HEY GUESS WHAT EVERYONE, THE DAILY MAIL ARE BEING MEAN ABOUT A DEAD WHITE GUY.
WE SHOULD, LIKE, SET THEM ON FIRE OR SOMETHING.
Forget about the woman they hounded to death. Or the relentless racism, the vicious homophobia, the rampant misogyny, the perpetual incitement to violence against anyone marginalised.
Now they’re being mean about a dead white guy, that’s just a step too far.
Yes. You may say you were pissed about all of those things, too, and that this is the last straw. I get that. I really, really get that.
But here’s the thing. Most of the evils of the Mail are not actually this particular newspaper. The Mail, for the most part, is a dark mirror which reflects disgusting attitudes which pervade society. It phrases them a little more bluntly than many are comfortable with, perhaps, but it is just an amplification of prejudices which already exist. The Mail didn’t invent xenophobia, it merely turned up the volume.
It is only really for white dudes that the Daily Mail is creating any kind of novel hate. For most of us, it’s just repeating the same hate we hear every day, in a louder voice.
It’s not the Mail that’s the problem. It’s fucking kyriarchy. And unfortunately, that’s too hard for a lot of people to attack. And so we have a moan about the Mail–god knows I’m as guilty of this as anyone else–rather than the social conditions which produce the bile that they spout.
It is the death of these conditions, the death of bigotry, the death of kicking down that needs to happen, not the death of a particular newspaper. The world around us is far uglier than a Daily Mail editorial if you allow yourself to see it.
Another angry woman 
I’ve been saying “Fuck the Mail” for years. For everything. No last straw, & I’m pretty sure many of the straws I’d say “Fuck ’em” for started before I was born & I’m an old grey-bearded git. I never buy red-tops anyway but I wouldn’t wipe my arse with the Mail, Star or Sun.
Yet another excellent piece. Well said.
Just pointing out: whilst the planned protests seem to be formed around the idea of “The Daily Mail was mean about a dead white guy who fought the Nazis”, the real *problem* with that piece in particular was the obvious ANTISEMITISM of yet again demanding that Jews, especially immigrant Jews, should love the country they happen to live in despite its long history and present of antisemitic violence – England has killed its Jews, expelled them, ghettoised them and put limits on our entry to this country as refugees, its has held us in POW camps as “domestic aliens” who were not to be trusted – and those last three are all within living memory. Why should Jews love England / Britain? Loving this country should not be a pre-requisite for *anyone* to be able to live here. Suggesting that Jewish people are not sufficiently loyal to the country they live in has a long, long history as an antisemitic trope of choice.
What upsets me about the planned protests is the (sometimes entirely wilful) denial or dismissal of the idea that what the Daily Mail had to say about Ralph Milliband is what it is also saying about all British Jews (probably also British Muslims) and all immigrants living in Britain – and it’s saying that we are to be held to a much, much higher standard of “Britishness” than any native-born Christian, that if we do not “love” this country, this state, its culture, its monarchy and government and if we are not sufficiently grateful that we are allowed to live here then we “hate Britain” and don’t deserve to live here.
THAT is what I wish people were protesting about that article in particular.
Fuck the Daily Mail for all the horrible things it has done. ALL of them, including this.
(I’m not angry at you, Stavvers, I’m angry at the Mail and at several non-Jewish people I’ve seen declaring that the article was not antisemitic or anti-immigrant but they’re protesting it anyway because… well, they weren’t clear on why)
Yes – the subtext of the Mail’s article about Ralph Miliband article is pretty clearly about Jews, who are Communists. Jewish white guys were not quite your regular white guys in terms of privilege in 1940.
Whilst I agree with what you’re saying, it’s not just about a “dead white guy.” It’s about a dead Jewish immigrant and his surviving family.
Don’t get me wrong, the Mail are fucking scum and always have been, I’m just glad that the backlash they’ve deserved for decades of bullying, racism, sexism and far right bigotry is finally coming to them.
You’ve failed to address the anti Semitism of the Mail’s accusations and avoided opposing its (predictable) anti critical realist (aka Marxist) perspective. Frankly, kba to have an argument with you either.
You need to start where people are.
Yes, you are right, its kyriarchy, like the outpouring of popular anger in Greece over the murder of Pavlos Fyssas (who was not the first Greek killed by the fascists, but women don’t seem to count), when there were already 5 known murders of immigrants and 100 missing, presumed dead, at their hands.
The point is that it brings pastor Niemollers’ words home – that they could come for you, the closer that their target is to your personal demographic. Jews today don’t in general suffer the kind of racism that they did in the 1930s, they have been made “white”, but they can be racialised at will, and this is the point. People don’t at the moment see Jews as racialised, but they are always vulnerable to it and in the same way all of us are potential victims of the kyriarchy depending on what aspect the right wing decide to focus on. Some are simply easier to target than others.
The key is to expand outwards from the popular anger to a deeper and more encompassing analysis which embraces those from increasingly marginalised identities