By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  June 13, 2020

SILVER SPRING—“I am going to take a break from my normal approach to writing and, instead, be more free-form here.  I have documented the true horrors of racism in the U.S. (and beyond) for years, in particular the persistent, living legacy of slavery and its detestable offspring embedded throughout our system confronting African-Americans in America today, the evidence for the existence of which is not only supremely compelling but overwhelmingly incontrovertible.  Each of my past pieces just linked to are base camps in which I provide many links by far more knowledgeable and accomplished people than myself for you to explore, should you want to learn more or, absurdly, if you doubt the premise itself (and then I beseech you even more to explore those sources).

Like any horror, whether terrorism, murder, sexual assault, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, etc., not all racism and not all racists are equal.  There is a spectrum, then, and the more we familiarize ourselves with it, the more we can deal with these elements in a divide-and-conquer strategy for success, whether smashing their grip on political and legal power wherever they hold any of it or peeling off some of the less nefarious on the lower-end of the spectrum into the arms of the enlightened (or “woke,” if you must).”

I categorized ten distinct stages as the best representation of the range of white racism in America, but there is certainly room for sub-categories that can exist in between and I view this as a 1.0, with future revisions a possibility.  Elements from lower tiers can be in upper tiers (e.g., I’m sure 6 applies to most in 1-5).  Also, to be clear for those who would derail this based on semantics, we are using the commonly-understood definition in which the term racism also includes discriminating against ethnicities, not just “races” (yes, sadly, I’ve heard racists tell me that that bigotry against Latinos, Arabs, Indians, Jews, etc. does not count as being “racist” because those groups aren’t races…).

So, without further ado, here are the ten main types of white racists in America, starting with the most racist:

1.) You wear a hood/swastika, burn crosses, march with tiki torches, openly say screw X group of people based on skin color/race/ethnicity, or wish you could do these things even if you’re not open about it.  Preserving the racial purity and racial hierarchy of the United States by excluding or kicking out non-whites and fighting against assertive minority-rights movements is of the utmost importance to you.  Under such thinking, whites can be viewed as “superior,” or “supremacist,” relative to most or all other races/non-white ethnicities.  You subscribe to a mini-renaissance of junk pseudoscience about how Africans and others are actually genetically inferior in terms of intelligence, and your subscription to these ideas without spending the necessary energy finding the plenty of evidence showing how this is quite easily debunked is as much proof of your racism as the other stuff.

2.) You do not openly express hate for X groups or profess fidelity to a white “superiority” over X groups, but as a white person, you express “white pride” and feel whites need to unite to stand up for each other: this makes you a “white nationalist.”  A lot of “all lives matter” people fall into this category, seeing assertion of black and other identities as a threat to them personally and to “their” fellow whites.  Politics for you is often about preserving the political power of “your” group and preserving “American culture,” by which you mean “white culture.”  You consciously believe in blocking access to power akin to your group’s own for these other groups and freely admit, at least to yourself, that you want to see whites’ privileged position in the American societal hierarchy preserved.  While not subscribing to ideas of white genetic, innate superiority, you likely subscribe to ideas of white cultural superiority and want to fight to preserve “white culture.”

(HISTORY LESSON: There’s no “black” ethnic group in Africa.  American slavers took people mostly from West Africa—a region consisting of numerous ethnic groups with distinct languages, histories, cultures, and traditions—and bred them like horses and livestock for centuries, forming them into one group that became African-American, mixing all kinds of African ethnicities into a new one that could not be distinguished by separate African ethnicities or points of origin easily and became a new, man-made ethnicity, kind of a form of a “genteel” Southern antebellum forced genetic engineering…  So African-American as a label, though artificially created by the slave trade, is still like Italian-American, Irish-American, Salvadoran-American, or Chinese-American as opposed to being analogous to white Americans.  “White-American” as an ethnicity is not actually thing, it’s a broader category; comparing it to African-American is comparing apples and oranges, like comparing Canada to Asia.  If you’re not identifying yourself in this sense mainly as your “ancestors’ countries of origins-American” but are self-selecting white as your identity, that’s not an ethnic group and it’s absurd, and if you feel the need to do that in response to African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and others asserting their identities, you’re revealing a racist mentality.  It’s like the “Confederate” rebel monuments that were put up not in the 1860s and 1870s but mainly from 1890-1940 to assert Jim Crow inequality, in response to anti-lynching efforts, and as a slap in the face of the budding Civil Rights movement.  White pride is, thusly, basically a racist way to push back against people of color asserting their rights/identities but without explicitly aligning with the terrorist Ku Klux Klan or other explicitly Nazi or fascist hate groups.)

3.) You keep your moderately racist misgivings to yourself and do not feel yourself a “white pride” person, perhaps even feel guilty about some of your views/status, but more quietly support, with a wink and a nod, structures and politicians that will keep white privilege alive.  You know you are doing this and it’s a conscious choice because you feel it’s “your country” or whatever, that “your people” built this country, not “those people.”  Rather than consciously feeling a general unified “white culture” chauvinism, you see certain black and brown cultures as inferior and ascribe African-Americans to such an inferior category.

4.) You deny racism against African-Americans and others is a thing and claim that there are no institutional barriers or systemic racism for blacks or other non-whites in America, that these issues are “made up” by Democrats to artificially “divide” people, (as if the realities of racism don’t do this already).  You may even believe the insanity that racism against whites is as bad as or worse than racism against blacks.  All this takes an insane amount of willful ignorance, ignoring mountains of data and history and a refusal to understand how history affects the present to the relative benefit of white Americans compared with African-Americans.

5.) You actually acknowledge racism is a real thing, but subscribe to the cultural inferiority/superiority chauvinism against blacks and others described earlier.  You justify racism as not only natural, but acceptable because you think those other groups face challenges primarily because they make poor decisions as a group and that they are often deservedly targeted by police as a group (though maybe sometimes unfairly as individuals) as a result, and are discriminated against, mainly because of this.  Thus, in your view, housing discrimination is just a way for better, harder-working Americans to keep their neighborhoods safe and nice and discrimination in education and employment exists because “certain” groups of people just don’t have the same motivation and work ethic as white in general do (these people will often also point to the high standardized test scores of some Asian groups to “prove” this assertion).  Police and criminal justice issues disproportionately affect blacks, you feel, because “they commit most of the crime.”  You make these arguments while willfully ignoring other factors for no good reason and mistaking symptoms for the disease.  When there is an individual case of a questionable or even clearly wrong police killing, you (nearly) always defend the police and blame the victim.

(Not at all coincidentally, many of these people are also quite within the realm of being racist against Jews [here being considered as the ethnic-group, bound by blood and genes, as opposed to the religion which could include recent converts and older convert communities].  Much in the same way these whites view blacks as inherently inferior based on junk pseudo-science or culturally inferior based on junk cultural understandings, the same whites often subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes about Jews and their nefarious “plots” to do whatever, including, most recently, that Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros is behind the black lives matter protests and the rioting and vandalism they incorrectly see as one and the same.  And let’s remember the that those tiki-torch-bearing little Nazi marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 were chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  The overlap with anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment is real, with anti-Semitism in the modern sense often definitely a form of racism.)

6.) You don’t feel the need to assert whiteness, deny racism exists, or subscribe to ideas of cultural inferiority/superiority, but you did and will proudly vote Trump and claim little or nothing Trump does is racist or has anything to do with racism (most of the above categories would claim this, too, but alongside one or more of the other ideas you do not embrace).  You feel that most or all accusations of Trump’s racism are just liberal or media smears.  This takes a stunning amount of willful ignorance or deliberate not caring enough about the concerns of so many Americans that would you even try to learn about the terrible racism of Trump and Trumpism or the serious threat that he and it present to people different from yourself and the damage this does at home and even abroad.

7.) You admit that there is systemic racism but go out of your way to minimize or at least lessen its effects (again, a lot of willful ignorance is required) and feel that African-Americans in particular need to just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” like other immigrant groups.  You deny the important legacy of slavery or minimize or lessen it since “that was a long time” ago. 

You fail to ask why African-Americans (that is, slave-descent) struggle far more than actual voluntary immigrants from Africa or black immigrants from other regions, again conspicuously avoiding the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.

8.) You say you support equal rights and fighting racism and, though you normally vote Republican, did not because Trump’s racism and other things about him bothered you so much, but have still voted Republican most of the time and may still after Trump, willfully ignorant and blinding yourself to the way the Republican Party has, for decades, been the party of racists and racism (though not in recent decades as explicitly as in the Trump era), all this in spite of clear, easily available evidence to the contrary.  You may have milder versions of the views held by the previous type (7), and feel that Trump is mainly the problem and that the Republican Party is mainly “fine” on racial issues without Trump.  It takes the blatant racism of Trump to partly open your eyes, but they are not nearly open enough.  A lesser version of this person (say, an 8.5) might be a swing “independent” voter who goes back and forth and votes Democratic sometimes but does not see or mostly misses the damage the Republicans have done on race in a very similar way to an 8.0).

9.) You consider yourself a solid liberal and normally vote for Democrats as part of what you feel is an obligation to fight racism, yet you regularly exhibit racist behavior or views (beyond “microaggressions”) without realizing it, though in mostly mild and subtle ways, not in more extreme ways except perhaps very rarely.  You likely have a few close friends of color and simply are not aware of how your views, comments, or behavior—often subconscious, a result or your upbringing, or simply a result of not having been exposed to the views of people of color in an intense way—are legitimately offensive and should be adjusted.  Though you occasionally do catch yourself or realize some of what you say, do, and feel is not appropriate (maybe realizing it’s racism or maybe not), you generally miss the patterns that at least make you fairly consistently a milder racist. No, voting for Obama once or even twice does no mean you are immune to being somewhat racist.

10.) You’re at least partly down with the causes of fighting racism and inequality and all but engage in some legitimately offensive “microaggressive” acts or statements unintentionally (mostly out of unfamiliarity) or have certain views or gut reactions to people who different.  You subscribe to misinformation about these groups without really bothering to look into them; you find yourself prejudging or avoiding certain people from certain racial/ethnic background without giving them a good individual shake (but let’s be honest, most people of most races and ethnicities everywhere around the world and certainly most Americans fall under this very human category).

*****

We should separate here people who fall on this spectrum and those who do not but may occasionally engage in acts that can be defined as racist, if out of ignorance, fear, convenience, or to play for some advantage.  They do not harbor racist views in general but once in a while consciously seek to practice or benefit from what has often been termed “white privilege” (though, considering the large numbers of poor whites in this country and how the best thing would be for poor whites and poor blacks to unite, during a conversation with a friend I came to the conclusion that the term “white advantage” might be a better term and might rub the literally dirt-poor whites of Appalachia a bit less offensively), undoubtedly a very real and pervasive concept regardless of how it is labeled.  Just as overall good people can do bad things and overall bad people can still do good things (Hitler really loved his dog, or whatever), so I believe that non-racists can commit some racist acts, though once they become something less than rare, we’re veering into a pattern and thus onto the above-discussed spectrum.  Discussing how generally non-racist people can still commit racist acts could be a whole conversation and exploration on its own, which we will not delve into here.

A whole further discussion still could be had on the silence and non-activism of non-racist whites being a huge part of the problem, and Dr. King has the ultimate word on that, from thoughts composed in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell in 1963:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

All members of the majority have a duty to stick up for the abused minority, and I have yet to see a better expression of this sentiment than that given in a speech given by Abraham Lincoln in 1858:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

For now, I will leave Lincoln with the last word on that.  I will keep my focus in this piece to the above spectrum I devised that involves how people think, feel, and believe in ways that subscribe in the mind and heart to racism, including a willful, irrational denial or exclusion of information that would force them to reckon with their beliefs and acknowledge other factors as the primary drivers of racial inequality instead of the ones they incorrectly choose to inflate.  Understanding the different ways and different degrees people think in terms of and subscribe to racism in their minds and hearts, their consciousnesses and worldviews, is crucial, and I feel confident in the above spectrum as a way to be able to do this and its rough accuracy.

One would hope that, over time, more and more of the people in the lowest rungs of this racism spectrum can be pulled out of it and into the light (I prefer “enlightened” as a term, harkening back to the Enlightenment—the grand intellectual revolutionary movement that helped birth our nation—over the Millennialspeak “woke”), and, indeed, such gradual realignment and enlightenment over time has been the story of slow—sometimes excruciatingly slow—progress for our nation on race from even our colonial era.  And this story has, though sometimes suffering setbacks, reverses, and a few dark ages, been one overall a gradually improving arc rising towards justice and equality.

Yet unquestioningly, our present Trumpian era is undoubtedly one of those moments when the upward arc is being pulled down, and there is never a guarantee that that curve (not to be confused with the coronavirus curve) will eventually resume an upward trajectory.  The most immediate question for now is “How much lower will the arc curve down and when will we (or even will we) see the arc move back up?”

