In that particular post I was not making comparisons, just asking how much has changed. And while a great deal has obviously changed, we are still left with an Eton elite at the top of government and that elite is still linking socialism with revolutionary communism in order to pursue an agenda based on strangling provision for those below that and further enriching themselves. Also, in Boris Johnson we have a charismatic leader who lies, deceives, is fundamentally corrupt and profoundly undemocratic.
The comparisons are not facile. Many people voted an openly venal and anti democratic leader into power in Germany many years ago, and many have voted for an openly venal and anti democratic leader into power in the U.K. today.
So while we might not have quite the same degree of evil in government, in substance, the ideology has not changed significantly. It has only been diluted.
Underlying the original post, with its link the the Guardian piece (there was also one in the DT), was the insinuation, and one which plays nicely to a popular theme amongst the more politically vociferous of the pfm membership, that because the Nazis admired the British Public School system in the 1930s, that there lies definitive proof that the Public Schools today, and most specifically Eton, act as a production line for a neo-Nazi 'elite' at the top of both government and society today.
The premise is, of course, utter twaddle. Both the schools themselves, and the society we live in today, bear little or no comparison to either the still heavily socially layered Britain of the 1930s, or to the Germany of the same period, humiliated as it was by the onerous conditions of the Armistice, and by the deprivations and despair of the collapse of the economy and the currency in the 1920s.
The Britain, and indeed the Germany, of today are two radically different places than of then, open, infinitely more egalitarian, informed and, even in relative terms, wealthy. Neither country is about to seek racial scapegoats, or build death camps.
So, Johnson is charismatic, a liar, and a sociopath, qualities that are individually, though rarely in such obvious ensemble, common to many people in politics, which does not of course mean that all politicians (even tory ones) are corrupt, venal sociopaths. TheDecameron will delight in now inquisitorially demanding how low I will go to defend Johnson, which is but a small burden that I have to carry on this forum. Boris was elected to take us out of the EU following a democratic instruction from the demos, and on a ticket of lifting those parts of the country that have been neglected by successive governments of all colours. On the former he was harried by a by definition
undemocratic rearguard action by the establishment and the EU itself, and by the pandemic and his own many misjudgements in response to it. He will be judged, and it will be harshly, at the next election on his success or failure of those two fundamental promises, and by his failures (and successes) in regard of covid, and indeed now, on his personal venality, greed and corruption.
Johnson has many very evident faults, but a 21st century rendition of Hitler he is definitively not, and the comparison is indeed utterly facile.
