Boris Johnson: a Hitler satire "Brexit bunker" tribute act and funny fable to authoritarian comedy acts

 If Alexander Borisovich DePfeffel Johnsonov could be compared to Hitler, it would only be in the sense that he was a man destined for the greatness of his own ego. The "World King" became the ruler of Brexit Britain. As the Ayran dictator of the English master race, England was, under his guidance, fated for greatness. His boundless energy and optimism would whizz-bang the nation into orgiastic delight under his personality, as he flew the flag of Brexit, the cult that he knew he was destined to lead as soon as he decided to choose to write the article in favour of Brexit that would lead him to victory in the referendum (or not).

But he didn't want Britain to really leave the EU. He just wanted to back the losing side in the referendum, and lap up the honour in defeat at Leave losing the 2016 EU referendum, so that he could take Cameron's place when he stood down shortly before the 2020 UK election. That would leave Boris ideally place to rule and dominate politics in the UK for that coming decade, his place in history secure. Sure, he had no idea what he was going to do with that power when he had it, much like Cameron. But being Prime Minister was much more important than having a plan for the country.

But he went on and won the bloody referendum, didn't he? Him and Michael, Goebbels to his Hitler, had to look like they had a plan when they won. It was lucky in a way that the two of them managed to cock up the leadership battle after Cameron fell on his sword so that it was nasty Mrs May who took the fall for the mess of the negotiations. She was never suited to power either. May was far too serious, with her own neuroses that haunted her like demons in the dark shadows of power, lurking in the back of her mind. The Brexit demons got to her in the end, sending her slightly mad probably.

But not Alexander the great, the Ayran superhero! He was biding his time, allowing May to take the blame for everything that was going wrong. Everyone knew about his energy and hypnotic power. When May finally gave in, her soul broken by the Brexit monster, it was Boris' turn to demonstrate his vision for Britain, giving Brexit a personality cult that it truly deserved. For Boris would be Brexit's dear leader, with the drive and dynamism of a blonde Hitler but with a better sense of humour and minus the anti-Semitism! Sure, Boris was a womanizer, a liar, a casual racist and almost completely amoral, but at least he was a lovable rogue! And having Michael "Goebbels" Gove at his side was a stroke of genius: Michael playing the straight man and the dissembling propagandist to Boris' affable fool-cum-secret genius. 

Then there was Dom. He was the man who never smiled, and when he did. you had the right idea to run very far away. Dom was the Martin Bormann of the gang. The real power behind the throne. He was the real ideologue, even more than Michael or Boris was. Boris was just doing Brexit for the bantz. No-one could really do anything without Dom's consent, and Dom controlled access even to Boris. Dom allowed Michael to take over control of the logistics and media side of Brexit - for Michael was more of details man than the fantasizing Aryan leader - while Dom controlled the wider strategic vision. 

This was how they came to win the public's adulation so quickly, with the motivational rhetoric and simple solutions - "Take Back Control" became "Get Brexit Done". TBC, GBD. Easy. Now at the height of Dom's powers at this point, he was able to get Boris to replace his new finance minister with an even newer one one more amenable to their agenda.  It was all about GBD, and the economy was to become a tool to the might of Brexit.

But the great leader suffered a cruel twist of fate: at the pinnacle of his success, a great pestilence stuck him down like Thor's hammer. The Gods were cruel to the unbelievers, and Boris had not prayed hard enough to the Brexit sigil for the nation's Aryan master to be protected. Struck down and debilitated for a time, the nation lurched without his divine inspiration and leadership. Brexit Britain's foreign minister struggled to fill the place of Alexander Borisovich, and in this time even Dom "Bormann" Cummings lapsed in his focus, his sight failing him on the way to Barnard Castle. It was a dark time for the nation and the government.

