Xenophobia Alive & Relatively Well

I am growing increasingly sickened by the burgeoning of racial hatred that infiltrates social media sites, Facebook being a case in point. I guess I must be naïve in the first place for showing any degree of alarm because clearly this is precisely what the perpetrators are looking for. The participants in extreme xenophobia seem to become feverishly over excited when faced with even the slightest degree of negative comment and are then likely to hurl themselves into excessively profane diatribes like lemmings. Adolf Hitler is being quoted left, right and centre yet I seriously wonder how many of his current acolytes from down under have read Main Kampf (except in mini-bites) – or even if they are aware that what they loudly proclaim about their targeted minority segment of New Zealand community actually emanates from the pages of His Struggle! Has any one of them actually stopped to examine what Beloved Uncle Adolf might have had in store for their own ethnic community given half a chance I have to ask? I certainly would have been wary of his plans for my own kith and kin back in the day, many of us springing as we did from English gypsy roots. His general ideas would not have been amongst those I could easily see myself embracing at any time in the future. Yet in this little out of the way corner of the modern world it would appear that old fashioned extreme right wing fascist philosophy circa 1920s/1930s is dangerously alive and well – well in small patches at least. Coming from London where for decades emerging pockets of Nazi idealism were unsurprisingly tied to white working class teens with short haircuts wearing bovver boots you could say that the local followers leave me in open mouthed amazement. Well, OK – call me old fashioned then, even wet behind the ears in my old age! However, there is something about one minority group targeting another minority group with such extremes of hate and venom, particularly distasteful.