America [6]

We lost.

We didn’t just lose an election in America. We don’t just happen to be living at a time where the current incumbent is a little further to the Right than we would like him to be. The current incumbent is always a little further to the right than we would like him to be. As a matter of fact, as a socialist and a democrat I think the current incumbent ought to be a little further to the right than I would like them to be.

Pete Seeger said that politics was like a see-saw. On one end there was this huge heavy weight, on the other, a big old empty bucket. And every day, a few kids walked past the see-saw, and put a teaspoon full of earth in the bucket. And for months and months it didn’t make any difference. But one day, of course, there was enough earth in the bucket, and the balance shifted, and the light end went down and the heavy end went up. And everyone said “How did the see-saw move so suddenly?”

I am not quite sure I agree with him. I think maybe there are buckets at both ends, and both sides are perpetually spooning earth into them; and the see-saw stays more or less on an even keel. Sometimes more in one direction than the other. But it is always the people at the heavy end who say “But if you like balance; if you think an even keel is the best for everybody, then the best thing you can do is obviously to stop filling your bucket altogether.”

As long as politics is a matter of opinion—even of deeply held and significant opinion—then absolutely we should go for balance. I want a 100% supertax and you want to abolish tax altogether: so we compromise. Tax is lower than I would like it to be and higher than you would like it to be. When my side gets in it goes up a little bit, but when your side gets in it goes down a little bit. A compromise is by definition an arrangement which both sides are equally annoyed with. I want to abolish the armed forces and you want universal conscription, and we end up with a bigger army than I would have liked and a smaller army than you would have liked, with increased defense spending when your lot are in and military cutbacks when my lot are in.

This is even true of some hot-button issues. Not every one who thinks that some criminals ought to be killed is a bloodthirsty psychopath, although most bloodthirsty psychopaths think that some criminals should be killed. People on both ends of the see-saw agree that there should be due process and proportionality and that we definitely shouldn’t kill innocent people. Not every American who agrees with the Second Amendment is a psychotic trigger-happy cowboy. Questions around gender and sexuality are more problematic: there is no room for compromise around a marginalised group’s existence. But I would still be in favour of sitting down and saying “Well, JayKay, what specifically is your issue and how might it be addressed?”

It could even be that both sides were advancing in broadly the same direction by widely divergent routes. It could even be that the distinction was never between the Left and the Right but between the idealists and the pragmatists. We both want wars to come to an end: it’s just that I think we should get rid of nearly all our weapons tomorrow; and you think that unilateral disarmament would probably trigger Armageddon almost straight away. It’s only the psychopath in the corner who thinks that peace is for wusses and the true emancipation of the human spirit comes through conflict. We both want to abolish poverty; it’s just that I think that we could have a wealth tax and some judicious welfare spending and no child would go to bed hungry ever again; and you think that without a certain amount of competition we’d all go bankrupt and there would be nothing to eat for anyone. It’s only the psychopath in the corner who thinks that poverty and starvation are positively good things because they weed out the unproductive work units.

The trouble comes when the psychopath in the corner takes control of an entire continent.

Why did we lose?

The Left is inclined to see every victory as decisive; the Right are inclined to see every defeat as a temporary setback. Britain voted (decisively) to remain in Europe in 1975: the Right spent the next forty years spreading myths about Europe and trying to overturn the decision. Britain voted (narrowly) to leave Europe in 2016, and the Left said “that concludes the argument; we can’t ever possibly talk about rejoining because will-people.” Britain decided (gradually) that some men happened to prefer men and some women happened to prefer women and that’s no-one’s business but theirs. The Left said “Good, we’ve finally won that argument, let’s move on to something else”; the Right said “How can we insidiously and subtly undermine the public’s trust in gay people, so that in ten, twenty, or thirty years we can re-criminalise them?” In 1966 the Left said “Thank God: we have finally consigned the gallows to the dark ages, where it always belonged”. The Right continued to run “string ‘em up” headlines every time some murdering happened. [1] And so on, and so forth. Schools are chaos because of this strange and temporary blip which prevents teachers from hitting children with big sticks. [2] Mosques and curry houses are exotic and temporary incursions into a naturally mono-cultural high street. The BBC have, for some ulterior motive, banned black-face comedy, but one day soon we will get our sense of humour back.

