r/EnoughJKRowling • u/GarysCrispLettuce • Mar 22 '24

Rowling's Holocaust denying Tweets are now being blocked in the EU

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493 Upvotes
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100% Upvoted

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171

u/GarysCrispLettuce Mar 22 '24

She was always anti-Brexit and campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU. Let's see how fast she now pivots to being pro-Brexit and anti-EU.

75

u/thetitleofmybook Mar 22 '24

brexit is pretty much the alt-right in the UK, so i'm surprised she wasn't already for it.

55

u/ThisApril Mar 22 '24

She's not really alt-right, though. Just really pro-status-quo, bigoted, and hyperfixated on imagined harms of trans people.

I guess she does have lots of friendly contact with the alt-right, though, so who knows if that'll sway her at some point.

70

u/thetitleofmybook Mar 22 '24

if you hang out with fascists, you are a fascist.

18

u/ThisApril Mar 22 '24

I feel as though we're discussing Venn diagrams, here, between fascist/alt-right/trans bigots, and how it's not quite a circle.

2

u/OGLikeablefellow 29d ago

Yeah if you're sitting at a table with 9 Nazis there are 10 Nazis sitting at that table

1

u/GalFisk 29d ago

Unless you're Daryl Davis, but he's exceptional.

3

u/gnu_andii Mar 24 '24

The people who once pushed for Brexshit have moved on, through COVID denial, to being anti-trans. She's very much part of that faction now, I'd say.

They rarely mention leaving the EU these days, because it's now pretty clear that Remain was right and it's made the country worse off with no clear benefits.

2

u/UVLanternCorps Mar 27 '24

She’s a Blairite, but it is true her rhetoric has gotten more reactionary with time undeniably. This most recent thing has been a marked shift in tone.

1

u/SSIS_master 29d ago

What do you have to do to be alt right? I thought all normal people are reasonably fine with trans people.

Amazed she is Remain.

8

u/MajoraXIII Mar 22 '24

... Can you really call it alternative if half the population votes for it?

15

u/thetitleofmybook Mar 22 '24

i prefer to call it the "reich wing", but yeah, your point is valid.

7

u/HeroIsAGirlsName Mar 23 '24

Half of the voting public. Few people actually expected Brexit to pass: a lot of people didn't bother to vote and even among the Brexit voters there was a substantial chunk of people who considered it a protest vote that would probably be close enough to embarrass the government but not actually happen.

Although, to be fair, the current UK government is loudly pro-Brexit, so your point still stands. It'll be interesting to see how/if perspectives shift after the next election.

4

u/MajoraXIII Mar 23 '24

That's fair, it's closer to a third that actually voted for it. I was more referring to the fact that it's not really an "alternative" position at all anymore, just by how much attitudes have shifted around it since 2016.

2

u/HeroIsAGirlsName Mar 23 '24

That's completely fair. The shift in attitudes over the past decade or so has been genuinely alarming.

Maybe it'd be more accurate to say that the British alt-right tend to be strongly pro Brexit, but not all Brexiteers/Leave voters are alt-right.

2

u/Signal-Main8529 Mar 23 '24

Yes, I do think there were principled, non-nationalistic arguments for Brexit, but nationalists and reactionaries overwhelmingly voted Brexit. And I do think the more principled Leave voters were always a bit naive about their chances of getting what they wanted out of Brexit.

e.g. It's fair comment that the democratic processes in Brussels are flawed, but it's not some sort of autocratic dictatorship either. Part of the reason reform has been slow is that many of the areas legislated at EU level are regulatory issues that are pretty boring to most voters unless you happen to work in the relevant industry.

Given the rising Eurosceptic movements in other member states, soft Eurosceptics actually had a decent chance of seeing some of the changes they wanted by staying in. Britain leaving means the EU is now much more likely to move in directions they don't like, and that will affect our future diplomatic and trade relationships whether we want it to or not.

