Sunday 2 June 2019

Is Trump An Actual Fascist?

This week on my blog is going to be very Donald Trump heavy as he is here and he is bound to do or say something stupid, insensitive or just plain crazy several times a day and until Thursday at least the whole media circus is going to be concentrating on him and his entourage so little else will get a look in which will make a nice change to Brexit. 
One word which is going to be bandied about, and used today by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, to describe the crazy haired lunatic is 'Facist' but it is hard to know how accurate that is because fascist and fascism is hard to nail down.
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are probably the most famous fascists but author of many books on Fascism, Robert Paxman, explains that Fascism is all about arousing enthusiasm by propaganda techniques for an anti-liberal, anti-socialist, exclusionary nationalist agenda while George Orwell in his essay 'What Is Fascism?' explains what is the most common traits of a fascist.
He found that fascist leaders scapegoat and demonise other groups to gain a common enemy to unite against, refer to a glorious past and wish to return to it, not allowing dissent or challenge, rid their Government of the previous laws and decisions of previous leaders, to create their own, use the nations resources to build up the military to which they threaten weaker and smaller nations. 
So to judge Trumps fascist tendencies, he certainly has scapegoated many including Mexicans (rapists and criminals), the media (enemy of the people) and Muslims so he gets a massive tick for that one.
His clarion call of 'Make America Great Again' satisfies the harking back to a better time agenda and CNN lists 62 members of his staff who have either been sacked or resigned under pressure, famously sacking FBI director James Comey when he refused to pledge loyalty to him.
Trumps whole time in administration has seen him energetically rolling back his predecessors laws and decisions and although he hasn't actually used the military during his time in office, he has threatened to destroy North Korea, warned of the end of Iran, has discussed sending the military to overthrow the Venezuela leadership and sent armed troops to the Mexico border while significantly increasing military spending from 2.4% to 4.7% to $750 billion.
Nobody can deny Paxman's criteria of pushing an anti-liberal, anti-socialist agenda is not spot on so when we also take George Orwell's definitions of what makes a fascist, then Trump is overwhelmingly one and the use of the word is legitimate.

6 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

saying something considered "stupid, insensitive or just plain crazy" is easy to do when the judges of such are spineless, arrogant, ignorant, self-righteous leftists...

Falling on a bruise said...

George Orwell?

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

and what leader doesn't?

what leader from the left doesn't blame racist, xenophobic, homophobic trump supporters that want to take away human rights from women, rights from blacks, rights from muslims, rights from immigrants?

you do it in most of your posts about people from the right...

and, Orwell isn't the judge. he wrote the evaluation system, the person applying it is the judge (you, mayor of London, most democrat candidates in USA)...

Falling on a bruise said...

If he ticks every single box of the evaluation system then doesn’t it prove it?
Not the lefts fault if all the racist, xenophobic homophobes are on the right and they get called out on it. Stop being racist, xenophobic homophobes and give us nothing to call you out about.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

the fact that the left overindex on ever narrowing inequalities, of ever smaller minorities (red headed, left handed, transexual, pro-abortion, vegans), does not mean a person on the right is racist or any of the other hateful and vile labels the left use to coerce people that don't obsess about the issues that the left obsess over.

Stop being so hateful and vile. it is nasty to judge people and nastier to label them.

Falling on a bruise said...

If it looks like a fascist and sounds like a fascist ...etc etc