The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler by John King

‘Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire.’ José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, 2007

It is sometime in the future and the individual nations of Europe no longer exist. The EU’s mission has reached its final stage and the United State Of Europe has been formed. Power is fully centralised, and this corporate-driven, closet dictatorship promotes New Democracy, its true nature hidden behind fake smiles, easy debt and empty liberal rhetoric. With the major cities controlled by Good Europeans, locals (commons) live as second-class citizens. Across Europe resistance groups fight back. And Britain is no different.

In London, an ambitious young bureaucrat (Crat) uses Suspicion software to identify threats to the State, stumbling across a shocking murder just as a high-ranking Controller is about to arrive from Brussels. At the same time, a member of GB45 leaves one of the Free English towns in Wessex and heads towards the capital. Despite the efforts of special police unit Cool and the paramilitaries of Hardcore, these three men are set on a collision course.

The Crat is Rupert Ronsberger, a true professional capable of believing anything he is told if it will further his career. A trained conformist, he is hard-working and dedicated, but like so many of his colleagues has an alter ego in Rocket Ron, a dabbler who makes full use of the laid-on Crat-only nightlife, two of his favourite venues the cutting-edge animal clubs Bark! and Splash! His current date is Polestar, an African sexer offered the chance to chill with Good Euros, her thirst for knowledge causing Rocket to make a grave error.

Horace Starski is the Controller returning to the city where he first worker as a Crat nearly fifty years before. A self-proclaimed man of the people, he owns Pearly penthouse in the East Side Gates, but hates leaving the Brussels Bubble. The inventor of Scales! technology, he is in the constant company of loyal guardians Bob Terks and Baby, but London stirs memories of a lost love and he is driven to travel into a commons zone alone. As he looks back on a choice made, his interest in the talented Rupert Ronsberger begins to mutate.

Living in a town that has yet to be fully subjugated, Kenny Jackson loves books and hates the USE, like every other local dealing in pound coins rather than virtual Eurodollars as an alternative system operates. An unlikely soldier, he is the boyhood friend of Kid Bale, former tearaway and now leader of the Wessex Boys. Forced out of London as a child, Kenny heads back and teams up with Tubby Nowakowski and his speedhead Uxbridge crew. Nearly arrested by Cool, he ends up with the heritage herberts of Wandle Manor for one last session ahead of his journey into the East Side, one from which he may not return.

The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler imagines a society where doublespeak merges with babytalk and the internet has morphed into propaganda/surveillance tool InterZone. Those who want to progress in life must follow strict rules they insist do not exist. Correctness and a denied censorship crushes expression. Physical copies of books, audio and film are illegal. The people’s culture is consistently stolen and sold back to them in distorted forms – Parisian songsmith Jean Rotten bursts onto the music scene with a ferocious Tenderberger jingle, Terry Johns captains London United against the Barca Flamboyants and is denounced for no good reason, while dead showman James Saviles is promoted as a brave libertine.  

Enforced digitisation has seen history edited, rewritten and deleted, so even the most wicked of individuals can be rehabilitated as The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler pays its respects to three of the author’s favourite novels – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And while this book offers a vision of the future, it is as much about the present day.

A Very Corporate Coup, by John King – www.newstatesman.com