Admittedly, this is not your standard issue-industrialised, globalised takeover of society. Why would it be? Fascism has come a long way since Hitler. Nowadays the general population is too smart, would recognise the face of tyranny and not this garden variety imposter. Or so we think. Besides, ‘without the Allies landing on the beaches of Normandy, how could we be under siege?’ We reassure ourselves before crawling back into captivity in a comforting lockstep with less fortunate nations. Adaptation is a wonderful thing, but maybe not for us. In keeping with the opaque nature of this political confidence trick, this is not your typical dictatorship either. Instead it’s Middle England’s answer to a veritable military junta, carrying the letters of marque from Her Majesty’s Government to legitimize its piracy, courted by the ivory towers of science and medicine, and extolled as a force for good by a population sleepwalking towards the edge of disaster. Meanwhile society burns ritualistically to the ground. But that’s ok, we can build back better from the ashes. Or so we are told.
This journey towards the wrong side of history is made possible by subtle nuances of control, confusion and fear that most fail to comprehend. Triggering the wholesale abandon of logic and reason to a seemingly benevolent cult who offer protections against our day of reckoning. The threat of death strikes an uncomfortable chord and our ability to adapt makes us low-hanging fruit. But who could have predicted fascism would look so ordinary from inside the Panopticon? Once we’re plugged into a shared digital common, a state of emergency can rapidly contaminate consensus, until collectivism flourishes like wildfire. Meanwhile, measured perspective becomes an act of war. Who wants to be on the wrong side of the cult, when those failing to bend a knee to COVID, are, by disassociation, guilty, with blood on their hands? This entire process works because the fertile ground for any dictatorship to prosper is fear. A state of emergency unites us with common purpose. And what could be more compelling than a pandemic? Death, like communism, levels the playing field of all distinctions. Regardless of class, age, gender, or race, death is indiscriminate. Reaffirming the normalcy of our departure from one place of relative safety to another is straightforward enough. Safety is, after all, relative to the setting of the emergency. The higher the alert level, the safer we feel in the herd, regardless of small matters such as the number of prison bars holding us captive. In a strong-enough current people are like driftwood trying to dock in the reeds. Remember the motto of this thing from the outset: ‘The New Normal?’
