An internal uprising has erupted at the BBC over the decision to temporarily suspend TV presenter and former footballer Gary Lineker to deactivate, because he had not spoken impartially on social media. Football program analysts, presenters and commentators Match of the Day refuse to appear on TV this Saturday in solidarity with their colleague. Sports programs have therefore been suspended or will be broadcast without comment.
Lineker wrote this week on Twitter that the British government’s plan to return boat migrants immediately upon arrival is an “immeasurably cruel policy” aimed “at the most vulnerable in a language not unlike that of Germany in the 1930s.” Initially this earned him a lot of criticism, but Lineker also received not only from his colleagues acclaim on Twitter from Professor of History Tanja Bueltmann from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. “If we can’t use our historical knowledge to identify similarities, then what is history for?” she says over the phone from Scotland.
Why did you feel the need to respond to the outcry over Gary Lineker’s comments?
Tanja Bueltmann: “His comments are not the real story here – the story is why the UK government continues to make policy choices that we know won’t work, and why they choose to use the language they use. But it has long been one of my concerns that comments like Lineker’s are immediately dismissed as ‘over the top‘ or ‘extreme’.
“A direct comparison between the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany would be wrong in my view, but he did not. It’s about recognizing similarities in the populist toolbox. I think this is especially important because Nazism didn’t start with mass murder, it started in much more gradual ways and language played a key role in that.”
What similarities do you see between the current discourse on refugees and the 1930s?
Making groups of people ‘the other’ and dehumanizing them. Refugees and asylum seekers in this case, but there are also other vulnerable groups that are attacked in the same way. The dehumanization is done, for example, by suggesting that masses of people are invading us – so it’s not about the individual refugees and their stories of fleeing war, it’s suddenly about a anonymous masses threatening the UK.
“We saw such language and this approach in the 1930s, in fact as early as the 1920s, in Germany. When Eastern European Jews sought refuge after World War I, it was presented as a mass flood and a threat to Germany. The Nazis then expanded this rhetoric and pushed it to extremes.
“I am not the only historian who argues this. My fellow professor Timothy Snyder, of Yale University, called it “obviously some people involved in current politics are adopting some of the tactics of the 1920s and 1930s.” Some contemporary politicians, according to Snyder, have learned propaganda techniques from twentieth-century fascists.”
Critics of this approach say: the British government does not gas people in death camps.
“This is the most complex aspect in all these discussions. The Holocaust stands apart and it is critical that it is never forgotten. There have been comments from some in the Jewish community, including in response to my Twitter thread, noting that I was wrong. I’m not going to question that, as it reflects the personal lived experiences of some in the Jewish community that I, as a German, don’t have.
“But I hope people can recognize that I wrote from my own lived experience. I have learned to take a stand when I see similar patterns to what eventually led to the horrific Nazi ideology. I think many Germans feel this: a kind of collective sense of duty to raise those similarities when politicians use similar language.”
Why do you think the debate on refugees has shifted towards the extreme right?
“It is clear that the far right has always been against refugees. But the shift we’ve seen in the UK lately is, I believe, a direct result of the inflammatory language used by British ministers. Even the government’s own lawyers warned the government that that hateful language could inspire the extreme right. We are literally seeing this happening right now. So in that sense I don’t find it surprising what is happening.
“The purpose of the shift is to fuel what we now seem to be calling the ‘culture wars’. The government scores incredibly badly, failing the UK in all policy areas. The prime minister is desperate, so he continues to resort to populism. That tells him to keep putting people out of order. This was also a very effective approach during the Brexit referendum campaign, which was aimed at all immigrants at the time.”
You also wrote that populist politicians ‘can no longer control this’. What do you mean by this?
“They have no control over the far-right groups that are now responding to this. The riots outside a hotel where asylum seekers are staying in Knowsley, near Liverpool, demonstrate this. The police were quite overwhelmed, a police van was set on fire. Events like this are organized by far-right groups such as the Patriotic Alliance, who operate under the guise of protecting communities. And politicians continue to fan the flames.”
The centre-right and the radical right are engaged in a battle to bind voters by using increasingly harsh language about migration, said political scientist Saskia Bonjour recently in NRC. Do you recognize this dynamic?
“Yes, I think it’s part of what made the Tories in the UK what they are today. They are still usually described as a centre-right, conservative party, while some of their policies are more extreme than what far-right groups propose. This was partly due to Brexit and the way in which Nigel Farage of UKIP pushed everything further and further to the right. But I also see this in Germany, where a growing number [christen-democratische] CDU politicians seem happy to rely on votes from the [rechts-populistische] AfD. Or think of the normalization of this pattern in Sweden.
“Perhaps most disturbing to me is how those who oppose this still pander to some of the underlying rhetoric. In the UK you have the ‘hostile environment’ policy: measures designed to make staying in the country as difficult as possible for undocumented migrants, in the hope that they will leave voluntarily. The Labor Party supports the principles of this policy as much as the Tories.”