#esp when europeans do it as if it’s not your fault

[glorianas]

it’s funny how non americans on here are constantly like USAMERICANS when americans call the country the US or the states most of the times and non americans refer to it as “america” you see where that might be a problem

[msmargaretmurry]

Hi! This isn't actually a ship question but in light of your comments on sid/ovi and geno/ovi I'm now extremely curious. How DO Caps fans see Ovi? What is the vibe on him when he's YOUR captain? signed, someone who is new to hockey and extremely sad to have missed bulk of the Ovi years.

hello anon, i'm sorry it took me a while to get to this, i had a super busy week! but okay let's get into it! under the cut, because this of course got really long 😂

i feel like really important context and something someone who's new to hockey very understandably might not know is that the way that mainstream hockey media talks about ovi now, after the 2018 caps cup, is wildly different from how they talked about him for most of his career. the non-local coverage of ovi for most of his career was wildly insulting and xenophobic. idk if you remember when i was talking about sid/ovi i mentioned how people just liked the idea of soft canadian golden boy/big loud russian brute, but that narrative was there because the narrative pushed by the media was good canadian golden boy vs big loud russian brute. it was billed as sid vs ovi but the underlying message was always that it was protagonist sid vs his antagonist ovi.

obviously the penguins (and sid individually with team canada) had the early success that bolstered this narrative, and the fact that it took the ovi and the caps so long to win their cup means that the many years leading up to that, they got to double down on the narrative that ovi was: lazy, selfish, showboating, stupid, disrespectful, a locker room cancer, the reason the caps couldn't win, a one-trick pony, a bad captain, lazy, selfish, lazy, selfish, lazy, selfish. they really loved to go hard on lazy and selfish. and yes, other players have been called these things by the media before, but it's important to understand when they were talking about ovi the implication was always that he is these things because he is russian. and their guy, crosby, the guy who actually wins, is not these things because he's canadian. (n.b. i am fully aware sid had to deal with plenty of his own shit esp around his captaincy and concussions; i'm just talking about in the specific context of this rivalry. like, none of this is actually crosby's fault, but one can understand my disinclination to engage with anything penguinsy after all this.) (n.b. #2 you can see this treatment of ovi mirrored quite blatantly in the treatment of nail yakupov, who was not lucky enough to land on a team and in a media market that would close ranks around him instead of letting him get ravaged by it. see also geno very much getting a pass in some ways because he's loyal sidekick to the good canadian boy, which does not challange the great canadian hockey narrative.)

(sidenote honestly getting into hockey with a team whose main stars were russian and swedish was such a weird and interesting crash course in the hierarchy of whiteness in the nhl which culminates in the best thing you can be is a white center from anglophone eastern canada and everything else slots into tiers beneath that, affixed to various stereotypes, especially about nordic and eastern european countries. but we're not getting deep into that today)

and like yeah of course they would praise him for individual great plays or great games and use him in marketing as an exciting player to watch (while turning around an insulting him for many of the things that made him exciting) but this was the narrative overall. the tsn and nbc talking heads gleefully jumped on any chance to talk shit about him. i spent a chunk of february 2014 in edmonton, which means i watched a lot of the sochi olympics on canadian tv, and i will never, ever forget the sheer mind-blowing experience of sitting there watching them fill time between events, cutting to the rink where one of the hockey teams was practicing. the russian team had already been knocked out of the tournament, and ovi was sitting in the stands watching the practice, and the commentator said about this, i shit you not, "i guess he doesn't want to go back to his washington capitals yet."

first of all. the nhl was paused while the olympics were happening. second of all. it was already public knowledge that ovi would be staying in russia a little longer than expected because his father had just had a heart attack. dc media has already reported on this. and tsn decided it was a good moment to make a snide comment about his dedication to the capitals instead.

after the capitals won the cup, the turnaround in a lot of the media as they decided to be publicly happy for him was so abrupt it was actually comical. but nevertheless, that is the soup we were swimming in for the height of the ovi years.

and it was really frustrating! because to caps fans, that was our guy! he's playing his heart out for us! we would hear the shit the non-local media said about him and just be like, are they watching the same player as we are?? he was so exciting and fun (still is!), and, if you actually paid attention, sneakily funny and smart. (one of my favorite ovi moments will forever be in 2013 when mike milbury said his career was in the toilet and a couple weeks later after a wildly impressive stretch of games ovi said "maybe they forgot to flush me.")

