“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” So begins 1984, author George Orwell’s frightening novel about citizens under the thrall of a dictatorship. “Big Brother is watching you” is a threat and a warning to the populace that is surveilled by the all-seeing eye of the “telescreen” that tracks their every move while also pacifying them with cheap entertainment and state propaganda. “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” are watchwords of the shadowy, thuggish regime in Orwell’s cautionary tale of tyranny rampant in a future world where courage is quashed while complacency and compliance are expected and enforced.
Flash forward to today’s bleak political landscape.The fictional dystopia of 1984 was an imaginary world, but an authoritarian regime could become an American reality in 2024 if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump has long had a fascination with political strongmen in such countries as Russia, China, Turkey, Hungary and North Korea. He has made remarks about using dictatorial powers to close the borders and drill for oil on his first day back in office if he wins in November. George Orwell warned long ago that there is no such thing as “dictator for a day” when he said, “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
In a Washington Post column last fall headlined “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly likely. We should stop pretending,” conservative foreign policy expert Robert Kagan wrote, “How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it.” He added that “if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care.” Thus this “land of the free” could become a land of fascism, American-style, where millions of citizens happily trade their freedoms for the blandishments of a flag-hugging con man promising to “Make America Great Again.” Today there are millions of citizens walking around America who would have been gladly goose-stepping around Germany if they had lived there during Hitler’s rise to power. Trump depends on their cultish allegiance or their cow-like indifference.
America has endured a long series of traumas since the 21st century began in 2001. That year was defined by the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to the ill-starred and ill-conceived Iraq War that began in 2003, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, and fueling more tension in the Middle East. The COVID pandemic of 2020 brought this nation to a shut-down and fueled conspiracy theories that fester to this day. When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump and his henchmen howled that the election was rigged, setting the stage for the right-wing riot in Washington on Jan. 6, 2017. Such assaults on the psyche of this nation have provided fuel for the fire of fascism in America, and Trump seems all too willing to fan those flames of repression, revenge and retribution.
At a campaign rally in Ohio on Mar. 16, Trump saluted as the national anthem was sung by a choir of convicts who are imprisoned for their crimes during the Capitol Hill riot four years ago. Before the recording of the singing jailbirds was played for the crowd, an announcer called the prisoners “horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages.” Trump echoed and inflated that rhetoric in Ohio and at a recent rally in Rome, GA, calling the Jan. 6 MAGA mob “unbelievable patriots.”
Trump has vowed to pardon members of that mob if he becomes president again. Such freed felons would be perfect recruits for bully-boy brigades of street fighters against dissenters during a second Trump administration. Just as fascist Benito Mussolini had his thuggish Black Shirt legions in Italy and Nazi despot Adolf Hitler had his Brown Shirt terror troops in Germany, a dictatorial Donald Trump would have his cultish cabal of criminals to do his bidding against any opposition.
George Orwell wrote 1984, but his words are a warning for 2024: “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.”
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