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      in US Politics

      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

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      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      in World Politics

      The Dazzling Shallowness of Bernard-Henri Levy

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      One of the attractions, or oddities, of France is its reverence of those who are regarded as philosophers, or at least philosophical thinkers. In the age of fast information, we also have fast philosophy — soundbite philosophy. Not that this has no value, but this value has to be abstracted from the veneers that accompany not just instant thought but instant thought that seems intellectually attractive: exciting, provocative, perhaps outrageous, but plausible.

      Juliette Greco: Snatching Dignity From the Jaws of the Absurd

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      It is in this category that Bernard-Henri Levy now finds a home. It is the task of the reader to distinguish content from veneer. But since many readers seem no longer to try, Levy has a ready audience for instant diagnosis of serious situations, rendered “philosophical” by the constant dropping of names, recognized as the serious thinkers of the past, and constant references to his own earlier work.

      Sense of Exaggeration

      That earlier work is not inconsiderable. Although always controversial because of his willingness to eviscerate sacred cows, his condemnation of Stalinism was a bold challenge to the European left to make a new start that banished socialism achieved by tyranny. His intellectual histories of French thought, such as in “Adventures on the Freedom Road,” although even then striving for effect, were vibrant and made thought seem integral to the French project of a national self. He wanted that national self to be humane and humanitarian.

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      Levy’s championing of refugees was staunchly within the moral need for a nation to be compassionate. His defense of freedom elsewhere, as in his taking of sides with Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban and his more recent advocacy of the Kurdish Peshmerga in their fight against the Islamic State, were evidence of a cosmopolitanism that he saw first evidenced in the life and adventures of his hero, the writer Andre Malraux. Malraux had fought in China (with the Communists), Spain (with the Republicans) and France (with the Resistance), and wrote great novels and art histories as well as somewhat exaggerated memoirs.

      That sense of exaggeration has always been with Levy. Every adventure has been a photo opportunity, including in Bosnia during the Siege of Sarajevo or wandering the ruins of what had been Muammar Gaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. That, of course, comes with kickback. Levy was indeed a frequent visitor to besieged Sarajevo, but those visits tended to be fleeting, leading the entrapped citizens of Sarajevo to nickname him not BHL, as he is widely known in France, but DHL — Deux Heures Levy, in and out (safely on a United Nations plane) within two hours.

      That he then compared himself with Susan Sontag, who stayed in the city for a lengthy period, accepting the same risks as all others without UN protection, was always rich. And his perhaps seminal influence on the French and, through the French, on NATO to intervene in Libya had the unforeseen consequence of war without end in the “liberated” country.

      His latter-day championing of Jewish identity and culture, echoing in some ways Levinas, but without his philosophical gravitas and genuine luminosity, leaves open questions as to Levy’s stance on any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians that they themselves might find just. This is a shame as, in some ways, he might be a reasonable interlocutor between the two peoples making, one would hope, the proviso that human rights must deploy equality of political rights — and, of course, that there is no humanitarian settlement without human rights.

      Gadfly of Thought

      Because he’s rich, given to Dior suits and Charvet shirts, lean enough and with sufficient hair to appear dashing in his late middle age, Levy crafts an image that all the same now seems that of the jet-setting gadfly of the international — and of thought.

      That sense of the gadfly of thought comes through in his latest (short) book, “The Virus in the Age of Madness,” on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is full of references to (highly excerpted) thought from great philosophers alongside references to his earlier writing. But there is a difference stylistically to his previous work. Levy was once the pioneer of an evocative methodology that married philosophy with fiction that all the same was evocative and sometimes illuminating. That was within the construction of an imaginary conversation between himself, or himself in disguise, and one of the great thinkers.

      The great thinker explains himself, but always within the terms posed by Levy as an interviewer. Of course, this made Levy the commander of explication and interpretation of another’s thought. But the technique drew in the reader and did provoke thought among the audience.

      This time, Levy seems merely to be interviewing himself, inviting himself to make declaratory and pontifical statements to do with his (seemingly erudite) outrage that COVID-19 has rendered all other catastrophes in the world second-rate as face masks and respirators subvert and overwhelm our awareness of hunger, war, (other) pestilence and political repression. This is a fair point but made with a dazzling shallowness that proposes no means of balancing concerns over the pandemic and for other worlds. It gestures toward the sacrifice of medical frontline workers but almost dismisses them toward the end in a frenzy of concern for the “out there.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The short treatise is a polemic that has a theme but no purpose. It pales beside Susan Sontag’s own short book, “Illness as Metaphor,” which discusses the use of metaphor in the ways we refer to serious illnesses — just as Levy announces his intention to dissect the uses of metaphor but winds up proposing grand vistas of image after image for the sake of effect. And, of course, he does compare himself to Sontag in their quite different Sarajevo involvements. He also progresses the use of Benny Levy, once the controversial aide to the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre, from one side of Bernard-Henri’s interview-as-philosophical-insight technique to the status of good friend. No aggrandizement is spared.

