So, it’s official that there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, and it’s now obvious that Trump is Putin’s puppet. A dangerous nexus of power exists between Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin (with other national, corporate, and criminal alliances, including the Heritage Foundation and the arms, fossil fuel, and data industries). It looks like they are poised to destroy the rules-based order set up after WWII to stabilise international relations.
While being derided and ignored, we have been warning for 10 years that “this is a coup”, meaning that:
- Ultra-wealthy and powerful individuals are driven only to grow their wealth and power. They do this by destroying the living world and exploiting, displacing and killing people. They protect their reputations against exposure, and expose their competitors. They collaborate to erode laws and protections so that they can continue to destroy, exploit and profit.
- Social and data technologies make our democracies vulnerable to “invisible war” – manipulating opinion and hijacking financial and electoral systems.
- The entanglement between hard-right authoritarian governments is extremely dangerous because of access to nuclear (and other) weapons, vast amounts of data and vast exploitable territories, combined with their lack of action to protect nature and people from an extremely disrupted climate.
I’ve been looking back at my articles from 10 years ago and the Brexit referendum, trying to understand and explain what was going on. I thought I’d reshare them here with some headline ideas, because we are still tangled in this knotty situation.
We have more in common
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/we-have-more-in-common-675c2d9383e1
“If the demos of ordinary people really do want to have more voice and control, they may start to see that the key to this is working towards a more functional and fair democracy. The referendum was not proper democracy because people believed lies — that have now been confessed to by Leave leaders — that they were either voting to save the NHS or to control immigration. The referendum was not proper democracy because due to decades of erosion of civic community, people were not taking their responsibility seriously to vote with care and consideration. It was not proper democracy because of the right wing, xenophobic and Eurosceptic ownership of mainstream news media.”
Ideas in Power
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/ideas-in-power-299787b70bec
“Ideas should be in power not (types of) people. AND ideas should always be free to change…
A more subtle but profound divide [than north vs south, rich vs poor etc] is between people who have intellectual agency, information literacy, cultural confidence and liberal values, and people who don’t have enough of these to protect against being influenced by others.
…Any political campaign that does not use evidence, expertise and questions to discover and share the truth should, in any ethical democracy, be judged corrupt. The Leave campaign was not based on ideas but on a manipulation of fears, using anchor concepts and inflammatory made-up facts.”
Mapping Post-Referendum Views
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/mapping-post-referendum-views-9b7ad4f4608d
I created a conversational tool for mapping all the different positions people hold following the EU Referendum. At the centre is ‘Power’, surrounded by a matrix of four positions of people who have relative agency, and beyond which are the disenfranchised groups.
To listen, to learn
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/to-listen-to-learn-ec1633797cb5
I wrote this 7 weeks after the Referendum, when negative consequences were already starting to show. In this piece, I was exploring: why have so many people voted, and why do they continue to campaign, against their best interests? How can we best understand this?
I wanted to question the motives and effectiveness of the many calls to listen [to people who voted to Leave], and to consider methods to reach a deeper understanding. I asked these questions:
- When we listen, how much are we hearing propaganda reflected?
- If we listen, are we listening in order to tackle underlying systemic problems or just to feed that propaganda noise?
- Does ‘listening’ to racists imply conceding to them? How to listen in ways that enable resistance to harm?
I set out three aspects of deeper listening that could lead to more action and justice: Empathetic listening, Conversational listening, Analytical listening
Welcome to the biggest crime that’s ever been committed
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/welcome-to-the-biggest-crime-thats-ever-been-committed-55436040d07e
In this piece, I’m drawing connections between climate denial, fossil fuel interests and the hard-right coup process:
I ask a series of questions, such as:
“Is it accurate or helpful to draw such a clear division line between affluent influential liberals (as pro-EU/anti-Trump) and the left-behind poor suffering from immigration and globalisation? Is this just a redrawing of the stark fault line drawn between the 1% and the 99%, by the 1%, as a deflection tactic? And in looking for fault lines and how to heal them, why do we pay so little heed to cultural hegemony, especially deliberate ‘perception management’, and its impact on our psycho-cultural states?”
I set out a long story about the following bullets:
“Fossil fuel companies and oil-dependent countries are at the heart of an industrial-military complex that has:
- knowingly expanded a system that is rapidly destroying the life-sustaining capacities of the planet, such that civilisation is liable to collapse this century,
- has fought and fanned the flames of wars over oil, and seems willing to continue stirring conflict as a means to exert control and frustrate efforts to build a sustainable peace,
- has fed a misinformation machine to spread denial of this science, to weaken collaboration on climate action, to deflect blame from these wrongs, and to sow confusion and division.
As part of this, Russia, an oil-based country led by oil barons, has funded right-wing groups across Europe, manipulated press and online news and supported Trump, in order to break apart the EU and weaken NATO, with the intention of exerting more power.”
Calling it out
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/calling-it-all-out-2b50e09881d1
In this piece, I’m making links with racism, triggered by Theresa May’s welcome of Trump (‘the orange arse’) to the UK.
I conclude it by saying: “If you do not actively practice egalitarian compassion, protecting rights and freedoms of others when you see them threatened, if you fall too far into the soggy middle of the spectrum, you are helping racism gain ground….When we have a powerful world leader bulldozing so many public institutions and laws, and living his own rotten racist values in global technicolour, he is setting off a landfall down into that pit. We all need to keep our fingers in the cracks in the dam shoring up our altruistic values, to keep remembering the consequences of xenophobic tyranny and explaining why ‘othering’ actions can be harmful.”
Links between Brexit and Trump
https://medium.com/@bridgetmck/brexit-is-like-trump-likes-brexit-5ce05ece4d6e
This is a painstaking piece, detailing all the similarities and connections between the Brexit Referendum and the Trump election. I’ve covered as many bases as I could think of, including Russian involvement.
Active Stewards in a Divided World
I’ll finish with this piece, although there are several more. Rather than blaming people for being divided and querulous, we need to have clearer sight on the most important divisions:
“If there is a division…the most significant distinction is between those who want to continue the system of extraction and growth, threatening populous civilisation for their own profit, and those who want to continue biodiverse life on the planet. Business as usual vs Life as it has existed for millennia.”
I stand by my concluding paragraph:
“This depletion of resistance does not have to apply to us all. We can open our eyes. We do not have to succumb to the conspiracy of factors that make us continue the ecocidal system at the expense of biodiverse life. But it’s not just about seeing, or believing, or not succumbing. We have to be active stewards, in terms of how we use resources, in how we protest ecocide and climate denial, in how we expose the management of our perceptions, in how we are gentle with each other to avoid conflict as people migrate and suffer, in how we express our views and push for justice and democracy, in how we explore new ways of sharing resources, in how we care for our local environments and in how we regenerate our planet.”
