In spite of the dire warnings given by savvy economists, some of them Nobel laureates, regarding the long-term gloomy consequences hanging over Great Britain in case England decided to pull out altogether out of the European Economic Community by approving the Brexit referendum, in spite of the sane advice given by some of the best academicians in the Union Jack warning against the enormous price to be paid by future generations in case of a possible triumph of the Brexit initiative, a majority of Brits voted in favor of Brexit, defying common sense and good economic judgment. The first blow felt by the Brits was almost immediate, with the English pound taking a hit and dropping to a 30-year low, confirming the predictions given beforehand by well known financiers and investors such as George Soros. And the actual pullout had not even started yet!
Even those British politicians who championed Brexit are now scared stiff regarding the economic punishment England will almost surely take once the pullout has been carried out completely. They are so scared that they have been dragging their feet by resorting to dilatory tactics, trying to delay as much as possible the inevitable. After making all kinds of wonderful promises to the people in case Brexit got approved, they know that the blame will rest entirely upon their shoulders in case things do not turn out as they once predicted while arguing in favor of Brexit. But they cannot drag their feet forever. 2016 will come to an end next month, and 2017 will most certainly be the year England becomes detached forever (yes, forever!) of the European Economic Community, for even if the British Parliament tries to come up will all sorts of excuses in a fruitless effort to delay the inevitable, it is almost certain that Great Britain will be simply be kicked out of the ECC. It is far far better for England to simply to honor its word and leaving the ECC as soon as possible, than to be kicked out by a majority of votes in the Council of the European Union. The ECC cannot and almost certainly will not wait much longer, and some of its members beginning with France have already called for setting a deadline.
The current British government, made up by those who came up with the Brexit idea in the first place, are supposedly vying for an orderly pullout while trying to negotiate with the European Economic Community the terms that will be more beneficial (or less harmful) for Great Britain. But this is sheer blindness, for they are in no position to argue or negotiate anything in their favor. By approving Brexit, in essence they lost any rights they had as members of the ECC. One of those things British citizens would like to hold on to is the advantage gained by being a member of the European Union which allows any of its members to freely seek employment and work in any part of the ECC without the need to request a special work permit to live and work in other countries such as Italy, Germany or France. In order to compensate for this loss, the concept of a dual citizenship is being considered. But acceptance of this possibility, which would allow British citizens to hold two passports, depends upon the European Council agreeing with the idea.
The truth of the matter is that some EEC member countries, in an effort to forestall a possible disintegration of the European Union, have every intention of making an example out of England on the consequences to be paid by any country when deciding to leave the ECC. The immediate consequence is that, once England has left, it will find it almost impossible to re-enter into the ECC even if the current British government is punished by the voters and even if, after the negative consequences have been assimilated, a majority of British voters decide that it is better to be a part of the ECC than to be out of the ECC altogether, since not being a member of the ECC will essentially mean no longer being a part of Europe, at least in economic terms. The French president, François Hollande, has already stepped up the pressure on the United Kingdom over its timetable to leave the European Union, insisting that Brexit cannot be cancelled or delayed, and that Britain will have to live with the consequences.
In essence, by voting in favor of Brexit, and exhibiting poor judgment in their decision, many British voters showed to the entire world that they fell under the spell of the song of the Sirens and ended up making a deal with the Devil, and they must face the consequences whether they like it or not. Those who are already opening their eyes want a way out when there is no way out. There is no turning back.
The failure of democracy and the failure of referendums in the attempts to arrive at solutions to long standing problems by submitting proposals directly to the conscience of the voters is evident in other recent developments in other parts of the world, such as Colombia where after a prolonged civil war that killed 220,000 people, displaced millions and brought atrocities on all sides, a surprising vote against the peace deal hammered out by the sole recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize Juan Manuel Santos sent the peace deal into limbo. Perhaps Colombians are waiting to accumulate another 220,000 casualties and take in a lot more misery before they realize that a peace deal, even a bad peace deal that doesn't satisfy all, is much better than no peace deal at all.
A similar scenario is about to play out a few days from now, on November 8th, when US voters go to the polls to decide who will be the next president of the USA. As with the Brexit, the American electorate will decide between two options. And just like with the Brexit, once the decision has been taken there is no turning back.
