Summary: I hope I’m wrong in predicting potentially apocalyptic consequences flowing from Britain’s ill considered decision to leave the European Union. I’m not holding out hope, however. In the very short time since the Brexit referendum, the pound has shed something in excess of 10% of its value, Scotland and Northern Ireland are talking about leaving the United Kingdom in order to be able to become part of the European Union again, Scotland by declaring independence and Northern Ireland by joining the Republic, David Cameron is a lame-duck who will surely vanish into well-deserved permanent political exile in consequence of his galactically stupid decision to press forward with the Brexit referendum in the first place, and above all, champagne corks were no doubt popping in the Moscow Kremlin Thursday evening.
Because the real winner in the Brexit referendum was the 17 million useful idiots who voted to take Britain out of the EU, it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the Russian government, which has pursued a long game policy since 1949 of breaking the unity of the West by any means necessary. They have been materially assisted by such self-seeking and marginal men as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. We are comprehensively betrayed from within. We must now do what we so often criticize the French for doing. We must seek scapegoats and punish them by driving Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson into the political wilderness and by depriving Donald Trump of the White House. Anything else would play straight into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s small, but grasping hands. If we don’t want to see Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Champs Elysées, the West needs to strap on his balls and kick Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump if not into the Tower of London, then certainly out of our political life. We can’t afford a hostile Russian takeover bid of the two most influential governments in the Atlantic alliance.
I hope this post proves to be wrong. Categorically, comprehensively, galactically, one hundred percent wrong. I hope I can recant of it in sackcloth and ashes if I am proven wrong.
But I don’t think I will be proven wrong.
Brexit is a disaster.
It is one of the worst, most galactically stupid political miscalculations ever made by any British politician. It is now well known that the infamous referendum on leaving the European Union was a political risk taken by discredited outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron back in 2013, when he tried to throw a bone to the fascist tendency within his own party by promising a referendum on EU membership. Cameron, like an awful lot of Tories and an awful lot of Labour, believed that Brexit couldn’t possibly pass, and that a would be a passing thing, rather like the Scots independence referendum last year. (Of that, more, later.)
Cameron was wrong. As a result of his mistake, Cameron is the first casualty of Brexit. It is not certain whether David Cameron took the decision to step down from the Treasury Bench of his own accord, or whether he was pushed out by Tory Party elders, or whether he may have gotten a subtle, but unavoidable, nudge from Buck House. At all events, it’s clear the David Cameron no longer possesses the confidence of the House, and that he probably no longer possesses the confidence of the Queen, either. When you’ve lost both Westminster Palace and Buckingham Palace, it’s time to get the hell out of Number 10. No knighthood and no peerage can be expected to reward him for his service.
With David Cameron, “discredited Dave,” on his way out, we should take a moment to parse out the immediate and long-term ramifications of Britain’s pending exit from the European Union. Those ramifications are potentially apocalyptic.
Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t fared much better, either. Not only did Mr. Corbyn fail to command a majority in a vote of confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but he has also had to contend with the resignation or sacking of two thirds of his shadow cabinet. Though Corbyn has not stepped down, claiming that he has a broader mandate from Labour voters then from Labour MPs, there are clear signs that the coup effort within Labour may not only not be over, but that it may well succeed within the next week to 10 days. Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of moving into Number 10 Downing St. seem to be fading rather rapidly.
As much as the British political landscape seems to be littered with the broken and bleeding remains of political careers, the British economic landscape appears equally unpromising. In recent days,, sterling has taken its biggest hits as the mid-1980s, shedding 10% of its value in a single night. The pound has got altogether dickie in 24 hours. Thursday morning, the pound was standing at $1.48. By evening’s end, the pound was standing at $1.32, and there is speculation that if the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street can’t calm jittery investors in the City and elsewhere, the bottom could drop out of the oldest active currency in the world. Indeed, some forecasters are predicting that the pound could be at parity with the dollar by the Fourth of July.
Indeed, the status of sterling as one of the world's reserve currencies is in grave doubt. Investors are already fleeing the island of Britain for the relative safety of the island of Manhattan. Already, the Fed reports that interest in US treasuries has shown a marked uptick.
But more than just taking a hit to the pound, Britain has also sacrificed a great deal of national and institutional credibility by this ill-considered vote. As from last Friday, the financial capital of Europe has ceased to be London and is now Berlin, and to a lesser extent, New York. London has overnight yielded pride of place, and it will take Londoners a long time to reconcile themselves to their new status as inhabitants of the backwater capital of a second-tier state that used to be one of the major shot-callers in Europe.
