only...