There are reasons to be cautiously hopeful that the current “black lives matter” moment after the killing of George Floyd by police—a moment that seems to have exploded into a fierce global movement—may really be something special, may really bring about change.  We are already seeing a spate of much needed local-level reforms enacted that is quite encouraging, but only time will tell if the systemic change we need in this country—not just in some localities and states, nor only in structures, laws, and institutions, but in our hearts and minds—is really upon us or, if, as in so many other similar situations before, public outrage and demands for change will be thwarted by the system itself, with public attention and efforts eventually waning and moving onto some other new or old distraction.

In the end, far fuller justice and a forceful, rapid upward shift in the arc will only materialize with serious movement of people down and off the spectrum I delineated above.  We should think of racism, then, not as a black-and-white thing or a box checked as a “yes” or a “no,” but as my wide spectrum that invites differing approaches and solutions for individuals depending on where they are on it in order to make those deeply necessary spectrum-shifts far more likely, far more soon, and far more powerful.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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The worst thing about Trump? Globally, people like him and his supporters are everywhere and their politics maddeningly banal, as the ethno-centric politics of hate in the Caucasian Republic of Georgia demonstrate frightening similarities to the same politics in the Unites States of America.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 10, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 10th, 2016

Patrick Robert/Corbis/Getty; EPA

AMMAN — Amid all the talk of the issue of the “normalization” of Trump, perhaps the most disheartening realization that comes to those who ponder such a concept is in how many ways how utterly banal are figures like Trump and the movement he is cultivating/exploiting, both in the wider world and throughout history. Georgia—the Republic of, in the Caucasus, not the one of peaches, the Atlanta Braves, and America’s Deep South—is as illustrative of this sad reality of the human condition as any other place, and is thus deeply relevant to understanding our own predicament with Mr. Trump and his fans.

To illustrate this point, I will steal from my own graduate school work in 2009 on conflict in Georgia involving Georgians, Abkhaz, Ossetians, and Russians, inserted in italicized blocs (apologies for all the parenthetical citations as we had a very strict and I would argue frustrating series of guidelines; here is the full paper). 

As will be demonstrated, much of Georgian history involves internal and external forces managing the relationships between ethnic Georgians on one hand and ethnic Abkhaz and ethnic Ossetians and others on the other in what can loosely be understood to be Georgian territory and in what comprises the internationally recognized borders of Georgia today. Since 1800, Russia dominated the country and has been nearly the sole major outside actor involved in these ethnic conflicts, and in recent years has acted to allow both Abkhazia and South Ossetia to become de facto independent from Georgia and to become de facto parts of the Russian Federation. After the period of the rule of the Czars over the Russian Empire ended, the ethnic minorities in Georgia competed for favor and power to be bestowed from the Soviet Union’s governing elites, elites whose behavior ranged from accommodating ethnic Georgian nationalism to addressing concerns of minorities in Georgia as a way to check Georgian nationalism when it became too anti-Russian/anti-Soviet (something which continued after the fall of the USSR up through today).

Much of American history, likewise, is the story of race relations between white masters and black slaves in the South and the relationship between the rest of the country and the South when it came to limiting the institution of slavery. Since 1865, slavery ended in America but attempts at legal and political equality for freed slaves in the South failed in the face of a terrorist insurgency that finally succeeded in overthrowing the post-Civil War order everywhere in the South by 1877. It was not until a long period of first oppression and later unrest that legal and political equality for African-Americans was imposed on the South by an activist U.S. federal government by 1965.

Creating Identities

“The creation legend of Abkhazia and Georgia is identical, a sad fact that has not led to unity and fraternity between these two peoples,” writes Goltz (2009), “but rather to a disputation of basic history and the denial of the very humanity of the other group” (Goltz 2009, 21). For most of its history, Georgia had a stronger eastern kingdom which dominated a weaker western Georgian kingdom, and Abkhazia (then called Abkhazeti) was often ruled by a local prince who might submit to another prince or one of the Georgian kings, or might not, and managed to stay free, and eventually grew in power into its own kingdom, supplanting the west Georgian state and rivaling the east Georgian kingdom for several centuries until the latter unified both into a single Georgian kingdom in 1008 C.E. (Suny 1994, 11-33; Braund 1994, 152-313; Rapp 2000, 576; Gvosdev 2000,1). This kingdom would be a “decidedly decentralized state,” where local rulers often flouted the authority of the “kings” and reached out to foreign powers independently for leverage against them, some trying to take the throne (Suny 1994, 33- 38). Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Georgia “remained…primarily rural” and its “towns…were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians, and other foreigners” until the nineteenth century (Ibid., 38-39). Mongols and plague fragmented Georgia, and Abkhazeti was one of three western regions “ruled as semi-independent” principalities; Georgia would not see reunification “until the annexation by Russia in the nineteenth century” (Suny 1994, 38-59; Gvosdev 2000, 2-5).”

Note how divided and difficult to control the region was.

“Because, arguably, interests are tied to identities,” writes Suny (1999), “self-understandings… must be investigated as prerequisite to analyzing the security requirements of states” (Suny 1999, 139- 140). Georgia is among certain former Soviet states where “uncertainty about current politics and future possibilities are deeply embedded in more general confusion about who ‘we‘ are and where ‘our‘ interests lie” and he writes that “[n]ational identity is a particular form of political identification” in a world where “nation is not natural or given but must be worked for, taught, and instilled, largely through the efforts of intellectuals, politicians, and activists who make the identification with the ‘imagined political community‘ of the nation a palpable and potent source of emotional and intellectual commitment” (Ibid., 140, 144-145). For Suny, “[m]odern nations are those political communities made up of people who believe they share characteristics…that give them the right to self-determination… they can be thought of as arenas in which people dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or who is out of the group, where the ‘homeland‘ begins and ends, what the ‘true‘ history of the nation is” (Suny 1999, 145; 4 Suny 2001, 866). He argues that many wars in the modern era are fought over such issues, and that “longlived ‘nations,‘ [like]…Georgians… who have written traditions that go back millennia, have in modern times reconstructed and made consistent the varied and changing identities and ways of conceiving themselves that existed in the past;” “earlier identities” have been molded into “frame[s] of later templates, particularly that of the nation” (Suny 1999, 146). He describes Georgia as one of several former Soviet Republics where “the problems of ethnicity, identity, and the appropriate political forms to sustain the new state in the future were at the base of the devastating and violent crises that fractured” them (Suny 1999, 154). For Suny (1994), Georgia is “reinventing its past;” and “[t]the key to the future lies in what a people selects from its past, how it imagines itself as a community and continues to remake itself as a nation” (Suny 1994, 334-335).

Several authors besides Suny articulate a similar position, that the intensely-felt ancient identities of the Georgians and the Abkhaz are important components to understanding their modern struggles conflicts with each other. Grant (2009) comments that these ancient Abkhaz and Georgian identities were so strongly felt that Russia “never entirely convinced…[these people] that they were full partners alongside the rest” of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Georgia‘s current President, Mikheil Saakashvili, “took a holy oath” as part of his presidential inauguration ceremony at Gelati, where the “greatest Georgian king of the eleventh century…is buried. By receiving the blessing at Gelati, Saakashvili, who wants a strong Georgian state, was symbolically alluding to a period of history when Georgia had such a state” (Grant 2009, ix-x; Nodia 2005, 78).

On the use of history in this debate, Zverev (1996) notes that it is a “salient factor” in understanding “why conflicts break out,” that “in Abkhaz literature, one finds references to the Abkhazian kingdom which existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. This is instrumental to the Abkhazian claim for sovereignty over the region even though the same kingdom could equally be described as a common Georgian-Abkhazian state, with a predominance of Georgian language and culture;” he points out that on the other side, Georgians “stress the allegedly non-Abkhaz character” of the historical Abkhazia, and that some even think of Georgians as “hosts” and that everyone else, including Abkhaz, are “guests” in Georgian territory (Zverev 1996, part I par.7). This debate, for Zverev as it was for Suny, is about presenting a case for who has the right to govern where and over whom, and this representation of the debate is also corroborated by the recent EU report on the August 2008 war (2009), by Khazanov (1996), by the International Crisis Group (ICG) (2006), and by Nodia (1998) (EURII, 66-69; Khazanov 1996, 6; ICG 2006, 3-4; Nodia 1998, 14). Nodia sums up Georgian views: “Abkhazia is Georgia, because it has always been part of Georgia when it was united. Georgians cannot see Abkhazia as a ‘foreign‘ land which was once conquered by them, and the accusation of imperialism usually makes them furious” (Nodia 1998, 19). Jans (1998) sums up the intersection of Georgian and Abkhazian thought, in that after the Cold War they were engaged in a quest for identity since “[d]emocracy, understood as the rule of the people by the people, begs the question of what is to be understood as ‘We, the people.‘“ (Jans 1998, 109) He further argues that “Ethnonational identities base their credibility and legitimacy on an interpretation of the historical past;” so for Georgians and Abkhazians, the past is of very present relevance to them (Ibid., 110). Lynch (2002) says that Abkhaz claims to the right of self-determination are, among other things, “based” on the idea that modern Abkhazia can claim to be the latest incarnation of “a long historical tradition;” he then quotes Abkhazia‘s foreign minister as saying “Abkhazia has a thousand-year history of statehood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact” (Lynch 2002, 837). Departing from the more neutral posture of others, Chirikba (1998), writing as an Abkhaz government official, argues that Abkhaz history shows more independence from Georgians than not, and thus provides its people with “legitimate grounds for their claims to statehood and sovereignty” (Chirikba 1998, 48).”

Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it should: for much of American history, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants constructed an American identity that was based on their supposed superiority over other whites—Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans—in addition to Africans and others, and defined being true “Americans” as their exclusive domain, working actively to frame these other groups as non-Americans and undeserving of the same rights, if any. Over time the different whites generally unified when it came to ethnic politics and redefined “American” as being white, which over much of the last century meant seeking to exclude blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites from sharing in the spoils of being an “American.”

*****

Perceptions of Meddling

“Areshidze posits the theory that the Soviet “system of ethnic autonomies was…in reality…a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the ‘protected‘ minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize” Georgia; Zürcher (2005) echoes this analysis (Areshidze 2007, 22; Zürcher 2005, 99). Castells (1996) claims that “the strong development of nationalism in the post-communist period can be related…to the cultural emptiness created by 70 years of imposition of an exclusionary ideological entity, coupled with the return to primary, historical identity (Russian, Georgian), as the only source of meaning after the crumbling of the historically fragile sovietskii narod” (Soviet people) (Castells 1996, 24). Eventually all these trends culminated on the Georgian side with the idea that “their further evolution was hindered by the restraints placed on them by the Russians. An attitude arose that, left to themselves, the Georgians could more quickly realize their historical potential;” “the erosion of Marxist ideology within the Soviet Union cleared the way for its replacement” by the forces already pent up even before Stalin and released after him. Released, they “produced an increasingly potent nationalist mood in all parts of Georgian society—and counternationalism among the ethnic minorities within the republic;” this in turn “stimulated a rapid escalation of ethnic politics in Georgia;” “[t]he specific goals of Soviet nationality policy, the rapprochement and eventual merging of nationalities, were further from realization in the 1980s than they had been at any time in Soviet history” (Suny 1994, 313-316, 320-321; Remington 1989, 145).

Such Georgian views are remarkably similar to those of many conservative white Americans: if the federal government would just get out of the way, they would be free to realize their full potential, and they deeply resent and oppose federal efforts to protect minority rights or to divert any common resources specifically in the direction of minorities; for these white Americans, this is taking what is “theirs” as “true Americans” as they define that concept and they seek to exclude or place limits on other groups that they view as less “American” and worthy than themselves. For them, their concept of their own freedom involves their ability to restrict the freedoms of others as they please. 

It was no coincidence that the election of a black President—America’s first non-white president—who campaigned heavily on giving poor uninsured people (the way conservative whites incorrectly read it: non-white) healthcare gave rise to the Tea Party which was in many ways white nationalism run amok (one only has to look at the many polls and multiple studies that showed that huge numbers of Tea Partiers thought Obama was a Muslim, doubted he was a Christian, believed he was not born in America, and had more prejudicial, insensitive, and extreme views on racial issues than most Americans, even when compared to non-Tea Party conservatives); those Tea party forces have morphed into the Trump movement, which has taken over the Republican Party, one of two major political parties in America, and clearly those people now carry the same noxious and extreme views on race that they did when they were members of the Tea Party; in fact, racial concerns seem to be the largest motivators behind people choosing to support Trump: in other words, Trump is the candidate of white ethno-centrist nationalism in America.

Weaponizing History

Suny (2001) claims that Soviet policy created a tendency for ethnic groups like Georgians and Abkhaz to invent imaginary histories that can bolster “the legitimacy of the nation and particular claims to territory and statehood” while at the same time becoming become “exclusivist” and encouraging “desperate policies of deportation and ethnic cleansing” (Suny 2001, 895-896). The EU report concludes that in the atmosphere discussed, there was “no political framework that would have been strong enough to integrate the conflicting national demands” (EURII 2009, 63). Violence, war, and revolution would soon erupt as Soviet rule ended in Georgia.

