Droplets of bigotry turn into rivers of blood!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

In my mind I see a vast flood delta being fed by streams and rivers, small and vast, flowing thick with blood, bullets and bombs, propelled by bigotry and bile.

The vision first appeared in my brainbox whilst watching a Sky News report about Michael Adebolajo, the suspected killer of the British soldier Lee Rigby. My eyes dropped to the news banner running along bottom of the screen, which declared that 50 people had been killed in a wave of car bombings in Baghdad.

Each family will mourn their dead with equal love and loss, but sadly each death will be exploited by others to speed the flow of the river.

There’s enough hate around at the moment to fill an ocean. The dangerous idiots at the English Defence League (EDL) have taken Rigby’s murder and turned it into a pogrom, attacking mosques in England in a bid to incite civil war.

English society usually enjoys an innate acceptance of differences, but bigotry buds are collectively buzzing at the moment, because bank balances are empty.

In Greece, the Troika’s austerity programme has spawned xenophobic hatred in the shape of the fascist Golden Dawn party; while here in Ireland, reaction is tempered by the same conservatism entrenched in the minds of Middle England, which dictates that when things go wrong, you blame your societal fringes.

Blaming foreigners comes quickly and easy to the English and the Irish. Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) performed incredibly well at recent local elections, because UKIP say exactly what small-minded people think but dare not speak out loud.

Standing outside a pub with a pint in one hand, a ciggie in the other, Farage talks engagingly and clearly about how he has nothing against them personally, there’s just too many people on one small island, and it’s only fair that English society prioritises jobs for the English, because you have to look after your own first.

It’s a horribly tortuous river that flows from Farage’s pint to the destruction of Fallujah, onwards to Helmand Province and the murder of Lee Rigby, but the painful truth is that war will come home. You simply cannot wage war in foreign countries and expect no reprisal in your own. I learned that as a teenager, when the IRA brought their bombs to my London school route.

When hatred flows, common sense and perspective disappear. Violent young things with more balls than brains go out and sign up to the EDL, so they can burn mosques, because the flow of their ignorant hatred tells them that Muslims have it coming, because they killed that solider on the streets of London.

Meanwhile, the self-styled ‘silent majority’ who live behind the privet-hedges of Middle England have their darkest suspicions and deepest-felt grudges legitimised by UKIP’s electoral success.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.