      Levy’s book does not even interrogate the disease itself. One would have expected Levy to interview the coronavirus, but, in fact, he dismisses its personification even in medical discourse without offering any epidemiological or biochemical investigation as to why the virus has been so easy to personify as an almost thinking antagonist. He offers no way forward except, fatalities and medical staff casualties notwithstanding, that we should diminish our concerns over COVID-19 and elevate our consciousness once again to countenance commitment against the great crimes of the world.

      But we never abandoned our commitment against the great crimes. Levy’s evidence that we did so relies only on the plenitude of newspaper headlines about COVID-19, as if that alone were enough to obscure ongoing and heroic struggles. He points out, of course, that he himself never ceased his war on the world’s great crimes.

      But this proposal of singularity ignores the fact that in every case of his activism, he had to cooperate with others and bear witness to the work of others. Levy never took up arms alongside the Peshmerga. He did, however, pose for a lot of photos with them. Perhaps one day he will publish a 1,000-page pictorial history entitled “How I Alone Tried to Save the World,” in hope that the world will forget that he once wrote meaningful books.

      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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      in US Politics

      It was hard not to laugh at Rudy Giuliani's hair malfunction – but it's time to stop equating looks with character | Emma Beddington

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      Weren’t the pictures of Rudy Giuliani’s hair malfunction last week wonderful? I was transfixed by footage of him bug-eyed and ranting at a press conference, as dark rivulets of hair dye (or mascara, expert opinion was divided) ran down his sweaty cheeks. The incident spawned a delighted outpouring of comment and mocking tweets. He was a Scooby-Doo villain unmasked; a gargoyle, a comic-book grotesque, and it felt so apt. For critics, it was as if corruption, lies and moral turpitude were finally oozing out of him as a tarry discharge.It is the same satisfaction we feel as we dissect the brittle spun-sugar edifice of Trump’s hair, the harshly theatrical lines of his makeup (“una naranja espantosa”, a scary orange, as a White House housekeeper described it to the Washington Post) or his cack-handed panda-eye concealer habit. It is delicious when the facade cracks, especially in one so obsessed with surface. It feels like poetic justice when a man who built a gold tower, regularly comments on his daughter’s looks and mocked a disabled reporter is caught looking diminished and ridiculous.No amount of expensive vanity, it seems, can cover what is essentially rotten about these men: the ugliness keeps showing through. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits. Except, of course, that is nonsense. I don’t believe for a moment that any of us actually thinks there is any correlation between looks and character. So why do we still allow and amplify this lazy trope?Years of cultural conditioning doesn’t help, I suppose. Hollywood has been conflating ugliness and moral failing since cinema began, and Shakespeare was doing it 500 years ago. The messaging is at its most intense in childhood: villains, from Disney to Harry Potter, are fat, disfigured or ugly. David Walliams has been called out for it; Dahl is infamous for it. Reading The Witches to my sons when they were small was an odd experience: they adored the story and Quentin Blake’s enchanting illustrations, but the diagram and explanation of an unmasked witch confused them – because it looked like me. I have alopecia and, like the witches, am bald beneath my wig. Was I planning to turn them into mice?Even in 2020, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch in the new screen version is revealed, beneath her disguise, to be a bald monster with disfigured, claw-like hands. Weary disability campaigners were provoked into action once more on the film’s release, condemning yet another depiction of disability as evil. People with limb differences, from Paralympians to Bake Off’s Briony Williams tweeted pictures of themselves tagged #notawitch and Warner Bros was flustered into one of those weaselly not-quite apologies. The studio declared it was “deeply saddened … our depiction of the fictional characters in The Witches could upset people with disabilities”.Things are slowly changing: the British Film Institute has said it will not support films with facially scarred villains, and the campaigning group RespectAbility is dedicated to analysing shortcomings in Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and trying to shift its portrayals.From a fictional perspective, it is surely more interesting to subvert the “ugliness as evil” trope anyway. One of the best things about the Amazon’s ultra-gory, superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys is how absurdly good-looking the truly repellent baddies are, all chiselled cheekbones and dewy beauty.But this reframing needs to go further than fiction, and that is up to us. Corruption and amorality can also be high-definition glossy and ready for its closeup: think of Ivanka and Jared. The next generation of hard-right demagogues probably won’t look like Trump or Steve Bannon (another whose general aura of dissolution and decay it is terribly hard not to conflate with his repellent politics). Isn’t that actually far scarier?There are many reasons to loathe Trump and Giuliani, but a heavy hand with the retouching wand, a pale expanse of paunch spilling out of a golf shirt, or a turbo-charged bad hair day are not among them. They are rotten to the core; let’s resist the temptation to fixate on the surface. More

