Everything’s Notgonna be OK.
Nihilism
/ˈnʌɪ(h)ɪlɪz(ə)m/
noun: nihilism
The rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.
Synonyms: negativity, cynicism, pessimism; More
rejection, repudiation, renunciation, denial, abnegation;
disbelief, non-belief, unbelief, scepticism, lack of conviction, absence of moral values, agnosticism, atheism, non-theism
•Philosophy; the belief that nothing in the world has a real existence.
•Historical; the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party circa 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order.
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There are a number of favourite, all-time repetitive lines in almost all Hollywood movie screenplays. They include classics such as “This ain’t lookin’ good”, “You’ve got 48 hours” and “You’re suspended - I want your badge and your gun” or “We gotta get out of here, now!” and usually when some whiney American infant wheedles something like “Day-ddy, what’s wrawngwith Mawmmy?” the classic reply will forever be “Everything’s gonna be OK.” And in Hollywoodland, it usually is. But most of us don’t live in tinsel town. For at least 50% of the world things are certainly not ‘gonna be OK’ at all.
Perhaps the make believe world of California can almost be regarded as another planet altogether. The sun shines each day there, our entertainment is crafted and constructed, and it is beamed around the globe as a small screen palliative against the true hopelessness of life in many lands Americans may never have heard of, let alone visited. Alongside those distant, dark, depressing destinations is the middle ground of economic existence, Europe, a concept which once included the British Isles, a.k.a. the United Kingdom. No longer. Britain (we can drop the ‘Great’ - it’s no longer relevant) now floats politically and economically in the North Sea like one of those abandoned rotting hulks of the Mulberry Harbours so brilliantly constructed for D-Day, which can still be seen rusting in the waves off the Normandy coast.
I am glad now to be old, past my three score and ten. The calendar ahead is dramatically shorter than the one behind me. But this is providential, as I shall not have to experience the struggles to come. It seems that in my British lifetime, every political, social and economic game plan has been rolled out, tried half-heartedly, and then, as the immorality and visible greed of politicians and business magnates has grown, the dog-eared ideas, only dusted down for elections, are thrown back in the Westminster wheelie bin. I say ‘every’ political plan - but one. That’s fascism, and the rigours of 20thcentury historical reality have forbidden ‘good and decent’ politicians from trying this. Yet its elements, spreading like carcinogenic cells from the tumour of old Europe, are slowly losing their repulsiveness.Fascism is a tool to destroy the workers' movements and secure rule by the upper classes. This element has already been in motion since 1979, and is always on the political agenda. Fascism suggests that ‘we’re all in it together’, and succeeds by appealing to the people and to their most primitive prejudices and needs, while actually pursuing the interests of the already rich, who must always be allowed more wealth. If this situation sounds familiar in modern Britain, then although the jackboots and the brown shirts are not out of the wardrobe yet, they are being polished and pressed by the handmaidens of UKIP.
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THE ATTRACTIVE FACE OF THE NEW ORDER; GERMANY'S BREXIT-SUPPORTING FAUKE PETRY |
For anyone of a liberal persuasion, or dangerously further to the left as I am, the vote to leave the European Union was the loudest foghorn or alarm bell of approaching fascism, something I never dreamed would sound out across this country in my lifetime. Worse still, I find myself living in a town which could be as rabidly racist as Vienna in 1938. I came to Mansfield for the convenience of its location when I was at the height of my career in sales and marketing in 1987. Back then there were 13 coal mines here. It was as blue collar as you could get. Labour MP, Labour Council. Today Tories (masquerading as ‘Independents’) run the District Council. We still have a Labour MP, but one of the metro-centric beige types who the establishment have rewarded with a knighthood. There are no coal mines here at all now. All closed, yet whilst Britain’s electricity still relies 40% on coal, we import it now from Russia, Poland and distant Colombia. Bulky, ebullient tattooed men (those still with jobs) who once worked down the pit now man the tills at Tesco. Mansfield has a large, thriving population of Poles and eastern Europeans. Walking round the supermarket on a Friday night is like being in Bratislava. And this colourful rainbow of legal, hardworking humanity on the move is the very thing which has been manipulated into the fascist clay to bake the xenophobic bricks of the new Brexit order. Over 70% of Mansfield’s electorate voted ‘out’ in the referendum. As the new fascism slowly grows flesh on its brittle bones, it will have no more fertile ground than right here on my doorstep.
