On Newsnight, BBC, last week Sir Alex Younger, the former chief of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6, said that we have entered a new era in which international relations are not determined by rules and multilateral institutions, but by strongmen and deals, citing Donald Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping as having that mindset.
That is a very bleak picture that he presents. A dystopian world disorder. Humankind with no voice, no freedom to create their own destiny, a joyless, stark, hopeless enslaved existence heading for mass extinction. The collapse of human civilisation.
Let us yet see if people can rise and live out human advancement, advancement of the human spirit, opening their minds to their possibly unique position in a universe that took millions of years to raise them from the slime to develop a thinking brain that can speak in language.
Only to slip into a nightmare zone in which language has no meaning as these so-called strongmen manipulate the minds and wills of vast populations.
Europe is rising to the challenge. America — can it wake up to this charlatan leader? He may have known exactly what his ultimate plan was all along, or he may be making it up as he goes along. When he waffles on, well he tries to act like a normal guy, which always sounds so fake, as he sprinkles around adjectives like 'nice' and 'beautiful' is it just subterfuge to disguise his grim intention?
Neither China nor Russia had a democracy before succumbing to totalitarianism. Germany, with its monarchy gone was only thirteen years into the Weimar Republic when Hitler took advantage of democracy's short tenure to seize power and create a constitutional dictatorship, vowing to make Germany great again.
Trump is also a creature of his time, able to echo the restive, destructive voices around him to audaciously disable a democracy to serve his own ambitions. But this is an America that has known greatness as a democracy.
https://time.com/6971088/adolf-hitler-take-power-democracy/
Timothy Ryback, April 26 2024, How Hitler Used Democracy To Take Power, TIME
