No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
In the dark times Will there also be singing?Yes, there will also be singing.About the dark times.Bertolt Brecht T he UK Referendum vote to leave the European Union-Brexit-took place on 23 June 2016, and the result was a triumph of the irrational over reason.Of course, I am conscious that it is unfair for somebody like me-an ardent European-to characterize those who voted to Leave as unreasoning and deluded.After all, I'm a white middle-class man in full employment and living in Lambeth (the London borough which recorded the highest proportion of people in the country voting to Remain in the EU).However, I did see many moments during the campaign that reminded me forcefully of an incident that the late Peter F. Drucker, Austrian-born American management consultant and educator, mentions in his 1939 book, The End of Economic Man.At one point during the rise of Hitler he witnesses a "wildly cheering rally" at which a speaker proclaims, "We don't want higher bread prices; we don't want lower bread prices; we don't want bread prices to stay the same-we want National Socialist bread prices!"During the Referendum campaign the same tone could be detected in the oftenrepeated slogan "We want our country back."Meaning what exactly?And, after the result, the new prime minister Theresa May's gnomic statement that "Brexit means Brexit" is another example of the depressing, but now all-pervasive postfactual politics.Needless to say, the campaign also provided numerous examples of vox pops, which were not so much irrational as plain racist.Anyone who glances at Dominic Sandbrook's 2010 social history book, State of Emergency: The Way We Were-Britain 1970-74, which covers the entry of the UK into what was then the Common Market, will recognize the distinctive voice of traditional Little Englander resentment, a snarl against immigrants and big corporations alike.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.