cell913blog.com #17

 In a piece on vox.com, dated February 14, 2019, entitled, Fascism: a warning from Madeleine Albright, interviewed and reported by Sean Illing, we find this exchange:

(Illling): When you use the term ‘fascism,’ what exactly do you mean?

Madeleine Albright: Well, first of all, I’m troubled by how thoughtlessly people throw around that term. At this point, anybody who disagrees with us is a fascist. In the book (Fascism, A Warning) I try to argue that fascism is not an ideology; it’s a process for taking and holding power. A fascist is somebody who identifies with one group—usually an aggrieved majority- in opposition to a smaller group. It’s about majority rule without minority rights. Which is why fascists tend to single out the smaller group as being responsible for or the cause of their grievances. The important thing is that fascists aren’t actually trying to solve problems; they’re invested in exacerbating problems and deepening the divisions that result from them. They reject the free press and denounce the institutional structures within a society—like Congress of the judiciary. I’d also add that violence is a crucial element of fascism. Whatever else it is, fascism involves the endorsement and use of violence to achieve political goals and stay in poser. It’s a bully with any army, really…..I think what differentiates fascism from other ideological movements is the use of violence and anger to achieve political ends. What you almost always see in fascist regimes is propaganda being used to set people against each other without any potential solutions to any of the problems. Fascism is always, in the end, about stirring people up and giving them someone to hate.

(Illing): You say that fascism is ascendant right now. Why do you think that is?

Madeleine Albright: A lot of reasons. Most of us were looking toward a system that had been established after World War II—democratic governments, a globalized economy that would gradually bring the world together- and thought it was remarkably stable. But the situation has gotten more complicated. A lot of people have benefited from globalization, but it has huge downsides. It’s faceless, and people want to know their identity, want to be connected to some religious or ethnic or national group. Identity is fine, but if my identity makes me hate your identity, then it becomes very dangerous and it falls into hypernationalism. Suddenly groups are pitted against each other or scapegoated and all of political life becomes tribalized conflict. And we see this happening in a number of places. Viktor Orban’s embrace of ethnic purity in Hungary is a good example of this. The other major factor is technology, which has incredible advantages, but it’s also desegregated voices and made it harder to take political action because individuals are sucked into echo chambers. Weirdly enough, this has managed to make us more tribal and more frightened at the same time. So there are just a lot of forces coming together and creating an atmosphere of anfger, and people have no idea what the solutions are, or if there are any solutions. Then some strongman comes along and says, ‘I have the answers, I can fix everything,’ And this is when you get fascism.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (ruthbenghiat.com) is professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda and democracy protection. Her latest book, entitled, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present ‘examines how illiberal leaders use corrruption , violence, propaganda and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded  over a century. In her substack space, Ben-Ghiat, on January 3, 2024, in a piece entitled, Authoritarians and their Sons-In-Law from Mussolini to Trump: Partners in Corruption, writes:

The essence of authoritarianism is getting away with crime, and corruption must be at the center of any analysis of how dictatorships operate.  A large percentage of actions authoritarians take are about covering up corruption: demonizing journalists, judges, prosecutors, and investigators, inventing narratives about their selflessness and purity and establishing ‘inner sanctums’ composed of sycophants, and family members who will keep their secrets, dispose of their enemies, and share in the profits from illicit activities…..The leverage and control the leader can exert over the son-in-law is also why left and right-wing authoritarians have placed these figures in economic policy and management positions that have high potential to enrich the family. When Chile became a laboratory of neoliberal policies during the military dictatorship, leader Augusto Pinochet put on son-in-law, Julio Ponce, in charge of the government agency in charge of privatizations and awarded him control of a chemical company with a $67 million annual profit. Another son-in-law, Jorge Aravena, got a large insurance agency in Cuba, President Raul Castro appointed his son-in-law, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodriguez, as head of the armed forces’ Business Administration Group, an entity with large powers over Cuba’s economy…..At his most powerful, the son-in-law can be a proxy for the dictator. That was the case with Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who was widely hated by Italians for trying to be a ‘mini-Duce’. As Mussolini’s biographer Laura Fermi wrote, Ciano’s nickname was ‘the jaw’ because ‘when Mussolini thrust out his chin, Ciano thrust his own half and inch further.

Why begin this piece by referencing Albright and Ben-Ghiat?

Obviously, everyone in North America, and in the western world, is both highly conscious of what is becoming a high probability that trump will be the Republican nominee for president of the United States, whether or not he is continuing to be arraigned in various courts, or possible even occupying a jail cell. We are not living back in 2016 when he had no record, no infamous twitter (X) account and no criminal indictment. There had been no insurrection which the courts have determined he incited. He has placed three (3!) justices on the Supreme Court, each of whom, along with the already three conservative justices on the court, (Roberts, Alito, Thomas) form a majority that could easily lean in trumps favour in any case that comes before the court. Republicans in the House and Senate, at least in numbers far exceeding responsible, court his favour, arguably for the primary, if not sole, purpose of enhancing their ‘stay’ in power. Even those who sidle up to the ‘great one’ in an attempt to curry his favour, while briefly and glibly thanked, are then thrown under the bus, if the occasion calls for such disloyalty.