One only need to look at how conservatives in America, particularly in the South, have created a fantasy about the Civil War that they maintain to this day: Lincoln was a tyrant while the South was bravely fighting for freedom and small government, despite a clear and overwhelming preponderance of evidence that, without question, slavery and white supremacy were at the heart of the Civil War—were actually its primary drivers—and at the heart of the ideology of the self-styled “Confederate States of America.” White ethno-centrists even try to force textbooks into public schools that downplay the issue of slavery, minimize discussion of racial oppression, and falsely frame America’s founding in a Christian context. Georgians and Abkhaz and others fight among themselves over their founding myths and over their histories, trying to distort and weaponize history as a way to delegitimize certain groups and assert exclusivity over this or that, but Americans are clearly no different.

*****

Zero-Sum Mentalities on Minorities: Identity and the Meaning of Independence

“Many Georgian nationalists are apprehensive of minorities like Ossetians and Abkhaz having too much autonomy and see this as a threat to Georgia; it was ethnic Georgian protests against the Abkhaz request for separation from Georgia in 1989 which sparked the rapid acceleration of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist, anti-ethnic minority agenda and “radicalized” Georgian nationalism; it became more belligerent towards perceived threats from minorities, especially Ossetians and Abkhaz” (Suny 1994, 317-323; Zürcher 2005, 90). For Devdariani (2005) Gamsakhurdia and his movement “perceived Abkhazia and South Ossetia as simply tools for Russian pressure directed against Georgian independence… “[C]oncerns of [their] local elites…[were ignored and]…tensions spiraled into violent clashes…[They failed] to see how…[their] own quest for independence challenged the identities of the Abkhazians and Ossetians” (Devdariani 2005, 161)…

Jones (2006), seeking to downplay ethnic tensions in favor of economic ones, disagrees that the protests were about Abkhazia and argues they were more about “Georgian independence,” but Jones still describes Gamsakhurdia as “using nationalist slogans to gain authority” and “manipulat[ing] a formerly moderate Georgian populace into a chauvinistic mob;” Zürcher maintains with others that the Abkhazian call for secession “led” to the protest (Jones 2006, 257; Zürcher 2005, 89). The EU report and Zürcher take care to mention Georgians, especially those in Abkhazia, saw concessions to minorities as too generous, and that this explains the rise of leaders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia (EURII 2009, 69; Zürcher 2005, 89)

When ethnic minorities tried/try to assert themselves in America, there was/is almost always a hostile backlash from the white majority, and these backlashes are often violence and can take on a form of terrorism. This was the plight the Irish faced as famously depicted in the Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, and of freed slaves who suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War and for a century after, and violence spiked again when they asserted themselves in the later 1950s and 1960s. Today, with racial, gender, and sexual orientation movements, there has never been a more diverse array of loud assertions of minority groups for their deserved place in public and private life, and the discourse is richer and more diverse than it has ever been as a result. But with the rise of the Tea Party and Trump after the election of a black president and the codification of homosexual marriage as a right protected by the Constitution (both good things), with the yet further proliferation of oversensitivity, an extreme form of politically correct discourse, and complaints of microaggressions (no so much good things), we are seeing a major backlash and Donald Trump’s rise to a height of just a few percentage-points of votes away from the presidency is the face and spirit of that backlash. Many of Trump’s supporters look at groups like blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBT community as tools for an unholy alliance between such groups and a liberal activist federal government—led by a black president they generally believe is a foreign-born Muslim—that these whites perceive has come to oppress them in order to favor brown people and gays and non-Christians (more or less non-Americans to them). Hence, we have whites chanting All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, with many whites condemning Black Lives Matter and some even trying to frame it as a terrorist group; too many and too often, whites feel they must have a virtual monopoly on group victimhood and cannot stomach the idea of recognizing and legitimizing the grievances of other groups.

Trump is therefore in many ways just America’s Zviad Gamsakhurdia. And it should be noted that Gamsakurdia propelled his country onto a path of ethnic hatred and violence that led to civil war. I don’t think Trump would push America into a civil war, but, as I’ve noted before, I do see America at an already dangerously high level of racial tension and violence not seen since the Civil Rights Era half a century earlier, with the one major exception being the 1992 L.A. riots, and I do see American society becoming far more divided than it is even now should Trump be at the helm, and view Trump as a danger to Western democracy. 

Still, it is clear that the nativism and ethno-centrism that are driving today’s Republican Party and have handed it to Trump are parts of a longstanding American tradition, best exemplified by the “Know-Nothings” for which Abraham Lincoln harbored such disdain, Southern Civil-War slaver secessionists and Redeemers, and George Wallace’s movement from the Civil Rights Era. And, as in Georgia, these often regional movements are both about hostility towards other ethnicities and about independence, and independence from a federal government perceived almost as a foreign power and from a foreign power for the U.S. and Georgia, respectively. Such a concept of independence is tied to spheres both public and private that are seen to be contested with these other ethnicities in a landscape that has long been ethnically and/or racially polarized.

In America, people, locations, and states that are very anti-federal government hardly look at what they deem interference from Washington—in particular from Democrats, and in particular from the African-American-led Obama Administration—differently from how Georgian chauvinists look(ed) at Russian/Soviet efforts to accommodate Abkhaz and other minorities in Georgia; likewise, minorities in America have long looked to the federal government to establish and protect their rights against a white majority that, to varying degrees depending on location, has often sought and still seeks to infringe or even outright destroy those rights, much like Abkhaz and Ossetians have appealed to Soviet/Russian authority to protect them from abuses at the hands of Georgians.

A most salient case-in-point in America involves recent controversies in North Carolina; as one of the states that had used state laws to institutionalize the oppression of African-Americans until 1965, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) had included North Carolina along with a number of states and localities in a list of places—mostly in the South—that had to receive “preclearance” from federal authorities before changing any of its voting laws, with this preclearance provision on component of an effort to prevent the re-disenfranchisement of black voters. This system worked quite well until 2013, when the narrowly conservative U.S. Supreme Court issue a partisan 5-4 ruling that basically said the VRA was no longer needed and that it constituted federal oppression of state sovereignty. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina was one of several states that enacted controversial restrictive voting laws under Republican leadership. These laws were criticized to varying degrees as thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of African-Americans, and at the end of August of this year, that is just what the federal court system decided: a federal appeals court had ruled that the North Carolina law sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and struck it down as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court in a 4-4 partisan tie issued on August 31st (with a vacant seat since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most conservative justice on the Court) was unable to alter this decision (but almost certainly would have had Scalia been alive; a close call indeed).

Thus, as American Republican right-wing white ethno-centrist nationalists seeks to curb and flout federal authority and prodding on many issues related to minorities, from accepting refugees and affirmative action to voting rights and Medicaid expansion to LBGT rights and imposing sectarian religious agendas, so Georgian ethno-nationalists long sought to fight Soviet/Russian attempts to protect and ensure minority rights for Abkhaz and Ossetians. Georgia has been a part of the Russian Empire for over 200 year until the end of the Cold War, so though this involves two separate sovereign nations today, many of the dynamics still resemble those of Russian/Soviet intranational politics; conversely, the South of the United States experimented with secession as a unit from 1861-1865 and tried to form its own nation, an experiment which failed miserably but which still helps to explain why the South above all other regions of the United States exhibits a staunch resistance to the rest of the national will and to attempts by the U.S. federal government to bring it along with other national projects, from segregation to the ACA (Obamacare) and any of a whole host of other items.

As in the case with Georgia, at the heart of all this tension are ethnic tensions between those in a majority that see any concession to minorities as a loss of their “rightful” power and societal position on one hand and ethnic minorities that depend on outside forces for protection from outright oppression and domination at the hands those in that majority on the other. And, much as Trump is galvanizing a backlash in minority consciousness and activism in America, so, too, did Gamsakhurdia galvanize Abkhazians and others to resist him.

Conclusion: All Politics Is Local (Exclusion of “The Other?”)

The bottom line is that the sad identity politics of hate and division and resentment are hardly anything exceptional in America and can be found all over the world throughout history and up through today, from Burma to Turkey, from Israel to Burundi, from France to Syria. Americans can only hope that Trump is not nearly as successful as Gamsakhurdia and that America will not follow Georgia in fracturing itself over ethnic hatred. Even if it manages to stave off such a scenario, that will only be a starting point for much needed healing and mending of racial and ethnic fences.

On a final note: Russia at one point gave military support to Gamsakhurdia, after he had been overthrown, as a way to weaken Georgia’s overall position before turning on him after Russia had wrested concessions from the new Georgian leadership. Trump might be interested in such history, with Putin’s Russia today interfering in America’s election and trying to help Donald Trump get into the White House.

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Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, 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 June 30, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter @bfry1981) June 30th, 2015

The Boston area on lockdown

Republished by Stupidparty Math v. Myth

Other articles in this series:

Development: The Fix for Terrorism & Violent Crime

American Guns: Not Just Killing Americans (See Mexico)

Gun Violence in the U.S.: The Numbers Behind the Madness

The Irrelevant Second Amendment

Why Is the U.S. So Good at Gun violence?

UPDATE July 1st:  In response to some of the comments and messages I have received, I want to acknowledge that 1.) I am aware that not only Republicans have pushed for/embraced these policies and approaches (Boston itself being a democratic stronghold) but that 2.) these policies are, nevertheless, overall concoctions of, and are driven and mainly supported by, the Republican Party its supporters/voters.  In addition, 3.) State and local counterterrorism policy is often heavily influenced by the federal government, and we have also seen a recent somewhat-federal-driven militarization  of state and local police. Even with all this in mind, it needs to be remembered that it was George W. Bush’s Administration that initiated two massive, long-lasting ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is the Obama Administration that ended one of those wars (Iraq) and is setting up the end (or at least minimization) of the other (Afghanistan).  Obama’s re-engagement in Iraq to deal with ISIS has been deliberately and decidedly minimal in comparison.  Drone strikes and surveillance—programs that Obama increased from the Bush years—are decidedly less destructive overall that the more ground-force-utilizing Republican-backed policies.  Furthermore, virtually any poll you would find would show that conservatives and Republicans are more in favor of the use of force and confrontation—even to the degree of often opposing serious diplomacy!—over liberals and Democrats, who tend to favor diplomacy and negotiation far more robustly over military options  When liberals and Democrats do support the use of force, it tends to be in a more measured and limited way than conservatives and Republicans.  Therefore, while there are certainly exceptions, the leaders of the Republican Party and their supporters and voters are the ones pushing these policies much more aggressively most of the time and are therefore clearly most responsible for their application and perpetuation.

I wrote, but never published, the below piece in the weeks after the Tsarnaev brothers carried out their horrific lone wolf terrorist attack on the city of Boston at the finish-line for the Boston Marathon on April 15th, 2013. The points I raised then are just as relevant now. When President Obama addressed the nation on the recent white-supremacist terrorist Charleston shooting, it was a sobering, depressing moment. His tone, his body language, screamed defeat and resignation, resignation that anything could or would be done in response to this act of terror. The contrast between this Obama and the Obama who took office—who was full of hope and enthusiasm and belief in the American people and system—was crushing to see. I have hardly seen all of Obama’s press conferences, but this was the most dejected I had ever seen him. There was an undercurrent of anger in him too, but more than anything, Obama conveyed a sense of hopeless frustration in that press conference:

Until the investigation is complete, I’m necessarily constrained in terms of talking about the details of the case. But I don’t need to be constrained about the emotions that tragedies like this raise. I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many time. We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and healing, but let’s be clear: at some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.

“At some point, but not now, and not during my presidency, because I am powerless as things stand now to do anything about this,” Obama seemed to  be thinking silently. Keep in mind, this was before Obama’s big week at the Supreme Court, and his singing of Amazing Grace after he delivered a eulogy in Charleston.

Comedian Jon Stewart—ironically, and, over his long career as host of The Daily Show, hardly for the first time—outdid the president in delivering an even more searing, relevant, and necessary message on the Charleston shooting. The day of the shooting, Stewart chose to forego comedy completely and to deliver an impassioned monologue about our inability to confront either racial issues or domestic gun violence, and our superability to freak out about foreign people killing Americans but to just nihilistically shrug away (especially Republicans, I would add) the far more frequent violence of Americans killing other Americans:

I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind. I don’t want to get into the political argument of the guns and things. But what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our — we invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over five or six different countries, all to keep Americans safe. We got to do whatever we can. We’ll torture people. We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. Nine people shot in a church. What about that? “Hey, what are you gonna do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?” That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around, and you know it. You know that it’s going to go down the same path. “This is a terrible tragedy.” They’re already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for 100 and some years and has been attacked viciously many times, as many black churches have.

He concludes his monologue by noting that “We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing—al Qaeda, ISIS, they’re not shit compared to the damage we can do to ourselves on a regular basis.”

