The Judge RANTS!
Date: 05/10/16
It Can't Happen Here?
(A reference - in case you didn't know - to Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel which was prophetic to start with, and may become even more so in the next few months)
Way back in the when, at the time that I was (pretending to) study A-level History under the redoubtable Eric Earnshaw, our course stopped at 1930.
However, my O-level course under Harold Jones did cover the period immediately afterwards. After all, how we faced down the Krauts was a glorious part of 'our island story ("Rah! Rah!")', and was therefore an essential tool of propagandising the children into the verities of Britishness, for we knew that such things could never, but never happen in this land of freedom, decency and tolerance.
Except...
...and...
![Newspaper headline: 'Amber Rudd vows to [...] force companies to reveal number of foreigners they employ'](../imagebank/illustrations/rudd_jobs_foreigners.jpg "We are coming for your aliens!")
(In passing: does anyone else think that Rudd looks like one of those over-promoted 'Human Resources' managers who are a plague on our working lives?)
...such as in our National Health Service, mayhap...
![Newspaper headline: 'Jeremy Hunt: NHS will [...] no longer rely on foreign doctors'](../imagebank/illustrations/hunt_foreign_doctors.jpg "You don't want Johnny Foreigner rummaging about in your insides, do you?")
...and, speaking of May and (mis)hap...
It's all there, isn't it?
- Increased violence towards those deemed to be 'other', encouraged by a political and media élite who use the rhetoric of fabulated grievance to create the desired effect in an under- and mal-informed public, and then walk away whistling Rule Britannia, claiming all the while that it's nothing to do with them, and that the public has 'genuine and understandable concerns' about all these wogs around the place...
- ...especially when they're taking all the jobs of that recently-invented demographic, the 'white working class' (as if only white people could be working class), a social group that those peddling the bile have never shown anything but contempt for themselves...
- ...that it's far, far better for you, the 'customer', to be operated on by an undertrained and under-engaged Tarquin from Farnham than by someone born in Kashmir who might actually know what he was doing (because he might taint your precious bodily fluids whilst doing it)...
- ...and the almost American fetishising of the military which decrees that Our Brave Boys™ never, but never commit atrocities and - even if they did (heaven forfend!) - they must at all times be allowed to get away with it.
All - along with the flag-waving and vaunting I've referred to before - pointing to one ineluctable conclusion to anyone who made any serious study of the history of the twentieth century, the first half of it in particular: that the soi-disant (sorry, foreign jabber there) 'United Kingdom' - particularly Englandandwales - is not so much sleepwalking through the gates of overt Fascism, but rushing joyously towards it like a child at a funfair. (That smell of burning flesh may be only the hot-dogs now, but wait a bit...)
And all the time, so many of those who claim to be 'progressive' or 'liberal' or - if you're one of the Blairite remnant in the Labour Party - a 'Clause One socialist' (another witless neologism, meaning 'not a socialist at all') are either too lacking in courage or principle to challenge the pleb-comforting narrative which has led us to be standing on this ledge looking down at a maelstrom of raw sewage; or they are too busy fighting their perceived enemies on (ostensibly) their own side to go out and - as a crucial act of persuasion - actually take on and take down the casual and gleeful xenophobia which has become the daily currency of public discourse, preferring instead to pander to the public's ignorance rather than seek to educate them out of it.
These are dark days, and they will get darker still.
