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Extremist antismokers in Japan attacking smoking while completely ignoring the Fukushima fallout (which ironically will give them lung cancer within a generation)
I've often thought that the antismokers made a political mistake when they started demonising smokers, because they created for themselves a highly numerous enemy which they didn't have before, when they were just battling the tobacco companies.

But perhaps it wasn't a mistake at all. Perhaps it was always an essential part of their strategy.

Antismoking organisations are essentially predatory in character. They survive by stealing from people. This theft is carried out largely through taxation of smokers and through things like the US Master Settlement Agreement, by which the tobacco companies pay out huge amounts of money. Those billions of dollars in pay-offs and taxes have funded the growth of the antismoking industry just like a rich diet of deer funds the growth of a wolf pack.

But if you're going to steal people's money off them in broad daylight, then it helps a lot if you can make it not seem like theft. And that's where the demonisation comes in. If you can make tobacco companies look like they're a menace to society, then it isn't theft to take huge amounts of money off them. It's money they don't deserve. And it's a noble thing to relieve them of it.

So the tobacco companies have been thoroughly demonised. And it was essential for the antismokers to demonise them in order to get away with their money, and win applause for doing so.

It might be said that whenever some social group is demonised, it's a prelude to stealing from them, and making the theft seem benign rather than malign. Before black people could be enslaved, they first had to be demonised. Before women could be made chattels, they also had to be diminished. Before Jews could have their money and property confiscated, they also had to be rendered less than human.

And if smokers and drinkers and fat people are now being demonised, it is in order to steal from them - mostly in the form of taxes. But excluding them from the job markets and from housing is also a form of theft.

The antismokers never let up because there's too much money in it for them. Smokers' money funds their antismoking jobs and their antismoking universities and the antismoking conferences they seem to hold every other month, with their hundreds of antismoking delegates. And once they've screwed some money out of smokers, they're back again the next year to try to screw yet more out of them. They're always pushing the envelope. The "next logical step" is always the one which will win them more loot.

It's got nothing to do with health, of course. It's about creating revenue for themselves. It's about stealing all that they possibly can. The last thing they want is for smokers to stop smoking. And that's why their Nicotine Replacement Therapies don't work. It would be terrible for their bottom line if they did. And if, as it seems, smoking bans actually increase the numbers of smokers, that's good news for them too.

There are no benefits from antismoking measures. The claimed health benefits of smoking bans are non-existent. In fact they're utterly fraudulent. And the social damage they cause is colossal.

Ultimately, societies can no more tolerate such predatory antismoking organisations than they can tolerate packs of wolves roaming the countryside eating people, or bands of thieves and muggers roaming the towns robbing people. Because if you let that happen, everyone gets poorer - including, ultimately, the wolves and the thieves themselves. No society can tolerate large-scale, organised theft for very long.

Antismoking organisations must be destroyed. They have got to be destroyed in exactly the same way that packs of wolves are exterminated, or bands of thieves executed. It isn't just that their organisations should be closed down, and their predatory scam wound up, but that the practitioners themselves should be put on trial for fraud and extortion, and punished accordingly.

Sooner or later (and it's beginning to get rather late) this is going to have to be done, or there'll be no doing anything.