The modern extreme-right are just copying ideas straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook

There's absolutely no doubt that the extreme-right is on the rise. Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Israel have elected extreme-right ethno-nationalists into government.

In Britain it's not all Brexit voters were vile extreme-right fanatics, but there's no doubt whatever that the extreme-right demographic were numerous enough to tip the balance in favour of Leave in a very close 52%-48% referendum vote.

In the United States Donald Trump was propelled into power with the support of the KKK and the 'alt-right', and he returned the favour by appointing the alt-right ideologue Steve Bannon as his most senior adviser, and then actually claimed that the Swastika-carrying "Jews will not replace us" thugs and murderous extreme-right terrorists in Charlottsville included "some very fine people".

One of the most extraordinary things about this resurgence of fascism is that the modern extreme-right are doing little more than lazily copying tactics straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook, presumably because they don't actually have any new ideas of their own, and just want another stab at world domination via the methods that almost succeeded for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The censorship fallacy

One of the most blatant examples of the modern extreme-right ripping off Nazi propaganda tactics is the continual refrain that their ideas are being censored, often expressed through sound systems on stages and glitzy websites (where the money actually comes from to pay for all of this extreme-right propaganda is the subject for another article ...).

Even worse than standing on a stage to claim that you're being silenced is the extreme-right tactic of screaming "censorship" whenever anyone else dares to use their own freedom of speech to criticise what the extreme-right fanatic was talking about. 

Freedom of speech means that you're free to say whatever you like (within the bounds of the law), but it certainly doesn't provide freedom from criticism if what you chose to say was a load of absolute shite.

Just like Adolf Hitler in 1928 the modern extreme-right are pretending that their views are being unfairly censored, and if these dangerous fanatics ever did assume political power, we can be absolutely sure that their very first moves would involve launching their own clamp down on free speech and setting about the ruthless persecution of their political opponents, just like Adolf Hitler did before them.

Free speech and criminality

Of course extreme-right fanatics will immediately try to counter criticism of their victims of censorship posturing by citing Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

"But we are being censored" they'll wail "because our beloved Tommy has been jailed for free speech".

The problem with this "free Tommy" narrative is that it's pure deception. Yaxley-Lennon wasn't jailed for free speech, he was jailed for attempting to disrupt the prosecution of child sex abuse gangs as a personal publicity stunt.

He risked collapsing several linked trials and freeing monstrous child sex abusers, he did it as a publicity stunt despite having been previously warned to stop disrupting trials by judges, and he pleaded guilty to the crimes he was charged with.

The fundamental deceit here is the claim that free speech gives people a blanket right to say and do whatever they like, but that's not how free speech works. Nobody is free to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, nobody is free to threaten to rape or kill people when they disagree with them, and nobody is free to deliberately disrupt child sex abuse trials for their own personal advantage.

Anyone who pretends that free speech does cover these things is simply misusing the term to excuse criminal behaviour.

Victim complexing

One of the most effective extreme-right propaganda techniques is victim complexing, which constitutes an effort to instil extreme levels of self-pity within the victims of their propaganda.

Pretending that certain minority groups are receiving favours is one way of doing it, pushing the fiction that the most privileged people in society are the biggest victims of discrimination is another, and pretending that certain political views are being banned is another.

The whole point of victim complexing is to inflate people's levels of self-pity as much as possible, because once you've got your intended audience walking around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of wind to get them all floating in the desired direction.

Xenophobia and anti-Semitism

Stoking fear of foreigners has always been a core tactic of the extreme-right, as has anti-Semitism. It's absolutely clear that this kind of rampant xenophobia and bigotry is on the rise again.

Look at Donald Trump's use of grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric to whip up his extreme-right base (despite the fact that his mother was an immigrant, and two of his three wives have been immigrants!).

Look at the way both Brexit campaigns used anti-immigrant fearmongering to achieve their aims (the Nazi style Leave.EU posters & the recently exposed Vote Leave campaign of highly misleading anti-immigrant fearmongering targeted social media dark ads).

Consider the wave of racism and racist attacks in Italy that have accompanied the rapid resurgence of Italian fascism there.