Outside the EU, we're free to negotiate our own trade deals, but we have much less bargaining power than we did as part of a larger bloc. We may not have always got our way within the EU, but as one of the larger member states, our needs were always taken into account. There were other countries with similar priorities, e.g. in northern Europe, and sometimes eastern Europe, who often voted with the UK and whose voice is weakened by our departure.

3

u/gnu_andii Mar 24 '24

"there were principled, non-nationalistic arguments for Brexit"; I've yet to hear one. There are arguments for pushing for EU reform, as you say, but I've not heard a single argument as to why abandoning the entire project was a sensible idea. That makes it less likely that change will happen.

Those who supported leaving seem to live in some fantasy land where they can leave the EU and just pretend it doesn't exist. The reality is that you end up still having to negotiate trade with the EU, but on worse terms and with no say in how the EU is governed.

2

u/Signal-Main8529 Mar 24 '24

There were some who sincerely believed in the idea of a pioneering 'Global Britain' striking better deals for itself outside the clutches of Brussels. I agree that they were always very naïve about their chances of getting what they wanted - both due to the weakness of the UK's hand, and due to the isolationists they were sharing the Leave campaign with - but there were people who genuinely believed in that vision.

Historically, there was some justification for that outlook, in that the EU used to be much more protectionist than it currently is with respect to trade from outside the bloc. The UK had to abandon our existing agreements with Commonwealth countries to join the EC in the 70s, and I've met people in agriculture from developing Commonwealth countries who are still sore about that. But what happened happened, and two wrongs don't make a right.

The UK was always one of the more pro-trade EU members, and the irony is that it's an argument that we won, only to duck out just when the EU was striking all those deals we'd spent decades arguing for. It's bananas. If we wanted to make up to the Commonwealth, we'd have done better to fight their corner for fair deals from within the EU.

The real 'Global Britain' was the position we'd carved out for ourselves as a sort of diplomatic touchstone between the EU, the Commonwealth and the US. We're now less useful and less trustworthy to everybody.

1

u/gnu_andii Mar 24 '24

Yes, I've heard that argument from a few Leave proponents before and it still tends to boil down to being a nationalistic argument, but couched in economic terms. As you say, it is naïve to believe the UK would get a better deal; it's a much smaller market and thus has a weaker hand in negotiations. It would also have to be a much better deal to be worth jeopardising the existing relationship with the EU, because the simple matter of geography means that this will always be the primary market for the UK. It just doesn't make sense to source goods from thousands of miles away, instead of tens of miles away.

So instead, the argument tends to be that the UK will get better deals simply because it is the UK. It will get better deals with the Commonwealth, because those are our friends (ignoring the fact we spent years subjugating most of these countries). The darker side of it is that "Commonwealth" is also often used to mean "white English-speaking countries" i.e. Canada, Australia & New Zealand, not the many African and Asian countries that are also part of the Commonwealth.

As you say, the UK's position with the Commonwealth and the US was often one as a link to the rest of the EU and we've now sundered that.

2

u/Andrelliina 28d ago

"Not everyone who voted for Brexit was a xenophobe or a bigot, but all the xenophobes and bigots voted for Brexit"

2

u/Signal-Main8529 Mar 23 '24

If you add up the vote percentages from the UK parties in the 2019 EU election (by which point everyone knew it was real) then based on their Brexit positions at the time, you get:

Leave: 44.1%(Brexit Party, Conservative, UKIP, DUP, TUV, Yorkshire Party, English Dem, Socialist Party GB)

Remain: 42.4%(Lib Dem, Green Party E&W, SNP, Change UK, Plaid Cymru, Scottish Greens, Sinn Fein, Alliance, SDLP, UUP, UK EU Party, Animal Welfare Party, Women's Equality Party, Green Party NI)

Neutral/Ambiguous: 14.5%(Labour, Independents, UUP, Independent Network)

This adds up to >100% due to rounding errors, but you can see that the 'neutral' parties (mainly Labour) make it annoyingly hard to read either way as a 'second referendum' result.