The Left lost because once the bucket was full, they thought they could go home and go to bed, and didn’t notice that the populist authoritarian ethno-nationalists had teaspoons of their own.

Not all Americans are part of the MAGA cult. As we have seen, a bit more than half of them are not. It is alarming that one in ten Brits supported Nigel Farage’s ludicrous Dad’s Army cos-play club at the last election, but reassuring that nine out of ten of us did not. And not everyone who voted for Trump, and not everyone who might vote for Farage, is necessarily a populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist. They may merely be stupid. They may have fallen victim to clever propaganda. They may have decided to vote for the authoritarian ethno-nationalist in order to give the other side a jolly good kick up the pink knickers.

From now on, all Germans will be wise. From now on, all Germans will be good. From now on, all Germans will be Nazis. But only two out of these three will ever be true of a single person.

Anne Frank said that she believed that, despite it all, “people” were really good at heart. What did she mean? Did she charitably believe that the Nazis who wanted to kill her were good people? That there was some excuse for them because they honestly and truthfully believed that killing Jews was a good and noble thing to do? Would she have accepted the defense that the people doing the killing didn’t really mean it and were only obeying orders? Caiaphas was in his own mind a benefactor to mankind. Or did she mean that Nazism was an aberration and a corruption: that these people were not born monsters, but were coerced or misled or manipulated into becoming monstrous?

It makes a difference. I am inclined to think that if you hurt and belittle and abuse a child then that child will very likely grow up to be an adult who hurts and belittles and abuses children. And I believe that adults can be cured and educated and learn to do better. [3] I am inclined to think that all aberrant behaviour can be approached therapeutically. [4]

Frodo wanted to kill Gollum: Gandalf said that the elves were treating him with as much kindness as they could find in the noble hearts, and that an attempt to cure him should be made, even though it probably wouldn’t work. That’s your actual Tolkien, and far more “woke” than contemplating the possibility that some very short people might have dark skin.

But right here, right now, that abused and badly educated child who watched Andrew Tate videos while his granny was being turned out of her council flat is standing outside an asylum hostel with a Molotov cocktail shouting “Who the fuck is Allah?”

And I am not.

The plinth of That Statue still stands in Bristol. “The best and wisest of Bristol’s sons” it says. Either he knew what he was doing, or he didn’t. If he didn’t know, he wasn’t wise; if he did know and did it anyway, he wasn’t good.

Epicurus said the same thing about God.

I think that all Anne Frank meant was that although there are Nazis in the world, most people are not Nazis.

I am no longer completely sure if she was right.

[1]   I have no idea whether or not Lucy Letby dunnit, but if she were to be exonerated I would smile sarcastically at the “surely she of all people ought to be hung” department.

[2]   Schools are not chaos. No more than they have ever been.

[3]  It was truthfully said in my schooldays that the teachers who really did believe in hitting kids with big sticks—the ones who picked children up by their ears and made them kick balls between posts in their underwear—had been in the actual army in an actual war and in some cases in actual Japanese prisoner of war camps.

[4]  What, all?

Yes, all.

What all?

Well, nearly all.

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America [5]

I am quite sure that there are a small number of very clever Christians and a large number of very stupid ones who honestly and sincerely believe in Young Earth Creationism; who have honestly and sincerely built themselves a world in which Scripture Sola overrides the empirical world or who have just never considered the possibility that God didn’t create the universe in exactly six days in the late spring of 4004 BCE. And I am quite sure that many of them are beautiful lovely people, baking the chickens and feeding the bread and taking hot dinners to the needy or just working at the factory and having a few beers with their mates on a Saturday night and harming no-one. But I am equally sure that the prevalence of Young Earth Creationism—the use of “evolution” as an evangelical and Republican swearword—does not always represent any actual, deeply held belief. I don’t think that the person who fills my Facebook Feed with questions like “If Jesus isn’t the son of God, why are all the demons so scared of him?” thinks he is putting forward anything approaching an argument. Nor do I think that the equally infuriating atheists who endlessly talk about sky wizards have the slightest knowledge of or interest in the thing they think they are denouncing. I think that we are dealing with shibboleths.

Start out saying that God made the world in six days because it’s in the Bible. Proceed to saying that the world is flat because the round earth myth is believed by the same people who propagate the great evolution delusion. Assert that vaccines cause polio and covid was a scam because you are not prepared to take the knee to the new high priesthood of science. Connect that with the utterly discredited and debunked theory (which is only a theory) that if you went high enough you would reach something the liberals call “space” and that the moon exists and Americans walked on it. End up posting slogans saying “You can’t be a Christian and believe in the moon landings. Period.”

