This VE Day, the phrase “mixed feelings” doesn’t touch how I feel with the world situation right now – here’s why my chat with a BBC cameraman made me queasy.
Some years ago I found a collection of WW2 letters in a junk shop. Portsmouth-based sweethearts wrote to each other throughout the whole war and kept an extraordinary record of their lives. While she was bombed out of her home in the Portsmouth Blitz, he went on to fight in North Africa and advance through Italy, all the while writing home. Unusually, there are both sides of the exchanges at least for the early part of the war. It’s not a small collection. To date I have scanned 3743 individual leaves. There are more to go. It is a story of determination and love, duty and dedication spanning the entire war. Hence the BBC interview: to share what I’d learned of the couple, and help commemorate the end of the war in Europe against fascism.
The interview went well enough. As we packed up, I commented in an offhand way how strange it seems to be reading these letters while a major war wages in mainland Europe, and the US reinvents itself as a fascist power. My sense of unreality about a nation, even a continent celebrating the end of that war against the backdrop of gains made by the far right in the USA and Europe, and the destruction of the post-war consensus epitomised my cognitive dissonance.
It was then the cameraman objected. At first his line was simply: “well, I’m reserving judgement and waiting to see what happens. We can’t know what effect Trump will have.” This was his response to my listing of systematic human rights abuses, kidnapping of citizens by ICE agents refusing to identify themselves or show warrants, suspension of habeas corpus – which American friends tell me is a central tenet of the US experiment taught in school – and is a defining difference between tyranny and democracy.
He did not acknowledge these well-documented realities. He ignored them and countered with: “But I suppose you were all right with Biden being in power?”
Surprised by the deflection, and at the moment not having got my range on him, I answered that I have no strong opinion about Biden. Though I’m not a devotee, it is true to say I heaved a sigh of relief when he was first elected. The Orange Menace would no longer dominate the headlines with increasingly insane rhetoric, which was a definite upside. And besides, at no point had Biden incited his followers to overthrow democracy. So there is that.
The cameraman went on to explain that Biden had been deeply mentally impaired from the moment he took office. He went on (as if this were a killer argument): “if you are so worried about democracy why were you not asking who was really in charge when the mentally impaired Biden was in power? I’ll tell you who it was: Obama.”
And at that moment of racially-undertoned conspiracy theory, I realised I was dealing with a MAGAt. A true, British-grown MAGAt, making tv programmes for the BBC, and clearly not only an apologist for Trump, but a supporter. Of course, this is why he was ignoring what is happening now in the USA and repeating far right propaganda points about Biden, who for all his faults was a President who gave up office voluntarily and did not seek to hold power longer than he was wanted.
When I told him that Biden hadn’t threatened to invade Greenland to take it from Denmark or annex Canada, he laughed.
“Oh, Trump isn’t going to do that. He doesn’t want that.”
Now, if there’s anything I’ve learned watching the news cycle closely in the US over the last 9 years with a growing sense of horror, it’s that Trump tells you exactly who he is all the time. If he says he wants to annex somewhere, he means it. If he sits down and talks with the PM of Canada and tells him he wants his country to be the US’s 51st State, and says “never say never” when Carney replies it won’t ever happen, then you have to take him seriously. But nope. According to BBC MAGAt, this is just somehow part of Trump owning the libs.
And so it went on. Where he could not deflect, he denied, where he could not deny, he mocked. I realised that we lived in completely different worlds. Having also paid close attention to the historical rise of fascism in Europe – how it advanced through a process of disinformation by weaponising the media and decrying those trying to give objective accounts as socialists or “lying Press“, I saw the same process here – the unwillingness to acknowledge that events had even happened: here, in England, in a BBC building, the same process that led to the rise of fascism in the 1930s was unfolding, right in front of me.
I left that meeting with a sense of deep disquiet. Queasy? Maybe sick was a better word. I had been invited to talk about one couple’s experience of life 80 years ago against a background of fighting a fascism that found its voice thanks to a megalomaniacal and charismatic leader. There is no doubt Hitler’s behaviour is being emulated by another megalomaniacal charismatic leader today. That was the first cause of the cognitive dissonance I felt. But the second was seeing how with no irony I the cameraman who had filmed the interview was happy to wilfully ignore the lessons of history. Indeed he appeared to be that they were being repeated. And to be clear, there is no doubt Hitler’s spiritual heirs are Trump, Farage and all their fellow travellers.
That’s why this VE Day, our national commemoration feels deeply uncomfortable. On the day a far right leader in the US announces a trade deal with the UK that will force us to accept concessions to our quality of life through imports of mistreated and antibiotic-poisoned beef, while his government demands businesses and cities around the world that want to trade with the US obey its pro-discrimination rules and while at home he dismantles democracy to advance corporate feudalism that will enrich himself and his chosen “in” group, while stealing rights from the “out” group… while his regime treats human rights with disdain, detaining, locking up and disappearing people, leaving them to languish in foreign prisons with no hope of release after kidnapping them from the streets of America without cause… while he actively suppresses the Press and while his followers attempt to suppress 65,000 votes in a North Carolina Supreme Court election, while seeking to intimidate judges upholding the rule of law, yes, we should certainly look back at history – but we mustn’t treat it indulgently or fondly, as if it is a confused old man who had important things to say once but these days mutters irrelevant things into his beer in a pub corner about a world long vanished. Instead, we need to start applying the lessons it teaches us.
Fascism didn’t die 80 years ago. It changed. And as the generation who fought it the last time disappears, it has returned as the elephant in the room with GOP in big red letters on one side of the Pond, and Reform in turquoise letters on the other.
And though some can see it, others are doing their best to make sure it is isn’t spoken about at all – even while celebrations of fascism’s defeat dull our nation’s senses and entice our patriots to forget today in dreams of other people’s heroic pasts.