Consider the use of anti-immigrant rhetoric and vile anti-Semitic propaganda by the extreme-right Hungarian government of Vikton Orbán to provide cover for his ever more tyrannical and anti-democratic political agenda. 

The parallels between Orbán's massive anti-Semitic poster campaign declaring the Jewish billionaire George Soros as an "enemy of the people" and the two minutes hate against Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's 1984 are impossible to ignore.

Cultural Marxism

The threat of "cultural Marxism" is another fascist trope pulled straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook.

The Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) was a way of railing against modernism and progressive values. 

In those days allegations of "Kulturbolschewismus" were lobbed at modern art, Bauhaus architecture, and anything resembling socially liberal values. Today the same allegation of "cultural Marxism" is used to disparage issues like gay rights, transgender rights, and gender neutrality.

Given that Marx's economic philosophy centred on exposing the inequalities and abuses of the capitalist economy, and steered well clear of architectural aesthetics and transgender issues, it's absolutely clear that the term "cultural Marxism" is just a way of invoking scary red bogeymen in order to fearmonger against progressive and modernist trends that the extreme-right see as threats to their traditionalist hyper-conformist mentality.

Normalisation of Nazi propaganda

One of the most shocking things about this resurgence of fascism is the way in which Nazi propaganda is being rapidly normalised within political discourse.

Donald Trump is the obvious example, with members of the Republican Party ever willing to excuse, or even parrot Trump's extremist rhetoric out of their desire to ride on the coat tails of his success. It's not necessary to rehabilitate the reputation of the hard-right warmonger George W. Bush to note that at least the previous Republican President never resorted to racist Trumpian anti-immigrant abuse to whip up support from the extreme-right, nor sought to impose constitution defying anti-immigrant legislation.

In Britain the story is the same. The once centre-right Tory party has passionately embraced the extreme-right, welcoming the fanatically right-wing ultranationalist blue-kip demographic into the Tory fold with open arms.

from Theresa May spewing vile anti-immigrant rhetoric, through the disgusting BNP-inspired fearmongering of the Tories' 2016 London Mayoral election campaign, to young Tories openly spreading Nazi propaganda tropes without fear of recriminations, it's absolutely clear that the Tory party has shifted so far to the right, that what was until recently the domain of the extreme-right is now considered perfectly normal and acceptable, not just among the Tory rank and file, but more worryingly, within the party leadership too.

The paradox of tolerance

We've already seen how the extreme-right resort to victim-complex crying over their freedom of speech when they are imprisoned for their lawless behaviour, or even when others use their own freedom of speech to argue back against their propaganda.

It's absolutely clear that the extreme-right want to exist in an unlimited tolerance environment where they are free from the constraints of the laws of the land, and free from any criticism of their views.

Essentially they're demanding absolute tolerance of their ever increasing use of Nazi propaganda, and their unquestionably lawless behaviour.

But as Karl Popper pointed out in 1945, "unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them".

It's hard to argue that he was wrong given that he witnessed Adolf Hitler's rise to power using the victim complexing narrative that his ideas were being unfairly censored, only to immediately set about silencing and executing all of his political opponents to create one of the most deadly and intolerant autocratic regimes in human history once he got into power.

The lessons of history

Now that the same process is repeating over again, with the modern extreme-right using the exact same propaganda tactics to spread their intolerant ideologies, it's worth remembering Winston Churchill's warning: "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

Now that almost all of the generation who witnessed the disgusting barbarity of fascism first hand (which obviously included Orwell, Popper and Churchill) are now dead, with the very youngest of the WWII veterans into their 90s now, it's becoming increasingly clear that the lessons of history are indeed being forgotten, and the extreme-right are perfectly prepared to use the exact same propaganda tactics as the Nazis before them in order to attack and undermine socially liberal democracy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Meanwhile in America ...

If you've seen the classic film The blues Brothers, you'll probably remember the scene where Jake and Elwood express their hatred of Illinois Nazis before driving their bluesmobile at the Nazi parade forcing them to jump off the bridge into the water.

What you may not know is that the Illinois Nazis in the film were based on an actual bunch of Illinois Nazis who regularly marched through Chicago and even attempted to hold a fascist parade through the mainly Jewish town of Skokie in the late 1970s.