Either you are consciously twisting your mind into an absurdity: not just saying that 2+2 = 5 but believing it, so that reality melts away and there is no love but the love of Big Brother. Or else you are like the King who wears a green robe and insists that everyone praises it for its redness; and executes the first person who says that the green thing is green.

The world is flat. Science is a myth. Covid was a scam. If humans evolved from apes, how come there are still apes? Ukraine invaded itself. They aren’t beliefs. They are masonic handshakes. Anyone who hasn’t learned them is a radical Marxist lunatic.

Prevailing orthodoxies define an in-group, and an in-group is defined by the prevailing orthodoxies of its members. “Woke” beliefs are the beliefs of people designated “woke”; and “woke” people are the people with “woke” beliefs. And yes, equally, “fascist” beliefs are the beliefs of people we have already decided to call “fascists” on other grounds. Some of us on the Left may stay seated in the National Anthem or take the knee at football matches or pretend that we don’t know who King Charles is because of sincere and deeply held anti-monarchist convictions. But very many of us do so because it really pisses off the Tories. The overwhelming impetus behind the Brexit and MAGA cult is, in the jargon, to Own The Libs.

But these are not innocent toddlers who have not yet learned the social norms. We are not talking about an incredibly rich pop star who is trying to find out what he can get away with. We are not talking about children shouting words they don’t quite know the meaning of, or silly left wing students putting up posters of Mrs Thatcher’s head in a guillotine or silly right wing students threatening to go to Highgate and desecrate Karl Marx’s remains. We are not even talking about an all-licensed fool defecating on the stage because the snowflakes have banned humour. We are talking about a man who controls enough weapons to destroy the whole world. And another man who is rich enough to buy it. 

I remember a story about a young Christian who was experiencing serious Doubts about God and the Bible and Jesus and who Cain married and whether those kids really deserved to be eaten by that bear. And a Pastor, well meaning in the anecdote, reminded her that Jesus said that if your eye offends you, pluck it out and if your hand offends you, chop it off, so if in this case it is your mind which is offending you, stop thinking, stop questioning, and just allow the wonderful emotional love of God to overwhelm you.

I remember a book about Calvinist evangelism. Maybe someone can identify it for me. You will understand that “evangelism” is about persuading people to make a conscious choice to follow Jesus—the whole point of evangelicalism is that being in a church and following a liturgy and confessing your sins and trying to live the best life you possibly can does not make you a Christian. You have to make a positive decision to have faith. But the whole point of Calvinism is that God is so much in charge of everything that he knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell before he even created the universe, and to suggest that the choice of a human can have the slightest effect on what God has already decided would be to utterly deny his God-ness. The book said that presenting rational arguments about God, or answering sensible objections to faith meant fighting on the devil’s territory, denying divine sovereignty, and, moreover, never worked. But what you were permitted to do was to explain that human beings had turned away from God in the garden of Eden, and that therefore their whole nature, including their brains, was totally depraved, and that therefore no objection to or argument about God could possibly be either rational or irrational; and that when the sinner was in a state of not-trusting-their-depraved-mind, the evangelist could jump in and tell them to put their faith in God.

Which seems to be a lot of trouble to go to if they were already predestined to do that anyway. And might God not have predestined the evangelist to explain Aquinas’s five proofs and predestined the skeptic to agree with them? 

I think you have to believe in free will: you’ve got no choice.

As long as we are talking spiritual truths you might think that both the Pastor and the Calvinist had a point. You can’t think yourself into faith. If you want to get in touch with the Great Wossit In The Sky, then by all means, turn off your mind, relax and float down stream. Jesus may literally want you for a zombie. The first step to quitting the booze is, according to some people, putting yourself in the hands of a higher power. Even if you don’t believe that there actually is a higher power. Trust the Force.

But are you still a functioning human being when you come down from the mountain top? Once you have accepted that Human Nature Is Totally Corrupt, can you continue with your engineering degree? Or are you going to proceed on the assumption that Pi R Squared is—or may possibly be—a lie of the devil to lead you astray? Is geology possibly woke propaganda put in place by Radical Right Wing Lunatics?

