{"id":32573,"date":"2024-10-31T07:46:15","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T11:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=32573"},"modified":"2024-10-31T07:46:35","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T11:46:35","slug":"how-did-democracy-come-to-this-sorry-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/how-did-democracy-come-to-this-sorry-state\/","title":{"rendered":"How Did Democracy Come To This Sorry State?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Trump=HitlerM<\/span>y wife and I are members of the Boomer generation.<\/strong> That means our parents, their families, and their friends, their neighbours and their communities were impacted by World War II. In our family, our parents\u00a0 \u2014 British and Canadian \u2014 fought against the Nazis, fought against fascism, fought to keep the world safe for democracy. They endured six years of hell and deprivation so Susan and I could live a normal life. Many millions who fought for our freedoms died, often in horrible, lonely, and painful situations. In my family alone, I lost an uncle and stepbrother; victims of the Nazis. I would never get to know them, would never see them become part of my life, never share the table with them, never share holidays or birthdays, never meet or play with their children. Just two of millions of people who died to defeat the fascists.<\/p>\n

I have met others who survived the Holocaust, too. Nothing speaks louder about the horrific values, goals, and means of fascism than the mechanical genocide of the Holocaust. Genocide is and has always been, a hallmark of fascism.*<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

So you might understand my bemusement \u2014 as well as my anger, and my fear \u2014 as to why so many people living in a modern democracy whose freedoms are the result of that fight to halt fascism seem to have forgotten that war and now support political leaders who are openly and avidly fascist.<\/p>\n

Have the lessons of history been so buried by ignorance or selfishness that people \u2014 including people of my generation whose parents fought the Nazis, and who also likely lost family members in that war \u2014 have lost sight of them? Or are they simply ignoring the threat that the conservative fascists represent to democracy?<\/p>\n

Maybe they don’t care? Maybe they think all of Trump’s promises and threats are just bluster. Maybe they think the system is strong enough to protect them from totalitarianism. They are wrong.<\/p>\n

After all, if they support Trump (and by extension his skinny Canadian mimic, Pierre PoiLIEvre), they support what Trump has openly and frequently promised (and threatened): mass deportations of millions people of colour regardless of their immigration status; using the National Guard and military forces against “the enemies within’ (which he has made clear are his political opponents, their donors and supporters); closing down media outlets that didn’t support him; nationwide ban on abortion and women’s reproductive rights; implementation of a repressive pseudo-Christian theocracy; making the FBI and Department of Justice a political weapon to be used by the President; allowing unrestrained nationwide police violence; allowing millionaires and billionaires tax breaks while adding thousands of dollars in annual costs to working families; ending social services and Obamacare; starting a trade war with every other nation; breaking alliances with democracies and aligning with other dictatorships including Russia; firing and deporting special prosecutor Jack Smith for doing his appointed job; jailing Kamala Harris for running against him; firing comedians and late show hosts who mocked him; disbanding the Depart of Education; appointing unqualified sycophants and donors to key government positions; requiring all civil servants to take an oath of loyalty to him or be fired; remove labour protections like overtime pay, minimum wage, and child labour restrictions; he has promised to pardon the insurrectionists who attempted to violently overthrow the government for him on Jan. 6 and called them loyalists and patriots while suggesting the police who defended the Capitol should be jailed…<\/p>\n

These are all things Trump has promised in interviews and hate rally speeches over and over. His plan to deconstruct democracy and turn the USA into an authoritarian regime under him are well documented in his Project 2025<\/a> \u2014 his published blueprint for implementing a repressive regime. He has openly\u00a0presented a platform full of racism, misogyny, grievances, revenge, violence,<\/a> and, of course, an endless stream of lies intended to create rage, violence, and chaos among his followers. Which he has done again and again.<\/p>\n

Just try to imagine what the USA will be like when Trump starts his deportation program. Imagine Germany in the late 1930s but with better weapons and technology to oppress people. Imagine hundreds of detainment camps, policed by armed guards, surrounded by fences and razor wire, where families separated and children caged. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat gave us a hint in a recent interview with PBS<\/a> following Trump’s hate rally at Madison Square Gardens:<\/p>\n

…Trump has been conditioning Americans since 2015 to see violence as something justified in certain cases and even patriotic… So when they’re talking about deporting so many people in America, this is a massive amount of people, and thus you need an infrastructure of repression. You need camps. And the whole thing is a dystopia. And this is not what America is. But Donald Trump has been conditioning Americans to think that this is the way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why do so many people believe that they should be governed by an overt authoritarian, racist, misogynist, convicted felon, business fraud, con artist, serial liar and serial adulterer in severe cognitive decline? Are they not aware that they will give up everything their nation allegedly stands for? How did democracy ever fall so low? **<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

If you are an American who votes for or supports Trump, or a Canadian who votes for PoiLIEvre, please stay away from the Cenotaph and do not attend any Remembrance Day ceremonies from now on. You have betrayed the values, betrayed the reason those people died to protect. You have chosen to support fascism. You will besmirch the memory of those who died to protect us by your attendance.***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Notes:<\/h5>\n

*<\/strong><\/span> “[F]ascism stands for the annihilation of whole groups of people, the elimination of democracy and all freedoms… Black, Jewish, LGBT, disabled people, women [are] all targeted by fascism across the decades.” Aaron Kiely, No Platform for Fascists<\/em>, 2012.<\/p>\n

**<\/strong><\/span> “The citizens of the world’s democracies now must live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties as a matter of their own free will rather than as the result of a disaster or foreign conquest. Worse, the budding authoritarians who live among us now know it too. They have a demonstrated market for what they are selling. They will be back, and the next time they will bring glossier and better-packaged versions of dictatorship than the ragged prototypes this first wave of loud and pushy salesmen offered.”
\nTom Nichols: Our Own Worst Enemy<\/em>, p. xiii, Oxford University Press, 2021<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span> In Canada, those Trumpian racist and misogynist attributes apply to the federal conservatives, whose leader has openly courted and supported far-right extremists and insurrectionists. It is deeply hypocritical for them to attend Remembrance Day ceremonies.<\/p>\n

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My wife and I are members of the Boomer generation. That means our parents, their families, and their friends, their neighbours and their communities were impacted by World War II. In our family, our parents\u00a0 \u2014 British and Canadian \u2014 fought against the Nazis, fought against fascism, fought to keep the world safe for democracy. They endured six years of hell and deprivation so Susan and I could live a normal life. Many millions who fought for our freedoms died, often in horrible, lonely, and painful situations. In my family alone, I lost an uncle and stepbrother; victims of the \u2026…… click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,1200,1973,761,219],"tags":[1725,1996,1761,707],"class_list":["post-32573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-federal-and-provincial-politics","category-ideologies","category-maga-cultists","category-musings","category-us-international-politics","tag-alt-right","tag-fascists","tag-poilievre","tag-trump"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":499,"today_views":0},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32573"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32586,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32573\/revisions\/32586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}