Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

Demonstrators march on international migrant day 2016. EPA

On December 31 1937, Cambridge classicist and man of letters F L Lucas embarked on an experiment. He would keep a diary for exactly one calendar year. It was, as he put it: “an attempt to give one answer, however inadequate, however fragmentary, to the question that will surely be asked one day by some of the unborn – with the bewilderment, one hopes, of a happier age: ‘What can it have felt like to live in that strange, tormented and demented world?’”

Lucas sought to preserve an affective archive, and to write about how it felt to live in an era of spiralling crisis.

As someone who wasn’t born in 1938 I cannot help but feel that Lucas’ solemn hope that his generation was living through the worst of it – and that lessons would surely be learned – have been well and truly dashed. Has 2016 been 1938 all over again?

Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

At present, as in the “Devil’s Decade”, we are experiencing the capricious convergence of historical forces: the fall-out of economic crisis and the extreme polarisation of the political spectrum from far-right to hard-left – the centre doesn’t hold. A tidal wave of refugees is being met by proportionately more xenophobia than compassion. Militant isolationism is thriving. Doors are being closed and walls built. Culture wars are punctuated by attacks on “experts” and intellectuals. 2016 has even seen open an unashamed airing of anti-Semitism.

The historical parallels between 2016 and 1938 are abundant. There are important differences in detail, in time and place, but the pattern of events, and of cause and effect, is striking.

Civil war raged in Spain then – as it rages in Syria today. Then as now, these internecine conflicts provide mirrors to existing fissures in international relations and deepening ideological antagonisms. By the end of 1938, and after Abyssinia, Spain, Anschluss, and Kristallnacht, not much faith was left in the ideal of internationalism or in the League of Nations – and this too sounds all too familiar.

The aftermath of the Kristallnacht. Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA

The rescue of refugee children through the Kindertransports was just as symbolically important, yet as negligible, a solution to an immense humanitarian and moral crisis as has been the response to lone children refugees holed up in Calais this year. And what of Aleppo? Shame was, and is, a dominant feeling.

Where next?

The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was perceived by many of its British critics as an act of national suicide. The Brexit decision has likewise, again and again, been described as an act of self-harm, even of national hari-kari.

Writing at the end of the year, contemporary historian R W Seaton-Watson had no doubt that 1938 had “resulted in a drastic disturbance of the political balance on the Continent, the full consequences of which is still too soon to estimate”. Treaties weren’t worth the paper they were written on in 1938 – and at the end of 2016 it is worryingly unclear where Britain will stand after triggering Article 50.

Meanwhile, George Orwell’s assessment of the disarray of the political left post-Munich could just as well apply to Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. As Orwell saw it:

Barring some unforeseen scandal or a really large disturbance inside the Conservative Party, Labour’s chances of winning the General Election seem very small. If any kind of Popular Front is formed, its chances are probably less than those of Labour unaided. The best hope would seem to be that if Labour is defeated, the defeat may drive it back to its proper ‘line’.

Full circle

One could go on seeking coordinates but the sum total would still be the same. The rug has been pulled out from under the assumed solidity of the liberal democratic project. A delicate tapestry of structures and ideas is coming apart at the seams.

Even more specifically, it is the psychological experience, the search for meaning, and the emotional cycle, the feelings – collective and individual – of 1938 that are uncannily familiar.

Post-truth politics is anti-rational. Emotion has unexpectedly triumphed over reason in 2016. Love and/or hate has beaten intellect. That’s true for Hillary Clinton’s “love trumps hate” slogan as much as it is for her opponent.

The referendum result shook many. PA

New political technologies render older ones obsolete. In both Britain’s referendum campaign and in the American election, traditional opinion polls failed to capture the emotion being expressed across social media platforms.

Back in 1938, it was British Gallup and the rival Mass-Observation that were the innovative political technologies. Using very different techniques, each offered fresh insight into the psychology of political behaviour and tried to unseal the stiff upper lip of the British electorate.

Mass-Observation tried to get into people’s heads, and diagnosed an increasing occurrence of “crisis fatigue” as a response to nervous strain and “a sense of continuous crisis”.

Almost immediately after the EU referendum, therapists reported “shockingly elevated levels of anxiety and despair, with few patients wishing to talk about anything else”. And the visceral nature of the US election campaign contributed, tragically, to the exponential increase of calls to suicide helplines. National crisis is inevitably internalised.

Reflecting on the psychological fallout of the Munich Crisis, novelist E M Forster observed that: “exalted in contrary directions, some of us rose above ourselves, and others committed suicide.”

As 1938 drew to a close, serious conversations were dominated by the verbal and physical expressions of fatalism, anxiety, sickness, depression, and impending doom. Lucas wrote in his diary:

The Crisis seems to have filled the world with nervous break-downs. Or perhaps the Crisis itself was only one more nervous break-down of a world driven by the killing pace of modern life and competition into ever acuter neurasthenia [shell shock].

It is too simplistic to say that history repeats itself. And yet, throughout this past year I could not escape the feeling that we have been here before. We share with those who lived through 1938 overwhelming sensibility of bewilderment, suspense, desperation and fear of the unknown. I can’t help but wonder what future historians will make of 2016.

It’s probably sage advice to go see a good movie over the holidays – and La La Land, already tipped to win an Oscar, may provide just the kind of escapism that is needed. However, when someone comes to make the movie of 2016, the soundtrack will probably be the late Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker. It certainly feels like 1938 all over again. Time to start keeping a diary.