Let go of your conscious self and act on instinct. Let wave after wave of non-rationality flood through you. Keep clinging to the belief which isn’t a belief. If you ever doubt just remind yourself that scientists lie about evolution, scientists lie about climate change, scientists lied about covid, scientists lied about the moon landings, scientists lie about the shape of the earth, the liberals stole the election, the earth is a few thousand years old, space does not exist, there is no sun no moon and definitely no Finland. 

[continues]

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America (4)

If you decide that it is a bad idea for children to have head-lice, then one of the things you might do is introduce a programme of checking children’s hair and giving them anti-bacterial shampoo if they need it. They used to do that when we were at school. We were always told beforehand that nits actually preferred clean hair. It is perfectly possible, governments being what they are, that the programme got a bit too complicated, with too many forms to fill in and too many quotas to hit. Everyone has heard a story of an organisation that has done something stupid to fulfill a target. There was the war story about the regiment that was instructed to reduce the vermin infestation in the barracks, and found out that the only thing they could do to comply was to introduce some mice themselves and then obtain a regimental cat. Or the one about the remote Scottish island that was reprimanded for not having a programme in place to reduce traffic fatalities and had to point out that, er, they didn’t actually have any roads. So it might perfectly well be that someone says “This whole nit nurse thing has got too silly and expensive; we’re getting rid of it.” And it might turn out that once you have fired all the nit nurses there is no outbreak of head-lice, because the programme was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. And it might turn out that there are still just the same number of head-lice, because the problem was real but the programme was doing nothing to solve it. But if it turned out that the kids were no longer learning their twice-times tables because they were too busy scratching their itchy heads, you might well conclude that the programme, despite all the form filling and box ticking, had been a pretty good idea. Some people might think that metal combs were a gross invasion of personal liberty and that if a man can’t infest his own family’s hair with parasites in his own house then whose hair is he supposed to infest; or that head-lice are an invention by Big Shampoo; or that brushing children’s hair is a form of grooming and the next move will be to check them for pubic lice; or, at the other extreme, that this light-touch nit-nurse system is pandering to the head-lice brigade and the common sense approach would be shave the heads of everyone between the age of five and eighteen but the barbers’ shop lobby won’t let you say that sort of thing. I think that if the first thing you do when you get into power is abolish all the Anti Head-Lice policies, then one of three things is probably true.

1: You are very sure indeed that the Anti Head-Lice policies aren’t doing any good.

2: You are very sure indeed that Head-Lice don’t exist

3: You are positively in favour of Head-Lice and want children’s heads to be as full of them as possible.

I can’t see into the Dear Leader’s head, obviously. But I have noticed that the International Head-Lice Fan Club; the Royal Society for the Protection of Scalp Insects and the Pediculosis Capitis Breeders Association have all welcomed his anti Nit Nurse policies with open arms.

When John Lennon exposed himself on the cover of an album, his straight laced Auntie Mimi said, oh dear, that’s what he used to do on the beach to draw attention to himself when he was five years old.

I am not sure that this is the last word on artistic nudity, the Two Virgins album, or indeed aunties. But I agree with the implication. When a little child is deliberately silly, sometimes the best thing to do is to ignore them. And sometimes it is best to treat an over-indulged adult as if they were a silly child.

Also: I don’t think Yoko broke up the Beatles.

Cults and conspiracy theories, lacking actual evidence, look for hidden symbols and patterns. This could stand as the definition of a conspiracy theorist: “One who looks for hidden symbols and patterns and believes he has found them.” Your bus is late; you get the wrong sort of coffee in the cafe; private schools lose their charitable status; a Black man appears in Captain America: and you stare and stare and a pattern forms before your eyes and you say “That proves it! The illuminati!” Or, more likely, “the Jews”. [1] So I am very reluctant to make too much of symbols.

The Boys is a superhero story written by someone who doesn’t like superheroes. If you haven’t seen it, then it basically asks “What if Superman were Donald Trump”? Or possibly vice versa. It’s very gory and moderately indecent. The fourth season goes completely overboard in satirising Far Right conspiracy theorists. Going completely overboard is very much Garth Ennis’s stock in trade. I never quite got over the massively overweight pope accidentally crushing the mentally retarded Jesus to death in Preacher and I mean that in a very caring way. The fictional super-powered Christo-fascists in The Boys are perpetually pointing to absurd hidden messaging as if it was the purest common sense. “It’s a Pizza Parlour! And they serve Pepperoni! PPP! Pedophile! How more obvious can it be?”

