Hitler

There has recently been a craze for people posting pictures of a Syrian refugee next to a snap of the same guy dressed in Isis uniform two years back, showing that they are on their way to destroy us. It was nonsense, inevitably. But then they always are. The same goes for the photos of overcrowded migrant boats doing the rounds, which are actually of an Albanian ship from 1991 (an interesting story in itself, told here).   As a rule never trust a meme, especially one that makes some profound point, because it’s almost certainly untrue. Among the most popular is an image of a matador sitting down next

One of the great moments of my student life was opening the door and seeing visitors step back, shocked. I’d shaved my hair off to an eighth of an inch. It felt like velvet but looked spiky and hard. It was all down to Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder with Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction, who’d just hanged herself in Stammheim prison, in Germany. My friends liked my haircut as we conflated Ulrike the martyr with images of a mullet-haired Jane Fonda raising her fist against the US army on behalf of the tortured Viet Cong. I was reminded of that haircut — and my shocked visitors — by the

I should declare an interest – because I work for the Sun. But even so, I cannot quite see what the Royal family’s objections are. It does no harm to remind the nation that Edward VIII had a sort of juvenile admiration for Hitler and that the Windsors are, in general, to the right of a fish-knife. I found the photographs historically fascinating. Nobody, surely, would blame Liz at the age of six or seven for joining in the Nazi salute urged on her by the future King. One of my own sons, when he was the same age, once asked me about the Nazis. So I told him, and

Churchill: When Britain Said No BBC2 The 50th anniversary earlier this year of the death of Winston Churchill produced an international wave of commemoration. Churchill remains among the most widely admired – and most regularly quoted – political figures of the past century, especially in America. While Churchill’s role in history will be legitimately analyzed for centuries, there is a class of Churchill-bashers (‘revisionists’) for whom the adulation of the last few months (and decades) cannot pass without a spirited answer. And where better to do this than on Britain’s state-owned broadcaster. The revisionists’ first salvo was Jeremy Paxman’s programme (‘all the dockworkers hated Churchill’) on the January 1965 state

The latest issue of The Spectator carries an interesting piece by James Bartholomew on ‘virtue signalling’, the bane of social media and political debate; that is, people expressing how ruddy good they are by telling the world how much they hate bad things like Ukip and the Daily Mail. He writes: ‘It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement

One month on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, free speech is still under attack. The outpouring of public revulsion at the bloody silencing of ‘blasphemous’ cartoonists after the attack was inspiring. It was a visceral display of support for the right to speak one’s mind – as crudely, offensively and blasphemously as one chooses – that has been absent for some time. But deep-rooted ambivalences have remained – and now these look to be exploited by policymakers looking to institute blasphemy laws of their own. When it comes to cracking down on aberrant ideas, Europe has long been leading the way. Restrictions on hate speech are in place across Europe.