Spoilers for the HBO miniseries Years and Years here, though really, you’re probably better off not watching it.
Did you know that it is in fact very easy to dismantle an authoritarian state* with a concentration camp system? All you have to do is show the police that refugees are living in squalid, disease-infested concentration camps and they’ll just go right ahead and arrest the Prime Minister. Show the populace some videos of the camps and everything will be fine, they’ll immediately turn on the state. I know because the HBO miniseries Years and Years told me so!
It also told me that people in the UK aren’t really authoritarianists, deep down—they do some crimes against humanity because their brother died helping a refugee get to the UK, or because they didn’t want to talk to the checkout lady at the Tesco, or because they didn’t really understand the consequences of voting for the shadily funded lady who says a swear.
There’s also a whole bunch of Black Mirror techno stuff that I’m not going to touch because I can’t get over the ending of this series! A return to normalcy, an authoritarian state toppled, because of some videos of refugees behind fencing! What!
Yes, yes, there’s some gesturing in the final couple scenes of the series toward the need for constant vigilance against demagoguery, but it really is that simple in Russell T. Davies’ world. The police in this world are not an arm of the authoritarian state, but instead a force that is somehow not comprised entirely of rabid adherents to the ethnic cleansing cause—or maybe it was, but then they decided not to be? There’s essentially one line that explains why the mostly privatized police—again, historically the building blocks of authoritarian states—suddenly decided to turn against against their fellows.
Maybe this really is the furthest authoritarianism would get in the UK. The Brexit vote might indicate otherwise, but I’m not about to generalize about a nation I haven’t been to since 2012.
In America, though, we already have a concentration camp system containing thousands of asylum seekers. We have already seen the photos, the videos; we have heard the cries of children. We have knowledge of the deaths occurring in these camps, the sexual assaults, the general atmosphere of fear. ICE, which each passing day bears more and more resemblance to totalitarian police forces, is taking children off the streets and detaining them.
And nothing has happened. No politician has suffered any real negative consequences. The camps are still operational. Greater cruelties are in store. Americans, to our everlasting shame, have not risen up en masse to demand the arrest of the President and whoever’s left of his cabinet for crimes against humanity.
I suppose it would have been too much of a downer ending to show that a police force under control of an authoritarian demagogue of a leader will only ever move to further consolidate power and brutalize non-Party members, or to show that the enablers of authoritarianism not only do not have “good” reasons but in fact only require the barest excuse to latch onto authoritarian activities.
We already live in a downer ending. We have police forces that suffer no consequences when their bullets just happen to pierce the necks of other people (of their own accord!), and news outlets that continuously allow the police to dictate their reporting on these incidents. Hundreds of active law enforcement officials gather in appallingly racist Facebook groups. This is not a problem that solves itself, no matter how many times we’re told that “it’s just a few bad apples.”
It feels like a strange kind of lie, the Years and Years finale. The kind you tell children: Just beware the monsters, and you’ll be all right. The solution to an institutional crisis lies in the institutions themselves. It’s just a few bad apples.
What Years and Years seems to forget is the ending of that aphorism: A few bad apples spoil the barrel.
*I hesitate to call this fascism because the leader—even if she is just a patsy—is a woman, and fascism tends to be very strict about gender roles and is not overly fond of women in general.