Well under Trump's chaotic rule the Republican Party have decided to give the former leader of this Nazi group a free run at the race to become the Republican candidate for the 3rd Congressional District of Illinois!

This isn't a joke or some kind of exaggeration. They've literally left the door open to Arthur Jones by not fielding a single other candidate!

Make no mistake that this guy may have reformed his fascist ways, he's still a full-on anti-Semite, white supremacist, and Hitler fanatic.

Here are a few quotes:

• "To me the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket."

• "I designed a huge ad, a full page ad appeared in the Milwaukee Journal with a huge swastika right in the centre of the thing. And the Jews had no idea ... imagine that you're a rabbi and you open the paper one morning and all of a sudden bingo, there's a swastika looking at you in the face [laughs]."

• "The green, red, and black flag of the black militants. That's their goal. They want to take over the south land and drive the white people out, and take it over, and create a black nation."

In fact the guy is so far off to the extreme right that he says that he regrets voting for Donald Trump because "he's surrounded himself with hoardes of Jews"!

Only a leader as inept as Donald Trump would allow an actual Nazi to gain the Republican nomination because they're to chaotically disorganised to find anyone to stand against him in the primary.

The Republicans are about to run a former leader of the Illinois Nazi Party (Arthur Jones) as their candidate in the 3rd Congressional district.

NOT A JOKE! The Republican Party under Trump really is that much of a dysfunctional extreme-right mess! pic.twitter.com/BVCbR3IReP

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) February 5, 2018

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Wikipedia just ruled the Daily Mail to be an unreliable source

To the untrained eye the Daily Mail may appear to be a newspaper, but it's no such thing. It's an extreme-right propaganda empire that has been owned and operated by the tax-dodging billionaire Harmsworth family for generations.

I'm sure we can all think of examples that demonstrate that the Daily Mail is savagely right-wing propaganda rag: Their support for Hitler and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1930s; their homophobic rants; their smearing of dead war heroes; their constant anti-immigrant hatemongering; their support for extreme-right candidates on the continent; their blaming a murder victim for their own death; their habit of mocking the gullibility of their own readers; their support for Theresa May's effort to scrap parliamentary sovereignty and turn herself into an all-powerful autocrat who can make and repeal laws as they please.

Interestingly Wikipedia have cottoned on to what an incredibly dodgy extreme-right propaganda empire the Daily Mail is, and after deliberation, the consensus amongst the community of Wikipedia editors is that the Daily Mail is an unreliable source that should no longer be used as a reference (unless absolutely necessary).

To put this into perspective a little it's worth noting that standards at the Daily Mail are so low that they've been declared an "unreliable source" by a voluntary website that can be edited by literally anyone with an Internet connection (unless they've been banned for vandalism)!

Everyone should know that Wikipedia is a useful research tool, not a final authority. Of course it has problems arising from the fact that literally anyone can make changes to the articles. Vandalism, poor referencing and point of view pushing make certain articles and topics unreliable, but there is a massive band of volunteers working to undo vandalism, straighten out biased articles and add reliable sources.

And that's the big difference between Wikipedia and the Daily Mail. One of them actively works to improve standards, correct mistakes and make sure claims are reliably sourced, while the other has abysmal standards, refuses to correct mistakes and is so full of unreliable claims that they're no longer considered an appropriate source by the other.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The hypocrisy of the UKIP complaint about Seb Dance's stunt

The Labour MEP Seb Dance held up a piece of paper saying "he's lying to you" behind Nigel Farage as he was busy spouting his usual brand of xenophobic, fearmongering anti-European rhetoric in the European Parliament.

The action was a breech of parliamentary etiquette for sure, and Dance will inevitably end up getting punished for it, but the hypocrisy of the official UKIP complaint really is something else.

The UKIP MEP who submitted the complaint is a guy called Bill Etheridge who said that it was "disgusting behaviour".

If anyone is a qualified expert on "disgusting behaviour" it's surely Bill Etheridge, who is one of the very many failed, defected or (in his case) disgraced Tories to have ended up in UKIP.

