h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How did I never come across this before? it's like the guy who wrote the story of an unsinkable liner called the Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sank - and wrote it in the 1890's...

The parellels with today and Britain losing its creative marbles over Brexit. the murder of Jo Cox and the way right-wing sympathists minimised it and denied it was terroristic - shades of Bettauer's assassin being leniently treated; also the insular inward-looking provincialism of Brexit advocates... horrible shudders...

Who was it said history may not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes a lot?

Thanks for reading!

Karl Marx:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Seamus Heaney used the idea of history "rhyming" more positively:

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

Thanks for those quotes.

In this case, though, I wonder if Marx's Hegelian process hasn't happened in reverse: once as farce, again as tragedy.

Which might be a warning to us today - they laughed at Hitler. At first...

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In this case, though, I wonder if Marx's Hegelian process hasn't happened in reverse: once as farce, again as tragedy.

Which might be a warning to us today - they laughed at Hitler. At first...@

Elephant in the room - shaped like Nigel Farrage and trumpets a lot while making vaguely threatening gestures with its horns.

People are still laughing at him but he's also being taken seriously now... like hitler a ridiculous little man thought of as a no-hoper on the fringes, but quietly making inroads. But on the scale of potential fascist dictators - certainly not a Hitler. Britain doesn't command the industrial resources to sustain any sort of major military machine, not any more. The spectre is still a horrible one, but I doubt Frage would become another Hitler - he's too much of a minnow for that, on the grand scale. I doubt if he could even aspire to be a Mussolini, although he has the skills-set: bombastic charismatic oaf who was on a mission to Make Italy Great Again.
Not even a Franco - repuslive person though he was, he was at least a general with victories in war to legitimise his position. Farage might have struggled in the Home Guard.

I suspect the referent is one of the lesser Fascist dictators in Europe who are virtually un-known today and who don't get the airtime devoted to the Big One: hungary's Horthy, perhaps, or Romania's Antonescu, small-scale Mussolinis who threw their lot in with Hitler. Or maybe not even an Atoescu: the referent might be the Slovak fascist leader Jozef Tiso, a thoroughly repulsive little creep who is virtually unkonwn today but led his country into collaboration with Hitler.

And all this begs the question - if Europe goes south, who will be the new Hitler and how will ordinary people collude or be coerced into giving him legitimacy - what can history and "fictionalised" accounts like this tell us?

That was an insightful and chilling romp through the catalogue of dictators, thanks. You're right: it's a pattern, it happens. And it will happen until we wake up and change our approach.

Personally, I was thinking of the menace geographically closer to me...