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      The Mount of Autocrats

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      Donald Trump would dearly like to add his face to Mount Rushmore as the fifth presidential musketeer. His fireworks-and-fury extravaganza on July 3 was the next best thing. Trump’s dystopian speech was almost beside the point. Much more important was the photo op of his smirking face next to Abraham Lincoln’s.

      More fitting, however, would be to carve Trump’s face into a different Rushmore altogether. This one would be located in a more appropriate badlands, like Mount Hermon in Syria near the border with Israel. There, Trump’s visage would join those of his fellow autocrats, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. To honor the illiberal locals, the stony countenances of Bashar al-Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu would make it a cozy quintet.

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      Let’s be frank: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are not the company that Trump keeps, despite his “America First” pretensions. His ideological compatriots are to be found in other countries: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Viktor Orban of Hungary and so on. Alas, this global Rushmore of autocrats is becoming as crowded as a football team pressed together for a selfie.

      But Putin and Xi stand out from the rest. They get pride of place because of their long records of authoritarian policies and the sheer brazenness of their recent power grabs. By comparison, Trump is the arrogant newcomer who may well not last the season, an impulsive sprinter in the marathon of geopolitics. If things go badly for Team Trump in November, America will suddenly be busy air-brushing 45 out of history and gratefully chiseling his face out of the global Rushmore. Putin and Xi, however, are in it for the long haul.

      Leader for Life

      At the end of June, Russia held a referendum on a raft of constitutional changes that President Putin proposed earlier in the year. In front of Russian voters were over 200 proposed amendments. No wonder the authorities gave Russians a full week to vote. They should have provided mandatory seminars on constitutional law as well.

      Of course, the Russian government wasn’t looking to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion of governance. The Russian parliament had already approved the changes. Putin simply wanted Russian voters to rubber-stamp his nationalist-conservative remaking of his country.

      At the same time, a poor turnout would not have been a good look. To guarantee what the Kremlin’s spokesman described as a “triumphant referendum on confidence” in Putin, workplaces pressured their employees to vote and the government distributed lottery prizes. Some people managed to vote more than once. On top of that, widespread fraud was necessary to achieve the preordained positive outcome.

      Instead of voting on each of the amendments, Russians had to approve or disapprove the whole package. Among the constitutional changes were declarations that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that Russians believe in God and that the Russian Constitution takes precedence over international law. Several measures increased executive power over the ministries and the judiciary. A few sops were thrown to Putin’s core constituencies, like pensioners. Who was going to vote against God or retirees?

      But the jewel in the crown was the amendment that allows Putin to run for the presidency two more times. Given his systematic suppression of the opposition, up to and including assassination, Putin will likely be in office until he’s 84 years old. That gives him plenty of time to, depending on your perspective, make Russia great again or make Russia into Putin, Inc.

      The Russian president does not dream of world domination. He has regional ambitions at best. Yet these ambitions have brought Russia into conflict with the United States over Ukraine, Syria, even outer space. And then there’s the perennial friction over Afghanistan. Much has been made in the US press about Putin offering the Taliban bounties for US and coalition soldiers. It’s ugly stuff, but no uglier than what the United States was doing back in the 1980s.

      Did you think that all the US money going to the mujahideen was to cultivate opium poppies, run madrasas and plan someday to bite the hand that fed them? The US government was giving the Afghan “freedom fighters” guns and funds to kill Soviet soldiers, nearly 15,000 of whom died over the course of the war. The Russians have been far less effective. At most, the Taliban have killed 18 US soldiers since the beginning of 2019, with perhaps a couple tied to the bounty program.

      Still, it is expected that a US president would protest such a direct targeting of US soldiers even if he has no intention to retaliate. Instead, Trump has claimed that Putin’s bounty program is a hoax. “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted.

      Knowing how sensitive the US president and the public are to the death of America soldiers overseas, Putin couldn’t resist raising the stakes in Afghanistan and making US withdrawal that much more certain. Taking the United States out of the equation — reducing the transatlantic alliance, edging US troops out of the Middle East, applauding Washington’s exit from various international organizations — provides Russia with greater maneuvering room to consolidate power in the Eurasian space.