Just as with Brexit, one of the options has been already branded as a rather nasty one, and many warnings have been issued not just inside the USA but also outside the USA warning about the dire consequences if this man gets his wish of being granted entry into the White House, entrusted with the nuclear launch codes of the most powerful military power on the planet. His shortcomings are too well known. As a matter of fact, they were well known even before he got nominated by the Republican party as presidential candidate, after he carried out a virtual coup d'état and hijacked the Republican Party to suit his own purpose. Before the Republican Party presidential primaries were held, he was well known as a xenophobe, a racist, a misogynist, a sexual predator, a pathological liar, and a demagogue, traits he may have buried deep in his genes. Lately, his shortcomings as a cheat and tax evader have been exposed. Yet, throngs numbered in the tens of thousands seem to follow him wherever he goes. He has proven that being politically incorrect is no flaw in running for office, and as a matter of fact, it appears to be one of his strong points. One year ago, very few political pundits gave him any hope of becoming the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, yet with one more week to go he is virtually tied with the other candidate and there is even one poll that gives him a slight majority.
At the time the Brexit vote was to be carried out, many not just in England but also around the world were confident that Brexit would be repealed by an informed electorate, they were even sure that Brexit would fail, and the approval of Brexit came in as a total surprise. The same thing goes for the current US political scenario.
Even more frightening are the similarities of Donald Trump in his quest for absolute power with a famous German dictator who comes straight out of the history books and who set things into motion to start off one of the most devastating wars mankind has ever known (he did not have nuclear weapons at his disposal although he would have used them if he had them, but Donald Trump will most certainly will if he gets to become US president). Among the things that Donald Trump shares with this man are the following:
(1) Blame a specific ethnic group of immigrants for all the problems in the USA, with firm promises to remove such groups using the full force of the state in all its might. Back in the thirties during the times of such German dictator, the problem were the Jews, and he came up with a Final Solution to the German problem of what to do with them. Nowadays, the Mexicans are to be blamed. Same reasoning, different countries.
If we focus on the Trump Immigration Reform plan by taking materials straight out of his website, we find that it kicks off with three “core principals” of immigration reform, the first being that a nation without borders is not a nation, that there must be a wall across the southern border (much like the Berlin Wall). If this point does not make it clear that he’s specifically referring to Mexican immigrants, his plan to pay for the building of that wall certainly does. He wants Mexico to pay for it. Why? Because they’ve been “taking advantage” of the American workers by sending millions of illegal immigrants for decades now, to the absolute financial ruin of the average American. He lies, of course, since he does not mention that there are other important factors to blame for the rise of unemployment among those in the working class, but just like Satan he uses his lies to his advantage. Covering all of the problems with the Trump logic and his mode of reasoning could be an article all its own, but what’s particularly audacious and just as revealing is his suggestion that Mexico has benefited from the “faulty trade deals” the USA has made with Mexicans. He’s undoubtedly referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is ironic as all get-out, because one of the most devastating side effects of that program has been that it flooded the Mexican market with U.S. government subsidized corn, forcing millions of Mexican farmers out of business. Inevitably, this led to huge numbers of people migrating to the USA to look for work, often in the agriculture industry. This influx of workers willing to do tedious, sometimes back-breaking manual labor in return for absurdly low wages undoubtedly played a huge role in keeping American farms afloat. His reference to NAFTA using the worst possible terms is revealing because, at the end of the day, Donald Trump is a businessman. He knows all about who reaped the financial rewards of NAFTA, and for damn sure it wasn’t Mexico. Trump has landed on a way to once again capitalize on one of the most lopsided trade agreements in history by recasting the victims of its most egregious ramifications into the villains who used it to “take America to the cleaners”.
(2) Sell hate as hope, lots of it, to the poorest citizens in the country. In this regard, it is instructive to take a quick read through Hitler’s 25-point plan for the Nazi party, which mostly just says Jews need to be expelled from Germany because they’re a drain on resources that should be going toward making life better for natural German citizens. Life was rough in Germany at the time, and at some point it got so rough that people were willing to go along with blaming it all on Jews if the plan offered some sort of hope that things would get better. If someone mentions the parallels between Trump and Hitler to most people today, they’ll point out that things aren’t nearly as bad in the USA as they were in Germany at the time. What most of these people inevitably have in common is that they’re white. There is also the problem involved in filling the jobs left behind by immigrants being forced out of the USA. This is absolutely a need he’ll have to address. The USA learned this the hard way when Georgia imposed strict enforcement of bans on employing undocumented workers. Farmers quickly lost an astounding 40 percent of their workforce and, in turn, about $140 million in crops that were left untended due to labor shortages. When they tried to stop the bleeding by “allowing" prison inmates to do the work instead, the plan failed when most of them balked at being asked to perform such grueling tasks. Trump is trying to attract the younger vote by promising to deport immigrants and by promising the young voters that they’ll get sweet farming jobs... that even criminals don’t want?