"selfish" was probably their favorite thing to throw at him ("lazy" a very close second), and we'd just be like ??? this is a guy who celebrates his teammates' goals harder than he celebrates his own. and he celebrates his own pretty damn hard! he always took time for community events, got involved in local charities, has a program to donate season tickets to underserved local kids, has a close (and extremely cute!) partnership with the american special hockey association, is out here quietly donating tons of stuff to orphanages in russia. a guy willing to make himself into a clown at the all-star game trying to win a car for a dc-area special needs hockey team, without telling anyone that's the reason he's making himself into a clown, and making sure they get the car afterward even when he doesn't win it.

and on top of all that, his teammates love him. part of the joy of being a caps fan (as with many hockey teams!) is getting to be witness to the amazing friendships on the team. and why would his teammates love him so much if he was just a selfish, lazy asshole?

another thing you need to understand is that he pretty much single-handedly turned hockey around in dc. when they drafted ovi, the caps were languishing. hockey was not a popular sport in the city. then ovi came, and everything changed, because he was so exciting and he made the team better around him and suddenly caps hockey was so fun to watch. over the course of his career, an incredible caps hockey fan community has grown up around the team. i've made some of my best friends through the caps. that wouldn't have happened without ovi. youth and rec hockey participation in the dc metro area exploded — they literally call it "the ovechkin effect." man, i'm literally getting teary-eyed sitting here thinking about it. he has had such an incredible impact on hockey in the dc area that it's literally hard to quantify.

he has always been a joy to watch not just because he's a generational talent, but because of the unbridled joy he brings to the game. certain members of the media would call it showboating or disrespectful to the game or whatever. to us it's always just been joy. and on top of that it's been such a joy to watch him grow up from this wild, sometimes reckless kid into a determined, media-savvy (still joyful! still full of personality!) adult to now a gray grizzled veteran married father of two (still joyful! still full of personality!) chasing one last record and trying to help usher the new young caps players into a new era of the team.

i guess one way to put it into context would be to say that around the time in 2013 that mike milbury was saying ovechkin's career was in the toilet was also the first time i sat down and did the math as to how long he would have to play and how many goals he'd have to reasonably score per season to break gretzky's goal record. and i decided right then that yeah, he was probably going to do it as long as he didn't get badly injured. i didn't hear anyone in the mainstream hockey media even suggest it as a possibility until many years later.

and like, man, i'm not saying that ovi's always been perfect or anything. and i'm not saying he never had media members praise him or be on his side, and i'm not saying there was never a small but annoyingly loud contingent of caps fans in the early/mid-teens who hopped on the "trade ovi" train, because there was and i hope they all feel very stupid now. and trust me, i've spent more time mentally wrestling with the problematic russian politics of it all than probably the vast majority of hockeyblr has spent doing the same with their maga faves, and i really have no desire to discuss that with anyone On Here except to say everyone is allowed to draw their own lines to maintain their peace and joy.

i'm just saying that man, i feel fucking blessed to have been a caps fan in dc during the ovi years. he has been a great captain, a great teammate, a great member of the community, has been great to the fans, and we will probably never see an athlete quite like him again in this city or even in the nhl. he's not a crosby or mcdavid type player, and he's never needed to be. he's his own thing. he's the greatest goal-scorer of all time.

[ladymazzy]

It's true that the MCU has made it abundantly clear on numerous occasion that Bucky was a victim of Hydra, not a willing participant. He was a POW whose skill as a fighter was manipulated and heightened (without his consent) by a malevolent institution. However, whilst he was not acting of his own volition, he was conscious of what he was doing throughout. This is not to 'blame' him but rather highlight the deep rooted trauma inflicted by this period of his life. He 'remembers them all'. He sees *his body* commiting those murders

I think it's clear that it's generally made clear that Bucky is not 'guilty' - certainly not in a basic binary sense at any rate. For one thing Bucky isn't in jail; he was pardoned. Compare his fate to that of Isaiah Bradley's, who ended up in jail after rescuing fellow soldiers. However, he's going to be struggling to live with the things he was compelled to do precisely because it was *his* body and abilities that were used

When Sam advises him to 'do the work', it's not in the sense of 'atone for your sins. It's in the sense of face your demons.

