Jim Makin's June 12 letter, "EU pullout would lower wages," shows a hazy knowledge of just about everything. To enumerate where he is in error:
1. Benito Mussolini did not come to power by listening to electorates; he did it by the fascist "March on Rome" in 1922 when he took power by force. Adolf Hitler certainly had popular support after the vindictive Treaty of Versailles and the insane inflation of the 1920s. However, the Germans did not realize — until it was too late — that Hitler actually wanted a war to establish world hegemony.
In this respect Hitler's "popular support" differed from, say, FDR's in the United States or British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's in postwar Britain in that they concealed nothing from the electorates. The Germans were absolutely misguided to follow the Nazi Pied Piper down the garden path to utter ruin, but to blame this on the "sadism and xenophobia" of the German lower middle class is ridiculous.
2. If Makin cannot see the connection between uncontrolled immigration and lack of green spaces, then he has a woefully hazy knowledge of demographics, land use and housing policy, as well as history. Would he perhaps care to comment on what the U.S. is facing right now with thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into its border states?
3. UKIP leader Nigel Farage does not "swill" champagne. He is in fact a beer drinker and is not surrounded by rich elites. This is exactly what I mean by casting cheap slurs rather than facing the issues.
4. Nobody in UKIP wants to "destroy" the European Union; the EU is doing a pretty good job of it by itself. The United Kingdom does not need to pay vast amounts of money into Brussels' coffers to be a member of what was originally advertised as a trading bloc and not what it has become — a half-baked political project. In this respect it resembles Hitler's concealment of his ultimate aims.
5. If the U.K. did leave the EU, the minimum wage would certainly not fall. This is just another scare tactic by people who think they know better than the ordinary man.
6. As U.S. President Barack Obama has expressed his august displeasure at the prospect of the U.K. leaving the EU, how exactly would this make us a "51st state" of the U.S.? The answer is that it wouldn't. It is just another scare tactic.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.