Welcome back, Benito
On 20 January Donald Trump, having been sworn in at the start of his second term as US President, outlined in his acceptance speech his mission for the next four years. Simply, he would put America first. He blamed ‘the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens’ for the broken state of the country. He, on the other hand, would never allow America to be taken advantage of. It would ‘expand its territory’, be ‘greater, stronger and more exceptional than ever before’, and regain its position as ‘history’s greatest civilization’.
Trump announced specific measures. Foreign tariffs will replace home taxes. The declaration of a ‘national emergency’ will seal the southern border, and millions of illegal immigrants will be deported. A second ‘national emergency’ will overturn US energy policy. ‘Green’ is a dead letter; instead, ‘we will drill, baby, drill’. ‘Social engineering’ will cease. The Panama Canal will be seized. The Stars and Stripes will be planted on the surface of Mars.
A few days earlier my Scottish cousin Louise send me a black and white family photo. It came without documentation, but was probably taken towards the end of the Second World War or shortly after the end of it, possibly in Ochiltree, Ayrshire. It shows our grandmother, as erect and imperious as I remember her, our moustachioed grandfather (surprisingly inconspicuous in the background: I have no memory of him), and their four offspring: Uncle Bob, with his wife Margaret, and three girls, my mother Ellie, slim in a white blouse and slacks and camera-shy as ever, Marion and Addie.
Two of the four are in uniform. (I’m not sure why my mother, who was in the WRNS, was not.) But all of them in that photo had experienced, in one way or another – my father, absent from the picture, was a conscientious objector – over four years of fighting against the forces of fascism. They all knew why the struggle was so important, they recognised what Hitler and his allies stood for, and they looked forward to a different world – more humane, equal and civilised – after the war came to an end .
That picture and those events are now around eighty years old. All the people in the photo are dead, and many of their children are dead too. The living memory of them, like the memory of their times, has faded, almost to nothing. Of course, historians and their sources – buildings, records, pictures and much else – survive to remind us today of the terrible events of the 1930s and 1940s. Some of these can act as moral prompts, like a visit to Auschwitz or reading Primo Levi’s If this is a man, and can leave a lasting impact on an individual. But our society is now so removed from the period that it’s easy for many to live in ignorance of the truths of the 1930s and 1940s, and to fail to resist the malign appeal of powers seeking to follow the tyrants of that time.
The chronological and mental distance between then and now is surely one of the explanations of why Trump and his like can gain support and power, and why those who have suffered from the last forty years of unrestrained, extreme capitalism feel they can put themselves in the hands of politicians – call them authoritarians, oligarchs, fascists or whatever you want – who would return us to the violent, oppressive world of the 1930s and 1940s, to the order of Mussolini and Hitler.
The most chilling part of the inauguration events in and around the Capitol – the building that Trump’s violent irregulars had stormed after he lost the last Presidential election – was to see Elon Musk, one of the tech emperors seated in the front row during the inauguration ceremony, standing at the podium in the subsequent rally and giving two Nazi stiff-arm salutes. It was no accident. His Leader had already left us in doubt about his convictions and methods. They include extreme nationalism and exceptionalism, the scapegoating and targeting of specific groups within the country, and the threat of violence outside it. For good measure Trump adds a determination to hasten climate disaster.
Trump will be gone within a few years, unless he signs an Executive Order proclaiming a new emergency and overturning the Constitution, but the same ideologies as his are still on the rise in Europe. In Austria and Germany Nazism is being resurrected, and across the continent ‘populist’ parties prosper. It doesn’t take a ‘March on Rome’ today to turn a state into a place of hatred, fear and discrimination, only a readiness to trust the unscrupulous or fail to oppose them.
Suppose the family members in Louise’s photo were able to come back and visit us today. Would they find it possible to understand how millions of people, after the experiences of the twentieth century, could make the same mistakes again in the twenty-first?