Etheridge was a Tory Party local council candidate until 2011 when he was forced to resign in disgrace after he decided to indulge in a spot of social media race-baiting. It's not often that someone's bigoted behaviour is so overt and extreme that they end up getting shoved out of the Tory party, but Bill is one of the rare examples.

Since joining UKIP and becoming an MEP for the West Midlands region Etheridge has continued to court controversy, famously telling a gathering of young Ukippers that Adolf Hitler "achieved great things" and advising them that they should study and imitate Hitler's speaking style!

This kind of hypocrisy would be utterly astounding, but by now we're well used to revolting displays of self-pitying faux outrage from Ukippers with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, and the self-awareness of inanimate objects. 

If anything is actually "disgusting" it's clearly a political party that is ever willing to provide a home to failed and disgraced Tories like Bill Etheridge, cuddle up to extreme-right hatemongers like the EDL and Britain First, and has continually shamed Britain by using the European Parliament to scam vast amounts in expenses despite hardly ever turning up other than to use the parliamentary debating floor as a platform to spread their  xenophobia, fearmongering rhetoric and anti-European bile.

We are living in interesting times indeed, where wealthy white western males like Nigel Farage can play the perma-victim and millions of people actually take them seriously, and light-hearted objections to Farage's shameful victim-complex grandstanding can actually be self-righteously described as "disgusting" by a Hitler-praising social media race-baiter and failed Tory like Bill Etheridge!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Welcome to Donald Trump's America

The actor Shia LaBeouf was holding some kind of live streamed anti-Trump protest when an obnoxious white supremacist wearing a Hitler Youth cap and shouting fascist slogans interrupted it.

Instead of punching the obnoxious little fascist, Shia LaBeouf shouted at him to drown out the Nazi slogans, which allegedly included the assertion that "Hitler did nothing wrong".

The clip of this incident immediately went viral, and the sympathy of Trump supporters was predictably directed towards the outright fascist and not the Jewish man who got angry with him.

There is absolutely no doubt that the object of the Trumpsters' sympathies is a fascist. The hat he was wearing is undeniably a Hitler youth cap, and the "1488" phrase he shouted into the camera is a Nazi code. The "14" refers to the 14 Words of white supremacism invented by the white supremacist murderer David Lane (who died in jail for the murder of a Jewish radio presenter). The "88" refers to "Heil Hitler" because H is the eighth letter of the English alphabet.

Aside from this Nazi troll, other fans of the 1488 code include the white supremacist terrorist Dylan Roof, the white supremacist murderer Curtis Allgier and the Tennessee Barack Obama assassination plotters.

The reaction of Trumpsters to this incident was an orgy of condemnation of Shia LeBeouf backed up with an awful lot of sympathetic pleading on behalf of the neo-Nazi.

Here are some of the countless Trumpster reactions to a Jewish man getting angry at a Nazi hat-wearing troll shouting fascist slogans [source]:

"A hollywood bully", "Liberal Bully & Nut Job. Don't see good things 4 him", "Keep it up libitards!1 You are doing just what you do best!!", "rather a violent outburst for someone promoting peace and  diversity", "Something is seriously wrong with Labeouf", "Liberals are the most bizarre form of hellish spawn Satan created", "Anybody got a straight jacket for him?", "Leftist coward", "oh the hate!", "Libs are so diabolical", "The non-actor was bullied by the actor", "Look at the Left Wing Bullies. No tolerance. No debate, Just Bullying at it's finest"  ...

So in Trumpland a Jew who gets angry with a Nazi is actually a hateful and mentally ill bully, and the Nazi is the poor innocent victim who deserves to be tolerated!

Perhaps a quote from Adolf Hitler might help to illustrate why tolerance of fascists is not such a good idea?

"Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement." Adolf Hitler, 1934

One of the other commonly occurring Trumpster arguments against LaBeouf is to deny the absolutely obvious with questions like "where do you get the info to assert that this man is a 'white supremacist'?" as if it's not obvious from the Nazi hat he was wearing and the white supremacist code he was shouting into the camera!

The Trumpster doesn't really want to know the answer to the question though, they're just asking it in order to try to add confusion and doubt into the debate and to gain recommendations and upvotes from other Trumpsters.

