Karl wrote:Culturally we are so heavily influenced by the US - people seem to typically think we are closer to them than we are to the EU (I don't think that's necessarily true, but it seems to have become more true over the last couple of years) - and I think if they go, we'll go. And unfortunately if their literal concentration camps are anything to go by they're most of the way there. Maybe the US will pull it back, boot out this prick at the next election and get a progressive, competent leader in next. Maybe that will heal them culturally, give a stronger voice to reasonable people and send the racist, hateful sphinctoids scuttling back under their rocks. If they don't - if we actually exist in the horrible universe where they decide "yeah, the Republicans are fine, more of that please" - then we'll be next, living under the soft, flabby, blue-veined fists of tosspots like Johnson or Rees-Mogg for a generation while the Daily Mail splatters its rancid diarrhoea into our gaping mouths forever.
It shows the success of propaganda that I read all of that and still can’t help thinking “yeah but it is America, they would never do such things!”
And I think that despite knowing the stats on innocent black people being shot by police. Despite knowing the ethnic makeup of their prisons. Despite knowing that just over 50 years ago (a tiny tiny amount of time) they had segregation. Despite knowing about Japanese-American internment 75 years ago.
The “Land of the Free” propaganda is very powerful, even for people who know that America has never been properly free. And it’s that propaganda that lets somebody like Trump do this sort of gooseberry fool, after all it couldn’t happen in America, could it?
And if this gooseberry fool can happen in America, then it can easily happen here where we are far more entrenched in a class system that teaches us deference to our “betters”.