[Atlantis]

I’m sick and tired of the chameleons on the far-right who will feel a deep hurt going right to the bottom of their narcissistic little soul if they are called by any of the epitaphs reserved for the likes of them. They will rail in indignation and imperiously demand the political correctness they have shat on when it’s about protecting persecuted ethnic or religious minorities. No, they are not patriots or nativists, because the hatred they thrive on cannot but destroy the social fabric. Most of them don’t even know what nationalism means. No, they are not the defenders of Christendom. They are as ignorant of religion as the fanatic Islamists. Far-right, alt-right, and the like, are too anodyne to express what they are. They are also populists, xenophobes and racists, but that is not the whole program. They are also haters, retards, thugs, bullies, homophobes, misogynists, but that doesn’t really cut it either. They are also neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but that’s not really adequate to identify the whole spectrum.

For all practical purposes Trumpism is the present day reincarnation of fascism. This is not about linguistic or historical nitpicking. This is about the base brutality and meanness that drives these people which is no different from what made people turn to fascism in the first part of the 20th century. As we know from Shakespeare, Greek drama or the Gilgamesh, the archetypes of the human character have been pretty stable since thousands of years. One century doesn’t make any difference.

Trump uses his army of tweets like Mao used the Red Guards and Hitler used the SA to attack the institutions of the State and to create his own personal fascist rule based on falsehood and meanness. Trump and Bannon deliberately target the free press, the independent judiciary, the independence of the central bank, which are the guardians of the State he is supposed to protect. Trump has drawn corporate America on his side by doing away with regulation via decree and by promising lower corporate taxes; just like in Nazi Germany, where industry was only too willing to serve Hitler. Numerous top officials have been dismissed in the institutions of the State and a Stalinist purge is lurking just around the corner for a wholesale cleansing of the institutions. The rest will go into internal exile, always under threat of punishment in case of dissension. That will be sold as drying up the swamp. But Trump is the incarnation of the swamp.

Last but not least, fascism is invariably linked to imperialism. As brutal and destructive the rules of Idi Amin or Pol Pot were, their limited geographical reach rendered them insignificant in the history of the planet. Hitler’s imperial expansion is, however, dwarfed by the global empire at Trump’s disposal. The logic of empire cannot but lead to fascism. The plutocracy that America has become cannot but aim for total control of the world’s resources. There are no checks and balances to control America’s greed. Conquer the world’s resources and ban its people.

It’s time to take off the gloves and call a spade a spade. Being nice won’t do with these people, and arguments are useless against heckling. They are rotten, through and through. How was it possible that the vermin crawled out from its holes after all these years? Was the tomb in the grotto not sealed tight enough? Was the pale not run through the heart at the prescribed moment? Was the silver bullet too high in lead content? Something went very wrong.

Trump’s holocaust will be climate change.

[Hindsite]

Climate change was designed by the God of the universe. Donald Trump has nothing to do with that and man cannot stop God's will from prevailing.
Name-calling and crying about Trump's win is not going to make Hillary President. So you snowflakes need to drop to your knees and pray to God for forgiveness, repent, and then help to Make America Great Again. Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem. HalleluYah.

[The Immortal Goon]

Trump is, at most, a Bonapartist. But he's no fascist.

For the most part, this is how bourgeois politics work. The World Wars created a kind of artificial bubble that is getting rolled back into the kind of parliamentary regime that the bourgeoisie prefers to have.

[SolarCross]

@Atlantis
That was a steaming pile of hysterical ad-hominem even for you. Trump isn't a fascist, I would say he isn't even a bonapartist seeing as he has no soldiering background at all. He is through and through a merchant manager. What he is doing is customer service; his customers, his voters, voted for economic protectionism, security particularly from Islamists, value for money from government services and an end to wildly experimental social engineering. Like any good merchant he aims to please his customers.

