Has Britain taken leave of its senses?
IT IS a historically provable fact that every now and then huge numbers of people, hitherto sensible, level-headed and normal, collectively take leave of their senses. They support the weirdest of demagogues and theories, as if in a collective lunacy that defies logic and is immune to reason.
No, I am not referring to the Conservative Party’s seeming decision to choose this traumatic moment in our country’s history, Brexit, to have a collective nervous breakdown into civil war. This lunacy concerns only a few dozen at the top. I refer to the Gadarene madness of millions.
Only the very oldest among us will as children have been alive when almost the entire German nation gave its heart and soul to a bizarre little Austrian in 1932. The enigma has never been solved, even by the Germans. Historians still puzzle, scholars still shake their heads. How could a civilised people, mainly of practising Christians, that had given the world Bach and Beethoven, Luther and Kant, Goethe and Schiller, also give it Himmler and Auschwitz? How could they do it? But they did.
In the broadest sense, are the seeds of something similar being sown here? Of course the immediate response must be: don’t be daft. This is Britain. And having travelled widely I know that among foreigners the essence of any admiration for this land of ours is almost certainly the moderation and courtesy that informs our elections and politics generally. And yet… something is happening.
CONSERVATIVE MPs and candidates have been openly threatened with extreme physical violence – yes, only online but the so-far anonymous thugs remain unrebuked. Moderate Labour MPs have been threatened with death and ordered to stand publicly to swear obeisance to the Supreme Leader… or else. This happened in the 1930s in Italy. The extreme Left demagogue then was called Mussolini. (Lest you be confused, both the Italian Fascist party and the German NSDAP started out as extreme Left. They were only later dubbed Right because each was a vicious rival of the communist parties for the working class vote. That was the schism – not economic theory or brutality towards opposing politicians.)
I do not recall language like that or threats such as that being used in our political rivalries, spirited though they have been. But they are being used now.
Excepting the insane aberration who killed Jo Cox MP, they are all coming from the hard-Left. But the new ultra-Left adores Jeremy Corbyn, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninist and demagogue.
Mr Corbyn has publicly supported the Provisional IRA which murdered 18 paratroopers at Warrenpoint and many civilians in Ulster and on the mainland with planted bombs. He has lauded Hamas and Hezbollah, dubbed terrorists by the United Nations.
He proudly subscribes to the economic theories of Marxist-Leninism which, everywhere they have been tried, have led to ruin.
Marxist-Leninism is another name for communism which, under the guise of “socialism” slaughtered millions from Berlin to Vladivostok and with its gulags set up more concentration camps than the Nazis.
Yet this crypto-communist, behind a veil of avuncularity, is greeted like a hero. Behind him stands Momentum and inside it the Hard Squad for whom intimidation is no stranger. Already within Labour anti-Semitism, always a storm-cone of coming nastiness, is virtually institutionalised.
But the truly weird thing is this. According to the polls, more than half the voters of Britain would elect him tomorrow – the new duce of hard-Left fascism – to be our prime minister.
Have they, like the Italians and Germans of 90 years ago, truly taken leave of their senses?