On Aftershocks

This is a really interesting book. In it, Susan Kingsley Kent argues that the British attempted to overcome the national trauma that came with the Great War by developing a sense of national whole-ness to be pitted against groups “outside the nation” (whether they be Indians, Irish, women, trade unionists, and so forth). Kent argues that the successes of the (primarily) Conservative government (although Labour and Liberals were at times part of this project) to vilify outsiders caused the British to establish more fascist-like sensibilities. The end result is that Britons rejected fascist parties and movements, as establishment parties already accomplished what fascist parties set out to do.

From the introduction of the book, I expected “trauma” to be a much more important concept to the book, but this appears to be dropped after the first third of the book. Each chapter is essentially a discrete vignette that appears unrelated to the others, but Kent argues that these vignettes are fundamentally intertwined by the politics of exclusion.

Ultimately, I don’t think that Kent’s argument is accurate. Although the Tories (among others) established a set of fascist-y politics, especially after the 1931 landslide win by the National Government. However, Kent does not take the time to dissect what “fascism” is. Fascism is a revolutionary movement that looks to overturn establishment politics and replace it with a rebirthed, class collaborationist, and authoritarian nation. Given that Tories and Liberals were generally the very definitions of the establishment, it seems unlikely that these two parties filled the “fascist gap” (if one existed at all in Britain—I do not know enough to discuss this). Maybe, and I think this is more likely, fascist parties did not gain much popular support because Great Britain was rather stable and there was not a need to overturn the order (not because the Tories essentially overturned the order).

Anyhow, I don’t know if I explained my views on them well enough or if they even make coherent sense. Please feel free to argue with me on this, I welcome it!