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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 10, 2023; see related February 17, 2017 two-part article: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—I am giving myself the privilege of reading Orwell in Spain, the Penguin Classics edition of Homage to Catalonia by Eric Blair of the immortal pseudonym George Orwell and one of the original antifascists, bookended by a number of relevant letters written by Orwell and those in his circles and with context from editor Peter Davison throughout.  The volume also includes occasional files from archives of the Soviets, who were targeting Orwell, his wife, and his other comrades for a future show-trial just as Orwell and his wife slipped out of Spain; some of his comrades were not so fortunate as he by far.

Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 in the spirit of pitching in for the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of the Spanish Republic, supported by numerous liberal and leftist volunteers from around the world and ostensibly supported by dictator Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union against General Francisco Franco’s fascists, in turn supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  For his efforts, Orwell took a bullet through the neck but survived that and many other hardships, acquitting himself well in having genuinely sacrificed for a cause worthy of such sacrifice, but one that was undermined in part by Spain’s supposed ally, the Soviet Union, whose agents in Spain often focused on settling scores within the international leftist/socialist/communist movement and who turned on many of their supposed allies to engage in purges and trials based on lies and gaslighting.  This would be a main reason that the Republic would fall completely to Franco’s fascist Nationalists in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Hitchens on Orwell, Ringing with Urgent Relevance for the Present

As usual, the late legend and one of the few humans who could rightly be described to be at least a partial heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, provides an introduction to Orwell in Spain that is as mind-blowing as it is well-written and pithy (the introduction was also published around the same time as Orwell in Spain as an essay in The Los Angeles Times).  Hitchens’ essay on his hero Orwell’s experiences in Spain includes some points that hit all too close to home in the here-and-now:

The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag heap of slander and falsification.  Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory.  ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all.  The recent opening of communist records in Moscow and of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937.  Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain.  Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his firsthand observations, he nonetheless became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow.  The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals,’ only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Hitchens continues later in his introduction:

…‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments.  Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century,’ the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer.  He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset — speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury.  It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously.  ‘All I have is a voice,’ wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939,’ ‘To undo the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain … And the lie of Authority.’  All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing and the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another.  The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

Let’s let that sink in: it is not the generally bad-faith “blatant lies of authority” that is “the ultimate foe,” but the “tacit or overt collusion between” those “blatant lies of authority” and that authority on one side with the “’folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves” and those clever people on the other.  As a consistent antifascist, Hitchens himself often energetically dedicated himself to taking on such “clever people:” intellectuals and leaders who should know and act better but in their actions still give aid and comfort to the “blatant lies of authority,” often unintentionally making good faith yet terrible arguments as “useful idiots” (to borrow the phrase attributed to Lenin, perhaps falsely) but other times lying deliberately (hello Ted Cruz).  Thus, Hitchens happily took on fellow leftist intelligentsia members and activists like George Galloway, Julian Assange, and Noam Chomsky (almost?) as fiercely as he critiqued Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Kim Jong-il.

Fighting the Rewriting of History from 1937 to 2023

For the Stalinists and their apologists Orwell stood up against (and, indeed, for the fascists of that era as well), the fastidious, near-robotic repetition of baseless lies and disinformation over and over and over again served to give reality to such “alternative facts,” to borrow former Trumpist mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway’s Trumpian phrase.  And, of course, it is altogether fitting to quote that disgraced woman—her own daughter and now former husband even very publicly more honorably refused to support Trump’s lies and hers—because what is terrifying my soul even as I write part of this is that the Trumpist movement—now one of the two largest political factions in the United States of American in 2023—is very much successfully engaging in that tactic Orwell dedicated much of his writing to combatting, a tactic used by the people Orwell spent much of life fighting.

A stark example is the recent Ohio Republican Jim Jordan-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the so-called “Durham Report”  and the related investigation of Trump’s Justice Department-appointed Special Counsel John Durham’s pathetic, embarrassing, and failed attempt to find proof that the U.S. government’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties and 2016 election interference was a baseless, politically-motivated witch hunt; this in and of itself is gaslighting and “hypocrisy” in the extreme, as the opposite is true, a truth I spent years of research and writing on in detail.  Short of ending in appalling violence, is there anything more politically Stalinist than an investigation ordered in bad-faith and/or extreme delusion to smear and undermine a good-faith investigation into topics most deserving of investigation, that then twists the results of the failed counter investigation to continue to make claims wholly unsubstantiated by reality??  In this vein, Republicans even spitefully, shamelessly, and wholly inappropriately censured—censured!—Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) the same day as the Durham hearing for his work against Trump on impeachment and his efforts to get answers on Trump-Russia, a ridiculous act of distraction from their embarrassing failure of a Durham hearing and in spirit also a pure act of abusive political retaliation: only five members of the House were censured in all the twentieth century and Schiff is only the third member of the House of Representatives this century and only the twenty-fifth member of the House in all of U.S. history to be censured, an act that is for generally serious offenses, including violence or incitement to violence, sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, and—at the time of the Civil War (1861-1865)—supporting the rebel “Confederacy.”

To go back to Durham and his probe, former Special Counsel Durham seems to be at least a partly honorable fool.  On the one hand, Durham seems to incorrectly accept as articles of faith that the Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probes were baseless political hit jobs (the first in his deluded mind concocted by the Clintons) and that there is nothing to Trump-Russia to the degree that he is unaware of many of the facts and much of the evidence and context surrounding team Trump’s deeply troubling ties to Russia, his perspective warped enough to believe in the nonsense and/or gaslighting his higher-ups—including then Attorney General Bill Barr—and others fed him and that he fed himself: during the Judiciary Committee hearing, I heard him tell Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) that he did not think Barr’s infamous memo had “blatantly mischaracterized” the Mueller report, which it clearly and obviously very much did, even according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself.  On the other hand, Durham more or less carried out an investigation that at least mostly adhered to rules and the law within the confines of his warped worldview even as that worldview was biased, selective, and inaccurate when it came to the issues between Trump and Russia, and that is why his results were so limited along with the reality that the evidence he sought didn’t exist because the investigation’s premises were false.

Both those who put Durham in place as Special Counsel and the rest of the Trump faithful were hoping as much as possible over the course of the four years of the Durham probe of to undermine investigations into Trump, playing politics with legitimate, serious investigations. Durham’s disappointing results—0 for 2 on prosecutions that went to trial, defeated twice by unanimous juries that returned “not guilty” verdicts and one plea deal with no trial for an FBI employee doctoring an e-mail who was determined by the presiding judge not to have acted with any political bias (confirming the previous findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s far more credible report) and who only received a year of probation—speak volumes about Durham’s probe’s credibility despite the spin of his “report” and show just how baseless was his effort to show that the Biden Administration Department of Justice was weaponized as a tool of political persecution.  In the end, it was Durham’s and Barr’s own conduct that actually revealed it was the Trump Administration Department of Justice that fell into being weaponized, yet Jordan, Trump, and many other Republicans and “useful idiots” insist on persisting in gaslighting or making unsubstantiated arguments with their original unsubstantiated claims even after Durham’s probe failed to prove them (ironically, it seems the probe did find enough evidence of possible financial criminal wrongdoing involving Trump that the Durham probe was forced to launch a criminal investigation into that, which, unsurprisingly, we have heard very little about…).

And herein is one of the more horrific aspects of this Jordan’s show-hearing that should be giving us all trouble sleeping at night: some of the Republicans on Jordan’s committee, most notably the vile Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), are furious at Durham not for the degree to which he was inaccurate, ignorant, or possibly dishonest but for the degree to which he did not go into full Stalinist show-trial mode because he did not run wild with lies and falsehoods but, rather, still operated within some level of orbit of reality.

To be clear, this hearing is not a Stalinist show-trial, and does not carry the consequences of them.  But they do share, on the part of today’s Republicans and their accomplices on one hand and the those of the Stalinists and their accomplices of yesteryear on the other, absolute contempt for truth and justice and an absolute commitment to pursuing the party line relentlessly.  And both Orwell’s and Hitchens’s words rang loudly in my mind throughout my viewing of the hearing as I digested it in terror, far more profoundly for having recently read certain pages of Orwell in Spain.

The gaslighting is also strong with the claim that Trump is being persecuted unfairly and Hunter Biden might get off with a “sweetheart deal” should a submitted plea deal between Hunter and the government be approved, which was reported the day before the Durham hearing and Schiff censure.  Again, the opposite is true: people in a position similar to Hunter Biden when it comes to gun possession while being an addict are rarely criminally charged or see jail time, as are first-time offenders in terms of the tax violations he had committed and has since paid off his debts in relation to, including back taxes and penalties.  If anything, his treatment has been harsher because he is Joe Biden’s son and the government is going out of its way to avoid any credible suggestion that the son of the sitting president is being treated lightly while the former president, Trump, is not; and, if anything, Trump has been treated with an extraordinarily light touch, given the nature and severity of his crimes and the more than two-years’ worth of blatant obstruction of justice committed by Trump to further his crimes.  The gaslighting only becomes even more ludicrous when Trump’s defenders claims there is a “two-tiered” system of justice, with the Trumps of the world being the victims, a deeply “insulting” claim coming from many white Republicans who have been loath to acknowledge the very real systemic racial disparities in the American criminal justice system—let alone do anything about them—but now whine for “justice” (i.e., impunity and immunity) for Trump.

The gaslighting is also front-and-center when Trump’s insanely ridiculous classified documents case for which he has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith is claimed to be equivalent or close to the Biden classified documents case or Hillary Clinton’s (conspicuously omitting Pence’s case, which is pretty similar to Biden’s), all the other cases including Clinton’s case were dramatically different especially regarding intent and when the Biden/Pence examples only turned up a comparatively small number of documents which were promptly returned and both of them agreed rapidly to have their respective locations searched, bearing no resemblance to Trump’s obstructionist and gaslighting conduct and the severity of the material at issue.

And those are merely a few current examples…

Orwell and His “Power of Facing”: A Ghostbuster to the Gaslighting Ghosts of Nazism and Stalinism Rearing their Ghastly Heads Today

We fought a world war some eight decades ago against a totalitarian fascism that I have previously noted gaslit reality to the point of being at war with reality itself, and we triumphed some four-and-a-half decades later against a Soviet totalitarian communism that similarly gaslit reality and also, like the Nazis it defended its homeland against in the earlier world war, used disinformation as a preferred weapon of choice in its losing ideological struggle against the capitalist democratic West.

After the West’s victories in World War II and the Cold War, how depressing is it, then, that, in 2023 the West finds itself embroiled both internally and externally with major forces practicing and embodying much of the same spirit of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany when it comes to waging new wars on reality, with its biggest centers of gravity in Putin’s fascist Russia—resurrecting the Soviet war on reality as the successor state to the Soviet Union—and in the Trumpist fascist movement and its media and political allies within the West (if you doubt the appropriateness of the label fascist for Trump or Putin, read my two-parter [part I and part II] and realize that was written well before the violence of January 6, 2021 or the massively increased levels of violence and war crimes Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine since February 24, 2022).  While the Chinese Communist Party helms a Chinese state that is increasingly totalitarian under the leadership of Xi Jinping and also embraces a war on reality, it is not nearly as aggressive with this tactic on the international stage as Russia, thus, China’s current relative restraint means its threat to the West is, for now at least, far less potent than that of both Russia and Trump as it is Russia that routinely engages in electoral and political interference in the West and Trump’s brand of fascism and its like-minded allies are a clear and present danger within the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, with fascists having real chances of gaining political power—even the U.S. presidency once again, though I do not believe they will succeed in this coming American election in 2024.  Other countries, such as France and Italy, are far more vulnerable, and some, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Israel, are veering hard in that direction.  Indeed, while I have been warning of this possibility since just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and even earlier in 2016, it brings little comfort to see the modern versions of fascism and their accompanying wars on reality staring us down directly in the face while also staring deeply into the past at horrors that we had vanquished twice in living memory, drawing power from their zombie-Frankenstein cousins from the Cold War and World War II.

Orwell would truly be rolling over in his grave were he aware of what was happening today, after so much blood and toil and sacrifice in the twentieth century to defeat fascist and communist regimes, to transcend their lies and assault against reality, and yet, he could take comfort in his words standing the test of time, not only validating his prescient view of past evils, but that his words could still be so useful and relevant today.  Yes, this is bittersweet, for we should have transcended those phantoms from past eras, but at least we have in Orwell the perfect guide to fighting these nefarious forces, that honesty, reality, truth, persistence, and simple eloquence can confront the enemy and defeat their lies, sometimes even without the forces of arms.  Orwell did risk life and limb (and was even shot) in Spain against Franco’s fascists (and Soviet agents), but it was in his writing that he made his largest contributions in the fight for freedom against fascism and communism.  Like Orwell and like his admirer and perhaps his heir Hitchens, we can and must be unflinching in the face of the gaslighting of Trump and Putin and their allies who constantly assert “that two and two are five” and that things that happened “never happened” (from the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection—team Trump claiming “it was Antifa”—to the Russian military torturing and executing civilians in Ukraine—Putin saying, ludicrously, that: “The Russian army does not strike at civilian facilities. There is no need for that.”).  Though Orwell had “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he never gave up and never ceased articulating the truth through his brave and, it seems, timeless writing.

As Hitchens wrote in his magisterial and pithy Why Orwell Matters:

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’  Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’.  It’s oddly well put.  A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.  So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’.  The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’.  Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.  The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

In the spirit of Orwell and (even if to a somewhat lesser degree) Hitchens, we must wield a similar “power of facing” in the face of the fascisms of Trump, Putin, and their lesser emulators.  In particular, the “clever people” and “progressive intellectuals” that Hitchens and Orwell single out who “tell themselves” Auden’s “’folded’ lies” that, when in “tacit or overt collusion” with “the blatant lies of authority,” become “the ultimate foe.”