Folk festivals often give out wrist bands rather than tickets, and ushers often want to see your wrist band before you enter a venue, so I have taken to raising my arm and saying “Hail, Caesar!” at these events. My, how everyone laughs! But we should take care. Is a raised open-handed salute necessarily a fascist signal? And does making a fascist signal necessarily mean that you are a fascist?

There were fourteen colonies in America. Ncuti Gatwa is the fourteenth Doctor Who. The French revolution is celebrated on the fourteenth of July. The Jewish Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth day of Nisan. The belief that Easter should be celebrated on that day has an official Latin name, quatrodecimism. The number fourteen scans really well, so in dirty folk songs gentlemen are inclined to hunt the Bonny Black Hare on the fourteenth of May rather than the seventeenth or the twenty second. The Titanic sank on the fourteenth day of April, and that was also the date of the Grapes of Wrath dust-storm. There are lots of reasons why someone might use the number fourteen symbolically. And it might just be an accident. There might just happen to have been fourteen green bottles on that particular wall. But when someone who has been (possibly) making Nazi salutes (apparently) waits until 14:14 to disseminate a message consisting of nothing but fourteen American flags. Well. You do start to wonder. [2]

If I was definitely not a duck, and if people kept accusing me of being a duck, and if I was very, very offended by the suggestion that I might be a duck, then I might try very hard, in public, not to do anything which someone else could possibly misconstrue as quacking.

Auntie Mimi could be right, after all. They may just be getting their political dicks out because it amuses them to cause the grown-ups consternation. Or because they are too innocent to know that what they are doing is something that you just don’t do in public. A child shouting “fuck” or calling the Black teacher “p*ki” may honestly not know why those words are prohibited, or mean anything by them. He may just be being naughty.

I was at college in the 1980s; during the whole Clause 29 thing and the whole miners’ strike thing and a huge schism about whether the Student Union ought to have an independent nuclear deterrent. You probably think that Ultra Vires is one of the less famous Transformers, but it was a really, really big deal at the time. There was a factional struggle between the Socialist Workers, the Official Student Socialist Party and the Student Socialist Movement for control of the Students Union and yes we had heard all the Life of Brian jokes.

But there were also some Conservative Students, although it is frankly hard to know why ex-Public School boys who had failed to get into Cambridge would have opted for Sussex as a second choice. I suppose there was no such thing as Clearing in those days; maybe we just had a really good Classics department. I’d rather Keir Starmer and Tony Blair stopped using the expression “Student Politics” to refer to anyone with socialist principles, but there is no question that the politics of students could get very silly indeed. If my parents had sent me to a fee-paying school, and if my accent were three notches posher than anyone else’s, then listening to earnest young purely theoretical Marxists in berets saying that people like me ought to be sent to the salt mines would have pissed me off as well. But I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of Campus Tories were trolls. They called for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality and the re-introduction of corporal punishment for the same reason they turned up to discos in three piece suits and attempted to order champagne from the bar. It was a form of retaliatory off-pissing; they were marking out their territory. If you had pressed them, they might have claimed that they were being ironic. You can hear the exact same tone of voice every time Boris Johnson opened his mouth to talk about pickaninnies and watermelons. David Cameron denied ever wearing a Hang Nelson Mandela t-shirt, but many of the Campus Tories did. Someone was certainly doing the fly-posting. I suppose they might have claimed that it was really a false flag operation by one of the lefty groups. The Socialist Workers denied having anything to do with the “Vote Thatcher to keep Kinnock out” leaflets that went out in their name.

[1]  The Great Illuminatus Trilogy used to sit alongside the Great Dune Trilogy in Wood Green W.H Smiths. I suppose I should read it one day. I never could get my head around the card game. 

[2]  The 14 words are a pair of neo-Nazi slogans: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth”.

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America [3]

Last year, I said that I didn’t think it mattered which way the US election went. Trump, I said, would claim victory regardless of circumstance: he would either perpetrate the kind of electoral fraud that he spent four years accusing the Democrats of perpetrating against him, or else he would seize power in an actual coup. Either way, there would be a kind of civil war, and the UK would have to decide which side to support.