I'm sure that a lot of these Trumpsters who insist on sympathising with an actual Nazi think of themselves as patriots, but their impassioned defence of an outright Nazi is pretty damned hard to square with the fact that 407,300 American servicemen died in the Second World War in order to defeat Nazism and Japanese imperialism.

It's incredibly sad that there are still Second World War veterans alive today, but their sacrifices have already been forgotten so badly that people who imagine themselves to be American patriots actually jump to the defence of an obvious Nazi, and bitterly condemn the Jewish man who got angry with him.

Things certainly aren't looking good for America when people have become so conditioned by the right-wing media that it's easy to trick Trump supporters into agreeing with Adolf Hitler quotes and a white supremacist Nazi troll becomes the object of a mass outpouring of Trumpster sympathy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The political extremism of Nigel Farage

In this article I'm going to look at the increasingly warped and dangerous political ideology being espoused by former UKIP leader and mainstream media darling Nigel Farage.

Intimidation of the judiciary

Nigel Farage detests democracy. In fact he even threatened to raise a gigantic mob to intimidate the judiciary into scrapping the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. He was so keen to establish the principle that the Prime Minister can simply make up the law of the land by themselves, with no parliamentary scrutiny whatever, that he tried to raise a right-wing mob to achieve it.

It's incredible that Ukippers who never shut up about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty before the EU referendum were suddenly shrieking for the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to be consigned to the dustbin of history just in case MPs might decide that Theresa May and her Brexiteer charlatans are making an absolute mess of Brexit and put the brakes on the thing in order to sort out some kind of coherent plan.

In the end Farage's threatened flash mob for dictatorship never materialised, presumably because Farage realised that fearmongering people into voting for Brexit was a hell of a lot easier than convincing them to actually join an extreme-right street protest demanding the principle of parliamentary democracy be scrapped. 

Farage didn't want the embarrassment of threatening to lead an army of 100,000+ to intimidate the judiciary, but ending up just leading an embarrassing anti-democracy parade of a few thousand of the most crazed Ukippers, Biffers and assorted other extreme-right anti-democrats, so he scrapped the whole idea.

Donald Trump's butler

Farage began sucking up to Donald Trump way before the orange one was elected as President. In fact it was on a July 2016 trip to the US to share his Brexit gloating with Trump and the Republican Party convention that Farage's aide was arrested by US authorities for having orchestrated a dark web drug money laundering scam.

When Donald Trump won the Presidential election Farage made a beeline for the US to appear with Trump in a gold encrusted elevator, just as all good unironic "man-of-the-people anti-establishment firebrands" surely should.

Upon returning to the UK Farage then set about demanding that Theresa May appoint him as UK ambassador to the US, which displays an incredible misunderstanding of what the role of an ambassador is.

The job of ambassador to the US is to promote the interests of the UK to the Americans. The way that Farage has been sucking up to Donald Trump makes it absolutely clear that he sees the job of UK ambassador to the US as an opportunity to promote Donald Trump's interests to the British.

Theresa May has done a woeful job of Prime Minister so far, but even she had sufficient sense to ignore Farage's ludicrous demands for her to make him Donald Trump's official state appointed British butler.

Nazi style propaganda

Nobody sensible would claim that all Brexit voters are raving xenophobic bigots, some of them had non-bigoted reasons for voting the way they did.

The reality though is that the EU referendum was won by just 700,000 odd people casting their vote one way rather than the other, and few would even attempt to deny that a great deal more than 700,000 Leave voters were of the bigoted Biffer variety with heads full of anti-immigrant hatred.

Not all Brexiters are racist, but all racists are Brexiters.

Farage knew perfectly well that he needed to bring out the swivel-eyed racists in force in order to win the EU referendum, hence the commissioning of a Nazi style anti-immigrant poster modelled on the anti-Jewish propaganda of the 1930s.

Farage's ploy succeeded and a strong turnout of bigots ensured a win for the Leave campaign, but anyone with any sense of decency on either side of the EU referendum debate was left shocked at Farage's deliberate employment of Nazi style propaganda.