As much as London’s status took a hit last night, so too did the institutional status and indeed the institutional trustworthiness of Her Majesty’s Government. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to count for something. At the Prime Minister’s word, countries around the world used to tremble. The merest rumbling from the British lion was enough to bring third world despots to heel. Just ask the Argentines, who may again be thinking very seriously about trying conclusions again with Britain for possession of the Malvinas. The Prime Minister of Britain has now become the head of the government of a second-tier state. Who now speaks for Europe?
From last Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks for Europe. The first female Chancellor in the history of the German Empire, of the Weimar Republic, or of the Bundesrepublik now enjoys more political influence on the Continent than any German leader since the Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen 140 years ago. The world now attends carefully on Angela Merkel’s words, while it airily dismisses the words of discredited David Cameron and holds the words of other British politicians, such as Brexit cheerleaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in contempt.
From last Friday, the credibility of her Majesty’s government is nil, the pound is dickie, and the British electorate is viewed worldwide as much of irresponsible yobs.
That’s the reality Britain woke up to last Friday morning when the discovered that roughly 17,000,000 thoroughly irresponsible voters had opted to cut Britain’s nose off to spite its face.
And if the short-term ramifications of Brexit are upsetting, the long-term ramifications of Brexit are almost too horrifying, to apocalyptic, to contemplate.
Because, in truth, Brexit may lead, sooner rather than later, to the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. The first great experiment in multinational European integration, the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland as one joint entity, forming a precedent from which James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution drew inspiration for the United States, may find its days numbered.
Already, there is talk from the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh of taking up again the issue of Scottish independence. It’s open to question what form of government the Scots might choose. Will they opt for a personal union with England in the form of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scots? Will HM travel north to receive the Scottish crown and anointing on the Stone of Destiny in Scone? Will the Royal Scottish ducal titles, Rothesay and Albany, remain as appanages of the House of Windsor? What about the Earldom of Carrick? Or the barony of Renfrew? Or will Scotland opt to become a republic, with all of the political fractiousness that republics in Europe tend to manifest?
The Scots opted in the last independence referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom because the United Kingdom was part of the EU. With the United Kingdom set to leave the EU, again because of the foolishness of an electorate easily swayed by the blandishments of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the case for Scots independence within the EU becomes almost unanswerable. And if Scotland becomes independent within the European Union, what kind of border controls will have to be erected between Scotland and England. Part of the rationale for the original Act of Union back in 1707 was to bring a halt to the interminable raiding back and forth across the Border. Will Brexit result in a heavily fortified border between the two halves of the island of Britain?
And what of Northern Ireland? Already, Sinn Féin has called for a unification referendum in the Emerald Isle. Will Hibernia once again be whole and entire? Will the fondest hopes of the Irish diaspora, that a free Ireland might govern the whole island finally be in prospect? Will 26+6 finally equal One? Will Northern Ireland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU find her EU home by reunifying with the Republic.
Irish reunification may be closer now than it has been since partition in 1922. Certainly, Ireland’s thumping majority adoption of marriage equality by referendum last year should put paid to the common Protestant assertion that “home rule means Rome rule.” An Ireland that can so decisively reject the preferences of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican is certainly not a place where Rome rule should hold any terrors. Though it is paradoxical to think that the acceptance of queerfolk, so otherwise objectionable to Protestants in Ulster, might be the factor that greases the skids of reunification, stranger things have happened in Hibernia. Because, paradoxically, a body politic willing to tell the Roman Catholic Church to sod off when it comes to integrating fairies (all puns fully intended) into Irish society, is a body politic that’s not willing to let institutional religion, particularly not institutional Roman religion, get in the way of individual civil liberties.
If Scotland and Ulster are soon to depart from the United Kingdom, what is left? Wales? One is reminded of the devastatingly dismissive piece of dialogue from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: “why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
The day may not be far in the future when the rump of the United Kingdom consists of England, Wales and Monmouthshire, and a few small islands around the fringe. I wouldn’t put it all past the Channel Islands to jump ship and make common cause with the French Republic. So much for “the Queen, our Duke.” Some United Kingdom, some British Commonwealth and Empire. Thank God Winston Churchill isn’t alive to see what may well be coming.