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      in US Politics

      Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

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      “I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
      The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
      However, the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying, paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies that American society is being so hotly compared to. As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project. Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”, systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality. Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “integral to totalitarianism”: indeed, for Orwell, totalitarianism probably “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”. And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies, in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological infrastructure. More

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      in US Politics

      Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

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      More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”I did now. More

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      in World Politics

      The Rise of the Digital Émigré

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      The French word “émigré” specifically refers to people who leave their home country for political reasons, a self-exile of sorts. In that sense, it’s a very different term from “immigrant,” “expat” or “nomad.” In history, émigrés have fled abroad to escape from revolutions in France, the United States and Russia. Many aristocrats escaped war-torn European countries amid the chaos of the Second World War. In the early 1920s, cities such as Shanghai and Paris were havens for émigré communities. Now, a century later, political changes have created a new wave of émigrés. I call them digital émigrés.

      For example, 2020 has brought an unprecedented rise in American citizens leaving the United States to seek new lives abroad. In fact, the number of Americans who gave up their US citizenship skyrocketed to 5,816 in the first half of 2020, compared with 2,072 in all of 2019, according to research from New York-based Bambridge Accountants. 

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      This trend has been accelerated not only by America’s poor handling of the pandemic, but also the rise of Trumpism and more generalized far-right political attitudes, plus uncertainty about health care and worries about newly emboldened militia groups across the country. Those who leave may include parents looking for safer countries to bring up their children or members of marginalized groups worried about the rise in racist political ideologies.

      Across the Atlantic, a similar dynamic is happening in the UK. Brexit has been a massive push factor for British digital émigrés. The number of British citizens moving permanently to European Union countries rose by 30% since the 2016 referendum. According to research, half of this number decided to leave within three months of the original vote. By now, some will already be almost eligible for citizenship in their destination country, which in some cases takes a minimum of five years.  

      Other Brits fled at the last minute, during the transition period of 2020, while their EU rights were still valid. At the time of writing, some are still planning an escape before the end of 2020. There has also been a 500% increase in British citizens who have taken up citizenship of one of the 27 EU countries. This is a predictable response to the actions of a UK government forcibly removing people’s long-held rights.

      These trends in both the UK and US indicate that people are no longer prepared to tolerate the consequences of damaging political decisions. In the past, it was harder to uproot one’s life and leave for another country. For starters, international moves require having a source of income, which can be challenging to find when you don’t speak the language, don’t have connections and aren’t familiar with the local culture.

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      Fortunately for 21st-century digital émigrés, the rise in remote working, and particularly in doing business online across borders, has provided the necessary freedom to make rapid international relocations. What’s more, the pandemic has boosted this trend by further legitimizing online working, compelling more employers to accept it as the norm. Countries needing immigration have seen the remote working trend as a golden opportunity to attract skilled professionals to their shores. A number of countries, including Estonia and Bermuda, have introduced digital–nomad visas. Others, such as Portugal and the Czech Republic, have special pathways to residency for foreigners who generate income from outside the country.

      In the case of Portugal and, more recently, Greece, generous tax breaks are available for those who make money online. For those countries, the beauty of the setup is that the foreigners’ money can help revitalize the local economy without taking jobs on the ground away from citizens.

      Indeed, the digital émigré trend is gaining such momentum that governments are beginning to take notice. If a large number of educated and skilled citizens leave their country permanently, taking their tax money with them, it could have severe implications for that country’s economy. Perhaps governments should keep this more firmly in mind when they decide to enact policies that deprive people of important rights, such as the freedom to live, work, study and retire across European Union countries. 

      Governments should tread carefully in this “digital first” world, where borderless working is rapidly becoming the norm. Remote working and online business empower digital émigrés to vote with their feet. These highly educated and skilled professionals can easily relocate their entire lives to destinations that more closely match their values, goals and lifestyle choices.

      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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      in US Politics

      As Donald Trump refuses to concede: the etymology of 'coup'

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      As Donald Trump sulked in the White House after the election and refused to concede defeat, many wondered if he was plotting a “coup”, in the sense of an illegitimate seizure of power. This is short for the French coup d’état, literally “blow” or “stroke” of state, but it took a silent linguistic coup for that to become its meaning.“Coup” is traced back to the Latin colaphos, for a punch or cuff. As the phrase itself suggests, a coup d’état was originally (from the 17th century) a decisive action by a (legitimate) government, such as the formation of an alliance or a cunning marriage; only later did it come to mean the seizure of the apparatus of state from outside. All coups, however, seem to require an element of surprise, just like a coup de foudre (literally, lightning strike) is love at first sight, and a “coup” in short is often cause for celebration: an admirable, unexpected success.Pleasingly, “coup” also has an old Scottish use, meaning: “The act of tilting or shooting rubbish from a cart, wheelbarrow, etc.” In this sense, emptying the White House of Trump will itself constitute a coup to be marked with much revelry.• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus. More