We see that Bucky has befriended Yori at the start of tfatws, but we quickly come to realise that Bucky is frozen, befriending Yori in order to atone, but unable to tell the truth because he's so horrified by his actions as WS. This causes him to act in less than honourable ways - befriending Yori whilst watching him mourn without any answers, disappearing from his date with Leah. It's not deliberate or done with ill-intent, but neither of these actions are remotely helpful to the people on the receiving end, or Bucky. Which is why he needs to 'do the work'.

Bucky was sat on the precipice of 'doing the work' by avenging and trying to be a friend to Yori without revealing the whole, awful truth about what happened to his son. This saddles him with an unyielding weight of guilt - ironically enough more than, for example, using his abilities to actively help others. He could never adequately 'avenge' his past actions, hence he continued to suffer and feel undeserving.

In contrast, when he reached out and helped others (quite literally) by rescuing the hostages, and received gratitude, he felt good for once. When he helped the Wilson's with their boat and hung out with the community, again, he felt good.

This is what Sam meant by doing the work. It's therapeutic advice, especially in support groups. It isn't about atoning or self-blame, but is about truth, reconciliation and 'being of service'.

Tfatws didn’t get *everything* right by all means (esp Karli Morgenthau's storyline), but certain aspects were dealt with in a way that had a lot of nuance. Even the terrible John Walker was portrayed as someone manipulated by the state - a victim just as much as he was a perpetrator.

When hurt people hurt people (even when they're not in control), finding any kind of healing is complicated because, frankly, other people also have to live with the impact of those unwilling actions. The alternative is Bucky shrugging his shoulders and walking away from Yori because 'it's not my fault'.

(I do think it's interesting that they cut away from whatever conversation he had with Yori. It couldn't be a neat and tidy one -far too much pain and the possibility of not being forgiven etc.)

As food for thought, people in comparable situations for better or worse really don't always get the chance to be of service and rehabilitate. For example, child soldiers compelled in brutal circumstances to carry out atrocities against can still be prosecuted (and it's interesting to note that the ICC is more prepared to prosecuted cases involving African war crimes than it is European or American...).

Dominic Ongwen participated in absolutely horrific atrocities having been kidnapped and coerced into the LRA around age 10. ICC deemed him culpable and convicted him. Major warnings for traumatic content in the article linked;

What happened in the MCU is that they made Bucky unquestionably a victim and then did not know how to handle it. 

In the comics, Bucky’s brainwashing leaves him with enough agency that his past as the Winter Soldier is absolutely comparable to Natasha’s. Both were used and abused and manipulated, but they maintained enough control over their own actions that it is reasonable to question whether it mattered that they didn’t know who they truly were because they were still people.  In the MCU, they specifically wrote Bucky Barnes as a character whose agency was not just compromised but actually removed. It’s not just torture and coercion, though there are 70 years’ worth of explicit torture and coercion, it’s that for him to act as the Winter Soldier they have to cauterize out what makes him a person. In the MCU Hydra/the Soviets have not one but two ways to do it: the chair and the activation words. The Winter Soldier does not comply without them. This is not a question of a prisoner breaking after years of enslavement. This is explicitly shown as a mechanical way of erasing Bucky’s consciousness and capacity for consent. And it was a choice by the MCU to characterize his captivity like that, much like it was a (subtle) choice to make Bucky a man who was drafted rather than a man who enlisted.  And up to Phase 4 that had played out alright; the characters who see him as culpable are also shown to not be objective (Tony, for example, or Bucky himself). The audience knows better, though, because we are privy to all of the flashbacks and the medical torture and the him being bodily dragged out of cryo to be activated. But then the MCU actually had to confront its choices in TFATWS and they did it in the worse possible manner because they both chose to reinforce the narrative that Bucky was a powerless victim during his enslavement while making his recovery conditional on accepting responsibility for it. They pretend to sell Bucky along with the activation codes. There’s a whole pivotal scene by the firelight where Bucky finally does not respond to the activation codes and Ayo tells him he’s free and that’s because he was not free beforehand. In a storyline which places explicit moral value on refusing the serum, never once was it mentioned that Bucky did not consent to being injected with it in the first place. His situation obviously parallels Isaiah’s, not Steve’s.