I now see that this was a comforting fantasy on my part. I wanted to believe that although Trump would certainly win, he would not win legitimately. That would have allowed me to say that the Prime Minister and the King ought not to treat with Trump and allowed nice Americans to say Not My President with some level of plausibility. I was, in short, in denial. I was not ready for Trump to actually win a second term.

Trump may not command the support of an overwhelming majority of the population. No party in a democracy ever does. Our own dear Kier had a landslide victory even though two thirds of the people who bothered to get up off their bottoms and cast their vote would have preferred a different Prime Minister. He won fair and square according to the rules he was playing by, but it would be futile to claim that he has a massive popular mandate.

Slightly more than half of America didn’t want Trump to be their President. But equally, slightly more than half of America didn’t want Harris to be their President. And slightly more Americans didn’t not want the white crook than didn’t not want the black woman. And seventy seven million people voted for him. Seventy seven million.

In 1987, about four million more of my fellow countrymen wanted Mrs Thatcher as their leader than wanted Neil Kinnock to do the job. But I didn’t see this as a metaphysical crisis. I saw it as a difference of opinion. Like Ronald Reagan, I was pretty confident that if the earth had been invaded by aliens, both sides would have buried their differences. I even thought that Mrs Thatcher probably agreed with me that it would be better if people were well educated and healthy and had somewhere to live.

You don’t need to explain to me that Mrs Thatcher’s theory—that the best way to bring about a Good Life for everyone was to sell the council houses, close the mines, cut taxes for the rich and abolish free school milk—didn’t work. I agree with you: that’s why I have always been a Trot rather than a Tory. But I am prepared to contemplate the possibility that Mrs Thatcher did believe it: that she was mistaken as opposed to actively evil.

Of course, the Tories did actively evil things. All politicians, by their nature, sometimes do. I don’t think that a conversation about how your lot tried to cosy up to General Pinochet, yeah, well, your lot had tea with Gerry Adams is particularly profitable.

Unless, I suppose, you think that the Right in general and Mrs Thatcher in particular have always been either corrupt or plain sadistic. Unless you think that the question was never about calcium deficiency in the post war era, and always about taking treats away from small people just for the hell of it. [1]  And yes; the superstitious belief that if only we were allowed to hurt criminals than there wouldn’t be any crime does sometimes shade into a ghoulish enjoyment of the idea of torture. When they started to talk about hanging, you sometimes felt that there was something more than disinterested penal theory behind their eyes. No motive is ever pure. I imagine that they would say that we had a superstitious belief that if only you were kinder to hooligans they would miraculously stop hooliganing and that our approach wasn’t showing any particular sign of working better than theirs. But I am on the whole inclined to think that Olden Days Tories were not closing the mines because they had a fetish for unemployed Welsh people but because they thought it was economically the correct thing to do.

There was sex, of course: clause twenty nine and the Alton Bill. And there was race: Thatcher felt that Enoch Powell had made some good points but should have moderated his language. Everyone always thinks that the years when they were regenerating from kids into young adults were the best years. At least, they think that those years were the normal years; that the way things were done when you were a teenager is the way you would naturally expect things to be done and everything since has been a temporary aberration. I am as bad. I wonder why McDonalds replaced the perfectly good Wimpy Bar. I am inordinately fixated on the first twenty seven issues of one particular comic book and two seasons of one particular children’s TV show. If I imagine a school, I imagine a 1978 comprehensive school, and am surprised (often, but not always, pleasantly) to hear how much schools have changed in the last half-century. I don’t think that the 1970s and 1980s were a golden age. I think we normalised an awful lot of shit.

But I would make two claims:

1: I grew up in a world where politics was often an honest disagreement between two more or less plausible points of view

2: I grew up in a world where the people who were actually evil mostly pretended not to be.

    But maybe, after all, they are not Fascists.

    One of them made a Hitler salute at a rally. But that could have been a random hand gesture.

    Then another one made a Hitler salute, but that could have been a joke about the first one making a Hitler salute.

Then a third one made a Hitler salute, but that could have been a gesture of defiance because the liberals had made such a fuss about the first two.

So maybe, after all, they are not Fascists.

The Leader described himself as a King, but that could have been a joke. “The King is dead, long live the King” is a well-known turn of phrase: if the Mayor of Bristol said “Traffic congestion on the Gloucester Road is dead, long live the King” I wouldn’t understand him to be making a play for Charles’ job. Quite bad taste to make that joke so relatively soon after the late Queen’s passing, and when the King hasn’t been so well, and where the young Prince of Wales can hear it; but perhaps these colonials aren’t as good at nuance as we Brit’s are?

