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"Sooner or later, you run out of other people to hate" and the BIG LIES of Brexit and the Midterms [1]
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Date: 2022-10-17
Umair Haque, who I keep reminding you all that you need to be reading, once again teaches me a great deal about the history of the nightmare we will be living if we keep on going down the Brexit road. I am alarmed by his most recent essay:
This Is the Broken Britain Brexit Made Why Did Britain Implode Over the Last Few Weeks? The Bill for Brexit Finally Came Due
The politics of hate and scapegoating will take us to the same place if we don’t stop it.
Just take a look at this from Citizens for Sanity:
These ads are running right now during the playoff games, as Will Bunch notes:
Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.
Bunch adds:
The required tagline lists the sponsor as a new group calling itself Citizens for Sanity. On one level, thanks to some excellent research by the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets, we know a lot about who these Citizens for Sanity are: the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump, offering America not just a new low for the 2022 midterms but a sneak preview of the nightmare that the 45th president’s 2024 comeback crusade is likely to be.
But Haque analyzes the truly horrific situation in Britain right NOW and this needs to be understood about how it was sold, and the consequences that were sure to follow:
Carnage means utter catastrophe on top of ruin. Britain’s economy is now in ruins. It faces a series of shocks from which many, many people will never recover. They will lose their savings, homes, possessions — end up broke, which is an event that leaves lifelong scars, on relationships, on self-worth, on careers, and of course, on a lifetime’s finances. The damage is permanent, it’s very, very real, and it’s only just begun.
and yes, winter is coming.
How did this happen? Big lies of course. The gluttonous rich always promising the piss of “trickle down.” Haque examines over and again the mistrust of the expert economists who tried to warn the disaster of Brexit, repeatedly ignored and vilified to the point of exclusion. How was it sold to the public? We all remember what seemed to many of us like utter folly and pettiness, but British pride (or something or ‘nother). Then, of course, hating on others sealed the deal:
What shape did that pattern of political expedience take in Britain? Here we come to the politic of Brexit, not just its economics. Brexit was based on a series of Big Lies, all of which were, more or less, designed to create scapegoats. The average Brit by then was suffering the effects of a vicious austerity program — and the masterstroke of the conservatives and the Brexit fanatics in those days was to find convenient scapegoats. Who, of course, were Europeans. LOL. Europeans had nothing to do with Britain’s problems whatsoever, and still don’t. How do we know? Well, has getting rid of them, hating them, spitting on them — has it made Britain any better off?
It is painful to read this piece as he examines the precarious position of immigrants in the British economy because it sounds like now, here, in my beloved country. He actually compares Britain to a RED STATE! If you watch that video from Citizens for Sanity, so full of hate, so filled with lies, you worry about Haque’s conclusion:
Let me sum all that up, because it’s a lot. Economically, Brexit made Britain, limiting fiscal space, making it necessary to borrow and cut to maintain living standards, in a desperate last gasp. But that couldn’t go on forever — the bill was going to come due, and the longer it was put off, the more implosive the final reckoning was to be. Meanwhile, because Brexit was made of Big Lies told about scapegoats, the project always had to end in fanatics who ended blaming Brits themselves for being weak, lazy, indolent, not hard-working enough — because sooner or later, you run out of other people to hate.
sigh
[END]
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/17/2129437/--Sooner-or-later-you-run-out-of-other-people-to-hate-and-the-BIG-LIES-of-Brexit-and-the-Midterms
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