The truth of Stewart’s concluding statement is something very few major American political leaders even attempt to acknowledge, let along discuss. The Department of Homeland Security itself is equally (and in some ways more) concerned about domestic right-wing terrorist attacks than attacks by Islamic extremists. And this perspective and Stewart’s are completely in line with American history and facts because since the 9/11 attacks, 48 people were killed by non-Muslims in terrorist attacks in America, compared to only 26 people being killed by Muslim terrorists on American soil. In the era before 2001, most notably, white anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh carried out the biggest terrorist attack in American history before 9/11, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more in Oklahoma City in 1995. But domestic terrorism stretched back much earlier: between 1882 and 1968, over 4,700 Americans were killed by extremist lynch mobs, often involving the terrorist Ku Klux Klan. And especially in the years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) at the end of the Civil War in 1865, Ku Klux Klan terrorists and other terrorists murdered thousands of freed former slaves and their white allies in a terrorist guerilla insurgency against Federal troops and the new state governments they had set up that provided freedom for former slaves, an insurgency which succeeded and paved the way for the institutionalized mass oppression backed by terror that was the Jim Crow and segregation era. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a spate of anarchist terrorism, including the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.

In the wake of the Charleston shootings, I now present my thoughts from over two years ago about how the threat of Islamic terrorism needs to be put in a healthy. proportional perspective and that we need to take much (but most certainly not all!) of the energy devoted to combatting that threat and devote it to dealing with more serious, deadly, and pressing issues here at home.

How Not to Stop a Terrorist 

A nineteen-year-old amateur terrorist on the run does not even come close to warranting a citywide shutdown. That it did happen should scare us all.

By Brian E. Frydenborg- May 20th 2013

Firstly, I want to begin by making clear that the Boston Police Department, the Watertown Police Department, Boston’s first responders, the National Guard, the FBI, the ATF, and other city, local, state, and federal workers did a great job helping the wounded, saving lives, keeping the Boston metro area safe, and bringing justice to one of the perpetrators of the horrific attacks in Boston and apprehending the other. The people of Boston, for responding to so well under attack and pressure, also deserve a lot of credit.

Having said that, the scene that unfolded on CNN live over the course of these events should deeply disturb all Americans for reasons that very few American commentators or pundits have even discussed. And I have to admit I am deeply disturbed that I am, apparently, one of the few people I know who feel this way.

I admit, I have hardly been able to see or read all commentary on the internet or watch every TV news program, but so far I’ve only come across three pundits who have expressed my views or views similar to them: Harvard’s Stephen Walt, writing several pieces for Foreign Policy, Michael Cohen, writing for Britain’s The Observer, and Michael Shapira, writing for the The Washington Times (and yes, I am troubled that I agree with The Washington Times). Those commentators on major TV networks or writing for most major publications, not so much. It honestly makes me feel very alone and isolated, and that, as much as I love my country, I feel at times as if I cannot identify with it or feel a part of it. This feeling has been creeping into me over the last decade, but after these recent events, it has never been more profound or more disturbing.

Before getting into what specifically I had problems with, let’s go through a few basic facts. Firstly, two brothers, who it seems acted alone, planted two pressure cooker bombs on a major street in Boston at the finish line for the Boston Marathon on the afternoon of April 15th and exploded them during said marathon. Three people were killed by the bombs and 264 wounded, some of them grievously so. Before the authorities had any real suspects, a massive security presence arrived in Boston: state and local police, National Guard troops, FBI, ATF, and others. When photos of two suspects were released on the early evening of April 18th, only a few hours later authorities were able to identify them even as they proceeded to attack and kill an MIT Police Officer, stole a car and took the owner hostage. Later, in the early hours of April 19th, a firefight ensued between authorities and the brothers in Watertown, resulting in the wounding, capture, and later the death of the older brother while the younger brother escaped. At dawn, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick then issued a call for all Boston area residents to “shelter in place,” what was essentially a non-legally-binding request to lock down the entire Boston metropolitan area. Not only Boston was shutdown but also its suburbs: people were told not to come into work and most businesses were shutdown, the subway, Amtrak, almost all taxis and public transportation were shutdown, and all this on a weekday. In effect, the Boston metropolitan area ceased to function for over a day. Ironically, only after the lockdown request was rescinded was the other brother found by a Watertown resident who was out and about on his property, out and about precisely because the order had been lifted. Soon after authorities apprehending the suspect. Overall, a good win for law enforcement and authorities, bad guys caught or dead. But the issue of the lockdown is something else entirely, and I am going to single that out from what I feel was otherwise a good job on the part of government officials.  

And here is where I depart company with my fellow Americans and am part of some sort of extremely tiny minority: I think this massive lockdown was a shockingly over-the-top, ridiculously unnecessary, and disturbingly unprecedented action. And I want this in particular to be clear to my readers: never in this history of terrorist attacks has an entire city, an entire metro area, been shut down in such a near total way in response to an attack or attacks. They say never say never, well, I am saying this never, ever happened in the history of terrorism until the authorities in Boston made that call. Anyone who doubts the scale of the lockdown needs only to look at the many pictures posted by Boston-area residents and sheer number of public institutions that were closed, from colleges to taxi services. As a student of politics and public policy, of terrorism and history, of comparative policy and human behavior, I can tell you that major cities have been dealing with terrorism for over a century. There were anarchist bombings all over the country early in the twentieth century. Jewish terrorists used bombings against British forces in Mandate Palestine, and Palestinians and Lebanese have used terrorist bombings against Israeli forces and sometimes civilians. Europe has had to deal with terrorist bombings from a variety of groups, from the Red Brigades to the Irish Republican Army to Basque separatists. The Tamil Tigers regularly hit targets in Sri Lanka. In the last decade and then some, terrorist attacks hit London, Madrid, Mumbai, Jerusalem, Moscow, cities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, more recently Libya and Syria and many other places. Some of these cities routinely deal with terrorist attacks, cities like London, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Kabul. In Western/developed countries in particular, most of the counterterrorist operations are successful, the perpetrators caught or killed, further immediate attacks stopped or prevented. These countries are able to more or less tactically successfully deal with these incidents, and they all have one thing in common: they never, ever shut-down an entire city in response to a few bombings. In fact, many of these incidents were far more deadly than the bombings in Boston. So why the near-total city shutdown in Boston, when competent, successful, prudent, and experienced counterterrorist officials in places like London, Madrid, and Jerusalem never even came close to making such a call? What was so different about Boston’s incident that warranted such an unprecedented, massive shutdown compared with far deadlier attacks in Barcelona, Berlin, Baghdad, Belfast, Beirut, Bersheeva, or any of many other places?

Seen in the context of other similar—or worse—incidents and what the general (at least in developed countries quite often more or less successful) responses to them were, the shutdown of the Boston metro area makes no sense and is beyond the definition of overkill. Of course it is natural for people to overreact. And it is natural for a place like Boston which is so unused to such attacks to overreact. But public policy is not supposed to be about giving in to immediate emotion. Policymakers have a responsibility to coolly assess the situation, and make decisions based on looking at how successful responses have worked in similar situations, prudently using an appropriate level of time, effort, energy and resources. And, simply stated, there is nothing in the history of counterterrorism which even remotely suggested that the necessary response was one of such a massive proportion as Boston’s response, a response in which a major metropolitan area in the U.S. was shut down in order to track down one remaining suspect who was a nineteen-year old kid (and an amateur, at that) whose picture was already on every television screen in America. If one crazy punk can cause an entire major U.S. city to shut-down, then we are doing something wrong and the terrorists are winning. Maybe they have even already won. Osama bin Laden’s goal with the 9/11 attacks was to draw the U.S. into a long, costly, bloody war that would drain our treasure, international standing, and our will to fight overseas, make the U.S. pull back our support for the non-Islamic regimes in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, and use such a conflict to draw recruits to al-Qaeda from all over the world. While we hesitated putting a massive presence on the ground in Afghanistan, with Iraq, gave him exactly what we wanted. It took a few years, but the sickening truth is that bin Laden played us like a harp. Now, it seems, we are at an even more extreme progression of bin Laden’s trap: the point where we can let one nineteen-year-old kid shut down a whole city and paralyze the lives of millions.

Let’s go through the typical responses I hear when I raise this issue:

“But the authorities didn’t know if there were other attackers or sleeper cells.”Yeah, and neither do any authorities after any terrorist attack in any city, but they don’t shut down a whole city.

“Any cost is worth saving lives.” Really? If one American citizen was taken hostage in, say, North Korea, do we then invade that country? When shooting sprees and murders take place in the U.S., do we shut down whole towns and cities to catch the perpetrators and protect people? Or do authorities take a more limited approach, not shut down a whole city and disrupt the lives of millions, and target their efforts in a more limited but relatively reasonably cost-effective response? As Stephen Walt points out, not long before Boston, there was a heavily armed police officer with military training who was killing people in L.A., but L.A. wasn’t shut down. The DC-area sniper-team a few years back killed people over a much longer period of time, and DC was not shut down. London had a much worse attack a few years back which killed far more people, and the Brits did not shut London down. The point is, lives can still be saved, killers and terrorists still stopped, without shutting down whole cities and disrupting the lives of millions (what terrorists generally want, right?), and the estimates of the costs of shutting Boston down for a day have ranged from several hundred million to a billion dollars. And, again, I want to re-emphasize this was to chase down a single remaining suspect. It cannot cost us hundreds of millions of dollars every time a terrorist strikes, there is no way that that kind of loss and/or expenditure is necessary, let alone sustainable, and that kind of inefficiency of application of resources is—and should always be viewed as—unacceptable. If anything, it encourages would-be-terrorists who seek that kind of massive overreaction.

“Maybe he would have gotten away if the city hadn’t been shut down!”Not likely. Again, if these other cities like London and Jerusalem are good at catching these terrorists without shutting down an entire city, why can’t we be as good and as efficient as they are? And it was only after the request to stay indoors was lifted that a local resident left his house and found the suspect.

“Well, it was different in Boston.” Was it really? As I pointed out, many other attacks have been far worse, and deadlier, and involved more terrorists and multiple cells. If anything, Boston was different in that the attack was small, using low-grade explosives that only killed three people, and with just two lone-wolves involved.

“Well, Boston isn’t used to this kind of stuff, so it’s understandable.”Again, government officials are supposed to transcend visceral gut reactions and emotion. So, no, it’s not understandable form a public policy perspective.

It seems like it is asking for a lot these days, but I just want my country to be competent and measured in the way I see other modern, developed countries often conduct themselves. I want us not to be the overreacting, Incredible-Hulk-meets-Daffy-Duck of nations. And I want us to have a healthy perspective and sense of proportionality. I must be naïve, and Walt laments this, too, when he wrote that

The more I think about the events that transfixed Boston and the nation last week, the more troubled I am. Not by what it says about the dangers we face from violent extremists (aka “terrorism”), but for what it says about our collective inability to keep these dangers in perspective and to respond to them sensibly. I am beginning to wonder if our political and social system is even capable of a rational response to events of this kind.

…The grossly disproportionate reaction to the Marathon attacks tells me that our political system is increasingly incapable of weighing dangers intelligently and allocating resources in a sensible manner. Unless we get better at evaluating dangers and responding to them appropriately, we are going to focus too much time and attention on a few bad things because they happen to be particularly vivid, and not enough on the problems on which many more lives ultimately depend.

He points out that far more people were killed while the Boston drama was underway by a factory explosion in Texas on April 17th, and links to Michael Cohen’s article. Cohen notes that the plant which exploded had not been inspected by federal government Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors since 1985, and that the Republicans want to cut that agency’s funding even more. He notes that far more people are killed by non-terrorist gun violence in the U.S. (as I have pointed out), and that while the Boston incident and aftermath unfolded, the Republicans killed the legislation on background checks that had an overwhelming majority of Americans supporting it. As he concludes.

It is a surreal and difficult-to-explain dynamic. Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on “others” – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc. But the lurking dangers all around us – the guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of freedom, if you will. And so the violence goes, with more Americans dying preventable deaths. But hey, look on the bright side – we got those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.

Since 1980, there have been more than 900,000 U.S. gun deaths, but less than 3,000 terrorist-caused deaths in America since 1970. In an amazing level of hypocrisy, Republicans continually make the argument that, as far as mass shootings go and general gun violence goes, well, “stuff (sh*t, if you will) happens,” and there’s little we can do about such things, but when it comes to anything involving terrorism, or what they consider terrorism, they will move heaven and earth and spare no expense, will literally bankrupt the nation, to address this threat. Laissez-faire for any kind of a threat that is frequent and can be expected, but activist for the rare, freakishly-low probability event. Vote Republican for protection from something that almost never happens at the expense of protection from common occurrences. This is a governing philosophy which appeals to raw emotion and fear of “outsiders,” “others,” “non-Americans” and (GASP!) Muslims, and that wholly relies on a total lack of perspective and introspection. It plays to the alpha-male, jingoistic types who want to blame all of America’s ills on foreigners, immigrants, globalization, outside influence, and the “turning” of America away from its “traditional values” and its “true self.” It appeals to people who want to do anything but look at what America does wrong, what needs to be fixed at America’s core, and who refuse to learn from the rest of the world; it seeks solutions by going after external threats in order to avoid any self-reflection or national self-examination whatsoever, and claims facts that do not support its simplistic, “America: love it or leave it” worldview as concoctions of a non-existent elite liberal media/academic industrial complex. One Republican state senator from Tennessee even joked that we need to ban pressure cookers, the devices used in the bombings in Boston, to draw attention to what he thought were outrageous attempts to ban assault weapons, in what is perhaps the most obvious example of the sickness in our society that ties those two issues together and exposes our national myopia.

