British Fascism in Alternate Histories of the Second World War
y Dunkirk, 1940: Operation Dynamo
y Dunkirk, 1940: Operation Dynamo
y Dunkirk, 1940: Operation Dynamo y Rudolf Hess flies to Britain proposing peace with Nazi
Germany
y Dunkirk, 1940: Operation Dynamo y Rudolf Hess flies to Britain proposing peace with Nazi
Germany
y The Farthing Set negotiate Peace With Honour : Both
sides keep what they already have.
Drastic Measures
Fixed Term Parliaments ID Cards requiring a stated religion Repatriation of foreigners on British Soil Weeding out of Communist sleepers in trade unions and Labour Party
Drastic Measures
Fixed Term Parliaments ID Cards requiring a stated religion Repatriation of foreigners on British Soil Weeding out of Communist sleepers in trade unions and Labour Party
The Reichstag Fire
27 February 1933
Term invented by Brian Aldiss in The Billion Year Spree to describe British disaster sf.
(1973)
Walton: it suits them perfectly. The difference between a cosy catastrophe and a horror or disaster novel is just like the difference between Miss Marple and Hannibal Lecter.
Who Survies Catastrophe? , Foundation, 93 (2005), 34-39, p. 35.
Clute: The novels skate of the meniscus of the horror of the world in a state of something approaching good cheer.
John Clute, (2008) Half a Crown by Jo Walton , Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2008/12/half_a_crown_by.shtml..
Gordon: Walton s novels do something very few novels about the Holocaust do they remind us how cozy it feels to be the ones who belong, how easy it is to close ranks.
Joan Gordon, Half a Crown by Jo Walton , The New York Review of Science Fiction. No. 247 (Mar 2009), p. 12-13, p. 13
This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon s present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite.
Doctorow: Farthing is clearly a parable about Britain and America in the wake of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, when commonsense, humanism, and a commitment to liberty and justice has been easily set aside in a fury of bloodlust and a dismal, shrugging apathy.
Cory Doctorow (2006) Farthing: Heart-rending alternate history about British-Reich peace , BoingBoing.net, http://boingboing.net/2006/06/20/farthing_heartrendin.html.
Roy Thomas; Michael Lark (illus.) Superman: War of the Worlds (New York: DC Comics, 1999), p. 63
Early postwar narratives uniformly depicted the Germans as brutal representatives of a criminal regime and portrayed the British people as heroic resisters against it. In the process, they affirmed post-war Britain s foundational myth that the fight against Nazism represented the British people s finest hour . (p. 35) As the British people s sense of moral superiority began to fade, their readiness to acknowledge their own moral shortcomings and recognize the humanity of their erstwhile enemies increased. (p. 94)
Kedward: there was no crisis of democracy in Britain: there was complacency, blindness and selfsatisfaction among many, and misery and hopelessness among others, but the hold of the party system remained firm, and men looked to traditional politics for political action, not to minorities like the B.U.F or the equally powerless Communist Party.
. H.R. Kedward, Fascism in Western Europe 1900-1945 (London: Blackie & Son, 1969), p. 92
y Further the erosion of British exceptionalism:
We had the same blend of complacency, demoralisation and naive elites more worried about the rise of Communism than the threat of fascism to British Democracy. For want of a nail it could have happened here.
y Further the erosion of British exceptionalism:
We had the same blend of complacency, demoralisation, and naive elites more worried about the rise of Communism than the threat of fascism to British Democracy. For want of a nail it could have happened here.
It Still Could