Prominent “useful idiot” fools on such matters include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Briahna Joy Grey, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey, Caitlin Johnstone, Katie Halper, RFK Jr., Russell Brand, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Rogan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, Cornell West, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Scott Ritter, even Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s own rather less impressive brother) and others who fancy themselves public figures displaying freethinking but who ultimately do little more on these matters than to give aid and comfort to fascism and even colonialism and imperialism in the name of supposed “pacificism” or “free speech.”  Those people and their ilk make their arguments in ways that usually show they have little understanding of peace or the U.S. Constitution.  In particular, they often keep parroting debunked Kremlin talking points about Western “escalation” and NATO expansion, which I have debunked myself repeatedly.  Or they will conflate moderation of disinformation on private platforms with unconstitutional “censorship.”  Orwell has the best of possible responses to the first group, the so-called “pacifists,” here in his perfect essay from 1942 “Pacifism and the War” in which he noted that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Orwell therein further elucidated his views:

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’.  The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda.  Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

He added: “My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking” and that “It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.”  Better descriptions of that crowd’s heirs in the present cannot be written, and, as before in Orwell’s day, many of those in this crowd today are often caught “back-scratching” and “arse-licking” each other in echo chambers.  To listen to them, rather than blatant Russian imperialism and colonialism, the greater evils are supposedly the Western exercise of power in daring to aid a Ukraine that, they will stress, has been dominated by and even been part of Russia for centuries (as if that should matter when Ukrainians themselves have earned their freedom and independence, recognized by formal treaty repeatedly by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union) and, even more so, in asserting either that there is, in fact, a moral dimension to supporting Ukraine or a false equivalence in equating Russia’s exercise and practice of its power in comparison with the America’s and the West’s: whether knowingly or unknowingly, these supposed and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” engage in behavior that dismisses, excuses, deflects from, or even advances Russian imperialism and its supporting false narratives. 

There can be but one course of action against today’s “intellectual” descendants of Orwell’s critics and enemies among the intelligentsia, and it must be that we especially utilize our “power of facing” to face them because they are usually the ones weakening the front against today’s fascists without claiming to actually be “for” those fascists, they are the ones who might persuade those with less moral discernment who would never think of consciously siding with fascists and who would be susceptible to low-hanging fruit of arguments relying on “free speech” and “peace” that objectively advance bad-faith disinformation and war against those fighting for their actual freedom.  And perhaps, with relentless opposition to their nonsense, some may even realize their folly and find their own “power of facing” directed back at themselves even though this may “put …[their] own position or preference to the test.”

Hitchens opens his introduction to Orwell in Spain with following two magnificent paragraphs:

The grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur.  He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, ‘right’.  He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war.  He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization.  And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.

He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist.  He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state.  Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines.  He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective ‘Orwellian’ is understood widely and – this has its significance – ambivalently.  To describe a situation as ‘Orwellian’ is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism.  To call a person ‘Orwellian’ is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.

We don’t have to take a bullet in the neck like Orwell did in Spain in 1937, but the least we can do is call out the lies, disinformation, and misinformation religiously in the cause of reality, as Orwell seems to have pretty much always done and Hitchens mostly did (even when Hitch Hitch erred—most notably on Iraq—he usually did so for principled and admirable reasons).  We can, sadly, fall into either of the definitions Hitchens enumerates for “Orwellian,” but we must strive to be his latter definition and we can do so by calling out the imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism of today as Orwell did for the versions in his lifetime.  We can also be sure that Orwell’s stances on Trump, Putin, and their movements and allies would not be doubt were he alive today.

Herein, then, has not been any kind of comprehensive catalogue of Trumpist and Putinist attempts to rewrite history—those of you following these stories are all too familiar with too many of those examples—but a clarion call to honor the spirit of those two writers departed from us, whose careers were mostly dedicated to opposition to lies but fidelity to the truth should inspires us even if we, too, feel frightened like Orwell because we have “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell consistently and unflinchingly spoke truth to power with “a power of facing unpleasant facts” and so must we.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 25, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is one of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s May 23 Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the May 23 Small Wars Journal article:

• May 23: A Terrifying Comparison Between Putin and Stalin
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

SILVER SPRING—In trying other times to convey the emotion and time-span of the struggles highlighted herein, in the past I have used a particular excerpt from a particular poem and will reuse it here because it is terribly apt and revealing, especially when noting the date:

Great Russia: [i.e., Russia]

Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten? I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?

Little Russia: [i.e., Ukraine]

I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.

Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.

I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,

Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.

Do not think that you are my master:

Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.

A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia, 1762 by Semen Divovych, Ukrainian Cossack scribe and poet

As the above quote demonstrates, for centuries, Ukrainians have fought for their freedom and to preserve their identity against an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist Russia (something I have discussed at length before). Below is a brief (not by any means comprehensive) history of Russian and Soviet mass atrocities carried out in what are now the modern borders of Ukraine.

Imperial Russia had control over Ukraine’s east for far a longer time than its west (part of that not even coming under Russian control until the mid-twentieth century), and the tsarist era saw systematic top-down suppression of Ukrainian as a language and identity (some Ukrainians even adopting Russian to suffer less discrimination) as well as suppression of the Muslim Crimean Tatars that was so bad that a large majority fled Crimea, leaving the Tatars who remained a minority in the face of colonialist settling of Russians and others in Crimea and other areas within Ukraine’s current borders (especially the Donbas), just some of the tsarist policies collectively known as “Russification.”

A free Ukrainian state finally emerged from the collapse of Imperial Russia at the end of World War I, only to be caught up in a number of conflicts, including the Russian Civil War; when the fighting was over after years of killing in Ukraine, Ukraine’s brief independence had been snuffed out by the time it was integrated as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, in 1922 (and far from willingly).

The Soviet era would see even more dramatic demographic shifts. 

A decade after being forcibly integrated into the USSR, in the face of both maintaining Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s policy of collectivization of farming, Stalin took what was a terrible situation with a regional famine and specifically directed and aggravated that famine towards Ukraine, killing millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 through starvation and its accompanying diseases in the man-made genocidal disaster that has come to be known as the Holodomor (the most detailed estimate approximates 3.9 million dead).  During this genocidal famine, Russians were resettled into some areas where Ukrainians had been starved to death or sent off to gulags, particularly in the east and south, so that the land could still be worked and yield harvests.  As the Donbas area in particular was a center of major industrialization, Russian and other Soviet migration to that region was considerable in this period. 

Understandably, when German armies came rolling through Ukraine in 1941, many Ukrainians with little love for Stalin, Russia, or the Soviets and their Union saw an opportunity in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation.  But the Nazis were uninterested in Ukrainian nationalism, so, not long after their invasion of the Soviet Union, they turned on their Ukrainian allies after some of them—Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B—proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state.  Bandera some of his Ukrainian nationalists were caught up in the crackdown, but some of the rest fought the Nazi invaders, even as their old enemies, the Soviets, eventually came back during their great counteroffensive against Hitler’s armies.

Thus, the OUN-B fought the Nazis and Soviets at once (until the former were driven out), eventually forming alongside others the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and fighting a bitter guerilla war against the Soviets that lasted until 1954, the same year Khrushchev symbolically gifted Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, though some tiny numbers of insurgents continued resistance for years after.  Not even including the fighting with the Nazis, some 150,000 Ukrainians—insurgents and civilians—were killed in combat by the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign against—as the Soviets blanketly called all insurgents—the “Banderites,” after Bandera (more on that by me here). 

There was so much killing and depopulation during World War II by the Nazis and Soviets in Ukraine that the people of the Ukrainian SSR suffered one of the highest casualty totals of the war both in proportionate terms and absolutely (about 6.85 million dead, some 16.3% of the total population in the relatively recent accounting of one Russian historian).  Additionally, the Germans deported some 2.4 million people from within Ukraine to work in Germany as forced slave labor (of whom, by some estimates, 400,000-450,000 died from the brutal conditions).  Then, when the Soviets retook Ukraine and other Soviet territory occupied by Hitler’s forces, large parts of populations that had collaborators in their midst or were merely suspected by paranoid authorities of having collaborated or harbored collaborators (or even just because they were seen as troublesome “foreign” elements) were deported to Soviet Central Asia or Siberia under appalling conditions that saw many of those deportees perish.  The deported included all of the Crimean Tatars (estimates range, but quite roughly 200,000) in just a few days in 1944 on the grounds that they had, en masse, collaborated with the Nazis.  In reality, only a small percentage actually had, and the Soviet government even admitted in 1967 that the accusations were false (I did not even realize I was writing this section on the anniversary of the beginning of this genocidal deportation, May 18).  Many ethnic Ukrainians were also deported by the Soviets from Ukraine (over 200,000 from western Ukraine alone, where UPA was most popular).

Few Russians are likely aware of the supremely sick irony of Putin pushing an expansionist, imperialist, colonialist war on Ukraine to reintegrate ethnic Russian populations back into Russia considering those populations mainly came to be in Ukraine’s south and east because tsarist and/or Soviet-engineered oppression, genocide, famine, mass killing, and mass deportations of Ukrainians and Tatars occurred alongside colonialist population transfers of Russians into Ukraine, settled often on the literal blood and bones of the previous inhabitants. 

Apparently true to its horrific legacy, Russian in this the current war has been accused by Ukraine of forcibly deporting some 1.2 million Ukrainians, including well over 200,000 children, to Russia, actions that can only bring back nightmare memories of the past horrors described above (on May 23, Ukraine updated the accusation to a total of 1.4 million Ukrainians, including over 240,000 children).

Thus, Ukrainians’ resistance to Russian imperialism, whether in the past or today, is not inspired by Western support or American manipulation into becoming “proxies” of the U.S., but a deep, lived experience passed on from generation to generation of being at the receiving end of a long history of atrocities that, sadly, in part defines what it means to be Ukrainian.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, May 23, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); this is the first of a series of articles excerpted and/or adapted from Brian’s same-day Small Wars Journal article, Bungling the Prewar and First Moves in Finland 1939 and Ukraine 2022: A Comedy of Errors for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, Respectively, his deep-dive analysis on the parallels between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War that was inspired by his reading the beginning of one of the definitive English accounts of this war—William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991, 283 pages; for sourcing, assume all uncited information comes from Trotter’s book but quotes will be given a page number or numbers in parentheses and anything from another source an external a link; in some instances, when I have written in detail about something, I may link to my own work, in which you can find many external sources backing up what has been stated). This conflict is especially timely as Finland seeks to join NATO in light of Russia’s recent imperialist aggression.

Other articles excerpted and/or adapted from the Small Wars Journal article:

• May 25: A Brief History of Russian and Soviet Genocides, Mass Deportations, and Other Atrocities in Ukraine
• May 31: “Banderites”: What Russia Really Means When It Calls Ukraine Nazi and Fascist
• June 2: How Delusions of Phantom Fascists Duped Stalin in 1939 and Putin in 2022
• June 5: Moscow’s 1939 Finland Hubris Repeats Itself in Ukraine in 2022
• June 7: A Flurry of Telling Parallels Between the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish Winter War and Russia’s 2022 Ukraine War

Location, Location, Location: Geopolitics in Eastern Europe for Stalin (and Putin)

Setting the Stage

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—On the first page of the first chapter, geography is, appropriately, discussed.  Like Ukraine’s plains, the Karelian Isthmus that connects Finland historically to St. Petersburg—the tsarist capital since the time of Peter the Great, but renamed Petrograd during World War I, then Leningrad in the Soviet era, after Vladimir Lenin’s death—has been a pathway for invaders from both directions.   In the case of the isthmus, this path was into and out of Russia and Asia on one side and Europe and Scandinavia on the other, and controlling such pathways was deemed vital to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s as it is also by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the twenty-first century.  Even in the 1930s, driving across the Isthmus from Finland’s border to Leningrad was simply a matter of a few hours (just thirty-two kilometers to its limits).

With Hitler’s outright and frothing hostility to the ideology of communism and to the Slavic people as a whole, and, to Russia’s West there being Imperial Japan (also intensely hostile to communism and expanding near Russia’s Far East), Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin eyed ostensibly neutral Finland quite nervously: though the Russian tsars ruled over Finland for a little over a century after the Napoleonic Wars, in the waning days of the Tsarist Russian Empire, Finns looked to overthrow an increasingly repressive Russian rule during World War I, some 2,000 Finns collaborating with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Germany during the war I and serving in their own unit in the Kaiser’s Imperial German Army.  Just days after the 1917 October/Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia—in which Lenin and his communists seized power in Petrograd—Finland declared independence and Lenin was too distracted by bigger problems to not acquiesce three weeks later.  Despite the efforts of Finnish communist with newly-Soviet Russian help to hold and expand power in Finland, during the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the Finnish communists were crushed by the opposing Finnish Whites with the help of forces from Imperial Germany.  Not long after, the Finns would allow anti-Bolshevik Russian and British forces to launch attacks against Russian communists during the Russian Civil War, though the communists under Lenin would prevail in the conflict.  He and his regime were bitter about losing Finland, and felt at some future point it could be brought back into the fold with little effort.

Some two decades later, with Stalin firmly in power and Lenin long dead, the new Soviet leader and his circle were concerned about another German threat: Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and that the Nazi Führer would be able to coerce a weak, unaligned Finland into being a base for a German invasion of the Soviet Union (Soviet Russia had coerced other parts of what was Russia’s disintegrating Empire into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the USSR) aimed at nearby and very vulnerable Leningrad, one of the USSR’s indispensable urban centers.  The World War I-/Russian Revolution-/Russian Civil War-era multiple direct collaborations between Finnish and German forces against Tsarist Russia and both Russian and Finnish communists only made this concern more acute in the eyes of the communist Soviets.