      Trump has dismissed pretty much every unsavory Kremlin act as a hoax, from US election interference to assassinations of critics overseas. Trump cares little about Ukraine, has been lukewarm if not hostile toward US sanctions against Moscow, and has consistently attempted to bring Russia back into the G8. Yet he has also undermined the most important mechanism of engagement with Russia, namely arms control treaties.

      President Trump’s servile approach to Putin and disengaged approach to Russia is the exact opposite of the kind of principled engagement policy that Washington should be constructing. The United States should be identifying common interests with Russia over nuclear weapons, climate, regional ceasefires, reviving the Iran nuclear deal — and, at the same time, criticizing Russian conduct that violates international norms.

      Territory Grab

      China’s Xi Jinping has already made himself leader for life, and he didn’t need to go to the pretense of a referendum on constitutional changes. In 2018, the National People’s Congress simply removed the two-term limit on the presidency and boom: Xi can be on top ‘til he drops. Forget about collective leadership within the party. And certainly forget about some kind of evolution toward democracy. Under President Xi, China has returned to the one-man rule of the Mao period.

      So, while Putin was busy securing his future this past weekend, Xi focused instead on securing China’s future as an integrated, politically homogeneous entity. In other words, Xi moved on Hong Kong.

      Hong Kong once had great economic value for Beijing as a gateway to the global economy. Now that China has all the access to the global economy that it needs and then some, Hong Kong has only symbolic value, as a former colonial territory returned to the Chinese nation in 1997. To the extent that Hong Kong remains an enclave of free-thinkers who take potshots at the Communist Party, Beijing will step by step deprive it of democracy.

      On June 30, a new national security law went into effect in Hong Kong. “The new law names four offences: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces,” Matt Ho writes in the South China Morning Post. “It also laid out new law enforcement powers and established government agencies responsible for national security. Conviction under the law includes sentences of life in prison.”

      The protests that have roiled Hong Kong for the past many months, from Beijing’s point of view, violate the national security law in all four categories. So, violators may now face very long prison sentences indeed, and police have already arrested a number of people accused of violating the new law. The new law extends to virtually all aspects of society, including the schools, which now must “harmonize” their teaching with the party line in Beijing.

      What’s happening in Hong Kong, however, is still a dilute version of the crackdown taking place on the mainland. This week, the authorities in Beijing arrested Xu Zhangrun, a law professor and prominent critic of Xi. He joins other detainees, like real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who was linked to an article calling Xi a “clown with no clothes on who was still determined to play emperor” and Xu Zhiyong, who called on Xi to resign for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

      Meanwhile, Beijing’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province amounts to collective punishment: more than a million consigned to “reeducation camps,” children separated from their families, forced sterilization. Uighur exiles have charged China with genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

      Like Putin, Xi has aligned himself with a conservative nationalism that appeals to a large portion of the population. Unlike Putin, the Chinese leader doesn’t have to worry about approval ratings or periodic elections. He is also sitting on a far-larger economy, much greater foreign currency reserves, and the means to construct an illiberal internationalism to replace the Washington consensus that has prevailed for several decades. Moreover, there are no political alternatives on the horizon in China that could challenge Xi or his particular fusion of capitalism and nationalism.

      Trump has pursued the same kind of unprincipled engagement with China as he has with Russia: flattery of the king, indifference toward human rights and a focus on profit. Again, principled engagement requires working with China on points of common concern while pushing back against its human rights violations. Of course, that’s not going to happen under the human rights violation that currently occupies the White House.