[Political Interest]

Trump is not a fascist. Where is Trump's ideological background in fascism? If he is a fascist he will have some sort of affiliation with far right ideology. None of the ideas and policies he has espoused are exclusive to the far right. Trump is a hard right centrist but a centrist nonetheless. If he moved any further right he would move into fascism. But he still does not meet the essential requirements for fascism. I highly doubt Trump is reading Julius Evola's books in his spare time.

[The Immortal Goon]

would say he isn't even a bonapartist seeing as he has no soldiering background at all.

I meant more in the mold of a Louis Napoleon or a Papen or Bruning. He's obviously no Napoleon Bonapart.

[Potemkin]

I meant more in the mold of a Louis Napoleon or a Papen or Bruning. He's obviously no Napoleon Bonapart.

Bruening wasn't really a Bonapartist. You may be thinking of Schleicher.

[The Immortal Goon]

Yeah, that's right. I also want to underline that's about as far as you can go so far as a credible claim about Trump. Even then, you should use certain qualifications to it.

[SolarCross]

Yeah, that's right. I also want to underline that's about as far as you can go so far as a credible claim about Trump. Even then, you should use certain qualifications to it.

Well looking at Louis Napoleon that would surely have to be a lot of qualifications. What stands out about LN is a man very keen to live up to the glory of the name he inherited and actually doing a very good job of it too. Particularly his stint as monarch was very good for France. If Trump were to be like LN that should surely be rather reassuring, no?

Trump doesn't have the burden of filling the super sized shoes of a true Great Man of history. So I don't see how he is like LN at all. Well I suppose they are both nationalists, but what does that mean as surely everyone in government is or ought to a nationalist? If you in or attempting to gain a leadership position of a nation state then you are either a nationalist, a con artist looking to fill your pockets with public money, or an infiltrating agent for some other faction. With that being the case you could just as easily compare him to Mahatma Ghandi, Benizir Bhuto or some such.

[The Immortal Goon]

Well looking at Louis Napoleon that would surely have to be a lot of qualifications. What stands out about LN is a man very keen to live up to the glory of the name he inherited and actually doing a very good job of it too. Particularly his stint as monarch was very good for France. If Trump were to be like LN that should surely be rather reassuring, no?

Trump doesn't have the burden of filling the super sized shoes of a true Great Man of history. So I don't see how he is like LN at all.

Most historians reject the notion of the Great Man of history. For the most part, "Bonapartism," is a description of a particular situation. Lenin said of it, very simply,

the manoeuvring of state power, which leans on the military clique (on the worst elements of the army) for support, between two hostile classes and forces which more or less balance each other out.

If you're legitimately interested, then it's worth reading the entire piece I'm about to quote. In it, the Party of Order (of which the GOP isn't a bad stand-in) began to denounce every kind of government expenditure as, "socialism," no matter how absurd the claim. Marx claims that replacing, "liberal," with, "socialist," was in a very broad sense not entirely wrong in that the kind of system that had been representing the people had lost legitimacy and there was a certain logic that the premise that the Party of Order stood upon was eroding with history and they couldn't get it back. When Bonaparte was elected president, it was both in a refutation to the liberals practicing, "socialism," and against the Party of Order—but all Bonaparte could really do is promise easy solutions based on accusations of conspiracy and things getting better just because he was there:

Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed by the party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education, and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been completely organized, as long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes likewise could not appear in its pure form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If in every stirring of life in society it saw "tranquillity" imperiled, how could it want to maintain at the head of society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, this regime that, according to the expression of one of its spokesmen, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion, how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how shall any interest, any institution, sustain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of the orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and the bistros; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?

Thus by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

In the domain of the interests of the general citizenry, the National Assembly showed itself so unproductive that, for example, the discussions on the Paris-Avignon railway, which began in the winter of 1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on December 2, 1851. Where it did not repress or pursue a reactionary course it was stricken with incurable barrenness.