Let’s embrace this myopia, Republicans seem to say. Sandy Hook, a number of other recent mass shootings, thousands incidents every year that see thousands of Americans killed by gun violence, a Texas fertilizer plant that exploded and killed 14 people and had not been inspected by a (now gutted) federal agency since the 1980s, and a whole host of other problems, deserve little or no attention and cannot be solved, so, do not dare suggest any further funding or attention to these issues from government, but terrorism? Let’s spend trillions combating an issue that barely affects any Americans year in and year out, let’s invade two countries in response to 9/11, one of which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and let’s focus on the wrong country between those two at the expense of getting the guy who did attack us so that it takes ten years, millions of dead, wounded, and displaced, and trillions of dollars, but when it comes to passing universal background checks for gun purchases, let’s filibuster legislation that is filled with loopholes anyway so that not even the lowest common denominator, no-brainer safeguard can become law.

Let’s focus on the hysterical and sensational and forget about the substantive and every-day problems, spend money fighting a war(s?) against a tactic (and how do you defeat a tactic like “terror” anyway?) in far-away lands but do almost nothing in the war against poverty in our own country. Let’s watch our children sink in educational achievement, and our workers get paid less than and less as inflation lowers our salaries that have stagnated since the 1970s, let’s not pave our roads or maintain our bridges or rail networks, let’s keep putting off every big domestic issue in favor of chasing around the globe a few thousand loosely-affiliated, brainwashed, murderous fools who can never do as much damage to us as we can do to ourselves and forget that any other issues exist or are deserving of marshalling our collective national effort and will.

This myopia seems to be our current default, especially with Republicans, who also seem incapable of coming up with what I have recently noted noted we need: long-term solutions that address root-causes and drivers of these problems. And I’m with Walt in wondering if we are even capable of doing better and with Cohen in wondering why other—dare I say more important—issues don’t get the same or even more attention.

I am not saying there is never going to be a reason to shut down a whole city. WMD or a massive number or attackers would be a different story. But now, have we set a precedent where total city shutdowns are to be the expected norm for incidents like this? Will there be no end to the hysteria at the policy planning level? It’s bad enough that two wars have greatly sapped our resources with our international terrorism response, let’s try to make sure our domestic counterterrorism policies don’t do the same. The 9/11 attacks were horrible, and scarred the New York City area especially. But the response to 9/11 is not more important that education, that being safe from routine crime, than our heath, than our national infrastructure, than our future. But looking at what we’ve put our money behind for the last ten years, you would think that avenging 9/11 was practically all that mattered.

Terrorists can’t defeat us. But they can goad us into defeating ourselves. And right now, I am worried about whether or not we are losing by beating ourselves. Because that’s how the terrorists win. And that is unacceptable.

Photo by Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images

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 June 16, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 16th, 2015

Republished by Movie Pilot

SPOILERS for the first five seasons, including the season 5 finale, but NOT for season 6

Varys: You have many admirable qualities- self-pity is not one of them. Any fool with a bit of luck can find himself born into power, but earning it for yourself? That takes work.

Tyrion Lannister: I’m not well-suited for work –

Varys: I think you are. You have your father’s instincts for politics- and you have compassion.

Tyrion Lannister: Compassion? Yes. I killed my lover with my bare hands, I shot my own father with a crossbow!

Varys: I never said you were perfect.

AMMAN — Game of Thrones, the award-winning hit HBO series that keeps setting new internet piracy records, is an incredibly unique show for many reasons. And though it has dragons and magic and frozen zombies, one of the reasons it is so unique is that it dares to tell us harsh, uncomfortable lessons about the very real world in which we live. Below, ten of the most important and salient will be discussed.

1.) A revolution, a campaign, and winning a war are all far easier than actually governing

“King Robert was strong; he won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended three Small Council meetings in seventeen years of ruling, and he spent his time whoring, hunting and drinking until the last two killed him. So, we have…a man who thinks winning and ruling are the same thing.” —Tywin Lannister

_____

“Killing and politics aren’t always the same thing! When I served as Hand of the King, I did quite well with the latter, considering the King in question preferred torturing animals to leading his people. I could do an even better job… advising a ruler worth the name, if that is indeed what you are.” —Tyrion Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen

_____

Hizdahr zo Loraq: Politics is the art of compromise, Your Grace.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m not a politician. I’m a queen.

Hizdahr zo Loraq : Forgive me. You’re right, of course. Still, it’s easier to rule happy subjects than angry ones.

Those who are good at climbing the path (or ladder, if you will) to power often find that exercising power or holding onto their new seat of power is far more challenging than the climbing process that got them there in the first place. In the same vein, often the skillset that allows one to ascend to power is not the same skillset that allows one to hold onto power and/or effectively govern. From Robert Baratheon to Daenerys Targaryen, we’ve see powerful characters stumble and struggle to maintain control and to rule the lands they have conquered (and for Jon snow, how many days did he last as the Lord Commander?). An army and dragons can’t govern. Robert’s hold on the Seven Kingdoms was short-lived, and Daenerys’ ability to govern her eastern cities seems precarious at best.  Let’s replace dragons with fighter jets and we can see the same basic experience for the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. We can also see echoes of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and both Barack Obama (he is better at campaigning than governing) and Nelson Mandela (legendary as a non-violent civil rights leader and revolutionary, not-so-great as South Africa’s President once in power). Americans were fortunate that their revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers could both lead a revolution and lead a government exceptionally well. France’s Revolutionary leaders during the French Revolution fell far short of the American mark when it came to governing. This show reminds us starkly the difference between getting power and using it well.

2.) Bad and good can and do coexist, even within the same person, policy, or country

Tyrion Lannister: So here we sit, two terrible children of two terrible fathers.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: I’ve heard stories.

Daenerys Targaryen: Why did you travel to the other side of the world to meet someone terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: To see if you were the right kind of terrible.

Daenerys Targaryen: Which kind is that?

Tyrion Lannister: The kind that prevents your people from being even more so.

_____

“You were a hero, and a smuggler. A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good.” — Stannis Baratheon to Ser Davos Seaworth

_____

Melisandre: Are you a good man, Ser Davos Seaworth?

Ser Davos Seaworth: I’d say my parts are mixed, my lady, good and bad.

Melisandre: If half an onion is black with rot, it’s a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.

When it comes to Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark, two of the show’s most beloved characters, most people are ready to sing their praises. And yet, when Tyrion had a chance to escape he murdered both his former lover and his father without needing to do so to escape. Arya herself seems driven by revenge and little else, and was content to let The Hound—the closest thing she’s had to a friend for a long while—die a slow and painful death. At the same time, we have Jamie Lannister—poster child for incest and attempted child murder (remember Bran?)—making us swoon by helping Brienne of Tarth, sticking up for his incest-love-child Myrcella, and standing up to both his father and Cersei on behalf of Tyrion. Sandor Clegane has many awful deeds on his resume, including murdering the butcher’s boy who was friends with Arya—yet he also saved Loras Tyrell from his own brother, Gregor Clegane, when Gregor (The Mountain) was being a sore loser in a jousting tournament, and Sandor also showed more kindness to both Arya and Sansa than arguable anyone else in recent memory except for maybefaceless-man Jaqen. Who here didn’t feel sympathy for The Hound when Arya just left him to suffer? Who didn’t come away from that scene feeling at least a little different about Arya? Then we have Stannis, touchingly showing Jon Snow respect and giving him a lot of leeway even as he sacrificed his own daughter to fire and a stake and murdered his own brother. Even Catelyn Stark killed an innocent girl who was Walder Frey’s ill-treated wife as her last act just before she herself was killed. Perhaps the most conflicted character still alive is Theon Greyjoy, now the shadow of a human being known as Reek. Even one of the Sand girls, who had poisoned Bronn and who was ready to murder a young Myrcella just because she was a Lannister, was willing to save Bronn with an antidote to that poison and didn’t mind showing a man who was down and in jail her lovely breasts as a pick me up.

One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so unique is its complex portrayal of characters as something more than simply “bad” or “good,” to which so many other shows and movies tend to reduce things. Human beings seem to always have had a tendency to lionize or demonize their heroes and villains in an oversimplified way that bears little resemblance to reality. Robert E. Lee is revered by most white American Southerners as some sort of saint, even as he fought to destroy much of what was the United States and the Constitution in favor of preserving aa society based on race-based chattel slavery. Russians today seem to revere Putin. Ronald Reagan is practically deified as a saint even though his record as president is highly questionable and often shameful. Richard Nixon is demonized even as he made peace with China, created the E.P.A., and ended the Vietnam War (though clearly not in the best way possible), hardly an all-bad legacy and full of significant, commendable achievements. George W. Bush may have objectively had one of the worst presidencies in American history, but he did more than any other president (including Obama) to combat AIDS, spending billions of dollars and saving millions of lives. Billions worship Jesus of Nazareth without really factually knowing much of anything about him, and billions others revere the Prophet Mohammad even though they factually know very little about him. The United States often tries to do good, but does more bad in the process. The NSA spying program helps to keep Americans safe but also violates their privacy. Even Pope John Paull II—literally a saint—had a pretty bad record on the child sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is in our DNA, but it makes us poor judges of character more often than not and blinds us to the very real truth when we try to make so many public figures into either heroes or villains. We can love or revile characters for certain reasons, and then feel the opposite about the same characters for other reasons. And that’s ok. It’s better than reducing people to simply “good” or “bad.”

In particular for policymakers, this can help people in power to realize that making deals with people who can actually make a positive difference should not be based simply on whether or not they are thought of as “good” or “bad.”

3.) Sexual violence against women is pervasive and often there is no justice for either the victims or the perpetrators

“And to my son, the stallion who will mount the world, I will also pledge a gift. I will give him the iron chair that his mother’s father sat upon. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo, will do this. I will take my Khalasar west to where the world ends and ride wooden horses across the black salt water as no Khal has done before! I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak! This, I vow, I, Drogo, son of Bharbo. I swear before the Mother of Mountains as the stars look down in witness! As the stars look down in witness!”­ —Khal Drogo, translated from Dothraki

_____

“Have you ever seen a war in which innocents didn’t die by the thousands? I was in King’s Landing after the sack, Khaleesi. You know what I saw? Butchery. Babies, children, old men, more women raped than you can count. There’s a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.” —Ser Jorah Mormont

_____

“Elia Martell. I killed her children, then I raped her…then I smashed her head in, like this! ” —Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane

I will simply link to feminist writer Amanda Marcotte’s brilliant and very true MUST READ article shooting down all of the specious arguments about why Sansa’s rape scene and others in Game of Thrones are somehow “wrong,” should be done “differently,” or are “sexist” and “misogynistic.” Does anyone think that Steven Spielberg is an anti-Semite because he showed Jews being killed in the Holocaust in Schindler’s List? Today, even in 2015, sexual violence is pervasive all over the world, and even often in the most progressive and modern societies, from the U.S. to Sweden (Stieg Larsson, anyone?) Only about 5% of cases are even ever reported to authorities, which means that for 95% of women even in the modern world, justice for the raped and the rapists almost never happens. Yet people get furious with Game of Thrones because it displays a medieval world (where rape was pretty much institutionalized and far more widespread than it is today) that shows us just that. Whether with Sansa or Wildling women, the show should make us damn uncomfortable with rape, and it does.

If you want a rape story with a happy ending, watch an network TV movie-of-the-week or Lifetime. If you want to be taught an adult lesson about the real state and results of sexual violence in the real world, and walk away with the obvious truth that rape is a mostly unpunished crime suffered by unknown and silent victims, internalize that, be far more outraged about rape that you would with a misleading happy ending complete with justice and healing, and use that outrage to both care and do even more about rape in society, then watch the show. If you want to childishly be coddled and made to “feel good” that rape, actually, isn’t a silent, hidden, mass horror, don’t watch the show. But don’t pathetically try to claim the showrunners or George R. R. Martin are misogynistic, patriarchal, bad people who are encouraging rape simply by portraying it realistically and who have failed in their “duty” to give us stories that reinforce and reward our smug, modern sense of self-righteousness that cries “BAD” whenever things turn out in a way we don’t like. I’m all about women’s empowerment, but the ever-present public talk of women’s empowerment has led too many to believe that this empowerment is a common reality in many places and instances where it is not. A huge portion of the women on earth—perhaps a majority—are not “empowered” and are at risk of abuse committed with impunity, including rape; that’s the unfortunate reality. All (the mostly unknown and unheard) victims of rape are lucky that a show is as brave and bold as this one to make people realize just how terrible and pervasive rape, with its near total lack of justice for its victims, truly is.

