The UK Daily Mail: without the support of this newspaper – which has run a rabid propaganda campaign against Jeremy Corbyn since he became leader of the UK Labour party – it’s said to be very hard to win a British election.
Noam Chomsky said recently that the rise of Trump isn’t the same as fascism because “you don’t have storm troopers”. He’s mistaken. Fascism is a virus that adapts to circumstances. It creeps, it hides its face. It’s been creeping in Britain for decades and it’s getting stronger. Its most powerful weapon now isn’t stormtroopers, but propaganda. As it was then actually – ask Mr Goebbels.
The UK is already an endemic surveillance state. Just kind of crept up on us didnit, never noticed didwe; some conspiracy theorists banged on about it but why listen to them.
Worse is creeping up on Britain, in the flabby, stupid form of Boris Johnson. Oswald Mosely, the Mail’s hero in 1934, was thin and elegant and stupid. We should never underestimate stupidity. Stupid people can be very clever in executing their brain-warped ideas. Boris Johnson, and this an observation about a mental condition not an expletive, is a fascist toe-rag.
David Cameron already tore up the Magna Carta when he murdered (droned) a British citizen without trial. Not that murder is anything new for a secretive state, but Cameron did it openly. Convenient for Johnson who has no sense of law or morals; the flab extends from his belly to his heart to his brain. Nothing can get through it. He’s already sold Britain down the river to Trump and to US and multinational corporations. The bill of sale is in his pocket waiting to be signed. He will sell anyone or anything to anybody if he thinks it will get him what he wants, especially if it keeps up the bottomless supply of upper-class double-barrelled half-wits in charge of the country as butts for Monty Python series, or films about the ruling class. Brits love their humour so much that they don’t mind the Boris Johnsons, the Dukes of Devonshire and Elizabeth the queen of a long historical line of genocidists pissing in their soup for eternity. Wot a larf, innit!
The liberal media, Guardian, Observer, BBC etc., seeing where their interests lie when it comes down to it, have torn their last connection – flimsy as it was – with truthful journalism, and openly joined the Mail in the gutter. They’re lying about Corbyn; they know they’re lying. They know many people know they’re lying and they continue to lie. They don’t care who knows. The reason? Because their lies about Corbyn and the Labour party are true whether they’re true or not, and they’re true for one reason – because the conventional wisdom purveyed by the liberal establishment says they’re true. Facts have nothing to do with it.
And that is the heart of British fascism. It’s not in the working class, or in the working people in “ordinary” jobs, or in the unemployed. It’s in the minds of swathes of the liberal intellectual class and in their bad faith and their alienation from themselves and from the rest of humanity. They’re liberal and intellectual and progressive until someone jogs their latte. Then – truth is what we say it is, that’s the truth and the whole truth, so help me conventional Guardian wisdom.
Corbyn is under attack from the entire British establishment. He threatens their interests; they close ranks. The rich who won’t pay taxes, the arms industry, the City of London, the warmongers in all parties, the Empire nostalgia merchants, the progressives embedded to their necks in the system who want cosmetic changes; those on all sides, and they are many, who want Britain to remain a US colony. Corbyn is a threat to them all and that’s why they hate him and will stop at nothing to get him.
(Below, Daily Mail article from 15 January 1934. The Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial also supported the British fascists.)