Writing in Friday’s New York Times, columnist Max Fisher suggested that the United Kingdom was what the European union had wanted to be but never quite became, a successful multinational state with a common government, a common currency, common national policy, and, symbolically but still importantly, a common head of state. And the United Kingdom, the first great multinational project in the world, has survived for more than 300 years. It has outlasted changes of dynasty, wars of national liberation, the acquisition and loss of Empire, class conflict, economic dislocations, two world wars, the ‘15 and the ‘45, and Margaret Thatcher, and yet the United Kingdom, under the amazing Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of any of the British nations, has managed to soldier on right up until last Thursday. It would be a shame, Fisher suggested, were the great multinational experiment that is United Kingdom to break up on the rock of what was essentially a fit of superannuated, over-65, English nationalist pique.
For the one overwhelming demographic reality that came out of the Brexit vote is a sharp generational divide. Brexit carried because the over-65 cohort came out in far greater numbers than did young voters. Indeed, the Brexit result can be interpreted to say some fairly positively uncomplimentary things about older British voters. Because the negative repercussions of Brexit will fall overwhelmingly and most heavily upon the younger citizens of the United Kingdom. A much circulated Facebook meme details the numerous ways in which younger Britons will suffer as a result of the shortsighted selfishness of their elders. That’s a wound that won’t heal easily. As younger voters begin to enter Parliament in increasing numbers as the years pass, they can be expected to carry into the House a sense of historic grievance which it is not unreasonable to foresee will inform their decisions. I expect that the voters who were over 65 at the time of Brexit may find a rising generation of new MPs entirely unsympathetic to the sense of entitlement so common to the elderly the world over. The older generation in Britain has wounded itself, the United Kingdom, and the world in ways that cannot even begin to be evaluated.
But we may and must ask a larger question. Who benefits from this self-inflicted wound orchestrated by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, in which Donald Trump, whom at least one angry Scot has referred to as a “cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon,” has made himself so disastrously complicit?
We know that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin last Thursday night. Soviet/Russian policy toward the West has always been to promote dissension, disunity, and mistrust in the European West. It is an open secret that the Soviets, including successive foreign ministers such as Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze tried hard to keep the EU from becoming a reality. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the quintessential Soviet apparatchik now running post-Soviet Russia, is pursuing long-standing Soviet policy.
It is in the Kremlin’s interest to have a weak and divided Europe on its western frontier not only because of the almost pathological fear of invasion from the West which is so much a part of the Russian psyche, but also because a weak and divided Europe leaves invasion routes from the east wide-open.
This is something that right-wing leaders on the Continent seem to have forgotten. When right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen and right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders made their predictable appeals for copycat referenda in France and the Netherlands last week, they seem not to have been aware of the presence in the room of Adam-zad, The Bear That Walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century ago we should have no truce.
The willingness of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and other crypto fascist politicians in Europe to make common cause with Russia, even at the cost of weakening the West, is somewhat akin to the Republican objections to Woodrow Wilson that called forth from him one of the most withering expressions of scorn in American political history: ““A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
One could so characterize the “leave” voters in the British electorate, but one really can’t blame 17 million yobs for succumbing to the frivolous and wicked blandishments of a small group of crypto fascists who, like the French right in the 1930s that preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, seem to prefer Vladimir Putin to EU Secretary-General Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen.
It’s hard not to read into the whole sorry mess a certain sense of sexual insecurity, even of penetration anxiety. Deep in the Freudian unconscious of many Brexiteers, informing their resentment of Brussels and its Eurocrats appears to be a sense that British membership in the EU has stripped the nation of its testosterone, making Britain soft, weak, and effeminate, too tolerant of Muslims, black people, and queerfolk. (After all, London is one of the gayest cities in what is still the EU) This certainly plays into the fascistic nature of UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage (the Sir Oswald Mosley for the 21st century). Fascism involves appeals to the so-called manly virtues, fetishizing masculinity, war, and violence. One could indeed cue up a scene from Cruising, or Interior. Leather bar, and not be too distant from what is going on in the Freudian id of the more militant supporters of Brexit.
And if Brexit is about creeping fears in much of the British electorate that Britain has become weak and unmanly, then the appeal of manly man Vladimir Putin and of the regime of manly discipline he has enforced on Russia becomes possible to understand, if not to approve of.
