History is repeating itself while we stand and watch
LIBERAL democracy worldwide is now facing its greatest challenge since the end of the Second World War. In America, Donald Trump’s MAGA tide of xenophobia and blue-collar alienation is rising again, while in Europe the lurch to the right is clear for all to see. Here in Ireland, centrist politics appears to have lost confidence in itself due to its failure to solve the most urgent problems of housing and health.
All this, of course, makes it more likely that Sinn Féin will realise in the short terms its burning ambition for power over all of Ireland. And this will occur in circumstances in which that party still regards the Provisional IRA as freedom fighters rather than tribal terrorists, as illustrated again this week by the powerful RTÉ Face Down documentary on the kidnapping and brutal murder of German businessman Thomas Niedermayer in Belfast in 1973.
Meanwhile, the arson attack on a hotel in Galway that was earmarked to accommodate asylum seekers, coupled with last month’s shocking riots in Dublin, demonstrate the existential threat now posed by the anti-establishment, anti-immigrant far right. Houston, we have a problem, even if most of us hardly even bother to notice.
IT’S always been like this, because authoritarian, would-be dictators never just creep up behind us in the dead of night and do us in by blade and bullet. No, they stand there in plain sight and tell us precisely what their intentions are. How they plan to undermine freedoms, cut through the red tape of the democratic mishmash, sort out the real enemies by whatever means necesber sary and make their countries great again. The impertinence of such out-in-the-open promises of tyranny is so enormous as to convince people they’ll never actually go through with it.
That’s the way Adolf Hitler established his murderous Nazi dictatorship in Germany in 1933, only months after seducing over
33% of the electorate with offers to re-establish Germany’s prestige and honour. Once he became chancellor, the die was cast.
Hitler disembowelled democracy from within, and in Novem1933 he received over 92% of the vote in an election without any opposition whatsoever. Germany was then a one-party state, exactly as he promised.
Emboldened by growing military threats, annexations and the cowering of his enemies, Hitler made his boldest prophecy of all in January 1939 when he threatened the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.
Again democracies failed to ‘get it’, failed to appreciate that he meant exactly what he was saying, that the follow-through catastrophe was only around the corner.
Now, on the eve of Christmas 2023, we have Donald Trump behaving in the very same way in America with his open wish to become a dictator for a day, his ‘bogeymen’ attacks on immigrants for ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, and his branding of political opponents as ‘vermin’, a cut and paste for the way Hitler described Jews as ‘parasites’.
Trump also finds time in his populist electioneering campaign to praise dictators such as China’s Xi Jinping and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He quotes approvingly from mass murderer Vladimir Putin, and also singles out far-right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán for particular regard, on account of Orbán’s ‘tough’ and ‘strong’ running of his country. That, of course, includes undermining the Hungarian judiciary and, by extension, the rule of law.
Trump’s threat to democracy is frighteningly obvious. But many still refuse to see it for what it is.
They reckon: Ah sure, that’s Trump… he’s bonkers. Yeah. Well, the world has paid a very heavy price for maniacal narcissists who gain power to make somewhere ‘great again’.
DEMOCRACIES have always had a seismic structural weakness (and strength) called moderation. So democrats are slow to rush to the barricades, relying instead on rationalism and sound argument to win the day. Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin couldn’t bring themselves to act like fundamentalists by declaring housing and health as crises demanding all-of-government emergency responses. So not enough has been done in either case, meaning that young people have been shut out of the housing market and patients shut out of proper healthcare, this vicious circle causing resentment that encourages the political extremes.
Liberals and democrats thought their Roe v Wade abortion rights would never be taken from them in the US. But now they’re gone.
Supporters of democracy in Europe have never envisaged a return to totalitarianism because of the bitter lessons of history, not realising that history appears to be repeating itself. Nine years from now we’ll be ringing in 2033, the centenary of Hitler’s rise to power. Democracies have a fight on their hands to make sure it’s a centenary that celebrates truth, rather than lies and hate and tyranny.