Players respond
Monica Rhor says this is familiar to anyone from countries where democracy is not taken for granted and demagogues have left division.
An 89-game schedule is the latest plan sent to owners.
In the spring of the autocrat, as thousands lay dying of fever across the nation and security forces beat people in the streets, walls began to encase the white presidential palace. Black fencing appeared and snaked around the perimeter, sealing the people out and the leader in.
In the capital city, on the steps of national monuments honoring ideals of liberty and freedom, secret police in uniforms with no insignia stood guard, faceless in plastic masks, impenetrable behind body armor and riot gear.
On the seventh day of unrest, the shielded soldiers marched on protesters gathered outside the palace, like an army advancing on the enemy.
Only then, when citizens of his country had been cleared through force, did the leader emerge from hiding. Flanked by a phalanx of guards, he walked past buildings marked with signs of protest, to a church he doesn’t attend. There, for the benefit of cameras, he held a holy book — aloft and upside down.
This could be a description taken from any number of dictator novels, such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch,” dystopian fantasies such as “The Hunger Games,” or chapters of history texts describing the waning days of a tinpot tyrant.
But it’s not. It is the United States of America in the year 2020.
A time when official White House media accounts disseminate propaganda films carefully edited to omit facts and the country’s leader describes the free press as the “enemy of the people.” A place where the president repeats Russian disinformation to smear an elderly protester injured when police shoved him to the ground.
It is familiar to any of us who come from countries where democracy is not taken for granted and demagogues have left damage and division in their wake.
That’s why my father viewed with concern Donald Trump’s rise to power. He had seen caudillos before, in our native Ecuador. We both quickly spotted the same qualities.
“You’re going to see what it’s like to live in a dictatorship,” he said back then, ticking off the strategies that would be used: control of the judiciary, wielding military forces to stop protests, crackdowns on free press.
Marc Polymeropoulos, who served in the CIA for 26 years under four presidents, has also heard those echoes, tweeting: “The president standing bizarrely alone and holding a Bible — after police on live TV attacked peaceful protesters to support this photo op — was indeed an iconic image. It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world. Saddam.
Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”
Other countries, seeing reporters and photographers arrested and attacked by local police, are now condemning attacks on journalists here, as this nation once condemned the erosion of press freedom in authoritarian regimes. They have watched with alarm as our norms are suddenly stripped away.
So have I.
I watched, on live TV, as the line of military police in riot gear assembled near Lafayette Square across from the White House, facing off against what had been a peaceful protest. My heart tightened as I saw more police on horseback. Then coiled even tighter when the smoke canisters spiraled and they moved through the crowd with stunning force. Witnesses and journalists on the scene insist they saw no projectiles thrown at police, though U.S. Park Police said they found stashes of bats and glass bottles hidden on the streets, and later quibbled about whether they fired tear gas or pepper balls at the crowd. As if that distinction matters.
It reminded me of the violence used to disperse protests in Ecuador where, as a teenager, I saw police lob tear gas at college students demonstrating in the streets. It reminded me of seeing National Guard tanks roll down our block in New Jersey during the 1967 unrest in Newark.
That’s one of my most vivid childhood memories. It filled me with stomachknotting dread then, just as the images out of Washington, D.C., and around the country do now.
The images should also be familiar to anyone who knows the history of this country. Our government has used brutal force on Americans and on American soil before — the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre where U.S. Army troops slaughtered several hundred Lakota Indians, the 1970 shooting of unarmed students at Kent State by Ohio National Guard, the water hoses and attack dogs turned on civil rights protesters by Birmingham, Ala., police.
Trump has long expressed admiration for authoritarianism. He once said the Chinese government’s violent crackdown of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests showed “the power of strength.” As president, he has praised dictators or strongmen in North Korea, the Philippines, Brazil and Russia.
The day of the mayhem in Lafayette Square, he urged governors to quash protesters: “You have to dominate.”
That’s not the language of a leader who serves the people. It’s the script long used by strongmen.