But now the audience is being asked to see Bucky as someone who needs to make amends, not just because his therapist says so but because the moral compass of the series, Sam, makes it explicitly clear that what Bucky needs to do is “do the work”.  And this is INSANE. It’s insane. To have Bucky weep when the trigger words wash over him and still, still, try to have the audience buy into the narrative of his recovery as one where he needs to admit wrongdoing is absurd. It would be normal and expected of Bucky to feel wretched guilt over his past but the recovery is overcoming that, not reinforcing it. Bucky admits, word for word, that he had no choice and that would be bad enough, but the Winter Soldier was made to not even conceive of the possibility of choice. 

There can be no culpability without agency and guilt is not a measure of responsibility.

Bucky Barnes has, for ten years of MCU canon, been written as a man who was powerless to stop the abuse that was inflicted on him and now that they have to cash that check the MCU cannot handle it. I don’t even know if it’s because they, like society in general, cannot abide the concept of men - masculine men, especially masculine leading men - as victims but the end result is that TFATWS is an explicit exercise in victim blaming. 

[stplatinum]

🌻🌻🌻

 YOU WANT THE REAL TEA???

YOU NEED SOME MILK???

LEGION DISCOURSE ENGANGED (under cut bc no one wants to read this shitshow) 

alright so i posted this before on my salt blog: 

people who obviously are not people of color and/or from cultures that have been colonized by europeans: tribals would never accept the legion’s bigotted and sexist culture!!! there’s no reason for them to develop these systems in the apocalypse when they had the perfect opportunity to reshape society

me, a native filipina: ……………………..h

with these tags: 

#NO SHADE BUT SOME OF Y'ALL ARE FUNNY AS SHIT!!! !#native filipinos had very good gender equality esp considering other areas of asia at the time #they also understood the complexities of sex/gender/sexual orientation and how all these identities are a spectrum rather than a strict bina #ry #and ye t#when the spaniards came!!! LOL!!! #so even let's say you're right that these tribes weren't sexist/homophobic #that literally has no bearing on how resistant they would be to those ideas #if you don't know what it's like to come from a culture that's been enslaved/colonized it really shows when you try to talk about legion

and honestly, after talking to some friends about this, i’m so FUCKING done w/ having to skirt around the issue. i can’t believe i feel uneasy about voicing my own opinions based on historical evidence and my own experiences as a native filipina to make white people/people who aren’t from a colonized culture feel comfortable with me. 

my people!! sold out my own people!! we had women’s rights, lgbtq identities, a rich economy, technology, cultures, kingdoms, trade routes w/ other nations! our own religions and languages and martial arts and weapons and mythologies! we had all these things! but the spaniards were still able to change us. we knew better, filipinos would have definitely seen the spaniard’s ideals as being “illogical,” but that didn’t matter, did it? so a lot of what people are saying about how it makes no sense how the legion would come into fruition is silly. i feel as if it undermines my culture. it’s ignorant. it’s HILARIOUSLY ego-centric to think That is How It Works. You Think It Do. But It Don’t. 

and don’t get me wrong i agree w/ most people’s ideas on a purely personal level (that legion bad, slavery bad, makes no sense, blah), but the point of caesar’s legion is to show that edward sallow DOES NOT have the same moral framework as you and i do. it doesn't matter how much it doesn’t make sense to us that slavery bad, bc caesar operates with different motivations in mind. his moral compass points a different direction from yours. and he’s so charismatic he’s pulled everyone else’s compasses to point towards him. 

he’s created a society where it is profitable to enslave women and children and he’s created an entire mythology to justify the system he’s created because his motivation is to conquer the mojave. 

tell me how that isn’t exactly how the spaniards subjugated the filipinos. made it profitable to take our land and resources away and then converted us all to a modified religion/culture that would make it sinful and wrong for us to rebel. 