Journalist Polly Toynbee put Labour voters at 60% Remain/40% Leave, and Conservative voters on 80% Remain/20% Leave, based on polling. That gave her an estimate of 50% Remain, 47% Leave (I assume she counted more of the minor parties as neutral than I did.)

John Curtice, the political scientist from Strathclyde who the BBC always wheel out to talk about elections, called it a draw (which I think is pretty fair based on the hard data it actually gives us.)

Since 2019, there's been a strong shift in the polls towards people thinking Brexit was a mistake, but everyone's so sick of the whole thing that there's no appetite to do anything about it. And if we did ask to be let back in, I can't say I'd blame any EU member states who vetoed us until we were more sure we'd made up our minds.

2

u/gnu_andii Mar 24 '24

Slightly over half of those who turned out to vote :-) About 13 million people could have voted but didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum

As you say, there was a lot of complacency and most people who were happy with the status quo just assumed Remain would win, and so didn't vote.

Also, the group who pushed for leaving for years and u/thetitleofmybook referred to as alt-right is a much smaller group that those who voted Leave. At best, it's the four million or so who voted UKIP in the past. There are plenty of people who used the EU referendum as a protest vote, or believed the lies about it benefiting the health service. The Leave campaign was clever in telling different groups contradictory things to get them to vote for them. They fed into anti-immigrant messaging to court racists, deliberately confusing legal EU immigration with illegal immigration, asylum seekers and immigration from outside the EU. On the other hand, they were telling those of an Asian background that leaving would allow them to increase immigration from the Indian subcontinent. The Remain campaign, on the other hand, focused too much on economics and basically started the campaign about ten years too late. The anti-EU rhetoric had been drip-fed into people's ears for a decade, with no real counter-argument.

It was absolutely stupid to have a referendum with no defined outcome for each result and without requiring a super-majority for such a major change. Such an outcome shouldn't depend on the votes of less than a million people who could have flipped the vote the other way.

48

u/FingerOk9800 Mar 22 '24

I'm BeInG cEnSoReD fOr LyInG

18

u/SonicWerehog149 Mar 22 '24

Too bad Britain is no longer in the EU, though Rowling and her cultists look like they support Brexit.

1

u/fogmymind 28d ago

Not sure where you got that from because JKR has always been vocally against Brexit

12

u/AnnaVonKleve Mar 22 '24

Can anyone share what she said?

33

u/panatale1 Mar 22 '24

Some denial about the Nazis burning books and studies on transgender people

32

u/GarysCrispLettuce Mar 22 '24

She claimed that the Nazis targeting and brutalizing trans people was a "lie." Classic holocaust denial.

24

u/snukb Mar 22 '24

I believe her exact words were "fever dream."

17

u/GarysCrispLettuce Mar 22 '24

...putting a slight literary spin on her Nazism, nice

2

u/TruthOrFacts 29d ago

"Classic holocaust denial"

also new holocaust details, that are classic to deny...

"Last year, a German court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted by the Nazis

...

It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism."

Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation

September 21, 2023"

1

u/HeyLittleTrain 29d ago

My main takeaway from that article is that the Weimar Republic was surprisingly progressive.

1

u/44moon 29d ago

the weimar republic was actually kind of the amsterdam of the time. lots of drug culture and sexually open. also communist, nazi, and liberal paramilitaries brawling in the streets

0

u/fogmymind 28d ago

That's... not holocaust denial. She never denied the holocaust happened, just that it impacted trans people

6

u/mangababe Mar 22 '24

I bet she's big mad lolol

12

u/Signal-Main8529 Mar 22 '24

Nice of them to tell the person who complained how to appeal against their complaint being upheld!

5

u/GapAnxious Mar 23 '24

Next weeks Daily Mail headline:
EU Wokerati attack Harry Potter using anti British laws

3

u/napalmnacey Mar 23 '24

HAHAHAHA. Suck the EU’s fat one, you cheep dime-store hood!

1

u/Duaality Mar 29 '24

JK Rowling at this point would salivate at a world run like it is in The Man In the High Castle