Alignment with the extreme-right

Many people were shocked by Nigel Farage's attack on the bereaved husband of Jo Cox, because attacking the widow of a murder victim would be bad enough in it's own right, but when the murderer shared the same fanatical hatred of immigrants and the EU as Farage does, then it's clearly incredibly tasteless and pretty damned un-British too.

One of the most telling things about his attack on Brendan Cox was the way Farage described the anti-fascist Hope Not Hate campaign as "extremists".

Farage has never had a problem receiving endorsements and adulation from the fanatical extreme-right. He hasn't spoken out against the vile extreme-right hate group Britain First instructing their followers to vote UKIP because he sees regular Britain First endorsements as useful free propaganda.

Thus Nigel Farage is trying to spread the Orwellian propaganda narrative that Britain First and the hatemongering fascist fringe are the good guys who need defending from anti-fascist organisations like Hope Not Hate, who are the evil extremists!

By publicly attacking and defaming the anti-fascist movement Farage is clearly trying to align himself with outright fascists in order to win their political support, just as Donald Trump openly courted the white supremacist "Alt-Right" fascists in the US and rewarded them with a key position in his administration for Steve Bannon.

Making up self-serving rules

Before the EU referendum result came in, fearing defeat for the Brexit campaign, Farage argued for a second referendum in the case of a 52-48 win for Remain saying that such a situation "would be unfinished business by a long way". After Leave won by ... err ... 52-48 Farage has changed his tune dramatically, claiming that any attempts to stop Brexit by means of a second referendum would result in "political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country", when pressed on the issue by Andrew Marr, Farage agreed that he was predicting riots in the streets.

So if Remain won a narrow victory Farage clearly wanted a second referendum, but after Leave won a narrow victory Farage threatened riots in the streets if there's a second referendum. This is an absolutely crystal clear example of someone hypocritically making up the rules to serve their own political interests.

Ideological purges

The resignation of Ivan Rogers as UK ambassador to the EU over the shambolic mess the Tories are making of Brexit provoked Nigel Farage into calling for a mass ideological purge of the civil service.

Like the independence of the judiciary (that Farage also hates), the concept of a politically neutral civil service is one of the cornerstones of the British political system. The idea of a politically motivated purge of the civil service in order to enforce ideological conformity is utterly abhorrent.

History tells us that it's when politicians start with the ideological purges to eradicate their opponents from parliament, the civil service, universities and the media, that totalitarianism really starts to take hold.

The thing to be thankful for is that Nigel Farage doesn't (yet?) have the political power to achieve his totalitarian ambitions. He can't sack the judiciary and he can't conduct an ideological purge of the civil service because he's nothing but a tinpot dictator with only as much political power as the mainstream media afford him with their endless uncritical coverage of his political extremism.

A "Little Hitler"

According to the top definition on Urban Dictionary the slang term "Little Hitler" refers to "a self-important tosspot who thinks he's in charge. Someone who makes up arbitrary and/or self-serving rules and has a tantrum if they aren't obeyed".

There should be absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone but the most fervent of Ukippers that Nigel Farage fits the description of "self-important tosspot who thinks he's in charge".
Just consider his foot-stamping tantrum over the judiciary favouring parliamentary sovereignty over autocratic dictatorship; the way he makes up his views on narrow referendum victories entirely to suit his own self-interest; his impotent demands to be made ambassador to the US; and his calls for the ideological purges of his political opponents to begin.

Farage is pretty much the (urban) dictionary definition of a "Little Hitler".

A "Big Hitler"?

The good thing about "Little Hitlers" is that they don't have the political power to enforce the dictatorships they pine for. They can't sack the judiciary, purge the civil service or turn our schools and universities into political indoctrination camps because they don't have the political power to do any of it, they just have one impotent tantrum after another over such issues.

The problem of course is that "Little Hitlers" sometimes become "Big Hitlers". Dictators usually steal political power by force (military coups, fascist uprisings ...), but sometimes they're handed the path to absolute political power by the electorate.

History tells us that it doesn't take anything like a majority of the electorate to turn a "Little Hitler" into a "Big Hitler".