When the leader came back from his respite there were many praising the return of the triumphant lion, waiting for the personification of the Brexit cult to inspire us all again. Alas, it was not to be. For the leader's health was not what it was; he seemed to lack focus, drive and certainty of purpose. He came to rely more and more on Dom while also limiting his own public appearances to a minimum. His sense of judgement, once sharp, had dulled and become fogged by indecision, paranoia and corrupt motivations. Those in the higher echelons of the party looked at the sclerotic and chaotic running of the government and saw a power play of personalities incapable of rational thoughts; for the elite had become poisoned by an amoral thirst for autocracy at all costs. And behind this most of all was Dom.

Murmurings in the ranks talked darkly of the time after the leader, for all could see that "the once-and-future king" was a ghost of his former self. Like May before him, something had sucked the life out of his soul. For her it was the essence of Brexit itself; for him it was divine intervention that had snatched away the essence of the leader's energy. Brexit it seemed, was a cursed cause. 

Who could take over the mantle of the Brexit sigil after the assumed saviour, Alexander Borisovich? Who was worthy? Some talked of Michael "Goebbels" Gove being the natural successor, given the longevity of his connection with the Ayran superman. But outside enemies were circling. Brexit Britain had few friends in the world thanks to the self-defeating fanaticism of its most ardent disciples. No-one wanted it to succeed; it was a doomed religion.

Now that Brexit was destined to ruin the country after all, once the dear leader himself eventually retired into obscurity, the leadership of the cause seemed a hopeless endeavour. Whoever took over would only act as an "Admiral Doenitz", there to formalize the death warrant of the Brexit death-cult. And few were willing to do that. There was no fame in surrendering the cause. Once it was all to "take back control", by now people were pleading to "Get Brexit Undone", to end the madness.

But the true believers needed a scapegoat, as they had used May before the dear leader. Michael "Goebbels" Gove was too cunning to allow himself that dishonour; better to coax another into the role. That way at least, the blame could be transferred from the fanatical ideologues that had ruined the country to another malleable cypher. That way at least, the flame of Brexit could still live on to be passed to another generation, and the brief glorious period of Brexit could be misremembered in myth... 

 

The British government's Coronavirus response: "gaslighting" the UK population and Brexit "psy-ops"?

 The UK government's response to the Coronavirus pandemic has become more and more chaotic and confused in recent weeks. 

The government's strategy for dealing with the pandemic has from the start has been like that of how UK governments of the past have dealt with many national crises - the "command and control" instinct, with the Conservative Party having a particular instinct for centralized decision-making on one hand, while simultaneously outsourcing operations to unaccountable and inefficient private service providers (which coincidentally often have some kind of nepotistic link to someone in government).  

Heading into the autumn and a predictable rise in infections, this has left Britain's ability to deal with the virus highly compromised. The UK government appears to have had no clear strategy: a "track and trace" system that has effectively broken down; a testing system that is incapable of dealing with an increase in demand for tests; and worst of all, a "lockdown" that whose rules and regional nuances have become so confused and contradictory that they make no logical sense and are impossible for any reasonable person to keep a track of from one week to the next. More on this in a moment.

The sheer levels of appalling incompetence on Brexit meanwhile were sharply raised by Ed Milliband in parliament recently. On both Brexit and the Coronavirus, the Boris Johnson's government seem to have to have no coherent strategy; on both key issues for Britain, if him and his government have a strategy at all, it is about blaming others for the government's own failings. 

On Brexit, any failure to get a deal with the EU is always put down to the EU's "unreasonable" behaviour; on the Coronavirus meanwhile, ministers have been blaming the British public itself for the the government's own strategic failure.

What is interesting in the case of the virus is that surveys have shown that a surprisingly large segment of the population agree with the government's pointing the fingers at its own electorate. In other words, they believe that it is not the government's responsibility to look after the public health of the country, but the people's themselves!

"Gaslighting" a perpetually-anxious population?