Rather than some obsession with dominating and controlling Finland, Stalin seemed mostly concerned with looming Nazi expansionism (hardly an unfounded threat, as history would prove) and saw Finland’s geography in relation to Soviet territory and especially the all-important Leningrad as an unacceptable risk under the status quo in 1938.

Aggressive Negotiations

Thus, in April of that year, Stalin had his agents approach Finland with his security concerns.  Unlike in 2022 with Putin and his “concerns” about Ukraine and NATO, Nazi Germany was one of the most evil regimes in world history and extremely expansionist as well as warmongering.  And today, we know in hindsight (and, indeed, many at the time felt this too, including Stalin, who was off by just a few years) that Hitler very much had designs of conquest and subjugation for the Soviet Union and the Slavic peoples.

Considering all this, public professions of neutrality from Finland, even if sincere by the Finns, did little to comfort Stalin; he knew if Hitler were to try to force Finland into the Nazi German Reich, Finland would not be able to put up much resistance and Hitler could use Finland, then, as a base from which to attack the USSR, or, even without formal conquest, could compel Finland into an alliance with Germany and force it to support an attack or join in an attack against the Soviets.

But Finland possessed a number of worthless, unpopulated islands—used only by Finnish fisherman during summer—that provided excellent defensive positions for the naval approaches to Leningrad, and Stalin’s folks inquired about the possibility of Finland ceding or leasing the islands to the Soviet Union in order to expand its security perimeter.

Finland flat-out rejected the idea.

Almost a year later, in March 1939, the Soviets came back, offering some slightly-disputed Karelian borderlands in exchange for a thirty-year lease of five Islands near Leningrad.  Considering the climate of 1939, this was quite a reasonable offer, based on realistic, pressing security concerns on the part of Stalin in light of a massive threat coming from, of all people, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Reich (again, contrast today with NATO’s defensive alliance led by U.S. President Joe Biden: needless to say, nowhere near equivalents; and Ukraine’s borders with Russia now are nowhere near as close as Finland’s was to a one of the largest and most vulnerable cities of concern for the Soviets, meaning there is nothing like a Leningrad-equivalent less than three-dozen kilometers away or even close to that distance).

The man who would come to lead Finland’s military through the war, Gustav Mannerheim, felt this deal was entirely reasonable, knowing how weak and ill-supplied his Finnish Army was (it did not have a single working anti-tank gun at this time).  He was already a legend at the time: a distinguished veteran of high rank during World War I, the culmination of his service for the tsar in the last few decades of the existence the Russian Empire of which Finland was then still a part; the leader of the anticommunist Finnish Whites who led them to victory in their brief civil war against the Finnish Reds; and at this point in 1939, the head of the Finnish government’s Defense Council.

But Mannerheim was ignored by the Finnish political leadership, along with the Soviet Union’s offers.  Still, the Soviets kept pressuring Finland over the ensuing weeks and felt themselves pressured in this spring of 1939, eyeing Nazi Germany nervously.

Hitler was indeed hostile, but was more focused for the moment on Central Europe, so the two enemies were able to come to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in in August 1939, Hitler gobbling up western Poland soon after followed by Stalin gobbling up eastern Poland.  Seeing the writing on the wall, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—each responding to invitations from late September through early October from the Soviets—soon after arrived in Moscow and would sign separate agreements making them de facto vassal satellite states of the Soviet Union, their freedom reluctantly signed away to avoid bloodshed faced with what they saw as a foregone conclusion.

Now, it was Finland’s turn.  On October 12, Stalin put forward his demands to a high-level Finnish delegation that had been summoned to Moscow, explaining he could not tolerate Leningrad being so vulnerable by land and sea in the current climate.  Therefore, he insisted on: a relatively large cessation of territory in the Karelian Isthmus approaching Leningrad; the destruction of all of Finland’s considerable fortifications on the Isthmus; four of the Finnish islands in the Gulf of Finland near Leningrad; most of the Rybachi (or Rybachy) Peninsula jutting out into the Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean; leasing mainland Finland’s southernmost point, the Hanko peninsula, and its port there, where the Russians would establish a base manned by some 5,000 troops and supporting forces.  In exchange, the USSR would give Finland some 5,500 square kilometers on Russia’s side of Karelia north of Lake Ladoga.

Compared to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which de facto had to cede their entire sovereignty to the Soviet Union—Finland was getting off easy.  And yet, the Finns also realized that the Karelian Isthmus demands meant essentially the eradication of Finland’s strongest and primary lines of defense against the Soviet Union.  In addition, nearly all of Finland’s government leaders felt this was only the first series of demands before what they saw as the inevitable coming of later pre-hatched demands, which, after giving in on these first ones, the Finns would be powerless to resist.  Some top Finish politicians and officials thought Stalin was bluffing or just setting a high position for haggling purposes, but Mannerheim, almost alone, thought the Soviets were quite serious and opined it would be wise to accommodate them.

As negotiations unfolded over the rest of October and into November, the Finns agreed to cede some of the Islands and a bit of the Karelian Isthmus, but rejected the Hanko proposition.  Yet Stalin’s list of demands was no ploy and it was likely Stain was genuinely frustrated by weeks Finnish intransigence during negotiations.  That the Finns were so stubborn over so many weeks actually led Stalin to believe that there was a distinct possibility they had already made some sort of backroom deal with the Nazis.  For Trotter, lending credence that Stalin’s real and full aims were most likely what had been put openly to the Finns in October was that, years later in the final years of World War II and the early Cold War—when Stalin could easily have conquered all of Finland—he chose not to do so.  But for Trotter, too, also clear was what the Soviets were demanding at gunpoint of Finland

came back to an irreducible case of right and wrong.  Finland was a sovereign nation, and it had every legal and moral right to refuse any Russian demands for territory.  And the Soviet Union, for its part, had no legal or moral right to pursue its policies by means of armed aggression.  Even [Stalin’s successor] Nikita Khrushchev admitted as much, decades later, although in the next breath he rationalized the invasion in the name of realpolitik: “There’s some question whether we had any legal or moral right for our actions against Finland.  Of course we didn’t have any legal right.  As far as morality is concerned, our desire to protect ourselves was ample justification in our own eyes.” (17)

A final meeting in Moscow took place on November 9 between Stalin alongside his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, and the Finnish delegation in Moscow, Stalin reiterating his position and the Finns responding with the same small concessions they had put forward earlier.  A yet-again surprised Stalin continued to plead with the Finns for an hour for further concessions, but to no avail.  All seemed frustrated, but he bid the Finns a respectful farewell with handshakes and an “All the best.”  It seems not with grandiose ambition, fury, or outrage, but a worn-out resignation to a regrettable yet necessary endeavor, that Stalin went from those almost cordial goodbyes to planning for a war to take his rejected demands by force.

A Disturbing Difference

I have already briefly mentioned a difference that I have found quite disturbing, one which I will now revisit in this conclusion.  Looking at the precipice in 1939 just before Stalin invaded Finland, it is quite striking and unsettling for us today to realize that what Stalin was demanding—and apparently genuinely—of Finland pales in comparison to what Putin is demanding of Ukraine today.  And this was even at a time of exponentially greater external security threats facing Stalin when compared with what Putin faces today in our present time of essentially no clear, present, imminent external security threats to Russia.  To be fair, Stalin was far more brutal to Ukraine in his day, as noted herein, and Putin is not attacking Finland, but that is not the comparison I am making.

Still, again, let this sink in: Joseph Stalin, of all people, and at a time of terrible danger to the Soviet Union that he more or less foresaw, seems more rational and measured in 1939 than Putin does in 2022 at a time of far more security and stability.

I am not yet prepared to say what this means, but this reality makes me, to say the least, extremely uncomfortable.

At the same time, the First Soviet-Finnish War had an astonishingly good outcome for Finland, and, as I have explained in other work, Ukraine today is—to use the technical military term—kicking Russia’s ass, so there are also those two points to consider…

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 12, 2015

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 12, 2015 and republished on MoviePilot on February 13, 2016

al-Furqan Media/Islamic State

AMMAN — There are some who would argue here in America and in other places that the greatest calamity of our time*—the metastacizing vortex of the Syrian Civil War and all its accompanying metastacizing side effects—is not “our” problem and does not really affect “us.” To them I would say, on several important levels, that they could not be more wrong.

Apart from the appalling destruction of human lives and cultural heritageon top of mass displacement contributing to make current population of globally displaced reach a scale not seen since WWII, and perhaps, even, taking all those into account, the most terrifying thing about this sad, sorry, tragedy is how absolutely quickly and nearly completely an entire (relatively) modern state and society has collapsed into pre-Taliban Afghanistan and Congolese-like (dare I say even Dark Age-like?) near-total anarchy and chaos of the most virulent and violent kind. Even in the worst days of the U.S. occupation in Iraq in 2006, when the U.S. barely managed to keep a lid on a semblance of order and Iraq teetered on the edge of chaos and civil war, the lid may have been popping and jumping, but it never flew completely off and out of sight; and after those dark days, the U.S. began to greatly turn things around. Well, with Syria, today, the lid has been blown off and it has been long-gone for some time now, and this is beyond debate. It happened so quickly that the world has been caught flat-footed and ill-prepared, content to play with Syria as chess game board and making things worse not only for Syrians but for the entire global community at worst and a few doing something to try to help but doing far too little, too late at best. In the middle, most nations do nothing.

Yet we all need to be concerned about how quickly a sophisticated, fairly modern, secular-oriented state like Syria devolved into the worst of religious extremist fanaticism and violent, murderous cruelty, of rampant anarchy and callous calculated mass-murder. Any country can produce a mass-murder or a tyrant, a Hitler if you will. And it should be remembered that before and during the Nazi era, Germany represented the peak of civilization, culture, learning, science, etc. That did not stop it from unleashing the greatest orgy of bloodletting in the history of the world for such a short period of time from carrying out and engaging in the most systematic and organized genocide in world history; only the Mongols may be comparable. No matter how great or powerful or advanced our culture may be, we must all recognize we may all, as nations, possibly produce a Hitler. Or, in this case, a Bashar al-Assad (to be fair not nearly as rotten an apple as Hitler). But it is easy to place all the blame on a leader, and harder (but more important) to confront the most troubling traits of an entire society; thus, the more important lesson here is that we may each, as a society, become Nazi Germany, or, in this case, Syria (again, not equating the two here, just making a point).

In 2015, Nazi Germany is something of a fading memory, a near-mythical tale few can say they experienced or observed contemporarily, whether up close or from afar. Syria is the greatest calamity to unfold in our current era,*and even in just the few years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the peak of violence there, the tremendous growth of immediate and stream-of-consciousness social media, mobile technology, broadband internet access, and interconnectedness means that the average citizen in the world, if they choose, can experience the conflict in Syria today in an up-close and personal way as no one in the world not directly in or near a conflict could have ever experienced conflict in the past. It is therefore an unprecedented teachable moment on several levels.

Syria is like a Gollum to our Frodo for all you Lord of the Rings fans. Gollum had the One Ring for 500 years and, as the prologue states, “it poisoned his mind” (an understatement). At first glance, Gollum looks utterly alien, evil, contemptible, deserving of being struck down, cast off, or forgotten. But as Gandalf explains and Frodo comes to learn, Gollum was a distorted mirror image of Frodo himself and of Hobbits general, as he was once a Hobbit named Sméagol. Especially after Frodo has been the bearer of the Ring for some time, he comes to understand the burden the Ring had been for Sméagol over the half-millennium it had taken a hold of him and turned him into Gollum; Frodo, begins to suffer as a Ring-bearer just as Gollum has, and even begins to speak and act more like Gollum as his quest goes on. In subtle ways in the books, Frodo begins to root for Gollum, hoping to redeem him back to Sméagol, because Gollum’s ability to be redeemed and overcome the evil of the One Ring is a reflection of Frodo’s own ability to do the same. In the movies, this is made more explicit with a sharp exchange between Sam and Frodo about the Ring and Gollum, in which Frodo snaps at Sam “You have no idea what it did to him, what it’s still doing to him. I want to help him Sam…Because I have to believe he can come back.” For us, we have to believe Syria and Syrians are redeemable and worth fighting for, because any nation is, frighteningly, capable of a similar descent; whether we like it or not, Syria is a distorted reflection of our own nations.

New Line

Perhaps you scoff at such a notion. “Our people, our culture, our nation, our system, our values, are better than them and theirs,” you say. “It couldn’t happen here.” Well, even in American history, there are frightening examples of similar breakdowns of society into murderous anarchy. During the Civil War, large portions of the South and Border States were engulfed in bloody, chaotic, anarchic, vengeful violence, where government authority evaporated and life was a series of bloody confrontations between deserting troops, roving guerilla bands, civilians divided over their loyalty to the Union, slaves and ex-slaves, and rebels who fought against the Confederate government; untold thousands were killed in remote parts with no witnesses to record the events; nobody and no one was safe from robbery, banditry, rape, and murder. From the Civil War through the 1960s, America experienced numerous race and labor riots, some of which were quelled with military force. The “Wild West” was somewhat anarchic for decades and was only stabilized with a heavy price in blood. In more recent living memory, riots in Los Angeles in 1992 were the largest in America in decades; much more recently, Hurricane Katrina brought one of the great American cities to its knees as New Orleans became a hotbed of death, violence, anarchy, looting, crime, and public mismanagement. And just last summer, Ferguson, Missouri, saw the worst riots in America since the aforementioned L.A. riots. Many white Americans would dismiss in a racist way the last few examples as black people just being black people; certainly white America would not behave in such a way today, they think.

