Boris Johnson caused quite a stir with his comments on the NuGovt's ethnically cleansing of the poor from London because of changes to housing benefit.
I only heard about it while watching Question Time this week and the outrage spluttered forth from various members of the panel who didn't like Boris's choice of words.
Historian Simon Schama said it was an insult to those that had actually been ethnically cleansed, oppressed, wiped out as a race in the holocaust, or thrown into gulags that made the use of this kind of comparison in modern times offensive. He said we really should mind our language.
I knew exactly where he was coming from and although I have a lot of respect for Mr Schama, I have to say that I profoundly disagree. By not suggesting such comparisons are we in danger of forgetting the hate that led to such "cleansing" of historical social and racial groups?
Just knowing it happened in the past against certain groups, doesn't mean it can't happen in future. I don't believe that using such comparisons denigrates or diminishes the exclusive torture, eradication attempts, or cruelty of those who have suffered under historical tyrants. Just because we live in the 21st century doesn't mean it won't happen again. It must be highlighted whenever there is a fear that public opinion of a group could lead to unfair treatment of that group and only by using this language can eyes be opened.
I talk of smokers here, of course, and the often "offensive" comparison made between the hatred of smokers and the hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. It comes about specifically because Hitler invented the still unproven theory of passive smoking or SHS in part to get at the Jews.
Of course smokers are not being packed off and sent to death camps even though they are excluded from all public places and there is no employment law to protect them from prejudicial employers. The hate that some people have of smokers is the same as the hate Hitler had against the Jews and other races he thought "filthy" "unhealthy" or "undesirable."
Had NuLabour stayed in power, I have no doubt that by the end of their term smokers would be criminalised and the first stage of locking them up in uncomfortable places such as prisons would have been the next item on the eradication of smoking agenda.
Constantly keeping in the public's conscience how such atrocities as the holocaust came to be means there is less chance of the tyranny which brings such outcomes as "ethnic cleansing" going unnoticed by the masses in future.
Ethnic cleansing doesn't start there. It starts with hate, misinformation and misrepresentation by Govts with ideological aims whatever period of history we live in and whatever group it is aimed at.