By Mick Le Moignan
For those who believe the study of history is the surest guide to understanding the present, holding the American election on Bonfire Night is an extraordinary irony. It is probably the most momentous, historic event since 1945.
On 5 November 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested at the Houses of Parliament, outside a cellar full of barrels of gunpowder. Under torture, he revealed a plot to assassinate King James I and other political leaders. He and his co-conspirators were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Their motives were rooted in racism, religious fervour and hatred. They resented England adopting a Scottish King and wanted to bring back Catholicism as the national religion. They hoped to motivate the common people to rise up and support them.
Populist politicians emerge in times of economic hardship, typically where there is an unbridgeable divide between rich and poor. They tell “ordinary” people their needs and concerns are being wilfully ignored by an elite establishment. The populist appeal is a tried and trusted formula, which usually leads to brutal violence and often war.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement planned to paralyse transport and communications throughout Italy and march on Rome, where they would force King Victor Emmanuel III to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister. Like Donald Trump, a century later, his rhetoric included “draining the swamp” of corruption in the capital. He aspired to restore the greatness of the ancient Roman Empire.
At the same time, the Treaty of Versailles obliged Germany to pay unreasonable reparations to the Allied powers for the First World War. This was fertile soil for a rabble-rousing populist leader like Adolf Hitler. He could not hark back to the imperial glories of Rome, but he did cite two other historical precedents: Germanic Emperor Charlemagne, who ruled most of Western Europe by the time he died in 814, and Otto von Bismarck, who unified Germany and ruled as its “Iron Chancellor” from 1871 to 1890. Following these earlier “Reichs”, Hitler planned to found and command a Third Reich.
In November 1923, Hitler failed ignominiously to overthrow the Bavarian and national governments. He should have been sentenced to death or life imprisonment for treason, but a reactionary, right-wing judge let him off lightly. In prison, he dictated Mein Kampf, one of the few books Donald Trump claims to have read.
Soon after Hitler’s release in December 1924, the Weimar government unwisely cancelled its ban on his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis). He needed a good election campaign manager. He found one in Joseph Goebbels, who flew him around Germany to address a series of increasingly fanatical mass rallies. He told barefaced lies about his opponents, ranted incomprehensibly and castigated liberals, Jews, Marxists, artists and intellectuals for undermining the nation’s moral fibre. His supporters expressed a degree of fervent adoration for him that astonished neutral observers.
Hitler received crucial support from a Murdoch-like media baron, Alfred Hugenberg, past chairman of the Krupp steelworks, which made a fortune from arms production in the Great War. Hugenberg’s grubby newspapers and film studios waged a culture war to persuade working people that the nation was in danger of imminent, catastrophic collapse and their livelihoods were at risk. They blamed the greed of a city-based elite of Jewish artists, financiers and academics.
Truth became irrelevant. The theory was that if something is said three times, the third time it’s true. An egotistical orator can persuade himself and his listeners of his Messianic qualities: God has sent him to lead us all from the darkness to the promised land. When political conviction morphs into religious fervour, rational thought runs away. The inevitable results are extremism and fanaticism. Real or imaginary enemies can be rounded up and penned in concentration camps.
The Nazi Party never won an election: at the last one they allowed, in 1933, they got 43.9% of the votes – but it was enough. The newly-elected parliament sat for one day, stood over by brownshirted bullies, and passed the Enabling Act which gave Hitler all the power he needed. Hugenberg’s media empire was abolished and Goebbels took over all communications.
Donald Trump has said he would only be a dictator for the first day of his second presidency – and that, too, might be enough. Protests can then be banned, resistance quashed, books burned and opposition parties banned at leisure.
Populist leaders need strong police or military forces to generate fear and inflict pain or death for the purpose of coercion. They prefer their supporters well-armed. Trump’s intention to use the US Army to round up “illegal immigrants” is no idle threat. He promises his democratic opponents “retribution”.
Trump is a bombastic, narcissistic mountebank, a conman, a liar, a sociopath, a draft dodger, a convicted rapist and a serial abuser of women who has feathered his nest with a multitude of business frauds, bankruptcies and tax-avoidance schemes. His criminal record makes the pre-Holocaust Adolf Hitler look like a cleanskin. He preys on naïve, Christian fundamentalist Americans by claiming God saved him from assassination for some holy purpose, calling himself “The Chosen One”.
He is utterly unfit for any public office, let alone the leadership of the world’s leading democracy, with a nuclear Armageddon at his fingertips. To his hypnotised supporters, none of this matters.
Trump is Putin’s puppet. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller found clear evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. If elected, Trump will cast Ukraine to the wolves, use NATO as a protection racket and cosy up to war criminals like Putin and Netanyahu. An isolationist USA will put up self-defeating tariff walls and disengage from vital global action on climate change.
Kamala Harris stands between us and a totalitarian bonfire nightmare. Let’s hope American voters have learned the lessons of history: if not, we’ll all be condemned to repeat it.
Further reading: I am indebted to Dennis Glover, the author of Repeat: A Warning from History, a short, prescient book published this year by Black Inc. Books in Australia.
