"Understanding the road to fascism" by Simon Elmer

 

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Understanding the road to fascism

By Simon Elmer

We are - we are constantly being told - living in ‘unprecedented times’, facing ‘unprecedented circumstances’ requiring ‘unprecedented measures’ for which there is no historical precedent and because of which - is the unstated implication - those in power cannot be held to account for the consequences of their actions.

‘Conspiracy theories’ now emerging as our new reality We are - we are constantly being told - living in ‘unprecedented times’, facing ‘unprecedented circumstances’ requiring ‘unprecedented measures’ for which there is no historical precedent and because of which - is the unstated implication - those in power cannot be held to account for the consequences of their actions. 

‘Unprecedented’, however, is one of those words that should set alarm-bells ringing in the head of the historian, implying, as it does, that we are in a moment about which history can teach us nothing, but which signals, in practice, that the speaker either doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is lying about what they are doing. But whether the present is a product of ignorance or deceit, history inevitably has a lot to tell us about supposedly ‘unprecedented’ moments, and so it does with the coronavirus ‘crisis’. 

The two years between March 2020, when the ‘pandemic’ was officially declared, and March 2022, when the last of the 582 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments made into law were revoked, have left us now, eight months later, in our own reenactment of that ‘phoney war’, also lasting eight months, between the UK’s declaration of war against Germany in September 1939 and the invasion of France in May 1940. 

With the lifting of the thousands of regulations by which our lives were ruled for two long years there has been an understandable desire to believe that the coronavirus ‘crisis’ is over and we will return to something like an albeit ‘new’ normal. But as new crises have sprung up to take its place - war in the Ukraine, the so-called cost of living crisis and the return of the environmental crisis - it has become increasingly difficult not to look back on lockdown as only the first campaign in a war that has not been declared by any government but is no less real for that. 

Waged by the international technocracies of global governance that have assumed increasing power over our lives, this war is not being fought against foreign countries but against the populations of their member states. Trialled for compliance under lockdown, the weapons of this war are Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency, Universal Basic Income, 15-Minute Cities, Sustainable Development Goals, and all the other programmes instrumental to the United Nations Agenda 2030. 

If they haven’t been already, these look likely to be launched in a Blitzkrieg campaign, possibly this winter, with the World Health Organization advising European countries to reimpose mandatory masking and ‘vaccination’. Just like the winter of 1939-1940, now is the deep breath before the storm. 

The comparison with the opening of the Second World War, however, is not merely an analogy. The willingness of our governments to use the forces of the state against their own populations on the justification of protecting us from ourselves signals a new level of authoritarianism - and something like the return of fascism - to the former democracies of the West, and one of the aims of my book is to examine the validity of this thesis. 

My purpose in doing so is to examine how and why the general and widespread moral collapse in the West since March 2020 has been effected with such rapidity and ease, and to what ends that moral collapse is being used. It is here that history can tell us something about these supposedly ‘unprecedented’ circumstances. 

Something, but not everything. For while historical fascism arose in the context of European nations and their struggle for power, a hundred years later that struggle has been reduced to their united and virtually unopposed roll-out of the programmes, technologies and regulations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And while our economic and military alliances are dividing the globe into new axes of geopolitical influence, the war we face in the West is not between nation states but a civil war waged against our institutions of democratic governance and the division of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. 

Insofar as these institutions and this division are being dismantled and replaced by the rule of unelected international technocracies, this war represents a revolution in Western capitalism from the neoliberalism under which we have lived for the past forty years into the new totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State. 

Since the revocation of coronavirus-justified regulations in the UK, much of the resistance to the programmes of biosecurity has become bogged down in challenging the justification for the lockdowns and demonstrating the dangers of the ‘vaccination’ programme. And while there is value and importance in this work, it has been accompanied by a reluctance to look at what these programmes have prepared our compliance for in the next stage of the Great Reset. 

These programmes will be implemented outside of any immediate threat such as that represented by the coronavirus ‘pandemic’, and can expect less compliance than that which met the restrictions on our human rights and freedoms under lockdown. For this reason, they are likely to be implemented quickly and all at once, with Digital ID holding our biometric data made a condition of numerous freedoms, cash withdrawn from circulation and replaced by Digital Currency controlled and programmed by central banks, and a system of Social Credit modelled on that in China all a reality to which we will wake up one day with no choice but compliance or having our access to the rights of citizenship removed by default. 

This is the context in which I have written The Road to Fascism, which describes how what was contemptuously dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ now constitute the reality in which our immediate future is about to unfold with terrifying speed and finality. The question confronting us now is not one of doubt or belief in the reality that is all around us, but of how to oppose it before we are submerged into the new totalitarianism.

The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State was published on 28 September, and is available in hardback, paperback and e-book.

https://architectsforsocial housing.co.uk/2022/09/28/theroad-to-fascism-for-a-critiqueof-the-global-biosecurity-state/

About the Author

Simon Elmer was born in London. In 2002 he received his PhD in the History and Theory of Art from University College London, and he has taught at the universities of London, Manchester, Reading and Michigan. In 2015 he co-founded Architects for Social Housing, for which he is Head of Research. His books include The Colour of the Sacred: Georges Bataille and the Image of Sacrifice (2007); COVID-19: Implementing the UK Biosecurity State (2020); Brave New World: Expanding the UK Biosecurity State through the Winter of 2020-2021 (2021); Virtue and Terror: Resisting the UK Biosecurity State (2021); and with Geraldine Dening, The Truth about Grenfell Tower (2017); Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018); For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism (2021); and Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022).

Source: The Light