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The Imperialist Whine
Psychological power of Brexit: fused superiority and inferiority into a single emotion. Both enormously hard done by and enormously grand.
British sense of disappointment that joining EEC will lead to a new era and resolve all problems - added to previous sense of postwar loss.
Welfare state functioned as a bulwark against self pity. Consolation for decline is the notion that Britain is doing something radical and profound.
Erosion of welfare state from Thatcher onwards, then becomes regarded nostalgically as part of a lost golden age.
Need for a new scapegoat for failure - non white immigrants
Overt racism shifts out of respectability (until recently) after accession to the EEC.
Without parallel? A functioning Western state starts to see itself as fundamentally oppressed.
England now starts to imagine itself not as an empire but as a colony.
Importance of the word “humiliation” - including in today’s headlines. (What happened? Just that May didn’t get her way.)
Robert Harris’s Fatherland written against backdrop of German reunification. NB also Len Deighton’s SSGB.
Harris’s alternative history invokes an alternative Treaty of Rome - Britain forced into a European trading bloc.
While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, Nicholas Ridley compared EEC to the Nazis.
Attraction of this kind of self pity is that it allows a fantasy of the emergence of a future heroic English resistance.
EU as oppressor has to be invented by the English to facilitate dark invasion fantasy.
This is a way of dealing with post imperial guilt: we are not responsible for anything because we are being oppressed.
British sense of disappointment that joining EEC will lead to a new era and resolve all problems - added to previous sense of postwar loss.
Welfare state functioned as a bulwark against self pity. Consolation for decline is the notion that Britain is doing something radical and profound.
Erosion of welfare state from Thatcher onwards, then becomes regarded nostalgically as part of a lost golden age.
Need for a new scapegoat for failure - non white immigrants
Overt racism shifts out of respectability (until recently) after accession to the EEC.
Without parallel? A functioning Western state starts to see itself as fundamentally oppressed.
England now starts to imagine itself not as an empire but as a colony.
Importance of the word “humiliation” - including in today’s headlines. (What happened? Just that May didn’t get her way.)
Robert Harris’s Fatherland written against backdrop of German reunification. NB also Len Deighton’s SSGB.
Harris’s alternative history invokes an alternative Treaty of Rome - Britain forced into a European trading bloc.
While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, Nicholas Ridley compared EEC to the Nazis.
Attraction of this kind of self pity is that it allows a fantasy of the emergence of a future heroic English resistance.
EU as oppressor has to be invented by the English to facilitate dark invasion fantasy.
This is a way of dealing with post imperial guilt: we are not responsible for anything because we are being oppressed.
https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-imperialist-whine.html
Right Wing Whine - equally tedious and dangerous