4.) The noble path does not necessarily lead to success and the good guys often don’t win

“Poor Ned Stark- brave man, terrible judgement.” —Jamie Lannister

_____

“I’m not Ned Stark, I understand the way this game is played.” —Tyrion Lannister

_____

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” —Ramsay Snow

There is perhaps no other show on television that reminds us as starkly that the good guys don’t always win and following moral and ethical principles does not guarantee success; heck, in real life it often maybe even usually does not. It began with Ned Stark losing his head. And it has hardly ended there, as any fan of the show or books can tell you. Among the ranks of the powerful, there are more Joffreys than Neds. George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns used some pretty dirty and shameful tricks to falsely smear two decorated war veterans—John McCain and John Kerry—and we all remember who won those contests. It is easy to lose track of how many crimes Silvio Berlusconi, longtime Prime Minister of Italy, has been accused of over the years. We have many states ruled by murderous dictators, from Bashar al-Assad in Syria to Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Putin and the Koch Brothers have immense wealth and power, and can hardly be considered nice guys. Many of the brave people who stand up to these people and challenge them simply lose. Other times, they don’t simply lose, they lose their lives as well (see, quite recently, Boris Nemtsov). Or see Benjamin Netanyahu winning re-election in Israel through race-baiting. Or Hamas winning an election, period. It is useful to remember that, more often than not, this is the way the world works. Ned and Robb Stark, after all, were naïve to proceed as they did and it cost them their lives.

5.) The most horrible acts are often done for the most predictable reasons

“Just how safe do you think Myrcella is if the city falls? Do you want to see her raped and butchered like the Targaryen children?! Make no mistake, they will mount her pretty little head on a spike right beside yours.” —Tyrion Lannister to his sister Cersei, mother or Myrcella

_____

Petyr Baelish: Tell me, Ser Loras., what do you desire, most in this world?

Loras Tyrell: Revenge.

Petyr Baelish: I have always found that to be the purest of motivations.

We often hear the term “senseless horror.” But, quite disturbingly, horror often has a purpose behind it that is fairly banal and predictable, even as it is still often inexcusable. Stannis sacrificed his own daughter to be burned to death, but it was almost boringly easy to explain why: he wants to be king, the one thing which defines him more than other aspect of his character. Joffrey has a bunch of babies killed, simply and predictably because he doesn’t want any competition. Jamie Lannister almost murders little Bran Stark, simply because he doesn’t want his incestuous secret to get out and also to protect his love: his sister. Daenerys reopens the fighting pits to keep the peace and lets her dragons burn a man alive to make an example. Lord Bolton wipes out most of the Starks and their supporters at Robb Stark’s wedding because he wants to be warden of the North. And Theon betrays the Starks to win the affection and respect of his father (which he didn’t).

Likewise, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in large part because it hoped these acts would end WWII faster and to intimidate a muscular Soviet Union. The U.S. much more recently invaded Iraq because it hoped it could bring democratic reform to the Middle East through invasion and occupation in order to reduce the root causes of terrorism and help stabilize a region ripe with fossil fuels. Israel invades and occupies the Palestinians for close to fifty years now mainly because it is afraid for its own survival. Terrorists often use terror because they are weak, oppressed, and have no hope of fighting a conventional military force. ISIS kills dissenters so it can maintain its grip on power more easily. Even the Rwandan Genocide was carried out mainly by one group (Hutu) against another (Tutsi) that was oppressing it, and then a reverse countergenocide was launched in revenge. One can hope that because of the sheer predictability of these crimes, they might at some point become easier to anticipate and prevent, especially for policymakers.

6.) Even in a brutal world, random acts of kindness are powerful

“I’ll stand for the dwarf.” —Bronn, volunteering to fight for Tyrion as his champion

 _____

“Leave him be!” —Sandor “The Hound” Clegane as he rushes to defend Loras Tyrell against his brother, The Mountain

____

“I will be your champion. ” —Oberyn Martell to Tyrion Lannister

Even in as brutal and cruel a world as that of Game of Thrones, there are still random acts of kindness that can surprise even the most cynical. Perhaps the biggest was when Bronn offered to fight for Tyrion at the Eyrie in front of crazy Lysa. Just a few episodes ago, a big hulking beast a fighter, who had no relationship with Tyrion, cut Tyrion free from his shackles so he could join Jorah in the arena and make his case to Daenerys. I already mentioned Bronn’s new love interest saving him from poison, and then there’s Jamie risking his neck to help out Brienne. The Hound saves Sansa and Loras as I’ve also discussed. Ser Davos sticks up for Robert Baratheon’s bastard after Melisandre sets her sights on him, and Sam goes way out of his way to help the wilding girl Gilly and her baby. Robb stark shows mercy to Osha the wildling who almost captured Bran, then she ends up helping to save Bran and Rickon Stark and is still looking after Rickon. And Tyrion goes out of his way to treat Sansa with kindness, passing on sex with her even though, within Westeros, he was well within his rights to insist, as we can tell from the distasteful bedding ceremony. All of these acts of kindness either do or presumably have big consequences for the show, too, and the characters receiving them (many of whom would have died without the help). The big exception, of course, is Oberyn Martell fighting for Tyrion as his Champion in Tyrion’s (second) trial by combat, since Oberyn loses, dies, and then Tyrion is found guilty.

The real world is also full of random kindness, of the type that’s sometimes just enough to not lose hope. As Gandalf says in The Hobbit, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Then again, sometimes good deeds don’t go unpunished. Ned Stark thought he would give Cersei the courtesy of a heads-up that he had figured out Joffrey was an incest-bastard borne of her and Jamie. Lot of good that did him… Similarly, the U.S. had little to gain in Somalia helping hundreds of thousands fend off starvation and ended up with the Black Hawk Down episode, dead Americans, and an Osama bin Laden emboldened by the American withdrawal…

7.) Religion is dangerous

“Trial by combat: deciding a man’s guilt or innocence in the eyes of the Gods, by having two other men hack each other to pieces. Tells you something about the Gods.” —Tyrion Lannister

_____

“We all must choose, man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same. We choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose evil. We choose the true god or the false.” —Melisandre

_____

“Death by fire is the purest death.” —Melisandre

_____

“Belief is so often the death of reason. ” —Qyburn

The world of Game of Thrones may be fictional, but it is deadly accurate at showing how dangerous and even deadly religion can be. The Lord of Light priests/priestesses, especially the vampy Melisandre, are clearly fanatics willing to do anything to further their agenda. Getting a major character like Stannis to sacrifice his own daughter by burning her alive was just the latest of her outrages and atrocities. Stannis quite literally played with religious fire, and now he and his wife and daughter are dead. With Melisandre, we see when a cause and religion are united, there are no more rules of decency for the fundamentalists and fanatics. And face-changing Jaqen and whatever sort of Many-Faced-God temple-cult he has brought Arya into seem to employ magic and death and assassination in equal measure. Not to be outdone cult-wise, Jonathan Pryce’s Sparrows—more or less the Taliban of Westeros—are about to turn King’s Landing into the 1990s Kabul of the Seven Kingdoms. They already seem all too happy to murder people who are gay (good luck Loras!), among other fanaticisms. Religious-backed or religion-associated violence are omnipresent not just throughout human history, but in the present day as well, and studies show that religion tends to amplify cruelty and violence in conflict, rather than the reverse, a point I have made before. Groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the (Christian) Lord’s Resistance Army, Srebrenica, both Buddhists and Hindus killing Muslims in South(east) Asia, and, not too long ago, the (Christian) Ku Klux Klan, the IRA/UDF and Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Ireland, and Europe’s pogroms against Jews (just to name a few examples!) are all indicative of this trend. 

Politicians too often simply focus on religion’s positives and blame its negatives on outside forces, but this is specious reasoning at best. The better leaders will be able to recognize the perils and pitfalls of religion and the faithful and be able to guard against them. Cersei Lannister unleashed a demon with her supporting Jonathan Pryce’s High Sparrow, not wholly unlike the U.S. when it supported mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Fiction that inspires fanatics can be dangerous in both the fictitious and real worlds, it would seem, and the more rational would do best to try to wield and engage such forces cautiously, if at all. Better to avoid playing with fire. The U.S. did not, and 9/11 was one of the long-term results, while Cersei suffered her own personal 9/11 as a result of her poor decisions with that naked walk of shame she had to endure. Thus, the problems with religion in Game of Thrones mirror the problems with religion in our own world.

8.) Trust, loyalty, and friendship are possibly the most prized commodities and they are also among the rarest, while backstabbing and secret agreements are much more common

“Backstabbing doesn’t prepare you for a fight and that’s all the realm is now: backstabbing and scheming and arse-licking and money-grubbing. Sometimes I don’t know what holds it together.” — King Robert Baratheon

_____

“People work together, when it suits ’em. They’re loyal when it suits ’em. They love each other when it suits ’em- and they kill each other, when it suits ’em.” —Orell (the Wildling)

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“Yes, Ned Stark had many admirers- and how many of them stepped forward when the executioner came for his head?” — Olenna Tyrell

It’s rare, but friendship still shines in Game of Thrones. Tyrion and Varys, unlikely duo that they are, seem to have really bonded on that ship even more than before. Sam and Jon of the Night’s Watch are also quite the bromance, and even Sam and Maester Aemon Targaryen were getting quite close before Aemon died with same at his side. Podrick is touchingly loyal to both Tyrion and Brienne. King Robert and Ned Stark had a touching friendship, too, so much so that Ned Stark was almost the only person Robert Baratheon thought he could trust towards the end. Hodor’s undying loyalty to the stark children is also touching (kind of like a mentally challenged Samwise Gamgee à la Frodo in The Lord of the Rings). Ser Davos gets an honorable mention for his deep loyalty to Stannis, though the loyalty is not returned and Stannis seems to be pretty unworthy of Davos’ fidelity, who even lost his son at Blackwater Bay fighting for Stannis. Perhaps more interesting is the bond he developed with Stannis’s daughter, Shireen.

Note how short the above the list is… There are far more betrayals in the show and if I listed them here I’d be giving a summary of the whole series. I think anyone reading this already realizes the value of friends and allies in the real world because how many of us really have many especially close friends, but Game of Thrones can be a good reminder. In international relations and politics, true friends and allies are also incredibly rare. The “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK is a very rare example of steadfast allies staying together over time, for example. Japan and the U.S.are another good example. Most alliances, however, are borne out of convenience and last only briefly (think USSR and Nazi Germany, then USSR and the Allies in the same war!). This is true in politics too, as we can see politically how many Democrats were afraid to even be associated with Obama in the midterm elections of 2014 (to their detriment), even though Obama was a big part of the reason why many of them previously won in tight races. There is often a negative price to pay for staying loyal. It is hard to tell which city has more backstabbing: King’s Landing or Washington, DC. For non U.S.-readers, I am sure you can pick up your local paper and read similar stories of backstabbing about your own country’s politics. Political and geopolitical winds can shift faster than the power rankings for the houses of Westeros. In the real world, “Red Wedding” Bolton-Lannister style backstabbings are more common than true friendship, sadly. Now, with the Season 5 finale, we can also add Jon Snow’s backstabbing (to his face) at the hands of his own brothers of the Night’s Watch. The policymaker who is on his guard but also values true friends and alliances will be the one to listen to, then, in the end.

9.) The rich and powerful generally do not care about the masses and treat them as their playthings

Tyrion Lannister: Listen to me, Queen Regent, you’re losing the people. Do you hear me?!

Cersei Lannister: The people? You think I care?!

_____

Olenna Tyrell: If it’s equality you want, so be it. When House Tyrell stops sending our crops to the capital, everyone here will starve. And I’ll make sure the hungry know who’s to blame.

High Sparrow: Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain? Has anyone in House Tyrell? A lifetime of wealth and power has left you blind in one eye. You are the few, we are the many. (Walks away slowly and then turns back) And when the many stop fearing the few… (Exits)

_____

“The powerful have always preyed on the powerless- that’s how they became powerful in the first place. ” —Tyrion Lannister

_____

“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.” —Tywin Lannister

You don’t need to read Marx or agree with communism to know that the rich and powerful ruling classes care for little more than themselves (and if you don’t agree with this statement, there is a really good chance that you are rich or powerful and in the ruling class). This goes for most of human history and continues quite powerfully today. And there are even academic studies that prove those on top are more selfish and have less empathy in their bones. There are so many examples of this in Game of Thrones, the way each House and wannabe ruler is so willing to spend human lives to get what they want. Even Daenerys, who exhibits some concern for her new subjects, also expects them to serve her and die for her claim to a distant throne in a land almost none of them have ever seen. Mance Rayder cared for his people. And Mance Rayder is dead. Tyrion and Jon Snow (and the many departed Starks) seem be the only characters in positions of power who routinely try to look out for those less powerful than them. A lot of good it did Jon Snow, as this very compassion is what incited a rebellion of his own Night’s Watch brothers when they killed him at the end of season 5. But almost all the powerful leaders in Westeros seem to only think of their people as objects, breaking Kant’s rule to always treat people as ends themselves, not means to an end. That is still sadly how the world works most of the time, even today. Syria (and now Yemen) and its people have become one giant chessboard, it people all pawns in a deadly game of international rivalries. CEOs make billions and treat their many workers as poorly as they can get away with. The list goes on and on, but the point is, there are very few powerful people who really fight for the masses, and Game of Thrones does a great job reminding us of this.