Wrong. At most, our culture, system, values, etc. buy us time, certainly less than we would like to believe and certainly not enough to prevent a societal collapse under the most severely pressing circumstances.

Three television shows illustrate this vividly, each presenting a vision of America (or at least a slice of America) coming apart and being reduced to primal anarchy: Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead, and HBO’s The Leftovers. (BEWARE SPOILERS, if you have seen one show but no other, just skip the relevant section; for those willing to have a bit of the story ruined but not the major parts, I have divided the spoilers into stages).

Fear the Walking Dead (SPOILERS)

Fear the Walking Dead is AMC’s new prequel of sorts for its megahit The Walking Dead. In The Walking Dead, the main character wakes up in a hospital weeks after the zombie apocalypse has begun. In contrast its mother show, Fear the Walking Dead starts us right in the middle of normal life in Los Angeles, before the outbreak and before society collapses. In just six episodes, we see a fairly normal group of people experience an utter breakdown of pretty much everything. It starts with isolated cases, and the riotous L.A. denizens are apt to see police brutality against regular citizens rather than law enforcement trying to contain a zombie outbreak: they riot en masse and draw the authorities’ attention from dealing with what they don’t yet know is a zombie outbreak. Such conditions only the enable the infection so spread even more in the ensuing chaos. Police and medical workers, on the front lines of dealing with people who are dead and then almost immediately “turn” into zombie, become particularly susceptible. Police stations, we must assume, and hospitals, we see, are turned into new front lines against the zombie infection. Many people try to leave town as disorder spreads, but the congested L.A. traffic only makes them sitting targets for zombies, as whole highways filled with abandoned cars imply in later scenes. The power stops working. 

Then the military shows up an is able to secure a small neighborhood here and there (lucky for the main characters), but most of the city of L.A. is abandoned; whole neighborhoods burn down, skyscrapers smolder, the streets and houses are empty and deserted save for small pockets, the lights are off. The military is there, ostensibly to protect the few secure zones they are able to create, but no one is there to protect the people from the abuses of a military that is almost as freaked out as the civilians. Outside of the protected pockets, there are signs that point to the military simply killing civilians left behind, possibly out of worries about infection. The sick and non-cooperative are forcefully taken away from their families and moved to detention centers. At this point, there is no law, only a new order coming at the expense of all freedom and backed by the butt of a rife. 

(BIG SPOILERS AHEAD). One of the characters in the show, we learn, was a security official and a torturer for the regime in El Salvador. He quickly feels the need to use his skills from the past, and, because it may benefit her son who has been detained, a single mother who is one of the main characters spend little more than a few seconds with her qualms and quickly accepts the use of torture with no apparent sense of guilt or shame and with no look back, unlike her boyfriend. Yet in the final episode, the boyfriend, composed until this point, comes undone and nearly beats to death the same man whose torture he was against, leaving him in a state where he may well die. The same man takes it upon himself, out of necessity, to shoot his ex-wife in the head with her full consent because she has been bitten by a zombie and knows that she will soon become one. The detained son escapes with a new friend but they decide to do nothing to help anyone else to limit their own risk; the main characters, when they decide to leave town just before the military arrives, decline to warn their neighbors of the impending disaster (not many people know what’s going on at that point); when they figure out that the military is weak and will soon abandon them completely, they decline to warn their neighbors yet again. It is likely that they have known these people for some time, but in a matter of days, those bonds come to mean nothing. Society is no more. The main characters even unleash a zombie horde on the detention camp entrance to serve as a distraction so they can rescue their own loved ones, totally willing to place all the guards and all the civilian detainees at risk.

(Exiting major spoilers) Throughout the entire show the authorities are more of less clueless, one or more steps behind and impending disaster they are ill-prepared or incapable of handling, and rather than coming together, people become more selfish and tribal, less concerned about helping others, more willing to place others at risk or leave them vulnerable, with naked self-interest dominating. The government, at least where we see it, completely abandons people and evaporates. All of downtown L.A. is a virtually empty ruin, a wasteland, by the last episode. The collapse of an entire city, one of the world’s largest, happens in a matter of days, as does the collapse of the moral fabric of society. Survival is the new central value, and sacrificing even longtime neighbors for self-preservation becomes the norm.

The Walking Dead (SPOILERS through season five)

AMC

The Walking Dead, the sixth season of which is just premiered, begins way past the initial devolution of its sister series, and takes us to some truly terrifying depths of cruelty and horror that unfortunately mirror all too much our own reality of anarchic war zones. By the time the show starts, society and government are already long gone. Most people are dead or are, literally, walking dead (zombies), and most survivors are now in small nomadic gangs whose numbers are constantly being whittled down not just by zombies, but by the aggressions and machinations of other bands of survivors. The words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides come to mind here: “…right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” And the weak sure do suffer, killed off by either zombies or stronger groups of survivors. Killing, pillaging, even rape (though this is more implied) seem commonplace, as the most cruel and brutal seem to survive at the expense of others; the more brutal, in fact, the better. Small communities seem to survive or be established here and there, but are run by the most brutal regimes as the sadistic Governor’s Woodbury, the deceptive, cannibalistic Terminus, and the Atlanta hospital all show us. The three communities exemplify murderous tyranny, ruthless deception, and the strong taking advantage of the weak, respectively. In the case of Terminus—without a doubt the most brutal of the three—we learn that prior to becoming what they became, they themselves suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of others. As Israeli historian Benny Morris in his landmark history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quotes W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” in the book’s preface: “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ That to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”

A dominant theme quickly emerges: the real challenge is not overcoming the zombies, but fellow human beings. 

In general, good men who try to show mercy often die because of it. Major characters die saving other people, and eventually some of these other people die too, showing a heartbreaking waste of life and that even the bravest sacrifices often turn out to be in vain. The show’s main character—and a major hero—ends up favoring execution as his preferred method for dealing with enemies as the seasons move forward, with him internalizing some very harsh lessons form earlier. Even young characters (and I mean young) exhibit sadistic and murderous tendencies, with one little girl even being put down like an animal after she kills an even younger little girl, an irredeemable product of her environment. “Good” guys sometimes kill first, ask questions later (or don’t ask), and the ability to resist having the environment completely dehumanize you is a constant theme and challenge of later seasons. Small acts of kindness and mercy are often rewarded only with death and despair. Sometimes the best mercy is killing someone to avoid a more painful death. Friends kill friends, lovers kill lovers, children kill parents, often out of kindness. Some of the drama comes as you really wonder whether some characters have lost their humanity, and if or how they can regain some shred of it.

(BIGGER SPOILERS COMING) In the fifth season, the band of survivors we’ve been following have absorbed some new people into their group over the seasons, and come across Alexandria, Virginia, a Washington, DC, suburb that was able to seal much of itself off from the horrors of the outside. Yet in being sealed off and incredibly fortunate, they are incredibly weak and ill prepared. We see how our main hero and character—truly a good man who has just been molded and shaped by his circumstances—becomes a little drunk on the power he realizes that his much stronger group can exert over them. Not without good reason, he plans to overthrow the current leaders and to take over and kill anyone who resists. It does not come to this, but in the end Alexandria’s leader and its people realize that they are weak and ill-prepared and allow the main character to take over peacefully, but not without having him quickly murder a problem member of their community with no hesitation. 

(Exiting major spoiler zone) The lesson they learn and that all the survivors seem to learn is that brutality is absolutely essential for survival; the question is, how brutal do you need to be and how brutal is too far and all-consuming? There is no easy or clear answer. What is clear is that the best of the survivors who have the most of their humanity intact have been able to survive by being able to become coldly, animalistically brutal in an instant and sometimes have to go “too far” just to survive in the jungle of the world in which they live. The softer, kinder ones in the group are usually the ones who die. And even as brutal as they become, the depravity, cruelty, and brutality of many of their opponents is so spectacular that there are clear moral distinctions even when all the people in question are incredibly brutal. Without the protections of society, no social contract to reign in our worst tendencies, brutality becomes absolutely necessary. Sometimes there is no “good” choice, only a less awful or even a totally unclear choice. The series makes this quite clear, and a popular game based on the series by Telltale Games that presents the player with truly heart-wrenching and gruesome personal choices similar to those in the show makes this even more clear.

The Leftovers (SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 1)

HBO

HBO’s The Leftovers, the second season of which just started, was an emotional tour de force unlike anything I have seen on television before. As the show opens, we see a small upstate New York town and witness the moment when some people just disappear. Into thin air. No explanation, just fear, panic, terror. We then fast forward to three years later, to the same town, and learn via background news casts that four years ago, 2% of the world’s population just vanished. All types of people: good, bad, rich, poor, black, white, atheists, Christians, Muslims, Asians, Africans, all over the world, in every country. As the entire world tries to come to grips with this mystery, the families and friends of those who vanished—the vanished being referred to as “The Departed”—struggle to go on with their lives, to feel life, to find meaning. (SUPER SPOILER SECTION: if you haven’t seen the show, stop here) These people—called “Legacies”—are most poignantly represented by one particular character, who lost her husband and two young children to the Sudden Departure. She still lovingly buys them groceries each week, as if they were still there. She has taken a job helping provide benefits to other Legacies as a case officer/interviewer for the U.S. Department of Sudden Departure. You might think that this job brings her a sense of purpose and closure, but it entails her interviewing Legacies with a long list a very unpleasant and intrusive questions that leave her and her interviewees emotionally drained at best.  Just to feel alive, just to feel anything, she regularly hires hookers to shoot her with a gun while she dons a bulletproof vest. She is miserable, and drowning in her grief. And she is not alone. 

People want answers from above, but none come. So people creates answers on their own: numerous cults have sprung up; they are all over the news, causing violence and chaos. One cult involves a man who is something of a prophet, and fills his well-armed and well-guarded compound with his favorite delicacy: young Asian women. Another cult is setting up shop in the upstate New York town that is the center of the series; it calls itself the Guilty Remnant; its members all wear all white, refuse to talk, all constantly smoke, and they each have assignments to follow and tail specific people in the town. No one know much of anything about them, especially since they do not speak, which only makes the more frustrating to deal with.

In the shows first episode, the town is gearing up for a parade to honor the “Heroes” (the Departed). At the end of the parade, there is ceremony where a sculpture is unveiled showing a mother and a baby that is being pulled up and away from the mother. The woman who lost her husband and two kids is the keynote speaker, lamenting her loss and wishing to have them back, even if for a moment, and not even one of the better moments: she’d happily take a moment when they were all together and sick, miserable. Suddenly, the Guilty Remnant approaches from a distance, and holds up signs spelling out “STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH.” The people of the town, sad and mourning the Departed, march up to confront them. As usual, the Guilty Remnant says nothing, provoking even more anger, which spills over into violence and a riot.

Throughout the series, the Guilty Remnant continually adds new members from the town, and seek to harass people at their most vulnerable. They even buy up a Church in the center of town and convert it to one of their outposts. They break into the houses of the Legacies and steal photographs of the Departed. With these photos and through meticulous research, they find details about these people. Eventually, they secretly order incredibly lifelike dolls (an industry has popped up manufacturing scale lifelike replicas of people to cater to some of the more bizarre Legacies) in the likenesses of The Departed. After a series of building confrontations and growing hostility, they break into and place these dolls in the homes of the Legacies, dressed up as if they were still alive in the spots where they were when they disappeared. I am tearing up just now as I remember the look on the woman’s face who lost her husband and two children, a look of sheer, consuming, and raw pain, of primal anguish, silent as the sound is muted but accompanied by a soaring soundtrack. There is much more of a primal nature to come.

HBO

See, these Legacies are pretty much miserable people, drowning in depression, grief, loneliness, unanswered questions, loss. They have tried mightily to solider on. The non-Legacy, “normal” people are not doing much better. They have all had to put up with a provocative, cruel, stubborn cult in the form of the Guilty Remnant who try as hard as they possibly can to make it as hard as possible for these people to move on with their lives. The placing of the replicas of Legacies’ loved ones in their homes for them to shockingly wake up to generates a timeless and primal reaction, and it is terrifying. In a small American town not far from New York City, scenes of apocalyptic destruction erupt: the whole town, especially the Legacies, is outraged at the guilty remnant. All manner of people, even young people and even the elderly, take to the streets in an orgy of violence, bloodletting, and destruction; the town’s police force simply stands by and even the mayor just stands by, helpless, as young, old, men, women, strong, weak, all attack the guilty remnant, beating them, shooting them, destroying their compound, setting it on fire, dragging the cultists away to be tortured and murdered. Fires, gunshots, screams, blood, fill the air and background; a primal, cave-man-like hatred consumes normal people of the town; they become beasts of vengeance and nothing more. Just hours before, the town was a common, if affluent, modern American town; one act, albeit one that was a culmination of a series of acts, destroyed modern civilization and returned the town to the dark ages and prehistoric times of unthinking hatred and unrestrained brutality. This occurs in episode ten, after we have had nine episodes—nine hours—of getting acquainted with this town, its people. To see it all come crashing down, to see an entire community embrace their worst tendencies and opt for murder and mayhem in an instant, is a terrifying sight to behold, presented to us with a lyrical poetic quality that in unnerving to your very core. 

It left me shaken and rattled; it may be hard to imagine 2% of the world disappearing, but for the rest of mostly ten hours, it was very easy to accept the grief and pain and hurt and loss of these finely acted characters as real, and to accept the Guilty Remnant cult as real and their actions as real. And it was very easy to accept the primal, brutal, and violent reaction as also being real, authentic, and, perhaps most frighteningly of all, understandable. You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

 You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

And that is terrifying.

