UPDATED WITH VIDEO/Why communication needs to be taught in schools: how many people recognised this as fascist?

From time to time I like to upload this video, so that those of my ‘friends’ and others who fell for this scary fascist bollocks and ranted and raved in favour of the crock of corrupt shite performing in it, and then voted for it and him, can squirm with embarrassment in their seats. It beats being ungracious in person.

They won’t be squirming with regret, of course – ma tarax. They were “conned”. They were “tricked”. They were “fooled”. But they’re not idiots. No, of course they aren’t.

Except that anybody with some basic knowledge of political communication would have recognised this instantly as a classic, textbook piece of fascist messaging. It’s modelled directly on the National Socialist Party messaging of 1930s Germany, with the added benefits of the communications technology of 2013.

That rush of patriotic pride you get watching it? The goose-bumps? Your spirits soaring with the music to a sense of great things? The wonderful fuzzy feeling of togetherness through nationhood to beat the rest of Europe?

Well, exactly.

But when I saw this for the first time on television in the 2013 campaign, the only emotion I felt was primeval fear triggered by subconscious association of the sounds and visuals with historic recordings of fascist meetings. The images flooding my mind were of Hitler’s 1930s crowd-rousing meetings, swastikas, scary faceless mobs brainwashed with a single message. It was marketed as a positive message, a positive video, but subliminally, all I picked up was a sense of deep, unadulterated evil. This video was the moment when I fully understood, with dawning dread that sickened me, what was to come.

As things turned out, my jangling antennae were not wrong. Even now, I can’t watch it without thinking how frightening it is.