We had a chilling experience last night on the London Tube Circle Line. A noisy, drunken crowd of men, and one woman, piled on the train, singing and shouting. They had extreme east-end accents, so that even my relatively well-tuned Canadian ear could hardly make out anything that they were saying. I assumed that they were rugby louts, and watched and listened, though everyone else in the car (an Indian family, a young man of colour) looked elsewhere.
Finally, Judith whispered in my ear “They’re white supremacists. They’re singing about raping Moslem women”. I listened even more closely. She was right.
The Indian family and the young man got off at the next stop. The louts looked in my direction in a friendly manner, having noticed my interest. I didn’t want them to think that I was sympathetic, so I nodded to Judith and we moved away down the train.
It felt like something from the 1930s, Nazis singing the Horst Wessel song. What was particularly upsetting was that these yahoos were not really bad people, just not terribly bright and without much going for them, who were out for a good time. Going home, some of them, to wives and children. They were having fun singing together and enjoying companionship. They could have been sing bawdy songs (offensive enough, but not racist). Instead, they were shouting out these virulent hate-filled songs and cheers.
They hadn’t made the songs up themselves. They weren’t songwriters. Someone else had written the songs and taught them to the louts. Got them drunk, got them singing, and sent them out to get on the tube to terrorize women and children. Who is writing these songs?
I learned today that the Harper government has just passed a bill removing hate speech from the Canadian Human Rights Act. I guess Canada’s hate-song writers will breathe a little easier.
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