*****

All of this is important when considering Syria, and when considering ourselves. Fear the Walking Dead shows us how quickly society can collapse and how quickly we can embrace depravities like torture as a necessity. The Walking Dead shows us how terribly far gone we can go away from society, and how brutality is both a necessity and a demon with which we must wrestle, needing to embrace it in order to survive but needing to check it to retain our sense of, and belonging to, humanity. The Leftovers, too, show us how rapidly society can crumble, but shows us this in a place that looks and feels very much like our world, New York suburbia, even, and absent zombies. When the power and police are gone, we resort to tribalism and bare survival. When we resort to tribalism and bare survival, we can go to frightening depths of brutality and depravity. Some rebels in Syria are brutal mainly out of necessity, like our heroes who mostly, but not always, walk the line well. Some rebel groups in Syria are just simply brutal strongmen like the Governor or the police of the hospital, trying to carve out their own little fiefdoms where they rule as kings and bring some semblance of order to a chaotic world but an order that is to their benefit at the expense of others. Other are far more gone, groups such as ISIS, not that different from the people of Terminus (and, it is hinted, the Wolves group we will encounter in in force in this new season); their embrace of brutality as a means for survival is at the full cost of their humanity. With enough provocation, any community or people can turn into animals, predatory, heartless, unfeeling when it comes to “others.” 

This tendency is, perhaps, our greatest enemy, even as it is a strength in terms of survival. When it comes to Syria, just like Frodo, we must believe Gollum can come back, and we must try to help; the effort, the trying, is more important than the outcome, for, as Iain Pears writes in The Dream of Scipio, one of my favorite books:

“How do we justify calling ourselves civilized, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief and of common values that stretch back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilized if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbors are massacred, your lands laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?”

To simply abandon Syria and watch it burn is condone the destruction of society and civilization, and to invite a similar response were that to happen elsewhere or even in our own backyard. For, as Pears also writes:

“Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.”

*****

Perhaps most terrifying of all, the collapse of Syria is in part engineered by collective human civilization: the internet, the weapons, the logistics, the ideologies and religions and sects and geopolitical rivalries involved, all are major contributors to this conflict, all products of millennia of civilization and development. Syria’s ruin is therefore our ruin, Syria’s victims our victims, Syria’s plight our plight. The world’s inability or unwillingness to stop the greatest calamity of our age* is also a reflection of the weaknesses of our civilization, weaknesses that must be addressed in order to prevent something even worse and on a larger scale in the future.

Towards the end of his book, Pears has one of his main characters describe the Holocaust he realizes is unfolding in the middle of WWII:

“When I was at Verdun [the WWI battle]… I saw things which were more appalling than you can imagine. I saw civilization coming apart at the seams. As it weakened, people felt free to act as they pleased, and did so, which weakened it still more. And I decided then it was the most important thing, that it had to survive and be protected. Without that tissue of beliefs and habits we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.

…I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. They are our greatest achievement. They are building a monument which will never be dismantled, even when they are swept away. They are teaching us a lesson which will echo for hundreds of years… The Nazis are… holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Look at what we have all achieved.’…

What they’re doing goes far beyond the war. Something unparalleled in human history. The ultimate achievement of civilization. Just think about it. How do you annihilate so many people? You need contributions from so many quarters. Scientists to prove Jews are inferior; theologians to provide the moral tone. Industrialists to build the trains and the camps. Technicians to design the guns. Administrators to solve the vast problems of identifying and moving so many people. Writers and artists to make sure nobody notices or cares. Hundreds of years spent honing skills and developing techniques have been necessary before such a thing can even be imagined, let alone put into effect. And now is the moment. Now is the time for all the skills of civilization to be put to use.

Can you imagine a greater, a more enduring achievement? This will last forever, and cannot be undone. Whatever benefits we bring to mankind in the future, we killed the Jews. No matter how great the advances of medicine, we killed them. However high our achievements may soar, however perfect we become, this is what is at our heart. We killed them all; not by accident, or in a fit of passion. We did it deliberately, and after centuries of preparation.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it’s not true.”

*****

In the end, the world has enabled such a rapid destruction of almost an entire society in Syria, and the world allows it to continue, perpetuates it. That is hardly to suggest equally diffused global responsibility.

But if the global community cannot save Syria, will it ever be able to save itself when confronted with far greater crises in the future? It would be terrible to try to save Syria and fail, but it would be more terrible to not even try to save it and just watch it burn, consuming all inside and around in a fiery vortex of death and destruction, fed by the oxygen of nihilism and selfishness. The shows I discussed demonstrate how easily and deeply this can happen, show in great detail the dynamics of radicalization and how they can spread and corrupt all whom they touch, sparing no one, just as is happening in Syria, and show us how such shocking dynamics and sudden collapses can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.

There are no easy answers. All I know is that Syria is a test of our current human civilization, and whether it is the mass beheadings, the thousands of sex slaves, the religious extremism, the masses of displaced, or the petty rivalries involved, we—our world, our civilization—are failing this test.

*****

 (*To those of you who would argue that the 2003-2011 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is the greatest calamity of our era, I would argue America’s 2003 Iraq invasion comes in second, and if you think that the situation in Iraq at the time of the Syrian Arab Spring uprising and the ensuing civil war contributed greatly to those events in destabilizing Syria you would be wrong, and it is most certainly the other way around, thatSyria destabilized Iraq, for, with the sacking of Rumsfeld and the implementation of new strategy led by Secretary Gates and General Petraeus starting in 2007, tremendous improvements in security and competence were made,so that from 2008 to 2012—the last year being a full year after a full U.S. withdrawal—the levels of violence were the lowest since the start of the conflict not including the initial invasion itself, particularly from 2010-2012.  Furthermore, throughout the entirety of the U.S. occupation, there was no major spillover from Iraq other than some refugees, whose numbers pale in comparison to both the current absolute number and especially the proportions of Syrian refugees, and the refugee populations today in Jordan and Lebanon especially are already having a much larger deleterious effect on those countries than the situation with refugees in almost nine years of U.S. operations in Iraq did with any of its neighbors. Certainly, nothing like the 2014 ISIS march into Iraq from Syria and its civil war occurred during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in regards to any of its neighbors. I have here linked to several articles I authored detailing these facts for those who wish to read more or doubt what I have written here)

See related articles by same author:

Putin’s Reckless Syria Escalation Makes Russia, Russians, Target of Global Jihad (Again)

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy II: Syria’s Civil War

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 17, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) February 17th, 2017; a condensed, edited version of this article is featured on War Is Boring, and a Kindle edition, a Nook edition, an Apple iTunes iBook edition, and an EPUB edition are available with previously unpublished content. 

5.) Why Democratic Fascism Is Not a Label Too Far For Trump & His Movement

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.” — Henry A. Wallace, 1944 , Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

AMMAN — By the standards discussed in Part I, Donald Trump is clearly a democratic fascist and the Trump Administration is moving America into democratic fascist territory, with the Republican Party, by and large, following Trump on a leash, as has mostly been the case since even before the Republican National Convention; the consequences of this will be disastrous and far worse than even the considerable damage the George W. Bush Administration was able to inflict upon America and the world. Trump and a core of his team have created a kind of cult around Trump as Leader and campaigned and are now governing on much of the traditional fascist political platform—demonization of immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and other minority “others;” a promise to “return” to the glorious past; vacuous promises to “destroy” ”enemies;” creating an atmosphere of permanent conflict; cultivating a sense of national victimhood, hatred of elites, contempt for diplomacy and the modern international system; corporatism; a disaffected populism—and style—bullying, bellicosity, fantasy, the dramatic and theatrical, exaggeration of threats, dumbing-down of language, serial lying, conspiracy-theory believing, anti-intellectualism, shutdown of any debate, an emphasis on action over discussion, misogyny, an obsession with weapons, treating the government as if it is Trump’s personal plaything—and each of these to an intense degree so that the overall resemblance to fascist movements of the past in far too many ways is indisputable, with the differences accounted for by the new, at least outwardly milder and far less violent democratic iteration of what we had hoped were the long-exiled ghosts of fascism.

The New Yorker’s Gopnik, writing in May of 2016, would approve of my term democratic fascism to describe Trump’s campaign and presidency:

There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist [quoting George Packer’s description of Trump as “a celebrity proto-fascist with no impulse control”], or American-variety fascist—one of that kind, all the same.

For some experts, the term fascism can’t fit movements that are not overtly anti-democratic (although one should consider the very real possibility of a difference between stated aims and actual aims) or violent, but that is why I like discussing fascism’s evolution and reincarnation into today’s democratic fascism. Writing two months later, Gopnik correctly notes that it is myopic to argue that Trump is not fascist because of one or a few major differences between historical fascism and Trump’s democratic fascism:

…to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s. 

Stefan Zweig, a globally celebrated Austrian liberal intellectual of the interwar years of the twentieth century, furiously penned in the summer of 1941 in exile in the United States a memoir he aptly titled The World of Yesterday, much of it an analysis of what enabled Hitler to rise and how so few saw his rise coming; many of the dynamics he discussed—namely the failure of traditional democratic elites and the ensuing desire of the masses to punish and replace them, that intellectuals ridiculed the leaders of these fascists as boorish and unwashed while failing to give proper weight to their programs, of the essential role that mass propaganda and sensationalism had in destroying the line between fact fiction and desensitizing the public, respectively, of the diminishing power of “the word” and journalism and intellectual discourse and writers to counter fascism, of the role serial lying had in propelling fascists to power, of the belief that such a powerful and liberal and sophisticated society could never fall under the sway of illiberal goons, of the faith that a society built on the rule of law would be strong enough to resist those who would destroy it, of how the extremism of fascists enables even the slightest recalibration to appear to opponents as a hopeful sign of moderation, of the fascists’ gradual and strategic introduction of their most extreme portions of their program to test public reaction and desensitize the public over time, and that one seismic ill event once such people were in power could be the point “[w]hen it’s too late to stop fascism”—are so painfully obviously present in America with Trump that to read the New Yorker article discussing Zweig is more than enough to send shivers down one’s spine (as for Zweig, he and his wife committed suicide only months after he penned his memoir).

Scholars of a mid-twentieth century German-originated school of thought known as the Frankfurt School noticed the power of American mass media that stifled diversity of thought (something Tocqueville noted long ago when he observed the power of the American press to influence American public opinion but also its subservience to public opinion, how that affected American public life, and recognized the overall oppressive lack of diversity of thought in America) to combine with an authoritarian leader and “large numbers of people…susceptible to…psychological manipulation” who were also “potentially fascistic individuals” as a recipe for disaster; reacting to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, these academics predicted the rise of fascism in America in their own time, and while their predictions were then premature, the dynamics they predicted would lead to fascism in America are in many ways far more present today; like others mentioned earlier, they saw a particular danger in the mass blurring of fact and fiction.

To quote Andrew Sullivan (who was also a friend of the late Hitchens and a fellow admirer of Orwell) in a seminal piece written last spring that was his return to writing after a long hiatus:

…[Trump’s] movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

Sullivan continues:

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

and then quotes from Sinclair Lewis’s aforementioned It Can’t Happen Here. His nightmare having come true, writing the night of the election in a piece titled “The Republic Repeals Itself,” Sullivan remarks that “This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media,” just what a successful democratic fascist needs to have done to set his democratic fascism up to “succeed,” as much as that word can be applied to a movement of this nature.

He further elaborates that

…the now openly revanchist right — far more radical than the Tory government in Britain — [will have] total control over the levers of power. They will not let those levers go easily. They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart — and generate pseudo-stories and big lies that, absent any authoritative or trusted media, will dominate the new centers of information, Facebook or its successors. We will be in a new political and media universe in which an authoritarian cult will thrive. This is how fascists tend to govern.

The generally spot-on William Saletan, writing for Slate, noted in October, 2016, how, without equating the two, Trump was even thematically and stylistically “sound[ing] more and more like Hitler,” albeit approaching the younger Hitler of the early 1920s. And just this month, in case people might think that only Trump at the top is the source of all the fascist-y stuff, Saletan explained how Trump’s far more well-regarded Vice President, Mike Pence, “is the chief enabler of the president’s fascist ways;” on top of that, let’s not forget the Republican Party as a whole, which seems far more partner than hostage to Trump and that just put out a survey that seems deliberately crafted to advance what we’ve described as democratic fascism, harping especially on “illegal immigration,” “radical Islamic terrorism,” and “the mainstream media” and clearly trying to hurt the reality-based media’s coverage of the first two issues in favor or more hysterical views (Question 13: “Do you believe that political correctness has created biased news coverage on both illegal immigration and radical Islamic terrorism?” and Question 24: “Do you agree with President Trump’s media strategy to cut through the media’s noise and deliver our message straight to the people?”); yes, the GOP is doing its part, some enthusiastically, some reluctantly, some in between, some unwittingly, and with only a minuscule resistance, even if it is larger than commonly found in a relatively monolithic and extremely monochrome Republican Party (all new GOP congressman from the 2016 election were white and out of 293 senators and representatives, only 14, or less than 4.8%, were non-white; in contrast, Democrats had 89 non-white members representing about 37% of their Members of Congress), a resistance whose voices generally come from a tiny group of out-of-power elites with something of a megaphone who are far less representative of the Party’s rank-and-file or current elected officeholders. So, lest we forget, Trump has plenty of help.

Michael Kinsley, writing in The Washington Post, focuses on Trump’s corporatist tendencies that resemble fascism’s past corporatism, that “Donald Trump is a fascist,” and while “[i]t’s ridiculous to compare any living person to Hitler or Mussolini…I mean ‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.” For Kinsley, Trump’s

seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.

The realization that Trump is something of a fascist hardly comes from the left or the media class alone; renown counterterrorism expert Peter Bergen also labeled Trump a “proto-fascist,” while conservative academic Max Boot tweeted all the way back in late 2015 that “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it” (he has also referred to Trump as a “fascist demagogue”). One of Boot’s fellow conservative academic travelers, Robert Kagan, wrote in May 2016 that Donald Trump

…is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.

