Remembrance Sunday this year will be on Sunday 9 November. For me, it’s always a day for honouring the heroic efforts and sacrifices made by men and women – both military and civilian – in the Second World War. They stopped the pernicious, anti-human, politics of fascism.
On that day, there will also be, as always, personal reasons for my remembering what that generation did. My father – who was an anti-fascist before the war (actively opposing Mosely’s British Union of Fascists in East Anglia) had, for that reason, joined the Territorial Army before war was declared in 1939 – he was a Normandy veteran, as part of the Royal Artillery’s 55 Anti-Tank Regiment, attached to the 49th Infantry Division.
My mother – who was Dutch, and was 16 when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940 – later took part in the illegal railway strike organised by the Dutch Resistance, from 17-25 September 1944, in support of the Allies’ ‘Operation Market Garden’.
If they were still alive, they – like many of their generation who survived that war – would be appalled and disgusted by what we almost certainly will see on Remembrance Sunday this year: many creeping fascists and fascists making cheap and insulting political capital out of the day, by wrapping up their vicious politics in Union Jacks and the Cross of St. George, and producing pathetic AI sequences trying to hide the fact that WW2 was a war fought AGAINST their divisive politics of hate.
There’s a saying that “you can’t polish a turd” – similarly, you can dress a creeping fascist in a national flag; but, at the end of the day, it’s still a… creeping fascist.
Here’s a link to a short clip from a 1947 anti-fascist film, called ‘Don’t be a Sucker’.
The clip explains how the Nazis rose to power by stirring up prejudice and hatred to divide the German people into antagonistic groups. As one of the characters says towards the end of the clip: “Somebody is going to get something out of it, and it isn’t going to be you.”
ALL of that applies to Farage and his creeping fascist Refuk party today. While Heseltine was wrong to call him a fascist, there are some similarities. In particular, as Farage has just made clear, he wants to lower the Minimum Wage for young people (currently at £10 per hour) and is against improving workers’ employment rights – but opposes raising taxes on the over-rich minority.
Just to put those two Refuk ‘policies’ in context: the average wealth of the top 10 richest people in the UK is now £20.5 billion – a rise of almost 50% in 5 years. To put it in everyday terms: if you earned £3600 every hour of the day, it would take you 650 years to reach such an amount! No wonder the over-rich/over-greedy 1% bankroll Refuk – which itself was founded by, and is run by, multi-millionaires!
So, that’s something worth thinking about on Sunday. Time to really honour those who fought – and either died or survived – in WW2, by making sure Farage’s and Refuk’s creeping fascism is dumped where it truly belongs: not in No. 10, but on the rubbish heap of History!
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