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ANOTHER NICE FASCIST WHO LOVED BREXIT: MARINE LE PEN |
As a left wing socialist I had already long abandoned any hope that the naïve dreams of my youth could ever become reality. Although I have benefited all my life from the great Spirit of 1945, saved frequently by the safety net of the Welfare State and the NHS, I had always fought and hoped for that sense of fairness and egalitarianism engendered in the ideas of Aneurin Bevan to become the norm. But fascism, this new, moneyed version, does not allow for such luxury. Without their golden carrot on the long stick dangled from Canary Wharf, Britain’s one-time ‘proletariat’ have nothing to aspire to. A cloying treacle of celebrity, benefits porn, bake-offs, strictly come dancing and rabid tabloid propaganda has been poured into the fuel tank of human progress. It is manufactured by the real Masters of the New Universe: Rupert Murdoch, Lord Northcliffe, the Barclay Brothers and all their well-rewarded acolytes in Parliament and the City, captained by the products of Eton, Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge. What was once regarded as an elected government no longer serves its electorate’s needs. The Labour Party included (‘labour’ is a term it should abandon forever), Westminster exists only to progress and make real the diktat of aggressive capitalism, a darker, more virulent extension of the ideas of Milton Friedman and the creepy, spidery remnants from the dank cellar of Thatcherism. And so, as Goebbels astutely observed;
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Therein lies the success of the Brexit vote. Foreigners are bad. Where now is that mythical £350 million per week we can give to the NHS? There are many more facets to the referendum lies package from both sides of the campaign. Those few politicians (a miniscule minority) who sometimes bleat out truths,
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the Dennis Skinners and Jeremy Corbyns of our new world, are Westminster’s court jesters, the shaggy dogs the rich wipe their greasy hands on at their frequent banquets. The champions of the Big Lie think nothing of sending young men to die in some forlorn cause. Tony Blair, that great Thespian of modern politics, is the very embodiment of the self-serving, money-worshipping hypocrite who can lean back on his soft mattress of banknotes and cry theatrical tears for his ‘mistakes’ for the eager media. Westminster’s club members can talk the talk, but walking the walk, their legs buckle beneath them. They will let our privacy be sold off because GCHQ must be the tool for control in the New Order. They cry crocodile tears for the NHS whilst taking bribes from lobbyists for privatisation. They hate the very idea of the public owning anything, because anything and everything can make a profit in the right hands, and profit does not exist for the progress of the nation; profit is for the rich. Thus we have a colourful assortment of Mickey Mouse railways and bus companies, a hi-jacked postal service where stamps cost more than a ream of the paper we write on, belligerent insurance and payday loan companies hiding behind false facades of ‘customer care’… the catalogue of calumny is as long as the Chilcot Report.
Hiding in my little fortress in my embattled corner of the New Reich I now look back in sadness, anger and sorrow. Outside, beyond the closed curtains of my fading world the tattooed masses shuffle along, thumbs a blur as they stare down at their I-phones texting God knows who. The new Daily Mail-reading Sturmabteilung is growing like a field of weeds, and soon ‘Little England’, isolated, backward, insular and xenophobic, having turned its inked back upon the world, will forget all the hope and potential goodness it once imagined it stood for. There is nothing left now. A bottle of beer, a smoke, a DVD, a good book, bed, a few more weeks, months, perhaps years of breathing, followed by welcome death.
I feel sorry for you, young England, and I feel guilty, because I have a past where hope reigned supreme. Your present, your choice, and your future will never know anything like it. I never imagined myself as a Nihilist, but now I’ve got the T-shirt, and it fits me very well.