by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, The Pulse:
The brotherhood that forms among the oppressed and persecuted never lasts, British historian and art theorist Simon Elmer says in his new book, The Road to Fascism – For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (London 2022).
He goes on to quote philosopher Hannah Arendt: “The humanity of the insulted and injured has never yet survived the hour of liberation by so much as a minute. This does not mean that it is insignificant, for in fact it makes insult and injury endurable; but it does mean that in political terms it is absolutely irrelevant.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
What must replace brotherhood now, according to Elmer, as the worst oppression measures of the Covid era have subsided, at least temporarily, is friendship; but not in the modern sense though.
In The Road to Fascism, Elmer argues that Western societies are now rapidly heading towards fascist totalitarianism, powered by the fourth industrial revolution and pushed on by oligarchs and bureaucratic power.
After the fall of the Soviet Union we have become oblivious to the dangers of a totalitarianism that doesn‘t originate on the left; the naive liberalism of the past decades has blinded us to this danger.
Elmer agrees with Hayek‘s warning in The Road to Serfdom, that the most dangerous kind of fascism is the one driven by international technocracies which could “easily exercise the most tyrannical and irresponsible power imaginable … And as there is scarcely anything which could not be justified by “technical necessities“ which no outsider could effectively question – or even by humanitarian arguments about the needs of some specially ill-favoured group which could not be helped in any other way – there is little possibility of controlling that power.”
And let‘s be aware that here Hayek doesn‘t even consider the possibility of the close collaboration between the international technocracies and monopolistic oligarchs we see in our times.
Elmer claims the support of the Left for the mandates and regulations of the biosecurity state are not based on its inherent authoritarianism as many on the right believe, but rather on its “infiltration by the neoliberal ideologies of multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics and, most recently, the orthodoxies of woke.”
Elmer rightly points out how “no-platforming, cancel culture, misogyny … policing of speech and opinion“ are not rooted in “politics of emancipation, class struggle or wealth distribution;“ there is really nothing socialist, in the traditional sense, about those symptoms of totalitarian ideology.
This seems to stand in direct opposition to the generally accepted view, at least among those on the right wing, that woke is left-wing in its essence, resulting from socialist infiltration of society in accordance with Dusche (and Gramcii‘s) “long march through the institutions.“ So, what is Elmer‘s reasoning here?
Quoting the Nazi motto of “Kraft durch Freude“ (strength through joy), in Elmer‘s view it is the “dream of a unified people, the commemoration of fallen heroes“ that lies behind the fascist salute, behind the willing submission to the leader; it is on kitsch that the aesthetics of totalitarianism are based.
Elmer is not alone here: According to art theorist Monica Kjellman-Chapin, kitsch, the mechanical, easily consumed art, arousing fake sensations, can “easily be deployed by totalitarian regimes as a mechanism of control and manipulation … infused with propaganda.“
In the words of Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.“
Woke, Elmer says, is the modern equivalent of kitsch. Taking the knee, clapping for carers, masking up, and in general obeying nonsensical orders, for “the greater good“, or as is probably more common, only for the sake of appearances, is in its essence the same as being moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.