and god as a disclaimer, there’s no one in particular i’m thinking about as i type this post. it’s not just one person. i think bits and pieces of these ideas i dislike have been shared by a MULTITUDE of individuals. i don’t truly think there’s one person who’s made a post that i am directly referencing bc all of these refutations (i guess u can call them that) have been bubbling in my head the SECOND i stepped into this fandom and began interacting w/ other new vegas fans about legion. 

i don’t fault anyone for thinking these things. i realize not everyone knows how filipino culture (or other cultures w/ similar experiences), so being ignorant is OK. i just wished that people would stop giving their hot takes on this topic when it’s abundantly clear they are either unqualified to speak about it bc they are white or just not from a colonized/enslaved culture or don’t know how history works or just haven’t taken a message analysis class, i guess :SHRUG EMOJI:

[afrosocialism]

7 Reasons why the Left is dead in America.

As we know, the left is in serious life support in America. It wasn’t what it was then in the 60s and 70s or the era of the Industrial Revolution. There are many reasons for its downfall, but I’m gonna give seven. 

#7: Internal in-fighting between ideologies and sectarianism. 

One of the major problem that befell the left is the constant antagonism between state and libertarian socialists esp. in the case of MLs/communists and anarchists/ancoms. We are fighting over what ideology is right and wrong, ideas from this revolutionary will set us free, which leader is better, what is or what is not socialism, and all that jazz. Both anarchism and communism have its problems, but we need to realize this: they’re both tenants of socialism that is made to fight against the capitalist state. We have no connection with each other just squabbling. Despite that, there are groups that are cult-like or secretarian that think their ideas are better and others aren’t. Avoid em. Anyway, look at the left in Latin America, as it consists of different ideologies working to fight against capitalism and imperialism.

#6: Over reliance on old leftist theorists and a cult of personality. 

I see this a lot in leftists and it annoys me that we still got people who are over dependent on works from leftist theorists like Bakunin, Marx, Kropotkin, and Lenin. They are so optimistic that if we just keep following their ideas, we’ll be free rather than adapting to the reality of now and see we need more than that to survive. Anarchist Panther Ashanti Alston Omowale said that anarchism is pitiful if it relies on the work of its European figureheads, rather than the experience of actual struggle and revolution. That can apply that to forms of socialism. If we rely on leftist dogma, we ain’t gonna progress. Another thing is that a lotta leftists wanna create a cult of personality around their favorite theorists than learn from their ideas and flaws. We refuse to adapt to the situation that capitalism created. Look at Communalism. It’s based off of experiences of revolutionary organizing and action. It was made for how to create self governed municipalities to survive from the vampiric nature of capitalism. We need to learn from recent experiences of revolution and struggle and the ever changing nature of capitalism. 

#5: How it treats anti-oppression and intersectional politics.  One problem with the left is that it refuses or fully adapt anti oppression and/or intersectional politics. Some of them may claim that they are anti-racist/sexist/transphobic etc. but don’t do nothing with it. Sometimes they make their opposition towards oppressive behaviors about themselves or invade marginalized folx spaces and police them. On the other hand, there are some that dismiss them as identity politics and call them divisive and believe that they are a distraction in fighting class conflict. The revolution will be intersectional or it will not be a revolution. What they don’t understand that these identities intersect with class and that class itself is an identity. Also, there are those that practice oppressive behaviors in their spaces (I’ll get into that more) and resist to understand how they benefit off of whiteness. 

#4 Over reliance on electoral politics and entrance to the state. 

The left believes that to succeed is to elect people into state politics. Even though this been a long practice with limited success, but those leftists groups also had revolutionary organizing. Here’s the thing: we ain’t got that now. We’re so fixated in putting our ideas to the state, that we forget the necessity to organize. At this point we should see the reality of electoral politics by these facts: 

A. The state is essentially capitalist as it is a system ran by the ruling class.

B. Electoral politics are controlled and operated by the state. 

C. Electoral politics are centered around an elephant and a jackass. 

D. Any chance that the radical left getting elected into state politics is slim. 

E. In order to succeed into the state, you must soften your views or assimilate into their political thinking. 

I may sound anarchist saying this, but I know that there are state socialists who agree that compromises with the state is surrender. That’s how Bernie Sanders was made. He came out left, but when he worked with the state, he didn’t bother to oppose the capitalist state, worked with the Dems and stood by or be silent of their atrocities, spoke nebulously for milquetoast reforms, and appealed to middle class white millennials than the working class and poor he claimed he’s standing for. We should never sell out to the state because the state will never be for our interests. 

