Burn the witch!

The comedian –a term you might choose to apply loosely- Mark Meechan, a.k.a. Count Dankula, has been fined £800 after appearing at Airdrie Sheriff Court charged with aggravating religious prejudice. His crime was to post a video on youtube, during which he trained his girlfriend’s dog to respond to the words “gas the Jews” and to perform the Sieg Heil with one of its paws.The video is not particularly funny and it would be easy to argue that it is in bad taste. That, however, is an observation which should only merit a response of ‘so what’?

At the start of the clip, Dankula announces that his aim is to transform the dog from being what his girlfriend regards as the cutest thing in the world –a little pug- into the least cute thing imaginable: a Nazi. But Sheriff Derek O'Carroll found him guilty under the Communications Act of a charge that he posted material which was grossly offensive because it was "anti-Semitic and racist in nature" and was “aggravated by religious prejudice”.

The clip wasn’t sent to anyone in particular; it was uploaded to a server and was only viewable upon demand. And, in spite of Dankula’s explanation of the joke, the context of his words were deemed to be irrelevant. If the context provided by the comedian was irrelevant, then it must surely follow that Sheriff O'Carroll’s use of the phrase “gas the Jews” in court was also anti-Semitic. The only way those words couldn’t be interpreted as anti-Semitic would be if one acknowledged the importance of context. If context is irrelevant, shouldn’t Sheriff O’Carroll be charged too? 

One of the worst things about this case (and there are many bad things) is that other comedians have been willing to throw a fellow traveller under the bus, indifferent or oblivious to their wretched acceptance of a milieu in which the context of words can be deemed irrelevant by the authorities. Just how complacent, stupid or tribal do you have to be in order not to grasp that the creation of such conditions might one day result in your own imprisonment?

Some have observed that Dankula didn’t get sent to jail and that his fine of £800 will probably be paid by donations from his supporters. Indeed, at the time of writing, his crowd funding page has raised around £114,000 to cover the predicted legal costs of his appeal against the sentence. Such observations are facile and ignore the two main points.

1.      This shouldn't have gone to court. The fact that it did and the way that it did, should set our alarm bells ringing.

2.      The fine is irrelevant, because the process itself is the punishment. The precedent has been set; if you wish to avoid the possibility of a two-year legal battle with its attendant fees, stress and adverse publicity, you had best rein in your online comments, opinions and jokes.

Last week, a young woman from Liverpool was convicted of hate speech for posting the lyrics from Snap Dogg’s track I’m trippin’. One wonders how this can be possible when neither the author nor the publisher of those lyrics have been prosecuted. Nor has any action ever been undertaken against the many folk who sing along with the lyrics at Mr Dogg’s concerts. The person who made the complaint was PC Dominique Walker, who works for the Hate Crime Unit of Merseyside Police. Let’s lay that one out for inspection: A person who gets paid to spot ‘hate crime’ makes a complaint about a ‘hate crime’ incident in which a young woman has quoted lyrics from a song that has been broadcast, promoted  and performed on many occasions.

Perhaps we should acknowledge the possibility (and by that, I mean the probability) that someone who gets paid to spot ‘hate crime’ ought not to be able to bring a ‘hate crime’ complaint against a member of the public.

Perhaps we should acknowledge the possibility (and by that I mean the probability) that it is in PC Dominique Walker’s professional interests to find and prosecute examples of ‘hate crime’ in the same way that it was in the best interests of witch-finders in the 17^th century to find and prosecute witches.       

Anyone who can look upon these prosecutions with equanimity should consider the possibility (and by that I mean the probability) that one day it might not be ‘reasonable’ folk who happen to share their views who will get to exercise this kind of capricious authority. Perhaps they should try and envisage a world in which the most reprehensible people imaginable have been granted the power to behave as the police and the courts have behaved in these cases.

In a mature democracy, people who make frivolous accusations of ‘hate crime’ would be ignored and considered ridiculous. Personally, I’d favour a more remedial treatment, perhaps involving them being marched through town, put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit.

But we can’t claim to live in a mature democracy when the actions of the authorities are edging us ever closer to an age in which that ‘stocks and rotten fruit’ option might begin to look like a quaint remnant of a golden age of progressive enlightenment.