Brexit themselves invite Nazi comparisons

I usually avoid echoing memes which have gained wide currency. However, there seems to have been a concerted counter-attack by Nigel Farage's fan club to people on Facebook posting obvious comparisons between the orchestrated disrespect shown by the Brexit Party to the European Parliament and the disrespect shown by a section of the Nazi party to the Reichstag. The photographic evidence is clear:

Brexit party 2019. Nazi party 1930. Turning their backs to democracy.

as is the documentary evidence. Goebbels' strategy as set out in Der Angriff, his journal of propaganda, is strikingly similar to Farage's:

We are an anti-parliamentarian party [...] We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us. If we succeed in getting sixty or seventy of our party’s agitators and organizers elected to the various parliaments, the state itself will pay for our fighting organization.

Phrases such as "Remainers have lost the plot" and "it shows disrespect to the victims of Nazi atrocities [to compare Farage to Goebbels]" abound on Facebook. What these people are blind to is Brexit's clearly deliberate aping of the Nazi stunt. Is there another recorded instance of this offensive gesture in a parliament chamber?

Liberal Democrats do not believe in the House of Lords as presently constituted. However, our peers work within the system constitutionally to change it. Similarly, we are opposed to the Police And Crime Commissioner system, but while it is in operation we stand candidates to make the best of it. Even Sinn Fein, opposed as they are to Westminster's rule over Northern Ireland, do not make a hooligan demonstration in the Palace of Westminster: their MPs merely stay away.

This is not the first borrowing of Nazi iconography by Nigel Farage. His racist - and misleading - "immigrant threat" poster of 2016 echoes images from a Nazi propaganda film. His rhetoric, too, with his appeal to the common man deceived by those in power, could come straight from the Goebbels play-book.

Why does he do it? Partly because it works, just as Tim Bell was inspired by the Nazi machine in his promotion of Margaret Thatcher, but also, I suggest, to induce the obvious reaction by his opponents on social media. Look at these rabid Remainers, he seems to be saying, how can they compare me, your friend in the public bar who is only fighting for your freedom, with the monsters who enslaved and slaughtered millions? Why, I even welcome Jews to my party!

Actually, I have always thought Farage more like the comic opera figure of Mussolini than the more obviously evil Hitler. Fascist Italy, before the pact with Hitler, had no death camps and was not constitutionally anti-Semitic. It was still, however, socially repressive and undemocratic. Farage shares the fascist contempt for elected representatives and the intelligentsia. A Faragist Britain may not be genocidal, but it would be conformist, without friends as neighbours and, except for the self-appointed elite, impoverished.