While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws in the spirit of the party of Order, and partly even outdid that party's harshness in their execution and administration, he, on the other hand, sought by childishly silly proposals to win popularity, to bring out his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from making its hidden treasures available to the French people. Such was the proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the noncommissioned officers. Such was the proposal of an honor-system loan bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs Bonaparte knew how to set in action. Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.

This was allowed to happen, in part, because as Lenin said (and he was rephrasing Marx here) there was a kind of class conflict that was frozen in inaction and looking for someone to stand above it and reconcile everything.

This is also, incidentally, what Marxists (both Stalinist and Trotskyist) saw in Weimar Germany. I dare say, in fact, that we all see this in Weimar Germany through our rear-view mirrors—but the Marxists were the ones pointing it out. Because it aligns closely with Marx's working of the liberals being called socialists as society broke down further, Trotsky is who I will quote:

But precisely this is the most important function of bonapartism: raising itself over the two struggling camps in order to preserve property and order, it suppresses civil war, or precedes it, or does not allow it to rekindle. Speaking of Papen we cannot forget Hindenburg on whom rests the sanction of the social democracy. The combined character of German bonapartism expressed itself in the fact that the demagogic work of catching the masses for Hindenburg was performed by two big independent parties: the social democracy and national socialism. If they are both astonished at the results of their work this does not change the matter one whit.

The social democracy asserts that Fascism is the product of communism. This is correct in so far as there would have been no necessity at all in Fascism without the sharpening of the class struggle, without the revolutionary proletariat, without the crisis of capitalist society. The flunkeyish theory of Wels-Hilferding-Otto Bauer has no other meaning. Yes, Fascism is a reaction of bourgeois society to the threat of proletarian revolution. But precisely because this threat is not an imminent one today, that the ruling classes make an attempt to get along without a civil war by the medium of a bonapartist dictatorship.

So Trump, like Napoleon III and Papen, becomes a representation of both working people and billionaires desperate for a way out but unwilling to fight for the overthrow of the other while there is a certain disintegration occurring.

The qualification I would venture would be that it is difficult, while in the midst of things, to tell where the lines actually occur so long as these fundamental class antagonisms exist and unite in our current reality. On the one hand, there are some obvious parallels to Trump and these other instances (1, 2), it completely remains to be seen whether it has any real affect upon them, or not. Part of this depends on the immediate future when we see what form the new administration takes. It is probably more likely than not that tension relaxes into a typical bourgeois parliamentary system than increases into a Bonapartist republic where increasing faith and ultimate authority is vested into the person of an individual assumed to be above the fray by contradictory class interests.

But we shall see.

[MB.]

Most historians reject the notion of the Great Man of history

I'm not sure what you're implying here, but this certainly is not true. Despite the efforts of the communists to define history as entirely structural (and then the socialist Annales and critical Frankfurt school of cultural Marxists to codify all history as "post-structural") there is absolutely no question that agency is at work- what you might describe as bounded agency in that the agent operates within the structure. I don't want to go too off-topic, but I do not agree with your point regarding the supposed universality of historiographical interpretation regarding the work and thesis of Carlyle. Even if "most historians reject" were a valid thing for anyone to claim to have knowledge of (it isn't) it wouldn't be a reasonable way to produce history (by majority opinion?!) anyway.
Edit: ever notice how communists call everything Bonapartism or try to associate with Weimar Germany? One cannot help but feel they're haunted by some very precise feelings of failure in these regards...

[Donna]

There is perhaps some support for the Bonapartist theory if the law enforcement community is considered an extension of the military complex. In my opinion there were elements within the FBI that were hostile to globalist politicians and in particular to the Clintons and this ultimately manifested as the Comey memo.

[MB.]

America right now is more like Metternich's Austrian police state. The elements of its decline into protectionism and a reactionary aristocracy of the plutocratic patricians at the expense of the people's liberty- not to mention its military ineptitude (16 years in Afghanistan! 14 years in Iraq!)- are clear indications of the internal divisions that will probably spark another 1848 at some point down the road (to at first the great celebration of the Marxists followed immediately by lamentations of failure as the bourgeois sides with the elite neoconservative reaction against the socialists and terminates the "revolution"). Trump is clearly Francis II in this analogy, having presided in the 1980s over the dismantling of the "old system" of industrial capitalism, and now returned to power in a feeble effort to preserve the wilting dream of the elite.