This kind of psychological blame-transference is akin to "gaslighting": the abusive husband that makes the abused wife believe that it is her fault she is being abused, because she isn't doing enough to earn her husband's respect. But equally, the government's success in getting people to turn on each other rather than the government is a sign of the success of the kind of discreet "psychological warfare" that the government has been conducting through austerity for the last ten years. While "austerity" itself is supposed to be over (until the government finds some other justification for its return) the "nudge theory" approach by the government has shifted people' perceptions of how they view the government: they are now much more likely to blame individuals or each other for failings in the country than the government compared to ten years ago. This is also very useful for the government considering its plans for Brexit.

While there is far more evidence to support a "cascade failure" of incompetence behind the government's Coronavirus response than some kind of dark conspiracy, what is clear is that the government's chaotic and ever-changing strategy (and laws) on the virus have left the public disoriented and anxious. Rules are changed at short notice on some occasions while at other times their communication is staggered many days in advance of their actual implementation, so they are not implemented until after the population have had a weekend to congregate together (and potentially spread the virus further). If there a rational strategy in place behind these endlessly contradictory approaches, it is impossible to discern. But as already mentioned, the government have already laid in the "strategy" of blaming the population themselves for the spread of the virus.  

Under these circumstances, an anxious and disoriented population would be more willing to accede to greater government control over aspects of their privacy and their daily lives. Such controls have already been happening, both in legislation and greater use of technology for the sake of "public order".

Under the cover of a public health emergency, laws have been passed by the government without any real parliamentary consultation; "temporary" laws that the government would equally be able to conveniently keep on after Brexit. And while a covert power grab is underway, the government produces guidance and law changes on the Coronavirus that change from week to week. The public cannot keep up with these perpetually-changing restrictions, and you wonder if that is down to government incompetence or something else.

A perpetually anxious and confused population is also one that is easy for governments to control. This is something that authoritarian governments know very well; and Britain's government structure is still among the most centralized and authoritarian in nature in the democratic world. 

It is also well-observed that Britons are perhaps among the most anxious and neurotic of the national populations in the democratic world. Some of this is due to history and culture, with Britain still having a hierarchical culture of  a "landowning aristocracy" and "landless tenants", a long history of social inequality and lack of social mobility. These issues have only got worse over the last forty years, and especially in the last ten years after the detrimental effects of the financial crisis and austerity on the stability and quality of the job market and social cohesion.

So the levels of anxiety in Britain's population were already high; with the Coronavirus and the government's chaotic "blame the people" strategy in dealing with it, the government seem to want the British population to turn on themselves. Thus distracted, this kind of psychological environment would be an ideal one for an authoritarian government to make whatever changes it thought it could get away with. This is the kind of thing that Naomi Klein talked about in "The Shock Doctrine". An increased role for outsourced government contracts to unaccountable corporations and a greater corrupt symbiosis between them a favoured government figures. In such an amoral environment, these Brexiteers all fail upwards, with the law only applying to "ordinary people". 

While Brexit is at its heart a Libertarian project, the authoritarian and corrupt instincts of Britain's Brexiteers are never far away. These people are only "Libertarian" in the sense that they hate the idea of having to help the "ordinary person". This is why there a view that Brexit will leave the wider state to shrink to a bare minimum of support for the general population, while leaving the Brexit "elite" to further integrate their corrupt connections between government and big business. Like in any corrupt authoritarian state, Brexit will be about subsidizing the Brexiteer elite. Meanwhile, the people will be too disoriented by the perpetually-changing situation to know where to target their blame; they have already been "trained" to blame each other.   

Brexit, CANZUK and Tony Abbott: a vision of "Empire 2.0"?

 The appointment of Tony Abbott as a UK trade advisor is one of the clearest signs that Britain's government sees CANZUK as a primary plank of its Brexit trade strategy.

Brexit has been an ideological project from its birth, with the Libertarian wing of the Conservative Party and like-minded supporters. Their vision was of Britain not as a part of the EU, who it sees in ideological opposition to their agenda, but seeing Britain instead as a "thalassocratic" power, a power of the seas as the British Empire had been.