Take Adolf Hitler himself as an example. In 1932 the Nazis won 192 out of the 586 seats in the German Reichstag, which was nowhere near enough to form a majority government. After a couple of months of political wrangling the German political establishment agreed to let Hitler serve as Chancellor, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The 1932 election was the last free and fair election anywhere in Germany until 1949, and the last open election for the whole country until the post-reunification election of 1990.

Less than one in three German voters supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1932 Federal Election, but that was all Hitler needed in order to seize power for himself and immediately set about with the political repression, attacks on the judiciary, ideological purges of the civil service and education system in order to eradicate political opposition and continually strengthen his grip on political power.

Nigel Farage has already made it absolutely clear that he's a "Little Hitler" who would just love to sack the judiciary, scrap parliamentary democracy and instigate a politically motivated purge of the civil service.

It's obviously unfair to say that if he were given the political power he craves, that Farage would eventually go as far as Hitler did. However Farage's is clearly identifiable as a potential dictator by his utter contempt for stuff like parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, and his burning desire to see the ideological purge of his political opponents set in motion.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The growing danger of anti-intellectualism

The problem of anti-intellectualism in Britain has got so bad that members of the political establishment class now feel comfortable with actively instructing the public to ignore expert analysis and make important political decisions based on ignorance and blind instinct.

Michael Gove's "people in this country have had enough of experts" comment during the EU referendum debate was the most high profile example of an establishment politician actively promoting anti-intellectualism. It's no surprise to see such a sentiment being expressed by this particular politician. Michael Gove was the man who stuffed our schools with unqualified teachers and ideologically vandalised the comprehensive education system; Gove is a a man who has put ideology and ambition above expert opinion and verifiable evidence for his entire political career; and Gove was just the second person in the entire history of the United Kingdom without any legal qualification whatever to serve as Lord Chancellor, the first completely unqualified Lord Chancellor was his immediate Tory predecessor Chris Grayling and the third is his immediate successor Liz Truss.

Michael Gove is such an anti-intellectual that he actually said that deterring youngsters from ordinary backgrounds from attending university with the prospect of vast student loan debts is "all to the good".

Of course Michael Gove hates the idea of decent levels of public education and actively promotes anti-intellectualism. A burning contempt for experts and expertise is woven through his entire political career.

The problem of course is that this kind of vehement right-wing contempt towards education, experts and expertise is staggeringly dangerous because it feeds into the belligerent "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" mentality.

Anti-intellectualism and dangerous ideological puritanism go hand in hand. Ideological fanatics fear education and expertise because educated minds tend to subject things (including political ideologies) to critical scrutiny. The fear of ideological non-conformity is the reason that extremist ideologies tend to censor criticism and debate, ruthlessly punish dissent and promote anti-intellectual mentalities amongst the general public.

History has taught us that anti-intellectualism (book banning, simplistic propaganda, enforced ideological conformity, ideological purges of universities, government, the media and the civil service) is one of the main features of the road to totalitarianism.

Think of Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Fascist Italy, the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the US, Stalinism in Russia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or Pinochet's military dictatorship in Chile. All of these regimes dealt ruthlessly with intellectuals who stepped out of line by contradicting the official ideology of the state. They burned books; they purged the education system of non-conformists; they banned dissent; and they imprisoned, tortured and killed people for holding "wrong opinions". They embraced anti-intellectualism out of an ideological fear of informed political debate.

Ideological extremists demand certainty and enforce conformity, while the fields of science and philosophical investigation tell us that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that many of the greatest advancements in human history have come about when intellectuals have developed new paradigm-shifting ideas instead of conforming to the orthodoxies of their age. Thus, anti-intellectualism isn't just a dangerous mindset that goes hand in hand with political extremism, it impedes the development potential of humanity.

History tells us that it's when politicians begin instructing the public to despise experts and intellectuals, and promoting their fanatical political ideologies as unquestionable political truths, then things begin to get dangerous, and that's exactly what is going on in Britain today.

The French philosopher Albert Camus wrote that "the most incorrigible vice is that of an ignorance which fancies that it knows everything", and by calling for the British public to reject experts and intellectuals in order to embrace this kind of ignorance, right-wing politicians have demonstrated that the vice of ignorance is something that they're deliberately trying to foster and promote in British society.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR