Power, wherever it lives, has a habit of calling itself moral. Whether it wears a flag, a crown, or a constitution, it insists that it protects rather than rules. That is why the idea of benevolent fascism is so dangerous, because it feels virtuous while it consolidates control. The uniforms may be neat, the rhetoric clean, the purpose declared noble, but underneath lies the same arrangement of authority over consent. What was once imposed by bayonet is now justified by security briefings and procedural language.
The courts become the new army. They entrench morality through verdicts, and the people grow accustomed to mistaking legality for justice. In both America, Britain and, in truth, across much of the so-called liberal world, law has replaced conscience as the instrument of order. Governments act, and when questioned, they answer not with ethics but with statutes. “It’s within the law,” they say, as if legality and legitimacy were the same thing.
But the lesson of the twentieth century should have cured us of that illusion. Everything the German government did between 1933 and 1945 was legal: authorised, debated, notarised, filed, and stamped. The concentration camp had paperwork.
Continue @ Labour Heartlands.
No comments