Around the world, George Monbiot writes, tyranny is on the march:
We see this at work in the United States today, where the Republican party’s blatant disregard for the constitution will allow Donald Trump to escape impeachment.
In Brazil, outrages against indigenous people, opposition politicians and journalists are encouraged and celebrated at the highest levels of government. Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election with the help of a judicial coup in which due process was abandoned to secure the imprisonment of the frontrunner, Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula). Bolsonaro has been photographed embracing two of the suspects in the murder of the leftwing councillor Marielle Franco, and has sought to block corruption investigations into his son Flávio, who allegedly has close links with members of the paramilitary gang accused of killing her.
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after discovering that his alleged association with the 2002 Gujarat massacres no longer appeared to tarnish his name, is laying the foundations for a vicious ethno-nationalism. His new citizenship law deliberately denies rights to Muslims and could render millions of people stateless. People protesting against this act are brutally attacked by the police. Police and armed gangs have raided two Delhi universities, randomly beating up students, to spread generalised terror. In Uttar Pradesh, political opponents are routinely imprisoned without charge and tortured.
The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has bragged of riding around the streets of Davao on his motorbike when he was mayor of the city, shooting people he suspected of being criminals. Since becoming president he has, in effect, turned the police into a giant death squad, empowering them to murder people they believe to be involved in drug crime. Unsurprisingly, this general licence has led to the murders of political opponents, and land and environmental defenders.
We are watching the march of what Monbiot calls "killer clowns:"
Like these other killer clowns, Trump may now feel he can do anything. His legal team has in the past suggested he has total immunity, boasting that he could literally get away with murder. A culture of impunity is spreading around the world. “Try to stop me” is the implicit motto in nations ranging from Hungary to Israel, Saudi Arabia to Russia, Turkey to China, Poland to Venezuela. Flaunting your disregard for the law is an expression of power.
Read the signs. They're not good.
Image: The Falling Darkness
6 comments:
I read the article this morning, Owen. Perhaps this is our fate as a species, since we do not put to good use the capacity that allegedly separates us from the other animals: reflection.
If these guys get away with it, Lorne, it's because we let them.
No question that he's right, Owen. Hedges addressed this decay on Monday. Here are two passages from his op-ed.
"The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. The longer we fail to name and confront our physical and moral decay, the more demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become empowered. Those who acknowledge the truth—beginning with the stark fact that we are no longer a democracy—wander like ghosts around the edges of society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for hope works as an anesthetic.
"The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction."
History teaches us that the rise of these rogue "pre-fascist" states tends to destabilize entire regions. This often manifests in regional arms races. A good example is in Asia Pacific, specifically South and Southeast Asia. There is a race there to acquire submarines. Even the city state of Singapore has half a dozen boats far more modern than the salvage-yard subs Canada fields. Some countries, i.e. the Philippines, arrived late to the party but are racing to catch up. It doesn't stop until you reach Australia which also has a major but troubled submarine acquisition programmer underway because Canberra sees trouble to the north.
This is, in part, compounded by the decline of American superpower hegemony and the concurrent rise of new major powers - China, India and the return of Russian might.
And then, as Hedges notes, there's climate change. What I've read suggests there'll be major climate impacts arriving over the next decade in countries that are already far from stable and prosperous. As Dyer writes, even the nicest tribe will slaughter its neighbours before it sees its own children starve.
Whether it's Bolsonaro or Duterte, Trump or Modi, they all share a blindness to the shoals that loom directly ahead. My war studies courses drove home the point that many wars break out that were never intended nor wanted. Nations back themselves into wars for all manner of unforeseen reasons. Weak leadership is a big one. Just ask the Kaiser.
We are surrounded by weak leaders, Mound. And the cruelest irony is that our future is in their hands.
Owen I would disagree with you. Our future is in our own hands and we need to take our hands to the ballot box and use them to vote. If we do not then we have failed ourselves.
With any luck trump will die of whatever he currently has and they can get over it. If people want to drink the cool aid, they may, but they will find out it is poisoned and they will die. Given the attacks on health care, clean water, one can expect the increase in dead and dying in the U.S.A. sooner than later.
It will take millions of Americans to take Trump down, e.a.f. We'll see if there are enough of them smart enough to do it.
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