[SolarCross]

Most historians reject the notion of the Great Man of history. For the most part, "Bonapartism," is a description of a particular situation. Lenin said of it, very simply,

I suspected you might misunderstand what I meant there when I referred to Napoleon as a true great man of history and you did. My point was that Louis Bonaparte, like a lot of people, genuinely perceived Napoleon as a Great Man of history and that affected his own choices in life. For example at one time he chose to take a career as a artillery officer.. that choice was clearly in imitation of his illustrious forebear who began his career in exactly the same way. Another example from wiki:

Louis-Napoleon returned to London for a new period of exile in October 1838. He had inherited a large fortune from his mother, and took a house with seventeen servants and several of his old friends and fellow conspirators. He was received by London society and met the political and scientific leaders of the day, including Benjamin Disraeli and Michael Faraday. He also did considerable research into the economy of Britain. He strolled in Hyde Park, which he later used as a model when he created the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.[21]
Second coup, prison, escape and exile (1840–48)

Living in the comfort of London, he had not given up the dream of returning to France to complete his destiny. In the summer of 1840 he bought weapons and uniforms and had proclamations printed, gathered a contingent of about sixty armed men, hired a ship called the Edinburgh-Castle, and on 6 August 1840, sailed across the Channel to the port of Boulogne. The attempted coup turned into an even greater fiasco than Strasbourg mutiny. The mutineers were stopped by the customs agents, the soldiers of the garrison refused to join, the mutineers were surrounded on the beach, one was killed and the others arrested. Both the British and French press heaped ridicule on Louis-Napoleon and his plot. The newspaper Le Journal des Débats wrote, "this surpasses comedy. One doesn't kill crazy people, one just locks them up." He was put on trial, where, despite an eloquent defense of his cause, he was sentenced to life in prison in the fortress of Ham in the Somme department of northern France.

There he is living safely and comfortably in London, where by "structural forces" alone he ought to have stayed for as long as he could but instead he throws it away on a wild and unlikely to succeed adventure to seize power in france. Why choose to do that if not to try to be as "great" as his uncle?

I am agnostic on exactly how much impact "Great Men" have on history, my suspicion is it is often overstated, for example Winston Churchill was fairly recently voted the greatest ever briton in a poll put to British people. To me that seems absurd, he was just "great" for being prime minister during the last Great War, but in actuality his personal contributions to events were modest. I'd rate that old pirate Sir Francis Drake the terror of the Spanish above Churchill.. Certainly I'd rank any of the scientists over Churchill: Newton, Faraday, Darwin...

But as MB notes history is made by people, people with agency and that includes the Great Men too. We aren't robots. What the hell are "structural forces" anyway, weather patterns, volcanic eruptions, geneology, geography....? It is such an abstract phrase it could mean anything.

[MB.]

Winston Churchill was a central figure in the direction of British imperial policy for over 50 years and has a strong claim to having led Britain to victory in both First and Second World Wars. He also has a Nobel prize in literature. I had to type this because it drives me nuts when people ignore Churchill's life-long political, military and literary career and focus entirely on 1940-1945.

[SolarCross]

Winston Churchill was a central figure in the direction of British imperial policy for over 50 years and has a strong claim to having led Britain to victory in both First and Second World Wars. He also has a Nobel prize in literature. I had to type this because it drives me nuts when people ignore Churchill's life-long political, military and literary career and focus entirely on 1940-1945.

Okay fair point, I wasn't knocking him so much as not seeing him as quite good enough on his own merits to be the greatest briton ever. Of course he was an highly accomplished person in many ways.

