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| Stalin Roosevelt Churchill defeated Hitler War in Europe 1938-1945 - 60 M deaths "We must have The United States of Europe" |
Let’s Not Listen to Hannah?
Mel Cooper, Oxford, UK
In her important study of how
Totalitarianism can rise and take over a nation, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt in 1950 noted:
“Mass propaganda discovered that its
audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and
did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement
to be a lie anyhow.”
Forget about Donald Trump for
a moment. This is how the British public, or about 50% of them, is prepared to
ignore reality and believe, for instance, that the EU is undemocratic and
therefore they must leave it and regain their sovereignty. They are also
prepared to believe that there will then be a lot of money to play with or give
to the NHS once we stop sending huge subventions to the EU; and that Nigel
Farage, the owners of the right wing press, and David Davis are honourable and
honest men.
Hence my belief that we will
leave the EU because just over 50% of this nation is too gullible and
emotionally pained not to. They also seem to believe in the subtext that if we
are very, very good and leave the troublesome EU, we will get our Empire back
and Britain will be “great” again. There is no point is explaining about
Proportional Representation, how it works, and why my area in the UK sends 10
MEPs to the EU Parliament. There is no point is explaining how the bureaucracy
works and that everything that is reported upon gets careful consideration and
the vote. There is no point is explaining that we did not give up our
sovereignty to the EU but pooled it with other European countries, which is a
very different thing. There is no way these people want to consider that if we
are so goddammed at the mercy of the EU, we somehow managed not to join the
Euro, not to sign up for Shengun. They do not want to hear that most of the
things that are troubling them and doing them down are actually local decisions
made by the government of the UK, where Scotland and Northern Ireland, for
example, have considerably less influence than the UK does in the EU
parliament. Who wants to remember that most of the important legislation of the
EU was written with major input from the UK? Who want to note that by being in
the EU we have had influence, moral and political and even economic, far beyond
our weight in this world? Yes, we have a veto over everything in the EU
Parliament, but hey, we have given up our sovereignty so how does that compute?
At the moment, not having even left the EU, we have already given up our
position at the top table and our moral influence. Why go on?
Mass propaganda has done its
work. Thirty years of increasing EU bashing in the Right Wing Press has whipped
up emotions and over-ridden any possible logic that can be applied by the Will
of the Majority to this situation. People keep hoping for a second referendum
or second thoughts. Forget it! As with Europe in the 1930s, we prefer the
darkness and do not wish to shine any light on the true motives of people like
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Rupert Murdoch or the other self-serving
plutocrats for whom leaving the EU is a dream of bliss come true. No abiding by
any of the rules, pretty soon, about quality of goods, quality of food,
protection of the workers or so many other difficulties caused by EU
legislation. Boris Johnson is the bent one of the bent bananas in all of this!
Of course we will be able to trade with China. How much cheaper do you thing
their goods will be?
And yes, of course, go on and
on about the markets because of course the EU needs us more than we need them
and they don’t really believe in their ideas of freedom of movement of workers,
students, etc. Theresa May has been trying to stop all those pesky foreigners
from coming to our country and now she will succeed. Because, frankly, who will
risk coming to such a xenophobic, self-serving, unwelcoming and increasingly
racist place?
So I congratulate the
Brexiteers. No one has pointed out that what we send to the EU is less than 1%
of what the government actually has to spend each year; that for this we have
unfettered access to one of the biggest markets in the world. No one is much
interested in noting that we actually are turning our backs on Europe in
various important ways and that if we open ourselves to the rest of the world
they will want us to pay various prices for access to their markets. No one in
the Brexit camp is at all interested in the urgent problems of the world that
can only be solved together. I have little doubt that after some pain (perhaps
a decade or two in duration) we will even get what might be left of our economy
on track again even if not quite as prosperously as before. (Robots do not rent
houses, buy food or clothes or pay much income tax but the Brexiteers tell us
they will save the future.) But once upon a time Britain turned its back on the
Sudetenland, and look where that led. What did it have to do with us? Think
about it.
And we are, in fact, doing it
again. Like that famous headline just before World War One when a fog rolled
into the channel, we are back in the days of CONTINENT ISOLATED. That is our
default position. We seem to thank that we are not actually a part of Europe. Think
about it! And think about the fact that ultimately Brexit is not an economic
issue, it is a moral one.
In age of increasing globalization
and incrementally growing need for co-operative approaches, we would rather be
proud little Blightey, all on our own, pugnacious and supposedly free and
independent, than part of a project to overcome centuries of hostility and
stupid isolationist thinking.
Well, it is a false freedom
we are going for. But hey, what do I know?!?! Let’s take the risk. Let’s ignore
the experts. Let’s give it a whirl and see what happens when we endanger
everything we supposedly believe in and both our economic and moral welfare to
make the offshore wealth of the plutocrats more invulnerable because not
subject to the laws that the EU is trying to bring in for bringing back into
taxability all that offshore money.
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