It will not have escaped most people's notice that today is Holocaust Memorial Day. We must never forget, especially at the present time when the threat from the extreme right is greater than for many years. The Holocaust was able to happen because the Nazis succeeded in de-humanising (in many German minds) millions of people. The modern followers of Nazism are still at it, trying to persuade us that all sorts of people are less than human and can be done away with in some way or another. All around the world, people are finding themselves under so-called populist governments many of which are mimicking the National Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. Almost without exception such governments spend a lot of time and effort inventing enemies where none exist in order to cow their populations and get them willingly to accept maltreatment of minorities and removal of democratic rights. We don't really need to look far to see such things happening. At least the Royal Navy has said it won't be complicit in pushing asylum seekers out of British waters.
