See also:
Also by the same Daily Heil author Dominique Jackson:
Our community’s response: http://socialwelfareunion.org/archives/1119
The Daily Mail has been embarrassed into deleting an offensive paragraph from an online contribution to its website.
A piece headlined Why our new legions of unemployed graduates need to adjust their expectations, by Dominique Jackson, contained this extraordinary paragraph:
“The German slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ is somewhat tainted by its connection with Nazi concentration camps, but its essential message, ‘work sets you free’ still has something serious to commend it.
There is dignity to be gained from any job, no matter how menial, and for young people at the start of their careers, there are valuable lessons to be learned from any form of employment, whether that is on the factory floor, on a supermarket till or in the contemporary hard labour camp of a merchant bank or law office.”
This grotesque lapse in taste was removed from the article once its presence was revealed on the Twittersphere.
There was no mention of the deletion despite the fact that three (of the 29) commenters on the article – which was posted on 4 July – pointed out that it was entirely inappropriate.
One of them, gloworm, glos, wrote: “Somewhat tainted? By the deaths of considerably more than a million men, women and children? I understand the point you are making, but to write off a phrase like ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ as somewhat tainted demonstrates such a complete lack of feeling for context that… Christ, words fail me.”
Yet the editor of Mail online’s Right Minds comment section didn’t feel it necessary take it down at the time.
Tom Chivers, in a Daily Telegraph blog today, wrote:
“Somewhat tainted, yes, Dominique. I mean, admittedly reductio ad Hitlerum is a logical fallacy, but nonetheless I think there might be lower-hanging fruit to reach for when it comes to inspiring slogans.”
And the New Statesman’s Alex Hern, in noting that the Mail was practising its usual “editing by Twitter” recorded that the Jackson piece had “mysteriously been updated” (at 11.39am) within minutes of the story going viral. Updated means deleted, of course.
Index on Censorship’s news editor, Padraig Reidy, managed to get a screenshot of the undeleted paragraph before the Mail censored itself, as the twitpic above shows.
Hat tips all round to New Statesman/Daily Telegraph/Padraig Reidy
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
There’s only one real way to be free… buy your own island, write your own constitution then declare yourself a free and independant state.
I disagree.
I think the The Daily Mail should NOT be let off so lightly or without remark. The Daily Mail MUST be forced to print a retraction and at the very least issue a public apology and rebuke against Dominique Jackson.
There is NO place for Nazi idioms or references. The history of Nazism is a horror which has indelibly stained the ‘souls’ of innumerable Nations.
Those British People, forced to fight in a War that was NOT of their making: those who fought, those who died, those who were wounded, tortured and enslaved could have NOTHING but contempt for us ALL, were we to stand by while their sacrifice, their honour and THEIR efforts for OUR salvation are besmirched with the vilest rhetoric in human history.
WHO among our Politicians, Media Pundits or Journalists would dare to stand in front of OUR present Olympic Heroes and say “ALL those whose Grandparents served Kind and Country ACTUALLY gave their LIVES for naught?”
What GLORY can there be in SPORT when its spectacle and endeavour is backlit by the gross, inhuman, fires of glowing crematoria and the policies which lit them?
One can gloss over the inane and peurile idioms which came to being under the shadow of the marching Third Reich, but one can NEVER forget or allow to be forgotten, the ceaseless, withering, merciless or tediously mechanistic misery the Nazis freely and decisively inflicted upon ALL who opposed their maniacal plans.
And now THIS filth returns to us under the pretence of an editorial exposee, discussing the “merits” of Nazi ideas. This condescension and simplistic, patronizing and achingly moronic reference to the “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes Freedom) epithet – forgets, ignores or wilfully omits the REALITY of course, that it really didn’t matter WHAT was “written” on the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau: because NONE would ever leave there -alive. For even if they worked themselves to point of death, the only way the men, women, children and infants of the extermination camps would ever escape, would be via a Chimney stack.
For they would only ever be allowed to leave …as smoke!
So, Today.
ALL of you.
Disabled and Able bodied. Tweet the PM, The Chancellor, Boris Jonson. Chris Grayling and Ian Duncan-Smith and CONFRONT them. Ask them DIRECTLY – Do YOU agree that NAZI ideas, concepts or policies should EVER be invoked in British Politics?
Hound them until you have an answer.
Bombard them with E-mails (particularly Number 10 and ask the SAME question over and over..
Let US shine a light on this verminous idea and banish it. WE have to stamp out the glowing embers of Nazism BEFORE the flames take hold again..