It’s an odd thing, watching people raised in liberal democracies support totalitarian regimes, and it fascinates me, because democracies are peculiarly vulnerable from within. What, when British people call for victory for Hamas, rather than the Palestinians of Gaza who have not elected a government since 2006, or the Houthis of Yemen, who are slavers, or the Trumpists supporting the January 6 insurrection, do they believe they are calling for? What do they think they see?
I see many reasons. The first is credulousness, and a lack of imagination to feed it. I suspect they are so preeningly insular — I saw a sign on a pro-Palestine march that said, “Israel is like my ex-boyfriend”, which is offensively self-involved — they believe that the structures of a totalitarian regime could not possibly apply to them, even if they could name them.