10.) Preparation and organization are key

“Winter is coming.” —House Words of House Stark

Last, but not least, the show emphasizes that preparation is key. Daenerys has been prepping for her invasion of Westeros for five seasons now (but did not plan her occupations of Mereen and Yunkai well, and thus had revolts in both). Both Tyrion’s preparation for the Battle of the Blackwater and Jon Snow’s preparation for the Wildling assault on The Wall allowed each to save the day. Robb Stark was great at winning battles but Tywin outmatched him by planning for a long game and even turned the Starks’ bannermen Boltons over to his side, defeating his enemy with secret diplomacy. We see preparation paying large dividends. Likewise, in the real world, this also is very true. Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 with a meticulously planned political campaign. But the same man just recently failed to plan for, anticipate, or engage opposition enough for his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and the deal was voted down by the House as a result. The American occupation of Japan after WWII was planned well and far in advance, while the more recent occupation of Iraq was clearly not; the many and telling differences in results are clear. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israelis are famously well-prepared and organized, and have been for the entire conflict, compared to their famously disorganized Palestinian and Arab rivals. That is a big part of the reason why today there is a full and functional Israeli state, while the same can hardly be said of a Palestinian state, sadly. Game of Thrones mirrors our real world well in showing how serious preparation can really pay off, a lesson policymakers should never forget.

**********

In conclusion, we can see that the world of Game of Thrones is very harsh and brutal indeed. It is perhaps the most important thing about this work of fiction that is able to so powerfully remind us of how brutal and harsh our own world still is, and to stimulate discussion about these truths and how to address them, both in popular fictional culture and in terms of what we do in the real world.

See related article: Game of Thrones and the Gift of Empathy

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

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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; part on defining fascism excerpted for January 1, 2023, article An Urgently Needed Definition of “Fascism” as the West Fights It Anew at Home and Abroad

“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

“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1983, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, “Introduction to the Abridgment”)

AMMAN — One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested); these elections are often fair in a strict sense, but the party in power is often subtly rigging the system in legal ways to restrict the process of voting so as to favor itself and disenfranchise those not subscribing to its program to enough of a degree as to give that ruling party a substantial advantage; when elections are held in such a system, the deck is already stacked in the ruling groups’ favor, and crude tactics like voter fraud, harsh media censorship, and election-day voter intimidation are cast aside in favor of things like redistricting, restrictions on voter registration, and explicitly partisan oversight of elections, where even subtle voter suppression actions can make differences that decide outcomes. Especially when such parties control the system over time, they are able to stack the courts with judges favorable to their intolerant vision and thus legal challenges to their misrule and abuse of power are stopped by legitimate means, with the very interpretation of what constitutes “abuse” or “illegal acts” watered down in a partisan way so that the legal precedents and judges’ opinions justify the very abuse being questioned, shutting down the courts as any kind of a venue usable by the opposition; this, in effect, makes these courts simply another tool for the ruling party to further its agenda and its consolidation of (and eventual stranglehold on) power. 

These systems can also use a—free, even—press to twist and mold public opinion and in ways quite harmful—even fatally so—to democracy; such a press can help bring out the worst in the citizens themselves, something on which the tyrannical majoritarian system is counting; but, perhaps, their citizens may be good enough at bringing out their own worst tendencies without the press fanning the flames, either by themselves or with the help of a charismatic leader, though the three often work in tandem.

Extreme examples of systems today playing these games, or worse, involve Turkey, where both journalists and political leaders critical of President Erdoğan and his party have wound up in jail, and Russia, where journalists and political critics of Putin and his party have wound up dead, up to and including the major leader of Russia’s political opposition, Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in sight of the Kremlin on a major public thoroughfare early in 2015 (sometimes, even when not necessary, these “democracies” favor the crude methods to make their point even more bluntly).

The true spirit of democracy is not merely in holding elections and then allowing the prevailing winners to do whatever they please to whomever they please; it is the recognition that the rules after the election apply equally to winner and loser alike, that the same protections of the basic rights of the winners must needs also apply to the losers, and the winners, while enjoying certain natural advantages electorally from having won the reins of power, will not use the very machinery of government to explicitly entrench and expand those powers in ways that violate the equal application and protections of the law in regards to losers and winners alike. Thus, Lincoln attacked slavery not merely as something inherently morally abominable, but something which allowed an elite to decide among themselves who was worthy of rights and who was not; criticizing both slavery and an anti-immigrant movement, Lincoln wrote in 1855 that

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal .” We now practically read it “ all men are created equal,  except negroes .”When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “ all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics .” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty— to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy .

Many of the millions of whites in America, not only in the North, but also in the South, who were against—and voted against—slavery, certainly did not lose this point in their thinking, as their leader Lincoln made sure to reemphasize time and time again. They didn’t need to be black to recognize the poison of discrimination and how it can spread.

And this is why current developments all over the world in democracies that are hardly new are so terrifying: people are increasingly unable to link their own (as conceived in identity terms) plights with the plights of those whom they deem “others” by their identity, with these “others” increasingly seen as the source of whatever problems—real or imagined—are fashionable to discuss.

I despise both hyperbole and conspiracy theories, but make no mistake about it, we live in an era of rising democratic fascism and of the weakening of traditional democracies and the values with which they were established and upheld. And rest assured, I did not come to the use of this term lightly; even a year ago, I would not have even considered using the term “fascist” to describe anything major in American politics, not the Tea Party, not the Republican Party; apart from when the Ku Klux Klan was a major force in American life in the 1920s, and apart from the South during the Jim Crow era, during Reconstruction, and especially during the terrifying vision of government attempted by the so-called “Confederate States of America” during the Civil War and the Antebellum slavery South would this term be widely applicable in America. Yet it is hard to describe what is happening in America, Europe, and elsewhere as anything else but democratic fascism (I’ve been coming across the term “illiberal democracy,” but that’s far too benign-sounding a term for the truly insidious happenings to be discussed herein even if it is broadly accurate; and this is far more than merely a rightward lurch; the Tea Party was a rightward lurch, and this is beyond even that insanity).

There are many reasons for this shift, but the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definitions of both “democracy” and “fascism.”

1.) Defining Democracy

In a pure, technical sense, there are no democracies: every modern national system avoids direct rule by the demos, the people, in favor of a system in which the demos choose from among themselves a number of representatives who by virtue of their election become an elite political class that represents the demos in the government, governs on behalf of the demos,and whom the demos hold accountable in a continuing series of recurring elections in which they can reinstate or replace said elite representatives. In every modern instance of true democratic government, the systems are set up along representative lines in the form of one or some combination of a republic, a constitutional monarchy where the monarch has relatively limited powers, and a parliamentary or a presidential system; the people may occasionally weigh in on referenda, but other than these occasional referenda, their participation is limited to voting for their representatives (sometimes including voting for a national prime minister or president), and the governance is left to these representatives.

Thus, in the pure sense, these systems are not democracies ruled by the demos, but systems in which the demos are ruled by elites chosen with the consent of the demos, with the wider demos consenting to a system in which many of them will choose representatives that lose electoral races or are part of parties not powerful enough to be in power but still consent to abide by the legitimate results and will seek to fight for a different result not through violence but through legal means, most importantly the chance to participate in a future free and fair election where the result can, potentially, be different. Some particularly naïve people—many Bernie Sanders supporters, for example—confuse the concept of a free and fair election with one in which a brand new party or a candidate who wants to engage in a hostile takeover of an existing party is not at any material disadvantage against other candidates and longstanding parties who have accumulated material and human capital resources through many years of efforts and relationships; even in a truly free and fair election, most candidates will not start with an equal chance or equal access to resources, but, rather, their own careers and decisions will determine their starting points in those regards.

Thus, in modern times democracy has come to be understood as a system that has the forms of mass popular input through free and fair and repeated elections of representatives and through effectively equal applications and protections of law and justice for all citizens on an equal basis, regardless of their political or any other affiliations (or something at least approximating this). This functions basically as a promise to both winners and losers: performance will matter and people can punish the winner or reward the loser next time around, with the winner not cheating using its governmental power to stay in power and the loser not losing simply because he cannot access the same power as those already in power; this is not, again, to naively say that winning and being an incumbent doesn’t come with certain natural advantages, but said advantages should not be collectively so powerful as to be insurmountable for an opponent if the people are not satisfied with the performance of said incumbent and/or want change. Thus, again, free and fair does not mean perfect, merely the ability for non-incumbents to compete with a realistic chance of victory if the people are not happy with the current leaders and/or desire change; if people are happy with current leaders, it should, naturally, be far more difficult to defeat them, absent extraordinary circumstances or scandals.

Of course, other ingredients are vital: the American Founding Fathers recognized the massive importance of both freedom of speech and of the press (hence the First Amendment is first), so that the people could have accurate information about the good, bad, and ugly of what their government was doing and make decisions based on such information, not government-controlled propaganda; likewise, a population educated and informed enough was also understood to be vital so that the people could make wise decisions and be able to tell the difference between propaganda and actual news. Modern democracy, then, can be understood to transcend the 1.) necessary but not sufficient mechanism of popular elections and to extend to include among the sufficient conditions: 2.) a justice and law enforcement system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool of self-empowerment and oppression of others by those in power (this necessitates some degree of judicial independence), i.e., “rule of law”, 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, 4.) and a population free to express itself not stupid enough to be manipulated by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality (although organized differently, this roughly lines up with the UN General Assembly’s list of the “essential elements” of democracy).

The dire threat to democracy today is not the abolition of elections, then, but the use of elections to empower leaders who—and parties that seek to—use the justice and law enforcement systems as a tool to stay in power, punish opponents, and control or bend the media to its will in a way that either cynically plays on the stupidity of the people to not realize what is happening or, perhaps far worse, that plays on their prejudices and fears to create a popular mentality that is aware of much of this abuse but cares not to speak out against it because those abuses are against despised minorities and, thus, those abuses are not minded by large swaths of voters because they are seen to be benefiting those voters. In such conditions, elections can serve to undermine democracy, strange as it may seem. This new form of democracy is not really democracy in our modern understanding at all, then, but is, instead, democratic fascism; here, elections are simply tools of certain groups of voters and political parties, coalitions, or leaders to legally seize power and then turn the instruments of the state into a spoils system that rewards the winners and the voters who empowered those winners and into a tool of oppression against many who aren’t (or even everyone else who isn’t) on board (including those critical in the press); if this is allowed to happen, it is always with some combination of the ignorance of those voters who buy into the rulers’ propaganda, voters’ tacit approval, or voters’ enthusiastic embrace of a system that explicitly favors them because of their politics (increasingly tied to identity in terms of race, ethnicity, or religion in this day and age) and explicitly discriminates or otherwise punishes those with differing politics (and usually different identities; in some ways, in democratic fascism the words “politics” and “identity” can be interchangeable, though this is common in many systems that are not democratic fascism).

2.) Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon.

So that is our understanding of fascism in a general sense; now, we may fuse that with our discussion of democracy into an understanding of fascism’s relatively-cleaned up, ready-for-(network)television, outwardly milder but arguably even more dangerous step-child from a loveless marriage of some 70 years with the American-dominated post-WWII international order: democratic fascism.

3.) Democratic Fascism: A More Presentable Fascism for the Twenty-First Century

Much like Bernie’s Sanders’ “democratic socialism” differs quite markedly from other forms of socialism and is far less “socialist” than many of those, so too is “democratic fascism” markedly different from the fascism and famously fascist governments of the twentieth century. For Eco, even if fascism in Europe experienced a rebirth, it would be shaped by the new circumstances of its birth and will hardly be a repeat “in its original form” of the same fascism that arose before WWII. 

And as Henry A. Wallace noted and we previously mentioned, unlike the fascist movements in the past—in particular Germany, Italy, Japan, and in Latin America—fascism in the United States would not use violence as a major vehicle to its power, but would, rather, primarily come to power through using media and twisting the concept of “news.” Of course, Wallace was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

The typical (small-“d”) democratic candidate asks you to vote for her to use the system and improve it to benefit you, the voter; the democratic fascist (and, we may also note, the democratic socialist à la Bernie Sanders) candidate campaigns to go to war with the system, to destroy, that by his virtue and abilities and/or with the power of the people behind him, he will sweep away the bureaucracy, institutions, politicians, laws, rules, and norms that apparently hold us back; there is no love or praise of the system or working within, or even the political party he is trying to hijack; the system, the party, are rotten to the core, there’s nothing to work with, they only have flaws; nothing short of a revolution (or “political revolution”) is required. The democratic fascist (and democratic socialist) needs to take existing legitimate problems and grossly exaggerate their intensity or to completely fabricate problems that do not exist but that play into people’s preconceived notions and prejudices; anger, contempt, and derision are some of the core emotional foundations the democratic fascist’s (and democratic socialist’s) campaign pitch; equal, or ever larger, than any hope for the future is the joy of destroying the existing order and of seeing the elites who have been in control be forced out of power and/or damaged in unconventional ways, so much so that even if the promises of a better future fail, the rest may be enough for the democratic fascist’s supporters to be content with, and continue to support, the new order; they will “feel” better and as if they are “on top” and “in charge” simply by virtue of the discrimination against the groups they despise, which they see as a restoration of “justice” and the natural order even without any true improvement in their own situation; thus, the democratic fascist appeals to the emotions of his supporters, independent of any reality and with plenty of lies and deceit ready to counter reality, a political puddle that will be eagerly lapped up by their followers who have reduced themselves to loyal canines so long as they are emotionally coddled like puppies no matter how irrational their beliefs and perceptions.

