Raining and Fertile Ground

Just as well, the weather has been a strange unpleasant combination of parched and muggy. There have been a couple of storms, but then the heat has closed over almost directly afterwards, and within an hour the air has felt just as thick and still as it did before. Now it's raining, it's cool and very pleasant. I have to pack for a trip to friends near Birmingham and then on to Bury, and this weather's a blessing for travel.

There have been a few things on my mind recently; a sociaist bookshop was 'invaded' to quote Sky news. As a piece of social commentary it stands by itself: https://news.sky.com/video/far-right-protesters-invade-socialist-bookshop-11463257

Natch, people have been equating it to the burning of books in 1930s Germany. Trouble is, it becomes difficult to separate isolated arsehole incidents from a trend, especially when 'Nazi' or 'Fascist' becomes a generic term meaning an evil person. I was reading up some definitions of fascism, and I came across a very interesting piece: http://www.anesi.com/Fascism-TheUltimateDefinition.htm

I was struck by a number of points made, but these stayed with me:

National unity. This was a fixed core goal of fascism. It held that social conflict could be transcended through service to the nation-state as the embodiment of the will of the people. With all serving the same master, internal conflict would disappear and the people (with certain out-groups excluded of course) would achieve their destiny...

Intolerance for dissent It would be trivial to observe that since the fascist model required individuals to serve the nation-state as the embodiment of the popular will, and subordinate their interests to it, dissent would be unthinkable for any true believer. A stronger reason for suppressing dissent can be found in the emotional characteristics of fascism. Accepting that ideas firmly held become reality, a dissenter imperiled the collective spell, and dissent was seen as a species of malefic witchcraft.

The last sentence of the above interested me. Brexit in Britain is often touted as being about believing in the greatness of the British people so wholeheartedly that things must turn out right, irrespective of planning or maths or any cold rationalisation. It is precisely a form of collective spell-casting, and one person left uninfluenced weakens the whole. If this alone makes for fascism, then while I don't think we are there yet, we are certainly in the ball park. What then stops this from becoming a fascist state?

'Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity...' The compensatory cults exist in GB, but purity and energy? We have little of such zeal, for all incidents like the above might indicate otherwise. They are shocking but they are rare. And the divides exacerbated by Brexit are not a case of poor against rich, or Tory against Labour; it's much more nuanced than that. I don't see Brexit becoming a uniting fascist-style drive, though giving any credence to the definitions above, there are similarities to a pre-fascist state.

Of course, it's possible to read too much into these things. But still...