(Julie Gottlieb is Reader in Modern History, University of Sheffield).

(This story was first published on The Conversation).

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Alright with the alt-right? PA

Far-right movements are clearly on the rise throughout Europe and the US. Winning elections in the US and campaigns to leave the European Union are providing an effective boost to charismatic public figures clutching a populist ticket and claiming to be outside of the establishment.

And in two major events of 2016 – Donald Trump’s election and Brexit – far-right movements have leveraged social media far more effectively than their opposition.

The “alternative right” or alt-right, has made expert use of blogs, tweets, hashtags, memes, and trolling to provide a legitimised voice to far-right ideas – and to use that voice to speak to huge amounts of people.

A nebulous collection of internet-savvy individuals who came to prominence in support of Trump’s presidency, the alt-right represents various right-leaning ideologies including white supremacy, Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and opposition to immigration.

Meanwhile the left’s social media usage seems to come across somewhat differently. Undoubtedly there are left-leaning campaigns gaining effective and vital support through social media – the Scottish National Party’s presence on Twitter for example, or the polished Facebook page of Pablo Iglesias (leader of the radical left-wing Spanish political party Podemos) which has compared Spanish politics to Game of Thrones.

But there are notable differences in how the social media usage of the left and right are reported and thought about in wider culture. There are innumerable reports exploring, in depth, Donald Trump’s Twitter timeline (which then adds to his social media presence, while a lack of coverage restricts social media growth).

Some say Hillary Clinton’s supporters even assisted her defeat by choosing to insult Trump supporters online rather than engage them in serious debate. British commentator Jonathan Freedland argued that Brexit Remainers have done little more than “exchange ironic, world-weary tweets, the electronic equivalent of a sigh, each time they read of some new hypocrisy or deception by the forces of leave”.

Given this imbalance, what might the left do to make better use of social media? Imitating the dubious strategies of the “alt-right” with an “alt-left” counterweight is probably not a positive move. (Remember that “alt-right” as a term and movement has its origins in the writings of Richard Spencer, president of white supremacist think-tank The National Policy Institute.)

Rather, what the left might benefit from is an examination of its own social media success stories.

One example is the @StopFundingHate campaign. This Twitter account (with 66,000 followers) encourages consumer pressure against companies which spend money advertising in right-wing publications such as the Daily Mail (which, it is argued, provide platforms for divisive social ideologies). So far its biggest victory has been Lego’s decision to end free giveaways through that newspaper.
 

Daily Mail and Lego not playing together any more.

To find out why the this particular Twitter account had sparked so much public interest, we analysed tweets featuring the #StopFundingHate hashtag with colleagues at Newcastle and Northumbria universities. As part of the CuRAtOR project, we work on investigating the cultures of fear that are propagated through online “othering” and how this can lead to subsequent mistrust and stigmatisation of groups or communities.

We found a large concentration of tweets around the sharing of a video produced by the campaign which plays on the British tradition of emotive Christmas TV adverts.

The seasonal ads usually attempt to associate positive traditional Christmas values – togetherness, goodwill, family – with the company’s products and services.

The @StopFundingHate video overlays clips from these adverts with text that juxtaposes their feel-good sentiment against the apparently divisive content of newspapers these same companies choose to advertise with.

Tweets that shared this video also often use a word, “brandjamming”, to succinctly describe the video’s aim in a single snappy term. That aim is to leverage consumer power against retailers by publicly pressuring them into cutting financial ties with sections of the news media.

One key element of the campaign’s success was its timing. It appeared in the lead up to Christmas, when emotions are stirred and consumers have power. Second, it seems that sharing visually engaging material is more effective than simply tweeting. The video had a simple message which realigned TV adverts we may have previously felt good about.

And while these strategies do not necessarily suggest a message with much longevity or depth, they do work to produce something that resonates with people and which people are motivated to share.

Social(ist) media campaigns

Building on these insights, we also collected the tweets produced by the @StopFundingHate account itself. These often referred back to the campaign’s own larger social media presence, with tweets containing terms like “Facebook”, “following” and “share” – regular reminders for followers to spread the message to non-followers and extend the reach of the campaign.

@StopFundingHate also regularly hijacks hashtags already in use by companies as well as more general Christmas-themed hashtags such as #goodwilltoall. This serves to place the message within more mainstream domains – somebody searching for heart-warming tweets about #bustertheboxer might happen across @StopFundingHate and question the validity of their feelings about the John Lewis advert.

@StopFundingHate uses its account to directly call out companies including @LEGOGroup, @JohnLewisRetail and @Waitrose. In mentioning these companies, the onus is thereby squarely placed on them to respond or, more typically, to be seen as failing to respond to critiques levied directly at them.

Yet it is important to remember that @StopFundingHate is not universally well-received. Just as the “alt-right” have been accused of dubious social media practices (such as trolling opponents, or using personal details in threatening ways), there has been a backlash against this particular campaign for encouraging press censorship.

So for @StopFundingHate and the left generally, a careful balance has to be struck. They need to be seriously committed to social change without being considered as a branch of the thought police.
Nevertheless, to put up stronger opposition against an increasingly institutionalised right, the left needs to analyse and reflect on its use of social media. If it does, it will be able to strike that balance – and apply its successes elsewhere.

(Phillip David Brooker is Research Associate in Social Media Analytics, University of Bath. Julie Barnett is Professor of Health Psychology, University of Bath).

This article was first on The Conversation.
 

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