Since this democratic fascism combines many elements that can be attributed to fascism, but far fewer of the elements we attribute to democracy, the term fascist democracy is not really applicable in the same way that democratic fascism is; yes, at least some major elements of democracy are present, but are twisted to serve undemocratic ends, with democratic fascists weaponizing the press and with it, in turn, weaponizing the people, who, in turn, weaponize the elections, which, in turn, weaponize the justice and legal system to serve the political empowerment of democratic fascists and the oppression or suppression of their rivals, corrupting all four of the key elements of what we noted defines true democracy; thus, these emerging democratic fascist movements are more fascist than democratic in our vetted understandings of those words.

So democratic fascism, even though it is far less jarring in it relative lack of violence compared to past historical fascist movements, can still amply demonstrate qualities of fascism even if in less overtly threatening ways (because how many things can be more overtly threatening politically than uniformed armed political operatives utilizing violence in their own country for political ends). At the same time, it is harder to stop democratic fascism or even to call it fascism because of its more subtle approach. So even while using democratic means—specifically elections and a free press—for decidedly undemocratic ends, democratic fascism demonstrates how it is a much more of a fascistic phenomenon than a democratic one; after all, some of our thinkers have warned how democratic fascists, especially, can deceive the public into supporting them, using the freedom of the airwaves to disseminate effective lies in a weaponization of information itself that enables them to reach a critical mass of support absent a critical mass of united, intelligent voters, so that, more or less, the democratic fascists can legitimately win an election; from there, they capitalize on their media influence within the free press and the lack of an informed, discerning population to turn the final element of successful democracy—a relatively independent legal and justice system that is generally fairly applied when it comes to politics and adheres to equal application regardless of political affiliation—into a political tool enabling democratic fascists to suppress opposition and/or favor themselves just enough (at least initially) in elections so as to create a one party state supported by a large swath, even a majority, of the voting public (it is important to note here in America that because Republicans blocked so many of Obama’s judicial appointments, Trump will have the opportunity to appoint more federal judges in his first term than any president in the last 40 years); such a program is harder to attack as undemocratic when the government is not rigging votes and not taking over the free press and, instead, allows the appearance of a competitive democracy to still convince a huge portion of the population that this false perception is reality; with enough public support and enough support within a free media, democratic fascists in power may not may not need to entertain the aforementioned overt measures in order for them to maintain power and disadvantage the opposition enough to make that opposition’s ability to win elections—now far less free and fair—extremely difficult or even non-existent, especially when they firmly control the judiciary. 

Thus, first with the media, then with the people, then with elections, and, finally, with the legal and justice system, democratic fascists succeed in bending the key components of healthy democracy into supporting the establishment of democratic fascism in a tipping-then-falling domino-like effect.

4.) Spin vs. Lies and the Weaponization of Information in a War on Reality That Fuels Democratic Fascism

It all starts, again à la Wallace, with enough of the free press attacking reality itself.

Which bring us to a discussion of lies vs spin. Spin is a normal part of politics; it is simply how politicians and their supporters, whether in government or the media, try to put their best foot forward in making their case and defending their actions; much like lawyers in a courtroom, then, spin represents an effort to put something forward in the best possible light (or, if they are against someone/something, the worst) in light of the available facts. More often than not, spin is rooted in truth, but is presented selectively in a way that only or mainly includes that which is most favorable to whatever position is being made. Like the situation with lawyers in a courtroom, then, here, the truth is somewhere in between the two positions: even when a lawyer “wins” a case, it is hardly accepted that every point he made was true; it is simply the role of the jurors or the judges to decide who made the better case and weigh the burden of proof into this as well. In many respects, the news media is our courtroom of public opinion, and it is hardly a coincidence that many of the people on TV representing various political people and agendas are lawyers themselves, as is the case of many of the people formally representing political parties and other groups within the government itself. Spin certainly includes false suggestions and distortions, often driven by unfavorable context being deliberately omitted; and lies certainly do get told sometimes in the art of spinning. Spin itself comes from the term “spin room,” which for decades has referred to the area where the press and representatives of politicians  would engage with each other after a debate between two or more politicians, and pretty much every representative would tell the press that his or her candidate had won (from that, we have the unintentionally farcical “No Spin Zone” on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show). 

Like the line between democracy and democratic fascism, the line between spin and lies is not always clear, and lies are hardly unheard of in politics; but we have clearly entered a new era where, as opposed to spin, we have politicians and their surrogates and supporters, particularly on the right, creating an alternate reality when reality doesn’t match their talking points, an alternate reality based on “alternative facts” (more on that in a bit) and reported as the gospel truth by (usually self-styled) “alternative” media. As a spectacularly salient example, immediately after his first debate with Clinton, Trump himself entered the spin room (an act itself unheard of), and, among other lowlights, Trump denied that he had said something that he had clearly just said during the debate with millions watching and the debate well-recorded for posterity.

Let that single example sink in for a moment.

Reality is not subject to partisanship, so the fervent partisan will create his own reality to suit his own ends. Yes, led by right-wing media outlets at first, and coupled with Trump’s campaign machine later on (which, to be honest, mainly consisted of Trump’s Twitter account and a handful of shameless surrogates), this brazenly-reality-challenging environment was the catalyst of the successful internal democratic fascist coup (aided considerably by Putin, and more on that later), with an alternate universe of “alternative facts” that a huge portion of the electorate—willfully or otherwise—confused with the real universe of just plain ol’ facts; so influenced, that electorate ended up enabling someone like Trump to win an election when never before would an American electorate have chosen him, for, as Orwell wrote, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And in Orwell’s 1984, this concept is taken to an extreme: “…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;” thus, there can be little more dangerous to democracy than people uncritically accepting junk fake news news—and I don’t mean a slant or an opinion on the news, but accepting blatant falsehoods and entirely false stories—designed to further a political end. 

And now, all that stands in the way of democratic fascism twisting all four main components of democracy in America is the last main pillar of democracy: the legal and justice system not being political tools and not applying the laws to benefit Trump et al. and punish/cower his opponents (Trump is already tweeting and uttering fighting words at the judiciary and intelligence community, neither of which are immune from his considerable influence and Executive authority), a pillar which is likely only to stand if either Trump’s own Republicans stand up to Trump or Democrats manage to start winning again, and neither (let’s be honest here) is likely (just see the horrid newly-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s confirmation vote or check out the DNC race, the strident Bernie Sanders, and left-wing voters). It did not get this way overnight (Republicans especially have been denying reality on a whole host of issues for years, including immigration, gun control, ISIS, Iraq, racism, and climate change), but we are definitely in an era where the facts are far more loosely played with, even if they are stubborn things.

A conversation journalist Ron Suskind had in the summer of 2002 with (it was later revealed) top W. Bush advisor Karl Rove is quite revealing of the mentality that conservatives have when it comes to their adversarial relationship with the media and with the intellectual community:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 

To be fair to the George W. Bush Administration, though this mentality should be quite troubling, it was never taken in its eight years to the heights that Trump, his crew, and his supporters collectively have taken us through today, not even a full month into his presidency, and, as I’ve already noted, democratic fascism is, in part, what it is because of how far it takes things, oftentimes times just greatly metastasizing trends that were already both in place and problematic to whole new dimensions. 

The Bush Administration didn’t generally outright lie, but it did tend to selectively present the best evidence for its case while deliberately avoiding or downplaying any information that didn’t help said case; this “spin” is not terribly uncommon in politics, as noted, but its heavy use in launching what turned out to be the largest U.S. military intervention since the Vietnam War certainly justifiably raised many eyebrows, to use understatement (more accurately, it was a sharp, sudden military escalation unlike anything before in American history, what Tom Ricks called “the biggest mistake in American history”). Yes, the intelligence assessments did estimate that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and Hussein pretended to still have them for his own reasons (explaining why Hillary Clinton and many Democrats voted to authorize to allow Bush to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein as a tactic to pressure Hussein and were not voting “yes” for “war”), but the credible parts of this intelligence were only based on old information and their estimates were not expressed as certainties; thus, the biggest lies of the George W. Bush Administration were generally lies of omission, of exaggerating the degrees of certainty, or of rationales (though Donald Rumsfeld should get some sort of special recognition for the alternate reality he set up for himself and even seems to have believed in, to boot).

And yet, the factual contortions of Trump and his team that occur on a (virtually?) daily basis almost make the misleading statements of the Bush Administration see quaint in principle.

Andrew Sullivan hits the nail right on the head with his hammer in his latest piece on “the end of Western civilization, the collapse of the republic”:

I want to start with Trump’s lies. It’s now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth [much as I love Sullivan, this seems pretty harsh on Clinton]. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling…

…What are we supposed to do with this? How are we to respond to a president who in the same week declared that the “murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years,” when, of course, despite some recent, troubling spikes in cities, it’s nationally near a low not seen since the late 1960s, and half what it was in 1980. What are we supposed to do when a president says that two people were shot dead in Chicago during President Obama’s farewell address — when this is directly contradicted by the Chicago police? None of this, moreover, is ever corrected. No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack…

…With someone like this barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind…

…it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago…

…[since] [w]e cannot avoid this surreality all around us.

In discussing Trump’s presidency just a few days into it, The New York Times’s Paul Krugman went into some realistic predictions of how thing will go under Trump (which is badly); his discussion of Trump’s response to these challenges is key:

So how will Mr. Trump handle the bad news of rising unemployment, plunging health coverage, and little if any crime reduction? That’s obvious: He’ll deny reality, the way he always does when it threatens his narcissism. But will his supporters go along with his fantasy? They might. After all, they blocked out the good news from the Obama era.

Yes, Trump likes to say he has “a running war with the media,” which is true (just watch his February 16th, 2017, thus-far-singular first full press conference as president, contrasted with a fact-checked/annotated transcript) and a war in which his close advisor Steve Bannon plays a leading role—and Trump regularly calls information that reveals unflattering truths about him “fake news”—but Trump and his team have an even bigger running war against reality, which sums up the bulk of his war with the media. 

I have been following politics since the mid-1990s, and closely since 1998; I’ve never seen a president, let alone a major party nominee, fights basic facts and reality the way I have seen candidate Trump and now President Trump do so, nor have I ever seen a team of top advisors so dedicated to lying and creating an alternate reality. I have lost track of the number of times I have literally heard and seen the president say and/or do something, only hours later, sometimes even less, to hear and see him or one or more of his team flat-out deny what I had just seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, led by several at the top of his inner-circle—the triumvirate of: the former serial purveyor of fake news à la Breitbart and admirer of WWII-fascist/Nazi-associated Italian intellectual Julius Evola, Steve Bannon, now Trump’s Chief Strategist; the circus-level contortionist of truth, master of “alternative facts,” and serial spouter of shameless lies Kellyanne Conway, now Counselor to Trump; the forceful fudger of facts and understudy for his namesake Sean Hannity, Sean Spicer, now our new White House Press Secretary and Communications Director (he is about to lose the latter position)—and followed by a whole host of eager distortionists incredulously given far too much regular television airtime, effectively dumbing down the airwaves. To be sure, some of these people have been on TV and in other media for years, particularly on Fox News and on fringe, extremist outlets; but in the course of a year, they and their outrages have been normalized and mainstreamed in way unprecedented for their kind; the volume of their presence coupled the intensity and shamelessness of their deceits truly is a brave new world that goes far beyond “spin.”

Alex Wong; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Even among the traditional, far more respectable media outlets not cheerleading for Trump, this election season was plagued by inadequate coverage, frenetic and thoroughly lacking essential context or rigor (or the rigor being misapplied), and saturated with a blithe false-equivalence, with the way the Clinton e-mail server story was handled only being the most salient example out of an entire election season’s worth of examples; combined with misleading or outright fake news, there was a critical mass of media being consumed by Americans that distorted reality just enough—and I mean just enough in an election that came down to less than 38,600 votes in 3 swing states where large numbers of Trump voters there (and nationally) made their decisions to vote for him in the final weeks and month of the election as orchestrated fake news harming Clinton and helping Trump flooded people’s newsfeeds and even overcame the degree of engagement of traditional reality-based news in terms of top stories—to hand Donald Trump the White House through an Electoral College win. 

Not only, then, did we have a presidential campaign that trafficked and reveled in fake news and constantly denies both reality and his own indisputable statements and actions, but we now have a president and his administration doing the same, with a truly huge portion of the American electorate accepting this fake news, lying, denying, and deception as reality. Competing against an alternative reality that generally tells voters what they want to hear are candidates that try to be far more honest with voters, who try to guide them to understanding “hard truths,” to quote Hillary Clinton, about problems and what is required to achieve solutions to them, which is about as unfair a fight as one can imagine in a democratic election. As the British historian Simon Schama noted earlier this month, “The indifference about the distinction between truth and lies is the precondition of fascism. When truth perishes so does freedom.”

Continued in Part II: Trump, the Global Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals

© 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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