The world is teetering on the brink of a new Dark Age. A few days ago we had the spectacle of Russia holding a summit of the BRICS nations in Kazan, which the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, attended giving it totally unwarranted legitimacy. The 33 countries that sent delegations included the 10 BRICS nations (China, Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, etc.) and others leaning towards autocracy and anti-Westernism. This is while Russia is involved in a bloody war in Europe which has cost the lives of perhaps a million people and displaced another six or seven million. Putin is set on a course of undermining democracy wherever he can and that means virtually everywhere.
Yet despite this, the US Republican party seems to be moving in the same direction. Donald Trump's campaign has accused Democrats of suggesting that Trump is fascist and comparing him to Adolph Hitler. The hypocrisy here is stunning. Social media is full of video clips of Trump claiming that Harris is a radical left-winger, a socialist, a communist, a Marxist and yes, a fascist. This is straight out of the Nazi/Soviet playbook, namely to charge the other side with your own crimes.
Trump's own longest serving, former chief of staff, John Kelly, a four-star general, is on record saying Trump has all the characteristics of a fascist. Authoritarian and nationalist with a strong attraction to dictators. And his own running mate, J D Vance, once said he thought Trump was America’s Hitler!
There is no doubt that Trump sympathises with Putin, Xi Jing Ping and Kim Jong Un in North Korea and would form a close relationship at the expense of Ukraine and Taiwan and plenty of other places too.
The polls remain too close to call. Harris will probably win the popular vote as Hilary Clinton did in 2016, but the complex electoral college system that America insists on using could hand victory to a 78-year-old deranged narcissist.
Trump is a moron according to his first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. These are people with an IQ between 50-70, about that of the average 12-year-old, which is probably accurate listening to Trump's limited schoolyard vocabulary and eye-popping ignorance. The problem is that his supporters are even worse, either imbeciles (IQ 25-50) or idiots (IQ less than 25). If Harris wins she should start by finding out how perhaps 70 million Americans could find themselves believing Trump could run a whelk stall.
Nations that descend into fascism usually do so from a state of desperate poverty and despair. What is happening in the US could be a historic first. A modern, wealthy, prosperous nation - in fact, the wealthiest nation on earth - choosing fascism in part because one of the candidates insists that America, far from being the richest, most powerful on earth, is in fact a “third-world” country and a “garbage can.”
Listen to this:
BREAKING: Trump again calls migrants “garbage” and says America is a dumping ground for them. While Trump tries to distance himself from his praise of Hitler, referring to other humans as literal garbage isn’t helping his cause.— Trump’s Lies (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) October 26, 2024
What do his supporters want? They have untold wealth but it isn’t shared very equally and the irony is that Trump will only make that inequality worse, by delivering tax cuts and lucrative contracts to his billionaire cronies.
If Trump does win, anything could happen and almost certainly US politics will take a great leap to the right, shifting towards fascism. Listen to this for example from a man said to be on the shortlist to become Trump’s Attorney General, America’s most senior law officer:
"We're gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing - anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious."-Benny Johnson, linked to Russian disinfo, with Mike Davis, a possible Trump AG. pic.twitter.com/9C8dCMIQqW— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) October 26, 2024
He's actually smiling about rounding up millions of people and shipping them off somewhere. The American right are not even trying to hide it anymore.
The New York Times had this on its front page yesterday:
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) October 27, 2024
Let’s be honest, the two global conflicts in the last century were won because the USA, with its massive economic and military power, came in on our side. The Second World War in particular was between good and evil and no other country possessed the wealth and resources to fight large-scale conflicts in Europe and the Pacific. Had it not been for the USA, fascism could easily have triumphed.
Now think about how we would cope if America itself became fascist or supported the aims of dictators and regimes that were fascist. What would we or the EU do to deter Russia or China, both with well-known territorial ambitions? Europe has left it too late to become self-sufficient in defence and I would doubt we would ever be able to defeat the two-thirds of the world that had succumbed to fascism and autocracy in any case.
Are we about to learn how fragile democracy is when facing tyrants like Putin? I fear we might.
