I’m not sure where you’re from. Sui, I presume you’re from Europe, or some country with Western European traditions and history. Forgive me if I am mistaken.

But if you are an educated and aware person, surely you can see what is happening in the USA. America is in the middle of a slow-motion fascist coup, not too dissimilar to what happened in
Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and several other European nations after the Great War of 1914. Fascism periodically arises when the middle classes feel threatened with losing their economic and political gains–what they see as “hard times”. They don’t want to experience the terrible poverty their parents had to survive. Their fears are exacerbated and exploited by commercial elites who feel threatened by social legislation, business regulation and its subsequent taxation that cuts into their profits and economic power. These elites in turn manipulate these bourgeois concerns by appealing to populism, nationalistic, racist, authoritarian tendencies which lie dormant in every culture. The natural response of the common man in hard times is to find someone to blame, a scapegoat, usually a foreign, religious or racial minority, or a lower social caste or class. They are determined to find someone who will make sure “the trains run on time.” They seek easy answers to intractable problems, and they usually involve violence. It happened in Italy and then Germany in the 1920s and we can see the result. It is happening now, all over the world as societies groan under the strains of overpopulation, resource shortages and social and cultural conflict. These themes are historical, they tend to surface periodically, but always with variations peculiar to the times and the peoples involved.

If you need a map to this dystopian future, I suggest an in-depth study of the last one “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, by William L Shirer (1960). America in the 21st century is certainly not the same as Germany in the 20th, but there are many parallels. In fact, the comparison is terrifying. Trump is the new Mussolini. The new Hitler is due to arrive any day now, and I am convinced he will be an American. In fact, I see several prominent contemporary Senators, Congressmen and Governors eagerly jockeying for the job.

The events of the last century, particularly the Great Depression and the World War, may be ancient history for you, but they were the world my parents came of age in. They experienced the hunger and poverty of the first, and my father fought in the second. I was indoctrinated with the hard lessons they learned even though my own personal experiences came from the Cold War which followed soon after–post-war affluence and Viet Nam.

America is now poised on a knife edge, either a continuation of the flawed democracy and hesitant freedoms–but undeniable progress– of the postwar era, or a collapse into an authoritarian abyss–a right-wing dictatorship based loosely on the models we now see arising in Belarus, China, Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria. This is the conflict you see being fought on this forum. And it is not going to stop by people suddenly becoming civil and gentlemanly to one another. One side believes it has too much to gain. The other knows full well what it stands to lose.