Article by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson

The brotherhood that forms among the oppressed and persecuted never lasts, British historian and art theorist Simon Elmer says in his new book, The Road to Fascism – For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (London 2022).

He goes on to quote philosopher Hannah Arendt: “The humanity of the insulted and injured has never yet survived the hour of liberation by so much as a minute. This does not mean that it is insignificant, for in fact it makes insult and injury endurable; but it does mean that in political terms it is absolutely irrelevant.”

What must replace brotherhood now, according to Elmer, as the worst oppression measures of the Covid era have subsided, at least temporarily, is friendship; but not in the modern sense though.

In The Road to Fascism, Elmer argues that Western societies are now rapidly heading towards fascist totalitarianism, powered by the fourth industrial revolution and pushed on by oligarchs and bureaucratic power.

After the fall of the Soviet Union we have become oblivious to the dangers of a totalitarianism that doesn‘t originate on the left; the naive liberalism of the past decades has blinded us to this danger.

Elmer agrees with Hayek‘s warning in The Road to Serfdom, that the most dangerous kind of fascism is the one driven by international technocracies which could “easily exercise the most tyrannical and irresponsible power imaginable … And as there is scarcely anything which could not be justified by “technical necessities“ which no outsider could effectively question – or even by humanitarian arguments about the needs of some specially ill-favoured group which could not be helped in any other way – there is little possibility of controlling that power.”

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