Have been re-reading various chapters of @fotoole’s superb book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.

His numerous insights feel ever more urgent this WE, underlined by that despicable Daily Mail ‘broken glass’ headline today.

I'd like to quote two sections:

(From Heroic Failure chapter 2, 'SS-GB: Life In Occupied England')

Rhetorically, it was a commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, at previous attempts of domination from the continent.

In 1989, for example, the Bruges group of anti-European Tories heard Prof Kenneth Minogue of the LSE tell them that 'The European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler.’

The sleight of hand was not subtle. Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign:

‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this (unifying Europe), and it ends tragically. The EU is attempting to do this by different methods,’ Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on 15 May 2016, a month before the referendum.

That Napoleon and ‘various people’ were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate’.

(And this from the bonus chapter, 'Amity Island - The Unsettling of a Nation', on Merkel’s trip to Ireland in April 2019)

She was not ‘blinking first’. Her trip to Ireland had precisely the opposite purpose -

to reinforce the sense that Germany and the rest of the EU took their commitments seriously. It was not just that Germany was not conceding defeat in the great game of chicken that Davis and his colleagues imagined. It was not even playing their fantastic game.

There was a complete dissonance between what the Brexiteers thought the underlying story was and what was actually happening. They were, as so often before, not even wrong.

But there is so much else beyond these two quotes.

If you have not yet read Heroic Failure, late Dec 2020 would be a really good time. O'Toole articulates the (continuing) delusion and self-pity of Brexit psychology with devastating clarity and much historical detail.

And if we want to ever (ahem) take back control of the narrative to nurture lasting cooperation and openness in the coming years, not to mention rejoining (the SM/CU at the very least), then it does help to fully grasp the screwed-up territory we’re dealing with.