A year and a bit ago, I published a post on a guy called Roger Hayes, who runs the British Constitution Group, which is dedicated to pretending that our current legal system contravenes the legal system that went before it and it’s therefore illegal, and that why they shouldn’t have to pay council tax.

Then Roger Hayes tried not to pay his council tax, and the court he didn’t recognise imprisoned him. A bunch of his followers went apeshit and claimed that this was an attempt by the British government to silence the truth of their illegitimacy and operate a secret trial system to suppress political dissidents.

This story kept showing up in my Facebook news feed because I am friends with a bunch of people who a) believe in the legalisation of cannabis who also b) believe in a whole bunch of other things like aliens building the pyramids, vaccines, sugar and aeroplane vapour trails containing poison, and putting “of the name” before your surname means somehow the law doesn’t apply to you anymore.

I therefore wrote to Wirral Council to ask them the background to this story in an effort to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Their reply, that Roger Hayes had experienced exactly the same judicial process that every non-council taxpayer does, was then published on my website here. The comments on this article are some of the craziest stuff I have ever read. People seem unable to decide whether council tax is illegal, unfair or optional, they just know that I am definitely, definitely wrong. On what I am wrong, they are also unclear.

Last month, the comments started up again in earnest, about how I’m really wrong and selfish because I think it’s a good idea to pay public sector worker’s pensions etc. Today, someone called Tom posted about how I’ve been censoring comments because they were unable to post twice and this was evidently due to me deleting their comments, as well as repeatedly calling my blog “idiotic”.

As I don’t generally delete comments and had never received one from Tom before getting this in my inbox, this was news to me. As I was unsurprisingly unimpressed at being abused on my own blog because of some guy’s technical problems, I edited his comment with a summary of my own.

At which point, someone called Miranda declared that she was unsubscribing from my blog because I should be grateful for my visitors and commenters giving my blog “visibility”, as if my tolerance for people repeatedly coming and blathering nonsense about their thorough misunderstanding of the law and nature of the state on a post I made a year ago was rooted in anything other than polite disinterest.

I pointed out that she was being a hypocrite to object to me acting as I please on my private part of cyberspace, and she then compared my editing of a comment to the Holocaust:

 

 

The german state were also on their own private land when they did what they did at Auschwitz, but it didn’t make it right  …which is at the heart of all my arguments here, and by the look of it, also of the good people above.

 

 

This particular part of a comment has now been removed from the post concerned, and I have put a moderation ban on Miranda, because this is the cheapest, most self-involved invocation of Godwin’s Law I have ever seen, and I’m disgusted by it. Congratulations on being the first person I’ve ever banned in 4 years of posting. I actually had to go and look up how to do it.

While I was writing this, Miranda attempted to comment again, following my comment that I was Jewish, making comparisons with the Sonderkommandos, the Jews who were forced to collaborate with the Nazis to dispose of the corpses of gas chamber victims, along with a variety of anti-semitic slurs and admitting that she had attempted to find evidence that Stalin was Jewish so she could throw his victims as me as well. This person will not be posting to my blog again, and I’ve reported these comments, given the IP address is located in Manchester.

I’m posting this because at the same time as these comments were being made, I was reading the weekly newsletter from my rabbi, about the funeral of a woman who fled Nazi Europe and was buried without friends or family:

 

Last Sunday we consecrated the tombstone of Greta Seligman. She came to this country on a domestic service visa, probably in 1938 or ’39, one of twenty thousand young women to do so before the war. Because she spent so many years in institutions and had been suffering from Alzheimers before she died, it’s proved impossible to ascertain from where she came or what her life story was. There were no relatives or friends at her funeral, only three charming people from Jewish Care, and myself and my son.

The notion that her grave would remain unmarked was unthinkable; I would have felt like an ally to those who, from Hitler down, forced her from her family and imposed upon the next seventy years of her life such trauma and such grief-filled loneliness. I took advice on what to have inscribed. No one knew her Hebrew name, so we wrote ‘Here lies buried Greta, daughter of Abraham and Sarah’, to include her in the parentage of her people. Below, we put ‘God is her portion’, because she inherited no parental home and no children inherited her and yet she belonged to the sacred family of all life. In between we wrote: ‘Fleeing the terrors of Nazi Europe, she came alone’. Below that we added:

Also in memory of her parents
and all the parents
who with selfless love
sent their children to safety
in an unknown land.

 

This is the reality of the Holocaust. Someone’s right to post comments calling me names is not comparable. Don’t try.