In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists appealed to many of the same kind of insecurities Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson or so eager to stoke. The 1930s were a difficult time for Britain. Though the Empire had attained its greatest extent in 1932, the nation had not yet recovered from World War I and much of the British political class found itself quailing before the aggressively nationalist regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. To the British Union of Fascists, Mussolini and Hitler had drafted the blueprint for a fascist future, to which they were prepared to urge British adherence.
In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s Russia represents the same kind of alternative and the same kind of implied critique that Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy represented of the liberal West in the 1920s in the 1930s. In our own time, the right-wing populists of Europe project onto Putin’s Russia what they consider should be the correct values of European society. Seen through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, these 1930s era values appear curiously out of place to American Democratic and British Labour party observers. Culturally conservative circles in both Great Britain and the United States profess to admire Vladimir Putin because, to them, his regime represents not only so-called moral clarity, but also a value system more in keeping with their own Weltanschauung, or world-outlook, a value system whose frame of reference is a radically out of touch with the realities of the modern European West. It is no surprise that both the American right and its European counterpart have gushed over Vladimir Vladimirovich, to the extent that right-wing American pundits and politicians have wished that Vladimir Vladimirovich, with all his homophobic, religiously-infused nationalism, were in charge in this country. Donald Trump, with his effusive -and treasonable- praise for Vladimir Vladimirovich, falls squarely within the standard deviation of the Western right.
Because the Western right evidently craves a return to the regimes of discipline so common and prevalent in Europe during the 1930s, from Mussolini’s corporate state in fascist Italy to Germany’s Third Reich, to the little Hitlers in the Baltic states, the so-called Royal dictatorships of the Balkans, Greece under Ioannis Metaxas, and Spain under Francisco Franco, to say nothing of France, belabored throughout the 1930s by a rightist defeatism that ultimately found its fullest expression in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy French regime in 1940: Better Adolf Hitler then Léon Blum. And as in the 1930s, a lack of confidence in the power of the West and in the strength of its values has engendered in the right kind of defeatism that sooner or later verges into treason.
For indeed, “treason” is the most appropriate word for describing the conduct of that pro-Nazi French Right which was willing to sacrifice the Third Republic, selling out France because of their preferential option for Adolf Hitler over Léon Blum. And “treason” may be similarly correct term for the politicians in the West who view the fascist experience through rose-colored lenses, and who, like the Obamanators in this country, who have so frequently expressed their admiration for Vladimir Putin and their wish that he could be in charge in this country. By playing to the selfish desires of a largely superannuated, over-65 electorate, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson played directly into the hands of the Kremlin.
Moreover, so has Donald Trump. The offenses of that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon in this regard are many and varied. The first, of course, is his breathtakingly foolish suggestion that the United States should reduce or eliminate its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty organization. Even someone as foolish as Donald Trump is presumed to have enough understanding of the dynamics of the free world proposes to lead to realize that the steady, stated, “long game” objective of Soviet/Russian foreign-policy since the Atlantic alliance was formed in 1949 has been to destabilize NATO by driving wedges into the infrastructure of the alliance. Their biggest victory came when France took itself out of the military command structure of NATO in 1968. Because Charles de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic at the time, and because de Gaulle’s loyalty to the West was unimpeachable and above suspicion, any question of France’s military exit from NATO being part of some sort of Soviet kriegßpiel against the West was necessarily rejected immediately as unacceptable and inadmissible. Infuriating though the general’s foreign policy was, there was never any question of France’s unimpeachable loyalty to the West, notwithstanding the continuing strength of the French Communist Party.
But Charles de Gaulle had a long and illustrious history of service not only to France, but to the West in general. It had been de Gaulle, who as a lowly General of Division, by refusing to accept the German conquest of France in 1940, and by considering to himself the unconquerable forces of free, fighting France, redeemed the honor of the Republic, gave France the will to live and persevere, and brought a reborn nation safely into postwar Europe.
For all of his missteps and occasional gas, Charles de Gaulle was far more legitimately a hero, and orders of magnitude greater a man then such marginal self-aggrandizing, self-dealing, self-important serial prevaricators as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and certainly that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump. The General was to his core a man of honor, a man of duty, a man of country. Farage, Johnson, and Trump, on the other hand, are flimflam artists, frauds, political charlatans of the extremest order. Like the French Right of the 1930s which was willing to sell out the West to the Nazis, Farage, Johnson, and Trump make absolutely no bones in 2016 about being willing to sell out the West to Russia.
