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The Scottish comedian and political commentator Mark Meechan, known on YouTube as Count Dankula, has been found guilty of a hate crime in a British court for a prank video where he trained his girlfriend’s pug to make Nazi salutes.
No, this is not April fool’s day, in case you wondered. The video of the Nazi dog is still up on YouTube, albeit classified as “offensive content.”
This story is real, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that a man might have to go to prison for up to a year for making a tasteless prank video, it would have been just ridiculous and absurd. Instead, it reverberates a darker tone.
Meechan is well-known for being left-leaning politically, and at the outset of the video he clearly and unambiguously states that it is a prank on his girlfriend:
“Girlfriend’s always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is. So I thought I would turn him into the least-cute thing I could think of: a Nazi.”
He also ends the video by stating:
“I am not a racist by the way. I just really wanted to p*ss [my girlfriend] off.”
Despite this clearly stated setup for the video, the prosecution argued that he was a crypto-Nazi that actually wanted to gas the Jews and was just hiding it as a joke.
Whether you find the prank funny or in bad taste, by any normal legal standards it is solidly within the bounds of free speech. The whole point of free speech is to protect offensive speech because polite or politically correct speech does not need protection. In effect, Great Britain, the home of the Magna Carta, John Locke, and George Orwell, has abandoned the primary principle upon which the nation was constituted. That’s a sad day for the West.
What’s even more disturbing is that this happens simultaneously with Great Britain protecting and even importing people who do want to exterminate Jews. Radical mullahs and prominent Muslims preach a message of hate towards Jews on a regular basis.
How can such madness take place in the country that arguably birthed the enlightenment and the industrial revolution? On the surface, the problem seems to be Naziphobia – an irrational fear of Nazis. The prevailing belief seems to be that under the skin of white people boils a wild Nazi beast that can burst into being at any moment unless it is thoroughly suppressed. The action of the British government shows that they are willing to let young girls be sexually abused for decades to not wake up this imaginary Nazi beast in the heart of Brits.
However, at a deeper level, the problem seems to be that Britain – and possibly the whole West – has slid out of the enlightenment and into the grip of the radical left, which considers any viewpoint on culture slightly to the right of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to be Nazi.
We are living in dangerous times. The last time the left was this strong was during the rise of communism in the twentieth century. Last time the bodies stacked up in the tens of millions, utopia always being only one more execution away. Does the West have the will to prevent that from happening again? We will see.