Indeed, loyalty is another of the trashed traits in contemporary American (and global?) politics. Trump openly curries the favour of dictators, while threatening one of America’s own military leaders. In thehill.com, 09/27/23, Brad Dress, in a piece entitled, ‘Trumps threats to Milley fuel fears he’ll seek vengeance in second term,’ writes:

Former President Trump’s violent rhetoric toward Gen. Mark Milley is raising fears he will us a second term in the Oval Office to seek retribution against enemies. Trump suggested Friday that Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is stepping down from his post at the end of the week deserves the death penalty for allegedly betraying him and committing an act of treason. The threat came just days after Milley warned that if Trump wins the presidency in 2024, he would enact vengeance against those he felt have done him wrong. And Milley believes he is at the top of that revenge list. ‘He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list,’ Milley told The Atlantic in a profile of the four-star general published last week. (In thehill.com piece) Kristy Parker, legal counsel at Protect Democracy is quoted as saying, ‘Trump has shown and talked about weaponizing the Justice Department to retaliate against people who he perceives as his enemies as he did, in fact, do that to people when he was president the first time.

Madeleine Albright, in her book, Fascism, A Warning, did not go so far as to call Trump a Fascist. Ben-Ghiat, the historian of authoritarianism, clearly considers him one of her cast of strongmen, and there is a sizeable cadre of American voters who have fallen sway to the trump ‘charm-offensive’. Now that he has successfully ‘won’ top rank in Iowa and New Hampshire primaries for the Republican nomination for the presidency, all the while commuting back and forth from and to various court hearings and campaign rallies, the American political campaign ‘system’ if there was one, has been so deconstructed as to leave the courts and the stage they offer to this candidate as another of his campaign resources. He receives wall-to-wall coverage from the media, whether he is ‘performing’ like a dancing chimp on the stump or in front of cameras or judges for whom he has nothing but contempt.

Campaigning while undermining the justice system and its highly professional (an non-partisan) officials, only injects more venom and oxygen into those trump cultists who have taken to threats to various individuals (thereby also directing needed and somewhat scarce law-enforcement resources away from the legitimate work they are being paid to do), while offering even more open windows to those wishing to throw cash at the trump machine. The tectonic shift in American life, especially American politics, now reaches right into the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, himself an unabashed sycophant of the former president, who, not incidentally, is making it very difficult to pry support from Ukraine out of the Congress.

At the same time, Netanyahu’s war in Gaza had not only taken a toll of well over 20,000 Palestinians killed, and many more maimed, left homeless, without adequate health care or needed food for survival. This war, too has taken Ukraine off the front pages of our minds, offering Putin even more opportunity for deadly strikes, while Ukraine forces struggle to cope.

If there has been a time in American history in the last seventy-five years when she has been so ‘inept’ and so ‘paralyzed’ in her political and geopolitical life as she is today, I do not know when that would have been. America, on her knees, at least from the eyes of her allies who now have to prepare to adjust to a world in which trump seeks and acquires a second term in the Oval Office, is not only a danger to herself; she is also a danger to the world’s democracies. An American democratic model that has ceased to function, as trump would prefer, is a serious threat to the stability and security of the international community. And not only does trump threaten the stability of the American election and governing systems, he threatens to take America out of international commitments, just as he did when he withdrew the U.S. from the Iranian accord on nuclear fission. Taking the U.S. out of NATO, too, would be an open invitation to Putin to flex muscles beyond Ukraine, and a ‘bent’ America would also embolden Xi Jinping to bring the Taiwan crisis to a head.

For those 70+ millions of Americans who voted for trump in 2020, there is a loud warning siren ringing in all of the capitals of the world, warning you not to repeat your vote of 2020. Your ‘head in the sand’ in tribal nationalistic evangelical fervor, while demonstrating your thumbing of your nose at the ‘establishment’ and those you consider ‘woke’ has the potential not only to hike oil and gas prices, food prices, interest rates and the padding of the pockets of the financial services and banking sector. You are, in a word, being duped, for and buy the ‘wannabe’ dictator whose

sole interest in his own hold on power (and his thwarting of the justice system!).

As Forest Gump reminds us in that memorable line from the movie:

“Stupid is as stupid does!”

In his blog, Scuola Leonardo Da Vinci Turin, (scuolaleonardo.com) writes:

The phrase that the protagonist uses to defend himself from the attacks of those who offend him conveys a profound meaning: people are not stupid, but it is their behavior that makes them so.

Can enough people be ‘stopped’ from repeating a very stupid and dangerous voting choice?