And they are not alone on the right (Sullivan is something of a conservative), with even the fairly restrained Ross Douthat noting, all the way back in December, 2015, that, “[w]hether or not we want to call Trump a fascist outright, then, it seems fair to say that he’s closer to the ‘proto-fascist’ zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative or his recent predecessors in right-wing populism,” and that “Trump may indeed be a little fascistic;” later, in May, 2016, when it was long clear to all but those bingeing on denial (not that there was a shortage of prominent conservatives fitting this description) that Trump would be the nominee, he referred to Trump as “a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control.”

I remember when some liberals called George W. Bush a fascist or a Nazi; they were very few, and never anyone of particular importance or who was widely-respected as an intellectual, a journalist, a politician (and no, Dick Durbin’s ill-phrased Guantánamo criticism can in no way honestly be represented as an attempt to call Bush or his Administration fascist in their overall nature, and that is the closest thing that comes to mind), but, rather, were often fringe rabble-rousers or small numbers of individual protesters, which was ridiculous (and I am not fan of Bush or his disastrous presidency), and I was happy to call out anyone calling Bush a fascist or a Nazi.

Well, this is different; across the political spectrum, a number of widely respectable, mainstream, serious, non-hyperbolic, measured, thoughtful people—some of whom were very critical of Bush and yet were hardly labeling his Administration “fascist”—who have been generally prescient and correct in their commentary are writing pieces unlike any they have written before, sounding the alarm that democracy and Western civilization is in peril; when I wrote my own similar call to arms—ahead of much of the crowd—it was more a call to arms that, while discussing a theoretical possibility of Clinton not winning, was meant more to play out the severe challenges a (second) Clinton Administration would face; I was extremely confident in a Clinton win at that point, but it turned out the far worse hypothetical would be our current nightmare of a reality. Sage people I’ve never known to be hysterical are using the words “fascist” and Trump in the same sentence, though this is generally an elite print media crowd and the reality of our new democratic fascism is not widely seeping through the television news crowd and the population as a whole, and that even allows for a huge portion of Americans who know this is very bad, very unprecedented, and yet still don’t know how bad it is. Today, more and more people do seem to be catching on because there is a sharp rise in the public consumption of dystopian, Orwellian fiction.  If the reader will indulge me in a bit of speculation, I think there are some very wise political leaders—senators, congressmen, governors, etc., of both parties (though clearly far fewer on the Republican side) who see that this is a form of fascism but avoid using the term so as not to turn away voters who would see such a term as “unfair” or “partisan,” a non-use aimed at laying the groundwork for bringing in even some of the reluctant Trump voters to help oppose him at some point in the future; this approach makes sense, and just throwing around the word “fascist” is both unproductive and counterproductive (more on that in a bit); I submit democratic fascism used consistently instead of just plain fascism is a remedy for some of the concerns that crowd might have, and I do hope they will begin to bring the term into the current lexicon.

Another point that must be made: these respectable commentators calling Trump out for his fascistic tendencies are not lunging towards the far left, and are not part of some intelligentsia that has suddenly already found itself there (though, if the “Sandernista” Bernie Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party and the far left in general has its way, the left and the Party may yet radicalize in the future, and that process may already be underway); no, it is not a symptom of the problems of the left that fascist is being applied as a label for Trump and his agenda; it is simply a product of the man and that agenda and where the right now finds itself, and while it is not common to use the label fascism or some sort of prefixed-fascism (as I am doing), to call him out, those doing so are not members of an extremist minority who have lost their moorings but are a minority of the most prescient, bravest, sharpest voices, whose their records back up their description as such.

And that is why this moment is, these moments are, are so terrifying.

Hell, even the U.S. Holocaust Museum has a poster “Early Warning Signs of Fascism” that reads almost entirely like this election’s Republican Party Platform or the Trump White House to-do-list:

@RaRaVibes

While Trump is clearly a democratic fascist, then, it important, here again, to make the point that being such, Trump is all the way on one end of a fascist spectrum, an end that overlaps slightly with democracy, while Hitler is all the way on the other end of that fascist spectrum. Despite important similarities between the two, it is crucial to note that Hitler was in most respects much more intense and went much further than Trump and that Hitler embraced genocidal mass killing, which Trump does not; thus, those who would correctly call Trump out for his democratic fascism must take care not to equate or appear to equate Trump with Hitler or his movement with Nazism or even come close to this, for doing so only plays into Trump’s hands and diminishes the chances both of those calling out Trump for what he is to be taken seriously and, in turn, that he and his movement can be stopped; in this effort, the prefixing of democratic before fascism is eminently useful.

Yes, Trump, is a very serious threat that could very well destroy American democracy, Western democracy, the West, and the international order as we know it and we can ill-afford minimized his menace, but we must also not exaggerate his threat, as awful as it is, as it seems he would not do these things through genocidal mass killing and world war or generally use violence the way the twentieth-century fascists did; obviously, this brings little comfort, but if Western civilization is to remain intact, we must defeat Trump by being fastidious in our distinctions and accusations and make those distinctions, however nuanced, clear, because Trump’s war on civilized values is also a war on truth; those opposing him by making facile, lazy, even just somewhat inaccurate comparisons and accusations weaken our best weapon against him: the truth. For if those fighting democratic fascism embrace a twisting of the truth to try to beat Trump, they will be trying to use a tactic that their opponent has already mastered; Republicans who tried to out-insult Trump in the primary failed miserably, and others wishing to out-Trump Trump in other ways will also fail spectacularly. In the end, sacrificing the truth to win short-term attention and political points will lessen the distinctions between the democratic fascists and those opposing them; this is not politics as normal, and the opposition can’t afford to turn more of the people more likely to oppose Trump away from politics by creating more apathy and cynicism in behaving more like him. So we in the opposition must not only not call Trump Hitler or a Nazi or his movement fascism or Nazism, we must call out those who do.

That is why democratic fascism is such a useful term: it helps to make those important distinctions away from Hitler, Nazis and other historical fascists that are so necessary, and yet still communicates the serious and insidiousness of Trump and his movement.

6.) Democratic Fascism: A Global Problem

In Sullivan’s election-night piece, he began by quoting Orwell:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” George Orwell famously observed. So what is it that we have just seen?

We are witnessing the power of a massive populist movement that has now upended the two most stable democracies in the world — and thrown both countries into a completely unknown future. In Britain, where the polls did not pick up the latent support for withdrawal from the European Union, a new prime minister is now navigating a new social contract with the indigenous middle and working classes forged by fear of immigration and globalization. In the U.S., the movement — built on anti-political politics, economic disruption, and anti-immigration fears — had something else, far more lethal, in its bag of tricks: a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric. Britain is reeling toward a slow economic slide. America has now jumped off a constitutional cliff. It will never be the same country again. Like Brexit, this changes the core nature of this country permanently. 

Sullivan places Trump squarely in a broader global movement. And that movement is one set out to destroy Western democracy as we know it, one that is far larger and far more organized than most people in the West have realized thus far.

If America was seeing the rise of a leader like Trump, the most extreme version of the Republican Party ever to exist, and pervasive extremist news outlets, that would be catastrophic enough; but when one takes into account similar trends all over Europe, in Russia, Turkey, in Israel, in India, and in the Philippines, to name the most salient examples, there is a worldwide trend in important democratic centers of charismatic leaders of right-wing parties/coalitions playing on hatred, fear, and division and pushing agendas that go against core democratic, liberal values, all while being backed by a megaphone of sympathetic extremist media that often either blend fact and fiction or ignore facts altogether. And America’s counterparts in this movement are arguably as dangerous because these leaders are dressed up in more of the proprietary graces and trappings of conventional politicians and are thus better able to mask tendencies that Trump could not hide even if he tried, making then sneakier, their threat less obvious, their appeal more infectious.

Though to varying degrees, one of the strongest common threads in this reactionary political movement is that the right wing parties and voters that are either rising in power or have come to power care little, or even not at all, about minority rights and about their leaders’ and parties’ publicly expressed willingness, either in words or in actions, to apply one standard of the law and enforcement to themselves and their supporters and to use a looser standard on political opponents and minorities (ethnic, religious, or otherwise, e.g., immigrants) who are not in line with the ruling parties and groups; if anything, they and their supporters embrace such double standards. 

In a Europe already seriously weakened by Brexit, these rising or newly empowered rightist democratic fascist parties that are enjoying successes across the continent exhibit a hostility and unequal application of the system that applies mainly to immigrants, in particular but not limited to Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; recent polls now show anti-EU, anti-immigrant far-right populist parties in the lead in the Netherlands, Italy, and, perhaps most alarmingly, in France, while Germany’s election, perhaps the most important test for Europe’s future, remains fluid and uncertain, even if, for now, prospects seem much better for saner heads to prevail there than in the Netherlands, Italy, and France. To add to the growing concern, in a just-released survey of over 10,000 Europeans in 10 EU countries, 55% agree on having a Trumpian travel ban that would stop all migration from Muslim-majority countries; only 2 of 10 countries did not have a majority approve, and the disapproval rate in none of the 10 countries exceeded 38%; Poland had the highest approval at 71%, and France, Germany, and Italy all had majorities that also approved, all of this boding ill for centrist, pro-EU, pro-tolerance candidates. Meanwhile, the Slovakian Prime Minister recently directly called the far right party that is his country’s fifth-largest and is on the rise fascist; “[s]ome people say that fascism is creeping here in Slovakia. It’s not creeping here, it’s present here,” he said. And rather presciently, at the end of 2015, The Economist worriedly noted the progress of these movements, with the title of the relevant article saying it all: “The march of Europe’s little Trumps.”

In Russia, this hostility, sometimes lethal, is directed towards ethnic minorities that try to assert their rights or protest their treatment and any sort of organized political or media opposition to Putin and his party, especially those speaking out against Russian actions in Ukraine; but the lack of protections hardly stops there: a bill with apparently robust public support partly decriminalizing wife-beating and child-beating easily passed the Russian Duma (the lower house of parliament) and was signed into law by Putin this month; additionally, the only politician who had any kind of serious chance of beating Putin in the next presidential election—Alexey Navalny—was just convicted of (likely trumped-up) fraud and barred from running against Putin (Navalny vowed to fight the conviction; let’s see how that goes…). The Russian people aren’t helping, either: a just-released survey found out 46% of them think positively of Stalin, the highest level in 16 years; only 21% had negative views and 22% responded with neutral feelings; that means Russians like Stalin by a margin of over two-to-one compared with those who don’t like him (and none of this even touches on the energetic activities Russia is doing to advance democratic fascism outside of its own borders; more on that soon).

In Turkey, this hostility has broadened not only to Kurds, the main Kurdish political party, and political opposition, but to purging journalists and news outlets and entire swaths of civil society and thousands in the government bureaucracy that Erdogan and his AKP party feel they cannot control or will not be loyal or silent in their opposition, even as Erdogan seems poised to transform the country’s constitution to give himself dramatic, sweeping new powers with an upcoming referendum. At the same time, both Turkey’s government and media feed their public with outlandish conspiracy theories centered on the the idea of America undermining Turkey at every step of the way and as the root of all Turkey’s present ills, drawing attention away from the both the government’s and media’s slide to one-party authoritarianism.

In Israel, the hostility is generally against Arabs but includes other groups, too. While Benjamin Netanyahu certainly deserves credit for not being authoritarian in the mold of Putin, Erdogan, or even Trump, the trendlines under his extensive watch are clear and the direction in which they are moving is shared by the others in this unfortunate list (we will elaborate a bit more here because, at least in the U.S., there is more doubt when asserting Israel is part of this trend than, say, Turkey or Russia). Netanyahu is a huge part of the problem himself, with a penchant for playing fast and loose with facts and an aptitude for even weaponizing history, perhaps most notably when he claimed a Palestinian had inspired the Holocaust, resulting in strong condemnation even from Israeli and German historians and a subsequent retraction; he is a huge champion of (adding) settlements—illegal in the eyes of the entire rest of the world—and their expansion, among the most extreme parts of Israeli policy and those bearing the most resemblance to fascism; and he continually engages in demagoguery designed to incite ethnic and religious division that empower him and his Likud Party. Yet Netanyahu is hardly alone, and is often pressured to move even further to the right by other politicians and public opinion, for not only many politicians, but many Israelis themselves—more and more of them—are embracing racism and illiberal undemocratic values; even mob violence inside Israel, not just settler-instigated violence in the Palestinian territories, is not rare enough, and punishment of Jews who commit violence is comparatively mild when compared to punishment of Arabs who commit violence, just one of the most salient qualities demonstrating how unequal Israel is as a society. Israel’s rightist government is also cracking down on liberal NGOs and has a racist migrant/immigration policy. And while Israeli courts, to their credit, have pushed back against the legitimization and establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that were illegal even under Israeli law—with some of them being established on land owned by Palestinians who can prove their ownership—Israel just adopted a law that basically negates the court rulings, making those settlements legal, though the courts may yet overturn this law; yes, Israel basically just passed a law that allows the government to take land belonging to Palestinians because they are Palestinians and give it to Israelis because they are Jewish, something that squarely fits in the fascist tradition. And let’s not forget how much admiration Netanyahu and Trump have expressed for each other.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling right-wing Hindu populist BJP party (both fans of Hindu religious nationalist rhetoric), since coming to power over two years ago, have sought to curb free speech, encourage and/or turn a blind eye both to police abuse and to sometimes violent religious nationalism on the part of right-wing Hindus who target minorities, and are cracking down on civil society groups critical of the government and its human rights record. 