This is not to equate Libertarians as the same as old-fashioned imperialists; the rationale is different, even if the effect is not that far different in reality. However, Libertarians in Britain see their agenda in the same fantastical light, almost entirely separated from rational and coherent thought. More on that in a moment.

The purpose of having someone like Tony Abbott as a trade advisor is transparently-clear - to facilitate the closer ties that Britain's government would want with Australia. Other ideological allies in Canada and New Zealand have also expressed a like-minded desire to have closer bonds with Britain. 

"Rule, Britannia!"

The thinking behind CANZUK from Britain's point of view is equally transparent. 

The fact that, within CANZUK, Britain would be the largest power, in terms of financial clout and population, can hardly be a coincidence. It's easy to see its British advocates as seeing Britain within CANZUK as the power with the financial might to support the resource-rich economies of Australia and Canada, for example. In this sense, Britain within CANZUK would see itself as the primary power within a trade association, and (presumably) able to dictate much of the agenda of the group. Russia within the EEU (an economic grouping of former Soviet states that Russia dominates) performs the same function, and the similarities cannot be mere coincidence.

In this sense, CANZUK would be to the UK what the EEU is to Russia: a tool of vainglorious power projection, and a kind of "legacy empire", in recreating something of its former imperial reach. 

It would only be a matter of time before the UK is bossing about its more junior "partners" in the trading bloc. No wonder that some in Australia are already calling Tony Abbott a "foreign agent" for working with Britain. At the same time time, Britain's role within CANZUK would only further encourage British arrogance on the global stage. While the Royal Navy is only a shadow of its imperial former self, the two enormous aircraft carriers built to roam the seas are further vainglorious symbols of Britain's power projection. It's not hard to imagine Britain encouraging other compliant states to join its "trade bloc" (Singapore has already been mentioned), and the more far-flung its reach, the more Britain's imperial vanity as a global power is stroked.

While the CANZUK group are all multicultural democracies, it is also a grouping of the former "White Dominions"; the same former colonies that had been the initial target of Britain's postwar labour outreach when Britain was in a manpower shortage. The fact that it was the Caribbean and South Asian parts of the empire that answered the call was not what the British government had actually intended. The "Windrush generation" wasn't actually part of the plan - the UK was really hoping for Aussies, Canadians and Kiwis instead. In a subconscious way then, isn't CANZUK also a way to turn back the clock? While CANZUK these days is a Libertarian project, it still has great emotional appeal to old-fashioned sentiments and nostalgia, with many of the older generation having memories of relatives moving "Down Under", for example. The feeling in Britain that "they" are "like us" is a strongly emotional one, with historical memory playing a far greater role than rational or practical thought. The feeling that Europeans are someone not "like us" is part of the emotional justification for CANZUK. It is an idea based on emotional pull; a dangerous game to play when all rational sense says it's an idea that makes no economic sense. 

Empire of irrationality

CANZUK has little economic or logistical reasoning behind the concept. The actual benefits to the nations, in terms of freedom of movement for trade and labour, are questionable as relatively little trade is done between them to begin with, at least compared to each country's close neighbours and larger trading partners. In Britain and Canada's case, especially so. Then there is the question of logistics and how to think that trading with countries thousands of miles away will make more sense than Britain trading mainly with countries just across the channel. CANZUK is an idea that appeals mainly to Anglophone romantics like Daniel Hannan (who by no small coincidence is, like Tony Abbott, also a British trade advisor). 

If the idea from Britain's point of view is that CANZUK is meant to be a replacement for EU trade, then only the merest glance at the comparison will make the idea seem not only absurd but idiotic. The population of the EU is nearly 300 million, while the population of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined is barely equal to the UK's. How do CANZUK's proponent's in Britain expect to get enough trade from such a smaller trading bloc? But again, fantastical ideas overrule any kind of rational thought when it comes to most things on Brexit.