[The Immortal Goon]

But as MB notes history is made by people, people with agency and that includes the Great Men too. We aren't robots. What the hell are "structural forces" anyway, weather patterns, volcanic eruptions, geneology, geography....? It is such an abstract phrase it could mean anything.

I'm not sure what you're implying here, but this certainly is not true. Despite the efforts of the communists to define history as entirely structural (and then the socialist Annales and critical Frankfurt school of cultural Marxists to codify all history as "post-structural") there is absolutely no question that agency is at work- what you might describe as bounded agency in that the agent operates within the structure. I don't want to go too off-topic, but I do not agree with your point regarding the supposed universality of historiographical interpretation regarding the work and thesis of Carlyle. Even if "most historians reject" were a valid thing for anyone to claim to have knowledge of (it isn't) it wouldn't be a reasonable way to produce history (by majority opinion?!) anyway.

It might have been a slight over-reach, but I don't know that I have met a historian of any stripe that is a proud advocate of the Great Man of history thesis. That's not hard to imagine when it's predicated on the scientific understanding of this:

...Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. On any terms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in such neighborhood for a while. These Six classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely distant countries and epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if we look faithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us. Could we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history.

I would dare say that the push against this view of history is more widely accepted as valid today, even if I haven't taken a survey on it and must accept that popularity does not make something true:

But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step and ask whence comes the great man, we find that the theory breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable answers : his origin is supernatural, or it is natural? Is his origin supernatural? Then he is a deputy-god, and we have Theocracy once removed or, rather, not removed at all; for we must then agree with Mr. Schomberg, quoted above, that "the determination of Caesar to invade Britain "was divinely inspired, and that from him, down to "George III. the GREAT and the GOOD," the successive rulers were appointed to carry out successive designs. Is this an unacceptable solution ? Then the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is recognized he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth, as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a minute part along with its institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts and appliances, he is a resultant of an enormous aggregate of forces that have been co-operating for ages.

...Even were we to grant the absurd supposition that the genesis of the great man does not depend on the antecedents furnished by the society he is born in, there would still be the quite — sufficient facts that he is powerless in the absence of the material and mental accumulations which his society inherits from the past, and that he is powerless in the absence of the co-existing population, character, intelligence, and social arrangements. Given a Shakspeare, and what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous traditions of civilized life without the various experiences which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use? Suppose a Watt, with all his inventive power, living in a tribe ignorant of iron, or in a tribe that could get only as much iron as a fire blown by hand-bellows will smelt; or suppose him born among ourselves before lathes existed; what chance would there have been of the steam-engine? Imagine a Laplace unaided by that slowly- developed system of Mathematics which we trace back to its beginnings among the Egyptians; how far would he have got with the Mecanique Celeste? Nay, the like questions may be put and have like answers, even if we limit ourselves to those classes of great men on whose doings hero-worshippers more particularly dwell the rulers and generals. Xenophon could not have achieved his celebrated feat had his Ten Thousand been feeble, or cowardly, or insubordinate. Caesar would never have made his conquests without disciplined troops, inheriting their prestige and tactics and organization from the Romans who lived before them. And, to take a recent in stance, the strategical genius of Moltke would have triumphed in no great campaigns had there not been a nation of some forty millions to supply soldiers, and had not those soldiers been men of strong bodies, sturdy characters, obedient na tures, and capable of carrying out orders intelligently.

Were any one to marvel over the potency of a grain of detonating powder, which explodes a cannon, propels the shell, and sinks a vessel hit were he to enlarge on the transcendent virtues of this detonating powder, not mentioning the ignited charge, the shell, the camion, and all that enormous aggregate of appliances by which these have severally been produced, detonating powder included; we should not regard his interpretation as very rational. But it would fairly compare in rationality with this interpretation of social phenomena which, dwelling on the important changes the great man works, ignores that vast pre-existing supply of latent power he unlocks, and that immeasurable accumulation of antecedents to which both he and this power are due.