In the Philippines, anyone involved in illegal drugs have essentially lost the protections of due process and equal application of the law, with President Duterte himself bragging about killing criminals when he was mayor as his extremely controversial drug war that has killed thousands of Filipinos in the less-than-a-year he has been in office continues in full force. As far as accountability, a Filipino senator who criticized the drug war was even removed from her investigative committee role, part of an increasing trend of the government using its power to limit criticism of Duterte and his government; experts fear the longstanding Filipino democracy, one of Asia’s oldest, may be in trouble.

And in the United States, we have now (mostly) sworn in a government that at the very least seems unenthusiastic about or unwilling to protect minority rights and may even be downright hostile both to preserving these rights and to minorities asserting their rights, whether African-Americans who are grossly mistreated by police and the criminal justice system, members of the LGBT community worried about losing their newly won rights, Muslims who saw anti-Muslim hate groups rise from 34 to more than 100 last year, or women worried about losing both access to contraception and their ability to decide on pregnancy without government interference. Basically, like the people backing right-wing populism in other countries, Trump voters see the America in which they reside as “theirs” to the exclusion of others and resent those other groups asserting equality (“when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”), seeing this assertion as a loss of their own prerogatives and politics as a zero-sum game in which they can only benefit in denying benefits to others and keeping those benefits, or the degree to which they are enjoyed, to themselves. These people don’t care if such sentiments and their end results directly violate the spirit of and/or laws of their very nations; in fact, they seek to remake their nations into illiberal systems that favor themselves and discriminate against certain others officially, longing both to recreate past discriminations and hierarchies, if perhaps more subtly, and part of this is to recreate a false mythological image of the past in present reality in which their ethnic, racial, religious, or other forms of superiority existed unquestioned and unchallenged (even in America, where slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution—though only reluctantly and initially—opposition to slavery was still exhibited during the colonial era and the subsequent constitutional conventions in which the Constitution itself was drafted and ratified). Real or not, on this weaponization of history perhaps no one here is more succinctly instructive than Orwell in 1984: “…if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

7.) Putin Leads an Assault on Western Democracy and Reality

And right now, the Russian government is by far the most skilled and prolific weaponizer of information—of spreading fake news, false history, and false facts—in the world, and this is where things get even scarier.

I wrote about a year ago that Western democracy was on trial, more than any time since WWII, that internal problems and forces growing in the West were posing a threat to the survival of the Western liberal democratic order that was greater than any Soviet armies or nuclear arsenals of the past; little did I know that the Soviet Union’s successor in Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, would lead a brilliant campaign—including the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—to exacerbate, further, and accelerate these trends, and effort that, so far, has been enough to ensure that the West is largely failing these tests, most notably in the oldest continuing and most powerful democracy in the world, the United states of America. And with the very latest revelations that multiple Trump campaign officials were in constant contact with Russian intelligence operatives, there is even less of an excuse not to realize that Putin and his people acted to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s campaign with the aim of helping Trump secure the White House, in addition to their also being a much higher possibility that there was collusion of some sort between (some staff on) the Trump campaign and this Russian effort.

In a Foreign Policy piece published just after Trump’s election by Yascha Mounk titled “Donald Trump Is the End of Global Politics as We Know It” and with a subheading of “What it means to live without a leader of the free world,” what is described is Vladimir Putin’s dream come true, and it makes you think about how much was at stake in this election and how the consequences of a world devoid of American leadership or with an American leadership that is cartoonishly incompetent, damaging to its own bedrock alliances and its own society, and blithely self-defeating were exactly the results Russia’s campaign against the United States was designed to bring about. By the time Trump is out of office, it’s entirely possible that there is no more EU and no more NATO, and it is likely that even in the realistic best-case scenario they are substantially weakened; how could things be worse? Just imagine Russian troops and Russian bases in various European NATO deserters, hardly an impossibility.

Putin is certainly imagining this possibility and acting to make this possibility a reality. “We’re on the verge of a new global order,” to quote one spokesperson for a movement within Putin’s own Russian United political party that is trying to help France’s far-right, anti-EU, very pro-Russia candidate triumph in the upcoming French election.

As I pointed out not long ago, Russia has a history of actively meddling in elections and votes in other countries; in a few cases where the final tallies were very close (the UK with Brexit and the U.S. with Trump), the burden of proof is on people asserting Russia made no difference, so large were Russia’s efforts, be they hacking, disinformation, or both. In other places like Bulgaria and Moldova the meddling has been longstanding and finally paid off with the victories of new pro-Russian leaders over the last few months; in other cases like Sweden and the Baltic States, there is a constant effort as well that has made an impact, though these countries are still very much on the alert and seem very unlikely to shift to overall favor Russia in their politics anytime soon; with other cases like Italy’s recent election, it’s hard to argue that Russian meddling made the difference, even though it seems Russia was still quite active in trying to hurt pro-EU centrist parties with fake news; with elections early last year in Germany, it seems Russian propaganda efforts did hurt the ruling party in regional elections. 

Some support and cooperation has been far more overt and public, though, than the shadowy hacking, fake news dissemination, and covert funding programs: all over the continent, from the UK to Italy to Austria (where fake news was rampant during its recent presidential election but that as yet has not specifically been tied to Russia) to France and beyond, Putin, his government, and Russian-government-dominated media has offered praise—sometimes even formal audiences in Moscow or political alliances with Putin’s own ruling party, United Russia—to right-wing populist and anti-EU parties along with criticism of pro-EU rivals of these parties; sometimes, this has even extended to financial support from Russian-government affiliated financial institutions, most notably in Le Pen and her party’s case in France; these parties often respond by adopting pro-Russian policies (for example, being against Western sanctions against Russia) and expressing enthusiastic public support for Putin and his program. Coupled with the massive disinformation campaign, Russia is clearly trying to manipulate public opinion and offer direct support to specific parties in Europe in an effort to change the politics of the whole continent. And even when these democratic fascist movements do not succeed in winning, they are still increasing their support and representation in parliaments; thus, all over Europe, they are on the rise and on the march with a purpose, a purpose that very much serves Putin’s goals of weakening Europe so that the EU and NATO will crumble and Russia will be able to extend and intensify its spheres of influence.

Putin’s efforts here are not a random or haphazard one; after years of exerting influence, he has sympathy and supporters spread over one-quarter of the European Parliament, and Russia’s efforts are, as before, pinpointing countries with upcoming elections, with the Netherlands, France, and Germany (and possibly Italy) the big tests for 2017; there are questions about whether these votes may lead to more exits from the EU, say, a Nexit or a Frexit (with a Grexit perpetually in the realm of possibility, too).

The Dutch vote in less than a month, and officials are nervous enough about hacking and interference that they are going to be counting all ballots by hand amid increased Russian cyberactivity targeting Dutch entities and suspicions Russians might have been involved in swaying an eventual Dutch “no” vote in a referendum on a free-trade pact between the EU and Ukraine last April, likely derailing the whole agreement. The party of the man called “the Dutch Donald Trump”—Geert Wilders—is leading in the polls and there are serious worries he may win, especially with so many Dutch voters still undecided (as was the case in America) and the rise of so many new, tiny parties that make the way a coalition will be formed much more unpredictable. One thing is quite predictable, though: he wants to hold a referendum on the Netherlands leaving the EU and very clearly wants to leave it, and some of Wilders’ policies are even more extreme than Trump’s: “[h]e wants to ban the Quran, shut down mosques and…cut all foreign aid,” and some of his tactics are quite Trumpish (he recently caused an uproar when he tweeted a fake photo of a rival with a “Shariah for the Netherlands” sign). If his party does well and especially if he becomes Prime Minister, that could increase enthusiasm for like-minded parties and voters in other European elections on the horizon, just as Brexit and Trump’s win might already be doing that.

France votes in two rounds in late April and early May. So far, France’s race has been incredibly tumultuous of late; the last few weeks, various revelations have upended the race. First, starting late in January, a French newspaper published a series of damning revelations that conservative and moderately pro-Russian candidate François Fillon had used his position in France’s National Assembly (it’s lower legislative house) to pay nearly $1 million in public funds to his wife and children for “bogus” positions, which seems now to have knocked him from the lead to on track to miss the runoff (only the top two advance but he is not a distant third); this seemed to make France’s independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron the favorite; but now it seems Russia is trying to hack his campaign much like it did Hillary Clinton’s, and Russian-controlled media like RT and Sputnik are slamming him (going so far as to spread rumors that he is gay); while praising his rival, far-right, very pro-Russian, and Putin’s favorite candidate: Marine Le Pen. 

Le Pen is similar to Trump: she is extremely anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and is pledging to remove France from the euro currency, even NATO, and possibly the EU entirely. Also like Trump, Le Pen has a globally-spread army of internet trolls engaging in shadowy tactics to boost her and hurt her rivals, and she has the highest internet engagement numbers of any of her rivals. She is furthermore like Trump in that she has not disclosed her campaign fundraising or spending, though her rivals have; this is a particular issue because she had been funded back in 2014 to the tune of a €9 million loan by a Russian bank with strong ties to the Russian government (the deal was even brokered by a member of Russia’s Duma and was suspiciously close in timing to her announcement that she believed Russia’s annexation of Crimea was legal, with incriminating evidence that she received financial support at Russia’s direction in return for her adopting this position); at the same time this happened, a €2 million loan was given to a political fund named Cotelec run by her father from a mysterious Cyprus-based company run by ex-K.G.B. agent Yuri Kudimov who is known to run “the financing arm of the Kremlin,” and from there it went to Le Pen’s party for its 2015 regional elections; this past December she just received a €6 million loan from her father’s Cotelec, and after her 2014 Russian lender was shuttered by the Central Bank of Russia (possibly because of a possible embezzlement scandal) and as she is being shunned by other mainstream lenders, she may be may be seeking another loan from a Russian entity to cover a €20 million shortfall in her campaign war chest.*

*(As an aside, if you are familiar with my work and this reeks of the familiar, your nose is not deceiving you; this is remarkably similar to the gigantic Eurasian gas scheme I wrote about— including some exclusive revelations—just before Trump won, a scheme involving billions of dollars in shady gas deals and the profits from them being laundered by the Russian mafia to buy Ukrainian politicians and corrupt the Ukrainian government so that Putin could dominate Ukraine; Paul Manafort—Trump’s future Campaign Chairman for some of the most crucial months of the Republican primaries when he clinched the GOP nomination and through the Republican National Convention—was one of the major players in this massive scam, and Rick Gates was definitely involved as was possibly Carter Page, both future Trump campaign advisors; in many ways this gas scheme led to the current war in Ukraine, and this modus operandi of “diplomacy” is more the vehicle of Putin’s foreign policy than the Russian Foreign Ministry).

While Le Pen is leading and has for a while now in the first-round polling, conventional wisdom holds that she won’t be able to get enough support to triumph in the second-round-runoff… And yet, conventional wisdom said Donald Trump had no chance of beating Hillary Clinton; the thing is, once a candidate starts winning—be it Trump in the primaries or possibly Le Pen in the first round of voting—that has a way of changing how people think and vote, and with scandals and propaganda efforts embroiling her rivals, the confidence that Macron should triumph in the second-round of voting against Le Pen is weakening, with at least one just-released credible big-data analysis from an investment firm predicting she will pull off a Trumpian upset and the French bond market already showing negative effect from its worries about the possible outcome of a Le Pen victory that seems less remote now than before. 

France’s foreign intelligence chief expects Russian internet bots to make millions of posts to help her candidacy and also fears that there will be releases of hacked private e-mails of her rivals; government officials are worried that the Russians will be working actively to alter the outcome of the French election, and there is also concern that Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks—Russia’s stooges, be they unwitting or witting—will have an impact, as they are already teasing thousands of documents related to the candidates, with indications that it will be trying to help Le Pen and hurt her rivals. And WikiLeaks overnight just released what it said was a CIA document showing orders for the U.S. to spy on the French elections of 2012; while such actions are routine even among allies, it is clear that WikiLeaks is selectively releasing this now with the intent of drumming up anti-American sentiment, which will, in turn, harm centrist candidates that support the current global order; this echoes previous recent efforts by WikiLeaks to discredit Merkel’s government for cooperating with a U.S. NSA intelligence-gathering program.

Speaking of Germany, it’s up next, having elections this fall. De facto leader after Trump’s win of the Western liberal international order and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (and her party) have already been a target of Russian fake news and WikiLeaks. While the far right Alternative for Deutschland party has gained in polls overall in recent months, for now, it seems safely behind both Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc and the party of her rival coalition partner, leader of the German Social Democrats party Martin Schulz, who are neck and neck in the latest polls. Still, an EU task force has noted in the past few weeks that Merkel is a specific target of Russian fake news, and German government officials, like their French and Dutch counterparts, are worried about Russian attempts to alter the outcome of their election. And as we saw with Hillary Clinton, there is plenty of time for Russia’s efforts, and the damage they may do, to fundamentally alter public opinion in Germany.

And if Italy holds an election? Who knows…

The Czech Republic, we may add, was also recently hacked by what its officials suspected was a foreign power, and few countries would have more incentive to hack the Czechs than Russia; the EU is generally trying to improve and prioritize its efforts to fight back against Russia’s hacking, disinformation, and electoral interference, but it remains to be seen if such efforts will be successful. What is certain is that, with precision, Russia and WikiLeaks are targeting the opponents of the far-right in Europe and proponents of centrism and the EU, including its NATO military alliance formed to check the USSR during the Cold War. According to one expert quoted all the way back in April, 2016, “Russia is starting to weaponize electoral processes in Europe,” and today, we can remove the word “starting” from that quote. Right now, fear of Russia is spreading among officials all over Europe as it seeks to advance the cause of democratic fascism.

