By Petr Navovy | Politics | June 24, 2016 |
By Petr Navovy | Politics | June 24, 2016 |
It happened.
It actually happened.
Waking up in Britain today was not a pleasant experience. I pity those of my friends who stayed up, getting progressively drunker as things turned dark. Or maybe I envy them, for at least for now they are in oblivion.
If there’s one thing Brexit is a demonstration of it’s the limits of democracy. I don’t say that out of sour grapes because ‘my side’ lost; I say that because despite the demonstrably false arguments being used, it ended up being the side that repeated those arguments ad nauseum that won. ‘Remain’, of course, wasn’t 100% innocent of this, but in the end what this result shows is the power of the media over the people. Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper, and other mass distribution outlets of its ilk, got their victory. Fear and xenophobia, the platform at the heart of the ‘Leave’ campaign — despite any protestations or cries of ‘anger with the status quo’, the latter of which is genuine but moot and meaningless when directed in this way — has won. Never underestimate what people will do when they are made desperate and then repeatedly lied to about who is to blame. And of course the cruel irony is that those who swallowed the lie, those who followed the easy answers, will be the first to suffer underneath a newly emboldened hard-right. The sun rises in a clear blue sky, but it’s a dark day today.
If you want to know what it felt like in those first minutes, it was a little bit like this:
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Petr Knava lives in London and usually plays music but-…ah, fuckit