With the lifting of the thousands of regulations by which our lives were ruled for two long years there has been an understandable desire to believe that the coronavirus 'crisis' is over and we will return to something like an albeit new normal. But as new crises have sprung up to take its place - war in the Ukraine, the so-called 'cost of living crisis' and the return of the environmental crisis - it's increasingly difficult not to look back on 'lockdown' as the first campaign in a war that has not been declared by any government but is no less real for that. The willingness of our governments to use the forces of the state against their own populations on the justification of protecting us from ourselves signals a new level of authoritarianism - and something like the return of fascism - to the governmental, juridical and cultural forms of the formerly neoliberal democracies of the West, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the validity of this thesis. Its purpose in doing so, however, is not to contribute to an academic debate about the meaning of the term 'fascism', but rather to interrogate how and why the general and widespread moral collapse in the West over the past two-and-a-half years has been effected with such rapidity and ease, and to examine to what ends that collapse is being used. The more deliberate is the immiseration of the populations of Western democracies, the clearer it becomes that the war started by COVID-19 is not between nation states but a civil war waged against our institutions of democratic governance and the division of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. Insofar as these institutions and this division are being dismantled and replaced by the rule of international technocracies that, under the cloak of the 'pandemic', have assumed increasing power over our lives since March 2020, this war represents a revolution in Western capitalism from the neoliberalism under which we have lived for the past forty years. Where it is heading with ever greater speed and finality, and which The Road to Fascism sets out to demonstrate, is the new totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State.
With the lifting of the thousands of regulations by which our lives were ruled for two long years there has been an understandable desire to believe that the coronavirus 'crisis' is over and we will return to something like an albeit new normal. But as new crises have sprung up to take its place - war in the Ukraine, the so-called 'cost of living crisis' and the return of the environmental crisis - it's increasingly difficult not to look back on 'lockdown' as the first campaign in a war that has not been declared by any government but is no less real for that. The willingness of our governments to use the forces of the state against their own populations on the justification of protecting us from ourselves signals a new level of authoritarianism - and something like the return of fascism - to the governmental, juridical and cultural forms of the formerly neoliberal democracies of the West, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the validity of this thesis. Its purpose in doing so, however, is not to contribute to an academic debate about the meaning of the term 'fascism', but rather to interrogate how and why the general and widespread moral collapse in the West over the past two-and-a-half years has been effected with such rapidity and ease, and to examine to what ends that collapse is being used. The more deliberate is the immiseration of the populations of Western democracies, the clearer it becomes that the war started by COVID-19 is not between nation states but a civil war waged against our institutions of democratic governance and the division of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. Insofar as these institutions and this division are being dismantled and replaced by the rule of international technocracies that, under the cloak of the 'pandemic', have assumed increasing power over our lives since March 2020, this war represents a revolution in Western capitalism from the neoliberalism under which we have lived for the past forty years. Where it is heading with ever greater speed and finality, and which The Road to Fascism sets out to demonstrate, is the new totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State.
Über den Autor
Simon Elmer was born in London. In 2002 he received his PhD in the History and Theory of Art from University College London, and he has taught at the universities of London, Manchester, Reading and Michigan. In 2015 he co-founded Architects for Social Housing, for which he is Head of Research. His books include The Colour of the Sacred: Georges Bataille and the Image of Sacrifice (2007); COVID-19: Implementing the UK Biosecurity State (2020); Brave New World: Expanding the UK Biosecurity State through the Winter of 2020-2021 (2021); Virtue and Terror: Resisting the UK Biosecurity State (2021); and with Geraldine Dening, The Truth about Grenfell Tower (2017); Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018); For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism (2021); and Saving St. Raphael's Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022).