And Herbert Spencer was hardly some kind of howling Marxist characature you try to paint anybody that dares to complicate the validity of the Great Man thesis.

But, again, as you say, I have no concrete proof that historians will tend to favour the understanding and study of the conditions of a given society rather than a single individual with, "a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them." And even if most did insist that the foundations and mechanics of a society were more important than a, "flowing light-fountain," whatever that is, then you're right that the approach is not necessarily correct.

...Though I suspect most people would agree that it is.

Edit: ever notice how communists call everything Bonapartism or try to associate with Weimar Germany? One cannot help but feel they're haunted by some very precise feelings of failure in these regards...

I had assumed that I was pointing out that Trump wasn't a fascist, but closer to a Bonapartist and explained my reasoning when pressed for clarification.

I guess I'm actually haunted by some precise feelings of failure! One might wonder how this kind of pseudo-Freudianism would fit into Carlyle's conception of history.

[Zagadka]

I don't think "Trumpism" is a legitimate concept. He has no coherent ideal behind what he's doing.

[Igor Antunov]

Western media is fascism: http://imgur.com/a/9QGR8

[Conscript]

I’m sick and tired of the chameleons on the far-right who will feel a deep hurt going right to the bottom of their narcissistic little soul if they are called by any of the epitaphs reserved for the likes of them. They will rail in indignation and imperiously demand the political correctness they have shat on when it’s about protecting persecuted ethnic or religious minorities. No, they are not patriots or nativists, because the hatred they thrive on cannot but destroy the social fabric. Most of them don’t even know what nationalism means. No, they are not the defenders of Christendom. They are as ignorant of religion as the fanatic Islamists. Far-right, alt-right, and the like, are too anodyne to express what they are. They are also populists, xenophobes and racists, but that is not the whole program. They are also haters, retards, thugs, bullies, homophobes, misogynists, but that doesn’t really cut it either. They are also neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but that’s not really adequate to identify the whole spectrum.

For all practical purposes Trumpism is the present day reincarnation of fascism. This is not about linguistic or historical nitpicking. This is about the base brutality and meanness that drives these people which is no different from what made people turn to fascism in the first part of the 20th century. As we know from Shakespeare, Greek drama or the Gilgamesh, the archetypes of the human character have been pretty stable since thousands of years. One century doesn’t make any difference.

Trump uses his army of tweets like Mao used the Red Guards and Hitler used the SA to attack the institutions of the State and to create his own personal fascist rule based on falsehood and meanness. Trump and Bannon deliberately target the free press, the independent judiciary, the independence of the central bank, which are the guardians of the State he is supposed to protect. Trump has drawn corporate America on his side by doing away with regulation via decree and by promising lower corporate taxes; just like in Nazi Germany, where industry was only too willing to serve Hitler. Numerous top officials have been dismissed in the institutions of the State and a Stalinist purge is lurking just around the corner for a wholesale cleansing of the institutions. The rest will go into internal exile, always under threat of punishment in case of dissension. That will be sold as drying up the swamp. But Trump is the incarnation of the swamp.

Last but not least, fascism is invariably linked to imperialism. As brutal and destructive the rules of Idi Amin or Pol Pot were, their limited geographical reach rendered them insignificant in the history of the planet. Hitler’s imperial expansion is, however, dwarfed by the global empire at Trump’s disposal. The logic of empire cannot but lead to fascism. The plutocracy that America has become cannot but aim for total control of the world’s resources. There are no checks and balances to control America’s greed. Conquer the world’s resources and ban its people.

It’s time to take off the gloves and call a spade a spade. Being nice won’t do with these people, and arguments are useless against heckling. They are rotten, through and through. How was it possible that the vermin crawled out from its holes after all these years? Was the tomb in the grotto not sealed tight enough? Was the pale not run through the heart at the prescribed moment? Was the silver bullet too high in lead content? Something went very wrong.

Trump’s holocaust will be climate change.

Why are Germans always out to destroy europe?

What the hell did our occupation do to you people?