#3: Engaging in a lotta pacifism. 

I know people that are nonviolent, and I’m like okay, but I think we really need to transcend from that. Pacifism has a lot of problems, mostly that the only way to fight against institutionalized violence and corruption is to be nonviolent and it implants that idea towards oppressed folx. It is ignorant  towards the history that this country (and many other settler nations) was founded by violence, that nonviolence alone is futile without armed wing to back it, and that it’s necessary to retaliate with violence against an illegitimate state. A lotta leftists have completely abandoned armed resistance and rejected violence as a tactic to fight against capitalism and oppression. They won’t even bother to fight the right, believing that they’ll change through debate and compassion. However, they don’t know that the right can and will exert violence on whom they hate. Many believe that nonviolence will produce better change, not realizing that the state has a monopoly on violence and can exert it at their own will. Also, pacifism is toxic as fuck as it tells us that we shouldn’t fight back while our oppressors plot our destruction.

#2: Too many liberals (and some reactionaries) in our movement.

One major issue why the Left is struggling because liberals (and some reactionaries) has invaded and flooded our movement. Main reasons for most of the aforementioned reasons are because liberalism is infecting our movement. They’re the main reason for why we won’t fight fascists/bigots as they humanize em, defend their actions as free speech, justify their existence. When the right gets stronger, they'll come out their doldrums and defend their existence, and let them kill us. Liberals push pacifism and electoral politics on leftists and claim that these ideas are radical. They distort the fuck outta history and the true meaning of socialism, into their view and pandering to the right's dismissive view of it. I see a lot of so called leftists engaging in liberalism rather than radicalism, that they’re deserving of questioning. I also see that a lotta liberals call them leftists and claim that they are the standard bearers of leftism and make leftism about being anti-conservative, yet pro liberal and liking leftist figures without even understanding their principles. They also flood the movement with conspiracy theories, something that isn't leftist. Let’s be honest, liberals aren’t our friends and not even left because they have a history of destroying and crushing leftist movements and leaders. Most of them are working with the Democrats and are double agents of the state as they exist dilute radical ideas and movements and assimilate them to the capitalist state. These people wants to push the left into the capitalist state and the Democrats. These people justify or be silent on neoliberalism and imperialism as long it’s a Democrat. These people also encourage or even gaslight other leftists to engage into shitty liberal beliefs. Most of them also engage in oppressive behaviors (mostly transphobia, racism, classism, sexism, and ableism). Speaking of that, reactionaries have also taken over the left, mostly in Facebook groups. They engage in the aforementioned behavior just as worst as the liberals and defend it as left. These are what I call the "alt left". The main reason why the left is dying too many damn people with reactionary or revisionist mindsets coming in infecting our movement with their shit.

And #1: AMERICA.

What could be at fault than any of the other reasons for the left's demise? Simple. It's America. Many people like to blame the left dying because the right going strong, identity politics, or being too soft, but they refuse to look at how much America fucked up the left. America (with occasional help from other Western nations) has spent years in dismantling, weakening, and suppressing leftist ideals, movements, leaders, and nations through the Red Scare, McCarthyism, espionage acts, police, imperialism, violence, propaganda, the FBI, CIA, NATO, unjust laws, betrayal, coups, neo-colonialism, installing puppet leaders, and war. America is the greatest enemy of the left, and will make sure we die a slow or fast death. America will never adapt to leftism because it is a white imperialist capitalist settler nation that was founded by the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of Africans. America is capitalist and will not give up its capitalist state without fight. You know why the left is dying here? Because America has killed it. America will do anything to destroy the left in here and in other nations.