      And Trump Makes Three

      Trump aspires to become a leader for life like his buddies Putin and Xi, as he has “joked” on numerous occasions. He has similarly attacked the mainstays of a democratic society — the free press, independent judges, inspectors general. He has embraced the same nationalist-conservative cultural policies. And he has branded his opponents as enemies of the people. In his Rushmore speech on July 3, Trump lashed out against:

      “… a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

      He went on to describe his crackdown on protesters, his opposition to “liberal Democrats,” his efforts to root out opposition in schools, newsrooms and “even our corporate boardrooms.” Like Putin, he sang the praises of the American family and religious values. He described an American people that stood with him and the Rushmore Four and against all those who have exercised their constitutional rights of speech and assembly. You’d never know from the president’s diatribe that protesters were trying to overthrow not the American Revolution but the remnants of the Confederacy.

      Trump’s supporters have taken to heart the president’s attacks on America’s “enemies.” Since the protests around George Floyd’s killing began in May, there have been at least 50 cases of cars ramming into demonstrators, a favorite tactic used by white supremacists. There have been over 400 reports of press freedom violations. T. Greg Doucette, a “never Trump” conservative lawyer, has collected over 700 videos of police misconduct, usually violent, toward peaceful demonstrators.

      As I’ve written, there is no left-wing “cultural revolution” sweeping the United States. It is Donald Trump who is hoping to unleash a cultural revolution carried out by a mob of violent backlashers who revere the Confederate flag, white supremacy and the Mussolini-like president who looks out upon all the American carnage from his perch on the global Rushmore of autocrats.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      A New Hysteria Around History in the US

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      In its report on US President Donald Trump’s Fourth of July weekend in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, the Associated Press characterized his speech as “a direct appeal to disaffected white voters four months before Election Day.”

      While Trump himself “zeroed in on the desecration by some protesters of monuments and statues across the country that honor those who have benefited from slavery, including some past presidents,” the AP notes that Kristi Noem, a Republican governor, “echoed Trump’s attacks against his opponents who ‘are trying to wipe away the lessons of history.’”

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      Americans suddenly seem obsessed with history, which used to be dismissed simply as “the past” and subjected to the proverb, “It’s no use crying over spilt milk.” So, what could the phrase “the lessons of history” possibly mean to a contemporary American?

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Lessons of history:

      1) From a historian’s point of view, the nuanced conclusions that can be reached about the possible meaning of events in the past, including the unintended consequences of decisions made by historical persons or institutions 
      2) For the layman in the United States, the simplistic chauvinistic anecdotes and bullet points dispensed in schools, especially when the content derives from books published in Texas

      Contextual Note

      As a prominent actor in what will soon be called an epoch of history — the Trump era — the president is living proof that obtaining a degree from Wharton doesn’t require a solid appreciation for or understanding of history. According to John Bolton, the former national security adviser, Trump may still be ignorant of the fact that the United Kingdom acquired nuclear weapons nearly 70 years ago and that Finland declared independence from Russia more than a century ago. Perhaps those two events took place in the too distant past to pique his curiosity or have so little bearing on today’s geopolitics that they merit forgetting.

      Bolton is not the only commentator to maintain that Trump’s grasp of history or of geopolitical reality is less than impeccable. But just as the killing of George Floyd in police custody has sparked a vast movement of people seeking to reevaluate some salient aspects of US history, Trump has decided that though he may not understand it, he has the duty to defend “history.” He appears to see it as a damsel in distress, bound by the villain to railroad tracks as the locomotive steams toward the captive in the kind of cliffhanger Trump probably remembers from his exposure to the history of cinema.

      Trump is right. History has long been manhandled in the US. And this is the moment to honor it. After all, the history of the now-globalized human race has taken a highly visible turn at least since 2001, with a notable acceleration since Trump was elected in 2016. Given the stakes, Americans should finally not just invest in history’s defense but inject it with the life it deserves. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      To defend history, the best place to begin is to examine the methodology of historians. The word itself is borrowed from French, where the noun histoire signifies both “history” and “story.” History as a discipline can justifiably be described as an imperfect version of the most accurate and complete story we can honestly tell about the past after having examined all the available evidence.” In some sense — on the storytelling side — it’s a discipline closer to literature than science. But Trump refuses to see it as a discipline, preferring to treat history as political advertising. Advertising also tells a story, though no reasonable person would call it a discipline.