And it’s not just Putin and Russia seeking to support these democratic fascist movements and undermine the EU: Trump’s master strategist, right-wing nationalist, and disinformation master Steven Bannon wants to link up and partner with these movements, too, as well as see his former fake news factory Breitbart expand into Europe, in particular, France and Germany, even as Trump criticizes NATO and reaches out to Putin. The EU President Donald Tusk recent wrote a letter to all 27 EU national leaders stating that the Trump Administration was a “threat” to the EU, one of the most dangerous it has ever confronted, along with Russia; on top of this, another top EU official flat-out said that Trump and Bannon were existential threats to the EU—which he said they were seeking to break up—along with two other such threats: Putin and “radicalized political Islam.” In fact, applying the analytical framework outlined in NATO’s recent Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, Donald Trump is doing the Russians’ work for them, for:

As the  Handbook emphasizes, Russian information warfare thinking anticipates that trolls and bots not under Kremlin control will amplify the messages and effects of Russia’s own information operations. However, having a U.S. president, his administration, and his own networks of disinformation playing these roles is probably beyond the wildest dreams of Russian strategists and tacticians of information warfare. Putin will not squander this opportunity.

This point is echoed by Saletan and, in fact, some European allies are so nervous about Trump’s relationship with Putin that they are spying on Team Trump’s communications.

Lastly, Putin is not only cultivating and using the far right; he is also weaponizing the far left as his “useful idiots;” while generally not taking the bait on the Kremlin’s pro-Trump propaganda, far-lefties in America were all too eager to gobble up its anti-Clinton efforts, and we’re not only talking about supporters of Jill Stein and the extreme-far-left in America, but also supporters of (relatively-to-Stein-&-Co. moderate) Bernie Sanders; these far leftists were often blithely retweeting RT articles about Hillary and echoed their distorted talking points. When it comes to stein, Putin even invited her to a gala in Moscow honoring RT propaganda station, where the now scandal-ridden Gen. Michael Flynn was also a guest of honor, and Stein is a regular on the channel. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here: the far left has no chance electorally in the way the far right does, so Putin can throw support at it knowing he is safe from its agenda but happy to see it weaken the center and take votes away from credible parties that can help stop his far-right darlings; in this way, the far left helps the far-right come to power through their myopia, narcissism, and willful blindness, as clearly happened in the U.S. election, particularly with liberal Millennials. By constantly attacking “the system” and the center and the mainstream reality-based media, it also generates specific mistrust of crucial institutions and general apathy and cynicism among those on the left, apathy, cynicism, and mistrust that also worked handily in favor of Trump over Clinton. This has even succeeded to the degree of compromising respectable leftist publications like The Nation into putting out apologias for Russian behavior, and it goes beyond propaganda and is happening, and has been happening for some time, all over Europe to the degree that Russian efforts help to explain the less-often-discussed rise in the success of far left parties in Europe; there is apparently evidence of clandestine funding of far-left parties and groups by the Kremlin, in addition to its more salient efforts to covertly fund the far-right. And besides Russian propaganda, “WikiLeaks is clearly the online epicenter of the 21st-century’s red-brown convergence”: Trump couldn’t stop talking about WikiLeaks, and neither could Bernie Sanders supporters.

Yes, Russia under Putin now is succeeding in projecting its power and influence in ways way few Soviet or Czarist leaders could ever realistically envision, not with troops and tanks, but with a brilliant master strategy that plays on and exploits the flaws and vulnerabilities in Western democracy and the very worst in human nature, with the media and cyberwarfare as its main weapons of war, all fueled by the aforementioned* massive oil-and-natural-gas-scheme of epic proportions (and in which some of Trump’s associates—including one very senior one, Paul Manafort—were involved). Yes, we are at war for the survival of our very way of life, and we still don’t even realize it yet. Perhaps the damage and worry Donald Trump is generating not even one full month into his presidency is a good example of how much more we should be alarmed when we look at it in conjunction with this global campaign as a whole and what is happening in Europe and other bastions of democracy.

8.) Conclusion: Democratic Fascism is on Track to Destroy the West As We Know It, Or, Time to Break the Glass, This Is an Emergency

Again, in light of my old piece published about a year ago, I write with a sad and terrified heart now: I never imagined so much damage would be done in so short a period of time; at the time, I saw the threat, but thought it more distant and thought we’d be beating it back more successfully at this point; instead, we—the West, Western democracy, liberals who believe in liberal values and multiethnic democracy—are losing, and losing badly.

Revolutions tend to have far-flung roots and can spread in unpredictable ways, but the beginning of this wave of massive populist discontent on the right was the Tea Party protests that began early in 2009 (or, if you want to really go far back, the religious conservatives’ global return to public life in the 1980s); if 2009 can be thought of as the global democratic right’s 1789 French Revolution Bastille-storming moment, we are now in something of the beginning of a political Reign of Terror, much as the initial French people’s uprising of 1789 gave way to a far more extreme (and the original) (Jacobin) Reign of Terror in 1793 (in the words of Trotsky, “Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism”). More polite, less bloody efforts directed at limiting or rolling back the power of the governments in Washington and Brussels, over taxation and regulation, have now exploded into outright culture wars in which aggrieved dominant group on both sides of the Atlantic felt like other groups gaining rights and increased diversity were assaults on their status and responded increasingly ferociously towards these groups, often embracing racism and xenophobia to these ends; “Kick them out!” no longer applied to mainly the current politicians in power, but to whole groups of people: Hispanics, Muslims, even other European immigrants; a similar spirit in the U.S. was directed at kicking disadvantaged minorities off of government assistance, even as their economic plight had worsened relative to those wanting to deny them assistance. Angry white people were… angry, and they were going to punish not only the political elites, but people who looked and dressed and prayed and spoke differently than they did, denying them either a physical space in their country or resources from the government, even if they were, at times, fellow citizens (that seemed to not matter too much). The political systems which governed America arguably since the Founding but at least clearly since the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act are now to be overthrown in America, just as the post-WWII EU-centered systems in Europe are also to be overthrown if Trump and his Bannon-led crew—and their allies in Europe—succeed in their endeavors.

If we think Western civilization is not capable of some sudden collapse, then we are deluding ourselves. As Adam Gopnik noted in July, 2016:

Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against [fascism]…fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

And seize power he did; I have a hard time believing many Democrats really switched from Obama to Trump, and the evidence is that Trump’s popular-vote-losing, historically very narrow Electoral College victory (narrow despite Trump’s outlandish characterizations to the contrary) came largely at the hands of white rural conservatives who voted in larger-than-usual numbers and white centrists and white liberals (and Millennials of all stripes) staying home or voting third party. Because of that, there may only be one way to stop the collapse and self-destruction of Western civilization and Western democracy as we know it: the left as a whole uniting behind the center-left faction with the broadest support, whatever qualms the far-left may have with this compromise towards the center; if we—and yes, I include myself—do not unite, if too many on the left who claim to care about liberal causes and values and other human beings don’t step up and actually do what is necessary to prevent democratic fascism from becoming the new modus operandi of the West, if many leftists—Bernie Sanders supporters included—embrace myopia, impatience, and narcissism as their approaches to politics, then we won’t need jackboots marching down the Champs-Élysées or Pennsylvania Avenue to know that democracy is losing or defeated. Worst of all, the defeat will have come at the hands of our own stupidity, because if Trump and his ilk aren’t enough to make the liberals of the world unite under whichever factions get the most votes in their elections, then perhaps we don’t deserve the democracy we inherited, and perhaps we deserve democratic fascism instead. Perhaps we need to suffer to appreciate how amazing the post-WWII international system—pejoratively and inaccurately labeled “neoliberal,” as if Reaganism and Thatcherism still reigned supreme and dramatic improvements and changes have not happened globally since the end of WWII and especially in the decades since the end of the Cold War—actually is, no matter what ludicrous anarchist, libertarian, Marxist, or fascist-oriented schools of thought claim to the contrary.

In the 2016 American election, African-American and Hispanic voters, especially those old enough or with enough education to understand how much has improved even while understanding how much work still needs to be done, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton both against Sanders and against Trump (and Hispanics almost certainly voted for Clinton in much higher numbers than the exit polls suggest as indicated by data from special surveys that capture the notoriously-difficult-to-measure Latino vote much more accurately than normal exit polls); these wise (the wisest!) voters, these voters of color were practical all the way through because that is the only way they know their people have seen gains over time. For Hispanics, many of them came from places that did not offer them anywhere near as much opportunity, safety, or social justice; they had suffered enough to appreciate the Western system, warts and all. For African-Americans, there was a deep understanding of how much effort and blood had been spilled for them to earn the rights that many younger people today take for granted; from slavery through Reconstruction and segregation and beyond, mature black voters have been and are only too painfully aware that allowing one’s emotions to overtake reason and practicality by putting one’s hopes behind candidates that overpromise and offer easy fixes, that don’t have a plan, that seem too good to be true, that this all too often turns into bitter failure and disappointment, even catastrophe, and with dire consequences that are not overcome by speeches and wishful thinking; they know all too well that progress is a hard struggle and a long-march that is gradual and always leaves more to be desired.  That’s not to wholly reject idealism: idealism is beautiful and necessary, but it must be channeled practically “to hard thinking about means and ends,” to quote Krugman, or it is self-defeating, as history shows only too clearly to those who study it and study it well. 

But if millions of voters in a two-party system voted for someone other than Clinton or stayed home when they knew Trump was worse than her, if the impassioned entreaties of their favorite pop stars and pro-athletes and movie stars and their parents and sensible friends and mentors and a president they voted for twice and civil rights legends (sorry, Cornell West has nothing on John Lewis) weren’t enough to convince them to do their duty to stop a madman from taking over the most powerful office on the planet, then maybe those people need to suffer in a way that makes them realize this is not a game, this is not simply an exercise in abstract self-expression, this is not simply about them, that voting carries real world consequences that affect other people, sometimes a neighbor, sometimes someone living half a world away. Because if the left can’t unite—not with a minority of it screaming at majority to undemocratically accept their minority wishes, program, and leadership when they were unable to convince a whopping majority of their fellow liberals to accept their program or their candidate—then, it seems, we will have one-party rule in a democratic fascist state, not just for a few years, but for a long time to come. The same can be said of Europe: if too many liberals there selfishly and childishly vote for tiny parties that don’t even pass the threshold required to get seats in parliament, just like third party voters in the U.S., all they will succeed in doing is diluting the liberal vote away from parties that can actually compete with Democratic fascism; you must vote strategically with an eye to the relative support of different parties and the likelihood they can win and have an actual impact on the outcome in favor of advancing your espoused values, not simply drawing away votes from other competitive parties by voting in a way that only leaves a snowball’s chance in hell of your vote actually helping to advance that values you so loudly proclaim but are apparently unable to think through with enough effort to understand how to help, not hurt, them.

Perhaps some pain is required then, in order for enough of the left to mature and become more practical for us to actually start winning elections when we don’t have a candidate with once-in-a-generation charisma, because if the does not mature and mature fast, pain will surely come, and almost surely come in the form democratic fascism and the destruction our societies, democracy, the West, and the international system as we know it. Democratic fascism, in its possible triumph, may actually do some good, then: it may finally teach the most naïve of us with objectively good intentions and who say we believe in human rights, social justice, and equality that a vote is never something to wastefully throw away, and that its effects often go far beyond ourselves, let alone our sense of personal satisfaction.

The Economist

*****

Even as I write this, I am watching Trump talk to a crowd in South Carolina at a Boeing facility to talk about Boeing military-industrial-complex products and ordering billions in new weapons systems; yes, a day after the worst and most unintentionally farcical press conference in American history and after his new choice for National Security Advisor declined the job offer after the previous one had to resign amid an exploding scandal after less than a month on job, Trump is going to his base to offer platitudes and fetishize the idea of American greatness by appealing to militarism and weapon fetishism; “God bless Boeing,” he finishes his speech, and yes, that came after “God bless America,” with a CNN panel of generally solid pundits playing right into his game by saying it’s a great speech compared to his press conference, giving him compliments for improvement after he set the rhetorical bar lower than any president since 1789 (including, yes, Andrew Johnson’s infamous drunk VP-swearing-in speech); yes, Democratic fascism is here: the question is, what do we, what can we, do now?

The choice is clear and, sorry kids, limited: liberals can stand united against democratic fascism and halt its progress before it’s too late or stand divided in the face of its systemic, Putin-backed onslaught and empower fascism in spite of their unwitting selves and professed values. That is your choice, and as a citizen and a voter and one who professes to subscribe to liberal values, in the end, if you choose that second option history will judge despicably and judge you totally independent of whatever linguistic or intellectual contortions in which you engage to frame your action as something else other than empowering this democratic fascism, and history’s harsh judgment will matter far more than how you personally judge yourself or how often your like-minded peers in a social media echo chamber give you self-serving likes and comments, retweets, or any other number of shallow accolades; democratic fascism, though it thrives on social media, is a result far deeper and more lasting that any tweet or like. 

And this democratic fascism is approaching faster and with more momentum than just about any but the most prescient of us, even at this late hour, can see; the time for debate is limited, the time to fall in line is soon, and unless we face “hard truths” about our present realities, what is possible and not possible now in these upcoming elections, idealistic dreams will remain fantasies and we will all be living in a nightmare in which the best we can dream of in the foreseeable future will be a fantastical ability to again make use of the chances to make a true difference that we already blew back when we had that chance to actually do so, before it became too late, back when we were living in a flawed but still historically magnificent system that still gave us the power actually make a difference in a democracy of liberal democratic values, before democratic fascism and we, through our own stupidity, destroyed that precious system like Shakespeare’s Othello when he “threw a pearl away (5.2).”

*****

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

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