Even though I said the left is in struggle in the USA, It has been slowing recovering with the election of President Donald Trump and the concurrent rise of fascism in this nation. However, the left got stronger in some nations of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

[vjlive]

Brexit

"We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years." Winston Churchill

Until it came to pass, Brexit - the referendum - attracted curious little attention elsewhere, at least beyond Europe, which perhaps is fair, but the consequences and the lessons from it would be far reaching, profound, and thus, hard to ignore. At the very least, it throws open questions everyone chose to ignore... until now.

Xenophobia

A large part of the 'Leave' vote was fuelled by xenophobia. Primary culprits being the openly xenophobic UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) led by Nigel Farage and Britain's largest selling newspapers - The Sun, Daily Mail, and other tabloids - every single day with anti-immigrant front pages, or rather plain lies; Eastern Europeans and Muslims, their favourite targets - variants of 'the Polish were taking your jobs', 'the Muslims are a threat to our way of life' were commonplace. It was, as it would be found out later, a profound, however false, message that would resonate with a large number of people in hinterland Britain. (London, Manchester, Liverpool decisively voted to Remain.)

Economy

Yet it would be misleading to cast the motives behind the 'Leave' vote as xenophobic and the 'leave' voters as racist. To understand the Leave vote one has to understand Britain. Britain, of today, remains a deeply divided nation - divided on class lines - between the haves and the havenots - between the winners and losers of globalisation; in a way, one can trace this back to Thatcher's time and the decline of the industrial cities of England.

Post the 2008 economic crisis and the election of a Conservative government in 2010, Britain has followed an anti-Keynesian austerity regime - read, cost cutting for the nation. The costs however were predominantly cut were from the spending for the lower middle class and the poor already reeling from the economic crisis - the social security benefits and the NHS (Britain's iconic national healthcare system that provides free healthcare to all its citizens funded by taxpayer money). The NHS was hit with massive budget cuts and plans to privatise it - leaving a body blow to Britain's weak, in both sense of the term.

It was much easier to tell people that the Polish were taking their jobs rather than explain the adverse consequences of austerity. Also, given the heavily Tory leaning press, the latter message was rarely, if ever, told.

The Revolt

After the 2015 election, after Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader, lost to the incumbent Prime Minister David Cameron, resigned, the Labour Party elected - to the party elites' surprise and considerable chagrin - a leftfield candidate, a rebel of the party itself, though a man well respected for his personality and character, but never really considered a contender for party leadership, but there he was - Jeremy Corbyn, the great red hope of the blue collar workforce that forms a major chunk of Labour's vote base. Tony Blair and his New Labour were old memory now. This was the first revolt.

In the same election, even though it didn't win may seats, the UKIP, UK's far-right nationalist party won huge number of votes, gaining its support from the economically disenfranchised. This was a phenomenon largely similar to what is happening in the U.S. now, the similarity in the demographics of the votebase of Donald Trump, a vanitious rambling xenophobic bigot, and Bernie Sanders, a conscientious grass roots liberal. This was perhaps the precursor.

The elections also pointed out - again - the immense power Britain's media held in swaying voters' decision: Ed Miliband who looked set for a comfortable win over Cameron was thwarted by the Tory press - with varying levels of journalistic morals and standards - from The Times to The Sun, with The Telegraph and Daily Mail, in between.

Buoyed by his victory and perhaps also by the victory of the Scotland Independence referendum, Cameron announced a referendum on whether to stay in the EU, to satisfy the hardliners in his party. Much foolishly, as he would later find out: June 23, as the sun set on the British Empire - all of Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England - the UK disconnected itself from the continent, and on the morning of the 24th Cameron stepped out of his residence and announced the end of his tenure.

The Lessons

1. Liberal values such as openness, secularism, multiculturalism fail to hold when the means of survival are in question. A populace that isn't well read, well travelled, well fed - or rather the havenots - holds close what it has - culture, race, nationalism. To transcend these sectarian divides requires a broader outlook and a life without survival for the basics. (This doesn't imply that all poor people are bigoted racists. Merely, xenophobia thrives in misery.)

