A couple of years ago I compared Hitler’s march to fascist power and that in the US.
- The pusillanimity of America’s progressives, who make up the bulk of the Democratic Party
- Their inability to make free health care for all the law of the land
- The party’s continued cosiness with the military-industrial complex
- Its supine acceptance of the Executive Presidency
- American fascists’ disdain for elections.
- The judicial pursuit of Wikileaks’ Jullian Assange
- Redlining and other ways of skewing elections
- Disregard for ‘habeus corpus’
- Use of drones to assassinate Americans abroad
- Attacks against collective bargaining
- Denial of citizenship to children born in the US of foreign parents
Most of the examples were mild compared to now. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo goes on television laughingly quoting Kissinger’s ‘The illegal we do right away. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” Putting those words into practice, in the lead-up to his impeachment, President Trump forbade White House lawyers from testifying before Congress. Having encountered no reaction from the Democrats, he is now preventing experts from testifying to the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives about his handling of the Corona pandemic, although he would allow them to testify before the Republican-controlled Senate, which exonerated him in the impeachment hearings.
All of this is processed by ‘news’ programs, which Trump routinely refers to as ‘fake’, perhaps because they are increasingly displacing Congress as the venue where key decisions are debated by elected officials, buttressed by ‘experts’. The media regularly reminds us that the President does not read briefing papers or ask questions when briefed verbally, and now it signals the growing role of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner who, according to an anonymous official, is for all intents and purposes, the president.
Predictably, the Old Gray Lady, whose motto is ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’ fails to mention that Kushner furthers the White Supremacist agendas of past advisor Steve Bannon, and current speechwriter Stephen Miller, (whose wife is the Vice-President’s press Secretary).
A century ago, Adolph Hitler pursued ‘Lebensraum’ room so Germans could multiply and rule over their neighbors. Trump’s handlers want to delay for as long as possible the inevitable triumph of America’s honey-colored ‘minority’, (which is actually part of the global majority), over America’s tenuous Caucasian majority. This may explain the White House’s lackadaisical efforts to control a pandemic that is particularly attracted to black and Latino genetic markers.
I still remember hearing Donald Trump yelling to his security guards ‘Get’m out!’ when a black attendee disrupted a 2016 campaign meeting, establishing himself among white working class voters once and for all as ‘their man’. Now, coinciding with a 2020 Pulitzer Price to a black female New York Times journalist for a feature on America’s racial history (The 1619 Project ), a video of the February shooting of a young black jogger by a former police officer and his son (who claim he was a neighborhood burglar), finally forced indulgent white authorities to arrest them.
In the latest news, a cellphone video showed police officers aggressively pinning a Black man to the ground as they arrested him, for not social distancing, when in reality he was talking to someone across the sidewalk, then violently attacking another Black passerby, dragging him on the street, punching him, and as with the first Black man, burly officers kneeled on both of their necks, sending the second man to the hospital with severe injuries to his back, ribs and chest. The officer, Francisco Garcia, has since been put on modified assignment while the incident is ‘investigated’.
Meanwhile, armed Trump supporters demonstrate against states’ stay-at-home rules intended to fight the Corona pandemic, invoking their first amendment right to ‘freedom’, the President’s controversial Attorney General ordered the Justice Department to drop the charges against former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, who lied to the FBI about a 2016 conversation in which he assured the then Russian Ambassador that if Trump were elected, he would drop anti-Russian sanctions. From the start, Barre was suspected of being appointed Attorney General in order to do the President’s personal bidding, and indeed he immediately tried to bury the Mueller Report. By controlling the courts, Barre has also enabled the President to continue flouting the rule that he must release several years of tax returns, even as i is revealed that he tried to favor cronies in the development of an anti-Corona medication. Democrats are rhetorically demanding that Barre resign, which can be nothing but a cry in the wilderness.
Although after three years of increasingly authoritarian Trumpism, the word fascism is being whispered, the Democratic Party will do nothing. Having chosen Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in order to block universal free health care, it cannot replace its bumbling candidate with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has the smarts and the gravitas to make mince meat of Donald Trump, and whose daily briefings on his handling of New York’s Corona pandemic increasingly look like an unofficial campaign. As ‘Uncle’ Joe’s image is marred by an accusation of sexual assault dating from 1993, he is saved by the fact that the powerful ‘Me too’ movement abandoned his accuser when it turned out that she now writes pro-Russian articles.
Finally, the head of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, has just published a book entitled: The World: An Intro, which appears to seek a reconciliation with America’s economically powerful rival, China, that would break its bond with Russia, apparently indifferent to the fact that Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by the failure of Germany’s socialists to defend the Russian Revolution.
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.