(3) Not taking him seriously only makes him more dangerous. Many Germans did not take the young leader of the NSDAP party seriously, and many more believed that in some of his more extremist points of view and radical proposals he was merely bluffing. But he was not. He really meant what he said. Not taking him seriously only made him more dangerous. Same thing goes with Donald Trump. After the World War Two disaster and the reporting of the atrocities that had been committed in the name of the Third Reich, there were those in Germany who justified themselves by arguing that they had been deceived by the propaganda and the official lies. But alas none of them were truly taken unaware and deceived. If anything really true can be said about this man is the fact that he spelled out very clearly in his book Mein Kampf what his intentions were and what he was planning to do. He hid nothing. Yet many were not willing to accept the fact that he had every intention of keeping his word to the letter and do the things he was promising to do. They shut their ears, shut their mouths and closed their eyes to the truth accepting nothing else in their judgment except the dogma and propaganda. They went into denial and justified all that was done and was to be done in the name of the Third Reich. In a manner of speaking, they all shared part of the blame, this was their misdoing and their true guilt, and as a result the entire country paid a catastrophic price for not heeding all the early warnings. In the USA, one of the first “Trump kinda seems like Hitler” comparisons came from comic and reigning Colonel Sanders, Norm Macdonald. He noted that, in the run up to Hitler’s rise to power, the media coverage surrounding him and his wacky ideas wasn’t a lot unlike what we’re seeing with Trump now. It was all political cartoons and people laughing off the notion that he could ever really take power. What’s terrifying is that Donald Trump is already so close to the US presidency.
(4) Donald Trump could have kept a copy of Hitler’s sequel to Mein Kampf by his bed. In a 1990 interview with Vanity Fair, Ivana Trump mentioned that, at least at one point, her husband used to keep a book filled with Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. Just the crazy ramblings of a scorned ex-wife? Nope. Trump actually confirmed it, but latter justified himself by saying that he thought the guy who gave him the book was a Jew (the man later confirmed that he's not). So why is this not among the biggest news? One can very easily imagine the storm that would erupt if the world learned that Obama slept with a copy of the Quran by his bed at some point. It’s not like that would even be a bad thing, but someone like Trump would run with it for months. Meanwhile, that the guy who is currently dead set on rounding up every Mexican immigrant in the USA and doing something with them once studied the words and teachings of a man who became one of history’s most notorious monsters by doing almost the exact same thing is not currently burning up your news feed. No one is tweeting about it. No one cares. No one is taking him seriously. What’s the point of prying into what things from his past might be influencing his policies? What if Trump ends up delivering one of those fiery speeches he’s been dreaming about delivering ever since he was sleeping with books from a bygone era? But even more frightening, what if it's already too late to stop him from taking over the presidency and make good on his word to prove the USA and the entire world that he was not bluffing?
Many Americans, especially the less educated ones, ignore the fact that before the rise to power of the Nazi party, Germany used to be a democracy, the Weimar Republic. The Nazis used to their advantage the chaos in Germany that came as a consequence of losing World War One, a defeat for which the Jews were held increasingly to blame by the far right fringe groups of Germany. President Hindenburg resorted to using emergency powers to back Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher. With the Great Depression exacting its toll in the twenties (the Great Recession has also exacted its toll nearly one century later), exacerbated by Brüning's policy of deflation, led to a surge in German unemployment (notice that Donald Trump has been especially keen on addressing the unemployed in the USA, exploiting their fears and anxieties just as the Nazis did with the German people in their time). In 1933, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party obtained 17 million votes in Germany's parliamentary elections, 43 per cent of the total, thus turning itself into the strongest political party in one of the most educated and civilized countries in the world. If he ended up becoming a dictator, it was because just like Trump today he had many accomplices in the midst of the German citizenry (it might be added that in Venezuela which is now sinking into desperation and ruin under the economic policies inherited from the Hugo Chavez administration, Hugo Chavez was not only elected by the popular vote in Venezuela in 1998, but was ratified in 200, 2004, 2006 and 2012, and perhaps would have remained in poser much longer were it not for the simple fact that he died of natural causes). In that same year, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor with the Nazi Party being part of a coalition government. At that point in time, the Nazis held two out of the remaining ten cabinet seats. Von Papen as Vice Chancellor was intended to be the “éminence grise” who would keep Hitler under control, using his close personal connection to Hindenburg. Within months the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933 brought about a state of emergency: wiping out constitutional governance and civil liberties. Hitler's seizure of power (Machtergreifung) was permissive of government by decree without legislative participation. These events brought the republic to an end: as democracy collapsed, a single-party state founded Nazi era.
