Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed a documentary about Poirot and Miss Marple in honor of Agatha Christie’s September birthday. Tina surprised a bunch of her blog readers by finding a nonfiction book by Daphne du Maurier called Vanishing Cornwall.

I had a different post planned for today, but one of my favorite British YouTubers released a video that feels important to our times. I wrote about J. Draper’s history channel a couple of years ago.

Here’s her latest video:

I learned a lot about Britain in the 1970s. That would have been contemporary for me in the middle grades and high school, but I wasn’t aware of any of this. I would have been completely fascinated by Rock Against Racism but that didn’t reach my small town in Missouri.

Not all of the things that worked in Britain to fight fascism will work in the US. We pay a price for free speech by allowing a lot of room for nasty, hateful speech. Also, in our current climate, some of the most fascist statements are coming from people in power rather than people seeking power.

Still, there are some good ideas here and I’m taking a lot of comfort from the fact that World War II isn’t the only example of defeating fascism that we have to work with.

For another historical (and more American) model that might help, Ezra Klein’s video this week was about parallels between our current times and McCarthyism.