The Leader put out a photograph of himself wearing a crown, but that could have been a joke at the expense of the people who complained about the first joke. The idea of a Republican King is quite funny, if you think about it. The idea of a Republican King who describes democratically elected leaders of other countries as dictators is also quite funny.

Maybe they are not fascists.

One of the Leader’s supporters proposed changing his country’s law to allow the Leader to stand for re-election in 2028, even though the law currently says you only get two goes. The Leader would be eighty-six in 2032 and a big part of his election campaign was that his opponent was too old for the job at eighty-two. But he isn’t responsible for what his supporters say.

Another group of the Leader’s supporters have formed an organisation to campaign to allow him to stay in power until 2032. They are using an image of the Leader in robes with a laurel crown, explicitly comparing him with a Roman emperor.

But the leader isn’t responsible for his over-enthusiastic followers. And they may also be joking.

They really may be joking. I said before that I can imagine speaking at a public meeting in the days when there was still a Labour Party and saying something like “I read in the papers that I am a Trot, so viva la revolucion”. I would be saying it because I am obviously not a revolutionary, not because I am.

I read the other day that a school teacher had been fired for threatening to smack a naughty pupil: he had been joking, the pupil knew he had been joking, everyone knew he had been joking, but everyone agreed that a teacher simply can’t make those sorts of jokes.

Maybe they are not fascists.

When a lessor elected official told the Leader that they would obey the federal law, the dear Leader replied “I am the federal law”.

The dear Leader said that if a person is fighting to save his country, then anything he does is legal. [2]

Some of the things we have read about the Leader and his supporters may not, in fact, be true.

It may even be that some of the things I have written here are not, in fact, true.

The Leader’s tame scientist did not, in fact, say that billionaires were an oppressed class and that other people had no right to entertainment and should roll about in the mud where they belong; although the fact that everyone believed it for a moment tells us something.

This kind of thing may be written by satirists. It may be published by the Leader’s opponents to make him look bad. It may, indeed, be published by the Leader’s supporters so they can accuse the Leader’s opponents of publishing them in order to make them look bad for trying to make him look bad. Or the fake reports may be published by the Leader’s supporters in order to sow doubt and make it easier to deny that the Leader has said something dangerous and stupid when he really has said something dangerous and stupid.

These tactics were widely used by the principled individuals who fought a noble campaign to keep women and black people from writing reviews of computer games and winning prizes at science fiction conventions. They called them “false flag” operations. There were also false false flag operations and false false false flag operations. It was bloody confusing.

Yes, I have, as a matter of fact, read George Orwell’s essay on Fascism. And he was right: in 1945, people applied that word much too widely, without any clear sense of what they meant by it. (Everyone always applies words too widely without any clear sense of what they mean.) But people should not be allowed to point to the essay and conclude that “Fascism doesn’t mean anything” or “People will shout Fascist at anything they don’t like”. That stops us from calling a right wing militarist populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist a right wing militaristic populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist.

The Leader and his Acolyte both openly celebrated the relative success of the Very Far Right Alternative Fur Deutschland party in the German election. The Leader’s Acolyte, indeed, stated that “only the AfD can save Germany.” [3]

The Leader and his Acolyte have both spoken positively about Nigel Farage.

The Leader’s Acolyte has talked about giving trillions of pounds to Nigel Farage.

The Leader’s Acolyte believes that a civil war in England is inevitable, and implied that last summer’s failed pogrom was the first stage of it.

The Leader’s Acolyte has spoken positively of Tommy Robinson Whose Real Name is Yaxely Lennon.

The Leader’s Acolyte appears to have endorsed Andrew Tate’s comedic bid to style himself unofficial Prime Minister of the UK.

But after all, they may not be fascists.

The Left bandy that word about far too much.

[1]  I remember school milk. It was never a treat; always a ghastly lukewarm ordeal. One of the earliest punishments I remember was for wasting your milk.

[2[  Save his country from what?  The current UK leader of the opposition says that only the Conservative Party can save western civilisation. Save it from what?  The last Prime Minister but two wrote a book entitled “Ten Years To Save The West”. Save it from what?

[3] Save Germany from what? 

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