It has been pointed out by many analysts that the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is more sympathetic to the idea and possibility of Donald Trump becoming the next president of the USA than he is to the idea and possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming president. However, if this is so, he may be playing with fire by forgetting one of the most valuable lessons learned from the past. It all boils down to this: Donald Trump is unpredictable. Stalin made the same mistake. He thought he could negotiate with a man as unpredictable as Adolf Hitler. Stalin agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and stood in the sidelines while Nazi Germany invaded Poland in order to satisfy the appetites for Lebensraum (a desire clearly stated in the 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf) which essentially set off World War Two. Stalin fully trusted Hitler, until on June 22nd 1941 he was informed that Nazi Germany had launched a full scale invasion of Russia. Just as with Donald Trump nowadays, Stalin did not take Hitler seriously. Hitler had also clearly stated in his 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf his ideological desire to destroy the Soviet Union, so that was nothing new. What was new for Stalin is that Hitler really meant what he had said, he was not joking, he did not take him seriously. The price that the Russians had to pay in order to respond to this unprovoked invasion of Russia was enormous, in the order of tens of millions of casualties. and in the end it took the combined military and intelligence resources of many nations in order to save the planet from a world domination by a man who just 20 years back almost nobody had taken seriously enough. If Vladimir Putin refuses to take seriously a man as unpredictable as Donald Trump, he may be playing with the worst possible fire of them all: nuclear fire. And may Mr. Putin be reminded that whereas Hitler did not have nuclear weapons at his disposal, nuclear weapons he would have used without any hesitation, Donald Trump as president will have access to enough nuclear missiles to destroy the planet, Russia included.
In dealing with individuals such as Trump, it is important to read between the lines. His failure to disavow well known neo-Nazi white supremacists such as David Duke has spoken loudly, and yet very few of his followers have listened. Other well-known characters such as Rocky Suhayda are not actively involved in supporting Donald Trump in public, but this is not because they disagree with his tone and rhetoric and ideology, it is entirely due to the fact that they know damn well that if they immerse in the presidential campaign calling all neo nazis to get out and vote for Donald Trump, this could hurt Trump instead of helping him, and they do want with all their hearts to see Trump becoming president. As a matter of fact, Suhayda once stated on his radio show that a Donald Trump presidency could give American Nazis the chance to build a ‘pro-white’ political caucus similar to the Congressional Black Caucus, and he sees a Trump presidency as a real opportunity, but this is as far as he has gone. He doesn’t want to hurt Trumps chances of becoming president, he and others like him will be more than happy just to see him become president of the USA. They must surely know something that even the Russian Secret Service and the naive Vladimir Putin ignore.
Since 1945 all the way up to the present, the German people have carried an enormous guilt complex. The things that happened in the name of the Third Reich were things that were not supposed to happen in a European country that boasted the claim of having the best informed society in Europe. Many books and many documentary movies produced in the USA have repeated many many times the accusation against the Germans of having failed to stop the German Antichrist while there was still time to do so. The words “shame on you” have been levied time and again against the Germans of the newer generations most of whom have no memory or recollections of what truly happened nearly a century ago. But if Trump becomes president Trump and does as he pleases with all the immense power handed over to him by the American people, it stands to reason that there may come a time when the Germans themselves will look back to America and say, in turn: “shame on you”. In essence, America may be on the verge of repeating the same mistake made by the Germans when most of them were unaware they were making the same mistake which the USA electorate may be about to do.
Not everyone has been fooled by Donald Trump, not everybody has fallen under his hypnotic spell. There are those who have truly opened their eyes, have stared directly at the true nature of the Beast, and have found it to be horrible. Former Republican Secretary of State Collin Powell is one of them. Former Republican President George H.W. Bush is another. Entrepreneur Warren Buffet is another. The same thing can be said about Oprah Winfrey, George Soros and Mike Bloomberg. Many Republicans have already stated they will not be accomplices of what could very well turn out to be the greatest historical mistake made by any one nation. Even the representative of the Republican Party in Mexico, Larry Rubin, has already made it clear he will not vote for Donald Trump. They have all concluded that this election is much more than simply the choice between two political parties, and have also concluded that the stakes in this election are way too high than simply a choice between the Republican party and the Democratic Party. Indeed, the fate of the entire world may be at stake. But what if not enough people open their eyes on time until it’s too late? This is what happened in Germany during the thirties. This is precisely what happened, more recently, to the Britons with the Brexit vote. It might be remarked that Brexit was almost nearly defeated, almost stopped dead in its tracks by a narrow difference. Likewise, the Colombian peace deal was almost nearly approved by a marginal difference. But as Charles Dickens stated in his immortal work A Christmas Carol, almost carries no weight, and in the issue that concerns us all the word almost carries no weight in the course of human affairs. If Trump wins by just one electoral vote, that will be all that matters, that will be enough for him. And from there on, things may very well go just as with Brexit, downhill. Except worse. Far, far worse. You can bet on it.
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