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Heroic Failure
Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain | Fintan O'Toole
4 posts | 3 read | 1 reading | 4 to read
'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' The Times. In exploring the answers to the question: 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. He also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster: the Charge of the Light Brigade, or Franklin lost in the Arctic. Now failure is no longer heroic - it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters, and by those who may suffer the consequences of a hard border in Ireland and the breakdown of a fragile peace.
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Minervasbutler
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Superb dissection of the act of collective madness that is Brexit by one of the astutest political commentators writing today. O'Toole identifies the roots of Brexit in a peculiarly English masochistic fantasy and references punk, the Hundred Years War and The Italian job among much else. Brilliant.

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Minervasbutler
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It is not as far as it seems from the stiff upper lip to the curled lip, from the heroic not caring of Captain Scott to the great snarl of Rotten‘s ‘And we don‘t care‘ at the end of ‘Pretty Vacant‘. But punk also created the most powerful paradox in the deep neurosis of Brexit: the strange psychic mash-up of revolt and pain, of bondage and freedom, of liberation and self-harm.

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Minervasbutler
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SAFinlay
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Wise, witty, honest & unafraid to skewer when it matters; its erudite & entertaining & a veritable romp thru history & context... if you read anything or can bear to read a whole book on #brexit let it be this

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