It has happened and everybody should have seen it coming. Overpaid journalists, commentators and media pundits never ceased to insist the election of Trump as 45th president of the USA could not be compared to the electoral victory of the NSDAP in Germany in 1932. Perhaps at that time, it did indeed resemble more the rise to power of Mussolini’s PNF in 1922, even if the methods were a bit different. However, less than 9 years later, it should not be clear that this is exactly what is happening.
The playbook was already available: The rapid dismantling of the state, followed by deliberate economic destabilization. Combined with the explicit abuse of power, this amplified the chaos that already existed not just nationally but internationally. The militarized domestic security forces colluded with an already deeply corrupted legal system to provide the perfect conditions for the obliteration of checks and balances that could at least sustain some modicum of the rule of law.
The final straw, the illegal military assault in Iran at the behest of the genocidal state of Israel, has tipped the USA as having officially become a fascist state. The only difference is that it is still not able to silence its dissidents.
Norman Finkelstein recently stated in an interview that Trump’s Republican Party will not become fascist because it has no opposition. As proof to support this claim he pointed out that Alexandria Occasio Cortez has not been jailed yet. This, however, may happen. When, for example, Zohran Mamdani becomes elected mayor of New York, we can expect the National Guard there very soon, amidst either false flag induced chaos or militia activities. When AOC publicly speaks against it, she could be incarcerated for treason. The “dissident voices” may be more difficult to silence because of social media, but their figure heads can certainly be interned in camps, just like in 1933.
Let is not fool ourselves to think that it is much better in the EU. The completely illogical blind support for Israeli war crimes, the genocide in Gaza and the unilateral attack on Iran, as well as a litany of other violations of international law, is no longer accepted by the vast majority of people in Europe. Even in a country which is paralyzed by fear and stupidity, Germany, 75% of its people are now opposed to supplying arms to that rogue state. Believe me, in no other country in the world barring the USA and Israel, have the mainstream media so biased in absorbing Hasbara as truth, as in Germany. The level of public debate on Israel is drenched in absurd arguments that equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The accusations of anti-Semitism are often also thrown around discriminately, based on the assumption that “Muslims” are by default always prone to anti-Semitism. The sheer hypocritical racist idiocracy of this cannot be overstated. The worst acts of anti-Semitism in history had been performed in Germany, by Germans, in the name of Germany and Germany’s national interests. The fact that the state of Israel exists as a Jewish ethnocracy is simply due to the Germans voting en masse (34% in 1933) for a party that promised to provide the final solution to the Jewish Question. Thus, of we are talking about guilt and anti-Semitism, then Germany – historically speaking – bears the brunt of causal responsibility for the Nakba. It still does as it is the second largest supplier of arms and military support to Israel.
What can we expect from a government that declares unconditional support for Israel even after its illegal attacks that amounts to war crimes on Iran? In a country where criticizing Israel is being criminalized as anti-Semitic and guilty of opposing German Staatsräson, we must not be surprised that freedom of thought let alone freedom of expression matters much. In a country that blatantly supports violations of international law, we cannot assume that we have any rights. When people are being arrested for comparing Gaza to the Shoah, or for reminding the public that Germany had also committed genocides in Namibia, it is clear that we are not merely dealing with attacks on the freedom of expression, as if such comparisons are comparable to, for example, racism, hate-speech or expressions of actual anti-Semitism (which is not anti-Zionism). Instead, we are dealing with a deeply rooted corruption of democracy that is exactly the same as the corruption that paved the way for the rise of fascism, national socialism and MAGA.
What is striking is the audacity to compare reasonable analysis to hate speech. There is a deliberate infantilization of public discourse. Exactly this is the stroboscopic preparation of the normalization of fascism and kakistocracy. To compare protests against genocide with hate speech is to silence dialogue and criminalize critical thought. This happened in the USA around Black Lives Matter. Trump criminalized the protests in 2019 and 2020 and used them to pilot techniques of fascist policing. In Germany, protests against genocide were equally criminalized and attacked with fascist policing methods.
We are indeed already in World War 3, not only because of the brutality of the many armed conflicts in the world today, but above all because so many governments are filled with kakistocratic and corrupt decision-makers, that will cynically exploit every opportunity to enrich themselves and their friends, not only financially but also symbolically and sexually. Rearming Europe will enrich the military industrial complex and those who have shares on the arms industry. There is no military Keynesianism; it is merely a means to shift public resources to private bank accounts.
The rise of commercials that try to encourage young people to join the military makes it clear that this area of the labour market is booming. What is interesting is that it does not ask those young people to be prepared to die for their country. War has become extremely banal. This is exactly what Paul Virilio referred to as “pure war”.
For those confronted by the facist agency ICE in the USA – which is indeed functioning like the Gestapo during the Third Reich – World War 3 is already in full flow. Ice treats its targets without habeas corpus. Its victims have no rights; they are arrested without a warranty, interne shifted to camps, without any recourse to due process. Trump has also deployed the National Guard in California and threatened to further use the military against American Citizens. That Trump glorifies himself as “commander in chief” and believes that the military apparatus is exclusively under his control, has allowed him to believe that he could attack Iran without having to go through a legal approval process by allowing the Senate to vote on it. Of course, this is also what Clinton, Bush and Obama had done when ordering specific attacks on for example Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria or Lybia.
The systematic destruction of international and national law is the prelude to World War 3. Europe, the USA, Russia and above all Israel are the main culprits… again. They have forfeited every possibility to prevent military escalation because they themselves have no respect for the promises they have made. Every agreement, every contract, is worthless because these actors cannot be trusted. They believe that they do not need to adhere to law because they possess military superiority. The sudden rupture in NATO has led European nations to radically increase their military spending only primarily as the price to pay for their own systematic violations of international law.
The chickens are coming home to roost as history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.
Disaffected Sociology 
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