(no subject)

[morwen]

So. Read this today. Didn't quite live up to my expectations. Although to be fair is quite nicely deranged. But.

The point of this sort of thing is that "it could happen here". And while the scenery of London (Parliament, the Old Bailey, Telecom Tower, Number 10, the Tube) is all there, the institutions are different.

The scary thing to me about fascism is how it usurps the state, not entirely replacing it - isn't it a bit of a waste to have a fascist leader in Britain who isn't Prime Minister, and surely the secret police ought to have been Special Branch? The only subverted state institution was the Church of England - we see the paedophile bishop (which is no longer really shocking either). Is this just because it would have been too radical/political for the 1980s? That the bad guys had to be racist, homophobic and Mengele-like bad guys, just so that nobody was in any doubt they were bad...

So, is anyone writing the V for Vendetta for the age of the War on Terrorism? Or are we in the end-times with no need for satire?

Comments

Re: Institutions...

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The security services were I think five - "the finger" (the police), "the eye", "the ear" both, I think, "the nose" (forensics/medical?) and "the mouth" of course representing the BBC. (NTV, as it was called). However, my understanding of the back story was that after a period of anarchy, the blackshirts effectively started up a new state, rather than hijacking the old one. It wasn't exactly clear though.

Despite being unpublished, What If Gordon Banks Had Played? (http://www.btinternet.com/~chief.gnome/) is probably the best I've seen in this genre - any timeline featuring Enoch Powell as Prime Minister, the Queen being assassinated by the IRA, and Margaret Thatcher sent to jail for war crimes is good by me. ;)

Re: Institutions...

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Aha! Another soc.history.what-if person! Yes, I've read most of the alternative history on the uchronia (http://www.uchronia.net/intro.html) website. What If Gordon Banks had played is superb; whoever wrote it, they were there in the 1970's when the collapse of the Wilson/Heath/Callaghan Wiemar Republic seemed all too plausible. There really was a loss of control of the security services... And talk of military assistance (not a coup!) that moved in from the fringes to tentative discussions among retired military officers, industrialists, and senior figures in the Conservative Party... One of whom was a close associate and mentor of Margaret Thatcher.

Arguably, this is the backstory that preyed on Alan Moore's mind when he wrote 'V' - but he went for an even more dystopian vision, with a collapse back to conditions seen in 1920's Germany leading to a fascist militia arising from the rubble of civil society. This is in contrast to the milder (and more plausible) case in 'What if Gordon Banks...' of an authoritarian leader taking legitimate power through the Parlimentiary process and consolidating dictatorial 'emergency' powers that are used with to dismantle democracy.