TONIGHT WE'RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT'S 1929

23/10/2009

A pertinent question must be asked: when did Britain decide the year 2009 was actually 1929?

Granted, the producer of Blade Runner, Michael Deeley, noted in a BBC 6 Music interview that the film made four prophesies for 2019: mass immigration from "the East", urban decay/slums, global warming and human cloning, all of which have to some degree come to pass ten years ahead of schedule. But nevertheless, whence the déjà vu around everything else? If 1929 marked the beginning of tragedy, are we approaching history's farcical repetition?

On Radio 3's Night Waves distinguished actress Maggie Smith (of Harry Potter fame, amongst other things) declared she felt English people did not like Jews, although this did not prevent her herself liking English people. This comes just a few days after the BBC's Panorama programme made known that it had sent two Muslim journalists to live undercover in Bristol's Southmead housing estate, at which point they were racially abused some fifty times in two weeks (including being punched, and having rocks, bottles, cans and chips thrown at them). Recent international politics has revolved around many Jews not liking Muslims and vice versa; it turns out many English may not like either.

And whilst Britain itself wonders about BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, America is wondering about David Cameron's decision to pull the Tories out of the neo-liberal European People's Party alliance (which includes Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy), in order to form the European Conservatives and Reformists alliance. This latter one includes a Polish politician who refuses to apologise for pogroms because of Jewish-communist links, and Latvia's For Fatherland and Freedom Party which has a tendency to commemorate the country's Waffen-SS (to point this out is apparently to recycle Soviet propaganda).

The president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, Latvian Holocaust survivor George Schwab, is understandably shaken by the Tory's having an EU alliance which may tacitly hint at Maggie Smith's assertion about English people. Speaking of Conservative Party membership of the ECR, Schwab stated: "I think Churchill would turn in his grave. It is an insult to the tradition of this great party." Perhaps the oddest thing about Schwab's response is not to hear Churchill's spectre conjured (we are used to that: the BNP have been doing it for their canvassing after all, as well as claiming that Churchill would today be a member of the BNP); it is odd, however, to hear the Tories referred to as "this great party." They surely seem to be "this mediocre party," albeit the first among equals.

Financial collapse, discontented populace, nationalist discourses, Churchill... And that annoying HMSO poster from World War II which states "Keep Calm and Carry On" is en vogue at the moment too. It should probably be pointed out that even if a strange siege mentality has crept over this green and wonderful (and damp, and maybe xenophobic) land there is actually no siege. Germany has no designs on Poland, the Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen, Japan just elected a Leftist government, Berlusconi is scary but he isn't (yet) Mussolini.

Having said that, as jobs dry up, maybe people are looking around at their competitors on the labour market and noticing that terrible category: migrants, sans papiers, Others, them. This again echoes those years of mass migration, but equally growing prosperity, after World War I. Then, like now, was a time of detainment camps and animosity towards immigration; it was also the time of the British imperial collapse and the break up of the German and Austria-Hungarian empires. America's contemporary (part currency, part militarily driven) imperial decline is not the same however, and this is in many ways an element more unique than all those foreseen by Blade Runner. Unlike then we are all already broken up into little sovereign States, hence our migration-based naval gazing is not currently "expansionist" as the euphemism goes. We are therefore perhaps not witnessing history repeating itself; we are witnessing something though.

John Gullick