2. Propaganda by mass media in democracies holds tremendous political power as they do in dictatorships. In other words, it is as easy to manufacture consent in a democracy as it is to thwart dissent in a dictatorship. The relentless anti-immigrant message percolated and believed, even though a large part of the misery was thanks to Cameron's austerity regime. Yet, those who suffered due to his policies shall elect a regime, that will be even further to the right - say hello to Britain's Trump, Boris Johnson - that would compound their misery. Causality isn't a strong suit in loud, uncivil democratic debates.

3. The polity is not just divided left and right, rather decentral and central. The Anti-EU vote is also a vote against a Centralised Superpower and an yearning to the old nostalgia of smaller communes and tribes. And it is not necessarily right or left, it can be both; just as centralised liberalism and centralised conservatism.

Way ahead

Scotland

Scotland is a left leaning liberal country unlike Conservative England. Scotland overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU as well being a pro-European nation. This could lead to a second Scottish Independence referendum, and this time Scotland could secede. The Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has already sounded out the beagle, if not sent a fax to the British Parliament.

Northern Ireland

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is the only land border between the UK and the EU. The present borders are soft borders: what this means is unless the border is sealed there will be unchecked immigration. (Remember, members of the 27 EU nations can freely move in the Republic of Ireland.) The sealing of which however will have adverse trade impacts and also the sustainability of the peace treaty between the UK and Ireland.

The Economy

As is, Britain has three unsavoury options to save its bacon a. Britain chooses to remain in the EEA (European Economic Area - Area that falls under the European free trade regime; EU members are part of EEA, as well as members of EFTA (European Free Trade Association) like Norway). The conditions for which, however, would be free movement of people - something Britons voted against - as well contributions to the EU, without right to legislation - that should go down well!

b. The referendum is not mandatorily enforceable. The British establishment - Tory and Labour - can choose to ignore it, but that would only mean strengthening Farage's hands in the next general election, as well starting a civil war in their own parties.

c. Britain goes the Swiss route - negotiating its own bilateral agreements. Not so easy! Firstly, Britain is a markedly different economy than Switzerland's. Secondly, EU has a lot of incentives to make an example out of Britain to thwart similar exits from the Union. This is important, given the rise of the far right across Europe - from France to Italy to Austria to Poland.

So what this could mean however is Britain expanding its trade ties with the larger world - US, China, India and other Emerging Economies. That is the good news. Yet, there is the threat that UK could end up being US' pygmy state (how the mighty have fallen, etc) without the company of its European brothers.

The GBP has already fallen. The British banks have taken a err... pounding. This should mean a bulk of foreign property buys, esp. in London and also potentially investments. Also a weak pound should benefit British exporters. Yet, that is scarce consolation for them after losing a free trade region with a combined population of 500 million people - effectively, the world's third largest nation, only with better living standards. To add misery to the mishap, the financial powerhouses could shift their shops to Dublin!

Yet, given the potential consequences and dawning of reality, with a pro-EU Prime Minister in Downing Street till October, one suspects UK would choose to remain in the EEA, though it is by no means certain. Brussels could want to really inflict some damage now, for reasons mentioned earlier.

The European Project

The Eurozone crisis - to put it in one small sentence - was due to a monetary union without a fiscal union. In other words, to avert another crisis of such sorts, there needs to be more integration of legislation and expansion in its scope, in the EU. Yet, it is EU's overreach that scared the 'Leave' voters, as well gave the stick to far right leaders like Farage and Marine Le Pen, in France, to beat the EU with.

For its many faults, the EU is an extraordinary project in Internationalism - its genesis after all a reaction to the discontents and disasters of nationalistic wars over centuries in the blood thirsty continent. It was also a project that furthered the causes of liberalism, free trade and the welfare state. A chance to live, work, love in 27 different countries is after all a wonderful thing to look forward to. Yet, as Brexit has reminded us, only if you have the means to do so.

The EU's great failure is globalisation's great failure - to adequately assuage and take care of those who have been affected by sudden, dynamic movement of capital, goods and people. Brexit should also remind EU of the limits of a superstate and its overreach. Unless, EU reforms to be a more equitable, ears-to-the-ground Union, as well one that appreciates diversity and decentralisation, more exits could follow. The Greek episode was particularly unedifying for its image. EU is a worthy project - "to forget the feuds of a thousand years" - to remain, yet it has to be made and perceived worthy to stop the leavers.