      Why is this important? Because the citizens of such a comparatively youthful nation have never really known what to do with history, especially their own history. Among the myths that Americans are taught in school is the idea that the American Revolution sealed the definitive rejection by a forward-looking people of the stale, sclerotic traditions of Europe, whose nations were the prisoners of their history. America was all about creating a new civilization, not adulating the past. With such a vision, even the idea of the past became permanently irrelevant to a people on the move.

      Trump complains that the protest movement is no more than “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” The opposite is of course true. History has already been wiped out of Americans’ field of awareness. History has actors, not heroes. Some stand out symbolically as either heroes or villains, at least for the sake of storytelling.

      Concerning the erasing of values, the famed “Puritan values” the US has traditionally been proud of were long ago replaced by the pursuit of wealth and fame, the two values that have guided Trump’s own life story. As for indoctrinating the children, some of us have an idea of what indoctrination looks like. Many of us were taught at school that Christopher Columbus’ contemporaries believed that the world was flat (false) and that a teenage George Washington, after castrating his father (i.e., chopping down his “favorite” cherry tree), proudly proclaimed, “I cannot tell a lie” (ridiculous).

      Speaking as if preparing his political supporters for battle, Trump declared that “just as patriots did in centuries past, the American people will stand in their way, and we will win, and win quickly.” Time is, after all, money, and short episodes of history are easier to commit to memory. 

      “[W]e will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” Trump added, imagining the mustachioed villains clad in black (with skin color to match) who have conspired to bind the damsel to the rails.

      Historical Note

      Donald Trump didn’t just complain. In a bold gesture, he announced an executive order to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” with his own list of obligatory denizens of the garden, the criterion being that they must be “historically significant Americans.” 

      The problem with this approach is that if history is reduced to stories about heroes, the damsel history would remain bound to the tracks. Heroes of various kinds do exist, but because they are deemed heroic, their stories take us outside of history into something closer to dramatic fiction. Worse, heroes can only be understood as champions of some collective endeavor — a cause, venture, belief or even an art form — that students of history need to come to grips with before they can assess the relative virtues and contributions of the heroes. There is little doubt, however, that the idea of celebrating heroes as role models would appeal to the host of a former reality-TV show called “Celebrity Apprentice.”

      Asawin Suebsaeng and Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast describe Trump’s drift as nothing less than a call for a new civil war. But the conflicts Trump typically cites tend to be the war of independence and World War II. The Daily Beast tells us that Trump repeatedly found ways “to compare himself and his supporters to Patriots during the American Revolution—and protesters to members of the British Army.” 

      But Trump then shifted his allusion to the 20th century and World War II when he declared “there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” He even glanced at China’s Chairman Mao Zedong: “[T]his left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.” Heroes are important, but so are recognized villains.

      Trump’s understanding of history resembles a jigsaw puzzle in a tempest where the wind has blown away most of the pieces. Interpreting the scattered ones that are left requires an imagination guided by whatever fantasies happen to be tumbling around in Trump’s unconscious. To be fair, that pretty much corresponds to the way the lessons of history tend to be written by totalitarian regimes. In the end, Trump may be far more normal than people give him credit for.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The City on the Hill Has Lost Its Shine and Its Bounce

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      Trump’s Ambiguous Battle Against Middle East Turmoil

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      On June 24, Al Jazeera’s reporter at the White House attempted to determine President Donald Trump’s position on the Israeli plan to begin illegally annexing occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised to begin operations on July 1.  On the White House lawn, Al Jazeera reporter Chris Sheridan […] More

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      Trump Is Playing Peekaboo With the Pandemic

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      What’s Annexed on Netanyahu’s July Agenda?

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      Trump, Biden and the Bear

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      As the joke goes, when confronted by a grizzly, you don’t have to outrun the bear — you just need to outrun your camping partner. With the bear symbolizing every form of headwind that both candidates in the 2020 US election face — from COVID-19, ongoing protests and the US economy to a dozen-odd domestic and […] More