There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors when its principal character, played by Martin Landau, revisits his old childhood home. In a typically surreal Allen scene, when Landau’s character goes into the dining room, he is taken back fifty or so years and confronted by the ghosts of his relatives having a family dinner. They are animatedly debating his current moral dilemma: whether or not it is justified to have a troublesome mistress, who is threatening to destroy his marri

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors when its principal character, played by Martin Landau, revisits his old childhood home. In a typically surreal Allen scene, when Landau’s character goes into the dining room, he is taken back fifty or so years and confronted by the ghosts of his relatives having a family dinner. They are animatedly debating his current moral dilemma: whether or not it is justified to have a troublesome mistress, who is threatening to destroy his marriage and everything he has worked for professionally, murdered. His aunt, a hard-line Marxist, says that morality is a bourgeois folly and that had Hitler won the Second World War, ‘history would have been written very differently’.



John King (author of the cult classics, The Football Factory and England Away) takes this as the starting point for his work of political science fiction, The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler. The book is set decades in the future when Britain has become absorbed into the United States of Europe. History has indeed been re-written and Winston Churchill and those who waged war against those seeking to unify Europe are officially portrayed as having been the warmongers for wanting to resist a united continent. This book is not, however, a re-writing of Robert Harris’ Fatherland or any of the other counterfactual books premised on a ‘what if the Nazis had won’ premise. Hitler only gets one solitary mention in the whole work. Nor is this some swivel-eyed EUsceptical long angry rant. It is too humorous and perverse for that and as a result all the more effective as a work of political subversion.



The novel takes you into an unsettling but bewitching dreamlike environment. The world conjured up by King, while fantastical in terms of technology and culture, is very of the moment in terms of how language and ideas have become corrupted, meanings subverted and reversed. He imaginatively updates Orwell’s concept of ‘doublespeak’ for the Blairite/Cameroonian postmodern era. So, for example, the secret police have been branded as ‘Cool’ and the regime’s equivalent of the Lubyanka is called, rather wonderfully, ‘Cuddles HQ’.



As in Brave New World, the regime doesn’t primarily exert its control through sheer brutality but rather by inducing conformity through its control of language and a seductive banality that sucks most of the populace in like easy listening music. The James Last Orchestra turned totalitarian. In the USE, all communication is digital, books and vinyl records, ‘hards’, having been banned. This of course makes thought control easier. Humans have computers inserted into the palms of their



hands linked to the InterZone. Elaborate light shows are projected onto the walls of the skyscrapers within the central London area that has become a sort of regime green zone, except its more Blade Runner than post-Saddam Baghdad. It is covered by huge domes that enable the climate to always be sunny.



The various orders of the imperial administration, the Technos, Bureaus, Crats and Controllers work and party within this antiseptic, unnatural Las Vegas like environment. They move about via Overground tubes. A sanitised football can be watched in wraparound 4D. Outside the walls of the inner city live the ‘Commons’, held in patronising contempt by the USE’s apparat. Strange foods are eaten such as blueberry muffins sprinkled with pork, elephant goulash and kangowraps, and the air is deliciously scented with strange odours, including reptile. There are disturbing references to human-animal hybrids being developed.



This book hinges on three main characters. There is a young ambitious Bureau called Rupert Ronsberger and one of his superiors, Controller Horace Starski. Ronsberger is proud of his fanatical, unquestioning devotion to the official line. Rupert is desperate for advancement. He has been trained to forget the past as ‘lasting concerns cloud future investigations’. One of his jobs is to keep terrorist subversives under surveillance using technology, Peep, that can penetrate deep into people’s homes. He sees a young woman suspected of being an anti-USE activist being brutally murdered by a member of one of the regime’s security agencies. Because he lives his life, like most of his contemporaries, through a sanitised make-believe world dominated by electronic media and the soap operas and films used to pacify and distract the population, he assumes this to be filming in progress.



He lives his life entirely in this bland bubble of bureaucracy and vacuous entertainment and cannot psychologically handle anything disturbing or that touches his emotions. He is no longer fully human, yet another interchangeable.



King describes a society that seems to be swimming in apparent digital choice but in which there is ever more policing of what people are allowed to communicate and what we can access about the things that really matter. An era in which the old feminist slogan of the ‘personal is political’ has become fulfilled as every micro aspect of life is regulated, managed and monitored.



Unlike Rupert, Horace Starski admits the whole system is built on lies and doublespeak. He is an expert practitioner in the arts of manipulating language and the truth, think Peter Mandelson crossed with the great



strategist of Stalinism, Willie Muntzenberg. ‘Truth was a process. It changed, mutated, emerged in refreshed forms. Horace Starski would never forget this revelation. He carried it with him to this day and would rely on it when he reached London. Of that he was sure.’ He yearns for an authentic existence, but knows this is not possible because of the course he has taken.



In a very powerful and moving chapter, he decides to leave the dome, disguise himself as an ordinary USE functionary and travel to Tooting. He had lived in south London when originally stationed in London as a young Bureau many years before. Here he had a girlfriend called Belle, a native, and spent the happiest and most real period of his life, but had had to abandon her as she would never have made an acceptable companion to an aspiring regime official.



Using Peep he watches her now at home with her family and is overcome with emotion. Starski is transported to and from this dangerous, unsanitised area by faux Cockney cabbies jabbering away in rhyming slang and bogus banter. While USE aspires to the emergence of the ‘Good European’ citizen it licences some of the natives to engage in safe, mock-traditional cultural pastiche. These are the ‘themed workers’ who sit exams to become so designated and are there primarily for the benefit of the regime’s visiting officials who want some occasional local colour.



It is the resistance member Kenny Jackson who provides the third main character. He has come up from the West Country to infiltrate one of the regime’s main London buildings, Pearly Tower. Kenny introduces us to a completely different world from the hollow sphere frequented by the technocratic elite; a combination of the Prole areas depicted by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘70s Punk with a whiff of Victorian dockside London. There are grimy pubs, cells of counter-cultural activists who illegally listen to illicit raw patriotic folk music, keep and write books and plan attacks. King’s insights into the football hooligan scene of about twenty five years ago adds authenticity here when describing the exciting world of subterranean subversion and collective organisation and camaraderie.



The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler can be seen as an imaginative updating of George Orwell’s essay James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution. This predated the work for which he is most famous and helps to explain the logic behind it. Burnham, in the context of 1930s America, had identified the emergence of a new class of technocratic administrators who would come to destroy the old capitalist class as well



as the working class and, to quote Orwell, ‘so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia and America... Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.’



In other words, the post-ideological, third way politics of today as epitomised by the really existing European Union as well as the internal politics of a growing number of countries, including China. King, too, is writing about a technocratic ‘new class’ that adheres to no clear, coherent vision of the future and is defined by its effective ownership of the political system, working hand in glove with big corporations such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, which exist in a symbiotic relationship with the state.



Transnational systems of governance are the perfect way to protect these emerging elites – political, bureaucratic and corporate – from popular accountability because their functioning is mysterious, and there is no clear and accountable locus of power. This is a system predicated on the keeping of power and privilege for its own sake, a reversal of the democratic legacy of the European Enlightenment, but one that utilises cultural devices and the manipulation of language to obscure its true essence.



John King’s book is an important work. Read it.