All of their policy prescriptions are in line with the Kremlin’s stated position on the issues in question. By actively seeking to destroy the West, including the United Kingdom, these three marginal men have done more damage to the West than all the Soviet spies who infiltrated Western intelligence apparatuses during the Cold War. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are more dangerous to the West then Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt put together. For Philby, Burgess, and Blunt could only deliver the damage to the West as Soviet moles embedded deep within the British intelligence apparatus. Farage and Johnson, on the other hand, can do incalculable damage to the West because they are such effective demagogues. By campaigning in favor of Brexit, Farage and Johnson have turned 17 million British voters into unconscious dupes of the Kremlin.
In this country, of the possible advent of a Trump presidency is even more disturbing. Again, it is worth noting that despite the unhinged claims of the John Birch society that Dwight David Eisenhower was a communist agent, this country has never had an actual “Manchurian candidate” for president until now. Trump is a threat not so much because he would be a conscious and willing dupe of the Kremlin but because he is so foolish and so lacking in impulse control that Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Russian intelligence apparat could lead him by the nose, turning him into an eager and uncritical agent of Russian policy simply by appealing to his vanity or by baiting him and playing to his predictable ill temper and lack of impulse control.
If Nigel Farage enters the British government, or if, God help us, the Queen is forced to ask Boris Johnson to form a government, her Majesty’s government will become, by inevitable and sickening degrees, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. The Tory Party, which cut its 20th century teeth on opposition to Russian/Soviet policy, would inevitably become the party of Putin. The same can be said of Donald Trump and any Trump administration in this country. We cannot allow the two most important governments in the Atlantic alliance to be a subject of a hostile Russian takeover bid or to have at their top man who are ideologically allied with, or in thrall to, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. We cannot allow Russia to secure by subterfuge what the Soviet Union could not win in more than four decades of Cold War.
Right now, we have been betrayed at the highest levels. As the revolutionary tribunal of the First French Republic might have said, ironically quoting both Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre: “Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, la patrie est en danger! Aux armes! Aux barricades!” We are betrayed! Citizens, the Fatherland is in danger! To arms! To the barricades! Though the French tendency to find scapegoats in time of political crisis has been much commented upon and deprecated by English-language commentators, we must sometimes acknowledge that even the French can from time to time occasionally get it right, that sometimes they are right to seek scapegoats, and that this is probably one of those times.
Though we should be loath to tumble to facile conspiracy theories, the particular concatenation of events in Europe and the United States in recent years supports a probable cause belief that the Russian long game is underway. Russia’s invasion of the Crimea, Russian probes around the Swedish defense perimeter and along the frontiers of the Kingdom of Norway, Russia’s singularly infelicitous and ham-handed attempts to meddle in the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, Vladimir Vladimirovich’s undisguised support for the Brexit referendum, the efforts of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to set in motion not merely the breakup of the European Union but also the potential breakup of the United Kingdom itself, together with shitgibbon Donald Trump’s asinine suggestions concerning NATO are all too much of a piece to be coincidental. A kriegßpiel, or something very much equivalent thereto, is underway against the West.
As Britain plunges into uncertainty and recrimination of the Brexit outcome, and as even Brexiteers find themselves experiencing a heavy dose of buyers remorse, to the extent that public opinion in Britain is now clamoring for what amounts to a do-over, Farage, Johnson, Trump, and Putin all find themselves sharing a vested interest in preserving the new status quo.
On the other hand, it is in the interests of those of us who believe in the concept of the West to rally together and to drive the traitors from our midst. Now, “traitor” is a strong word, and I don’t use it in its strict legal signification here, but I think it’s safe to say that like the French traitors of 1940 preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump are all tantamount to traitors. If we cannot round them up and march them through Traitors’ Gate in the Tower of London or send them packing to Guantánamo, we can, at the very least, make sure that we drive Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson so far out into the political wilderness that they, like the discredited idiot, David Cameron, (what his name never be spoken again!) will never come back to afflict the lives of reasonable people again. Similarly, good people in this country will need to make common cause to ensure that Donald Trump never comes anywhere close to the White House. We can’t afford to dance to Moscow’s tune, and we won’t have to, if we’re smart enough not to be taken in by the sort of blandishments that inflicted Brexit upon the world.
Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, l’ouest est en danger!
We are betrayed! Citizens, the West is in danger!
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