* Note: this diary has been getting a lot of eyeballs. If you’ve already seen it, you may still want to check out the updates at the bottom. — xaxnar
The title for this comes from Umair Haque, who has seen what is happening here now in America, and warns that those who have seen the end result elsewhere first hand are being ignored. He is crying out to be heard.
We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.
We Survivors of Authoritarianism Have a Message America Needs to Hear: This is Exactly How it Happens, and It’s Happening Here.
...We survivors of authoritarianism have a terrible, terrible foreboding, because we are experiencing something we should never do: deja vu. Our parents fled from collapsing societies to America. And here, now, in a grim and eerie repeat of history, we see the scenes of our childhoods played out all over again. Only now, in the land that we came to. We see the stories our parents recounted to us happening before our eyes, only this time, in the place they brought us to, to escape from all those horrors, abuses, and depredations.
We survivors are experiencing this terrible feeling of deja vu right now as a group, as a class. We talk about it, how eerie and grim this sense of deja vu is. It’s happening all over again! Do you remember this part of your childhood? When the armed men roamed the streets? When the secret police disappeared opponents? When the fascist masses united — and that was enough to destroy democracy for good? We talk about it, believe me — but you don’t hear it because we have no real voice. America’s pundits are named Chris and Jake and Tucker. They are not named Eduardo and Ravi and Xiao and Umair. But Chris and Jake and Tucker can’t help you now. They don’t know what the hell they’re dealing with. They literally have no idea because they have no experience whatsoever.
The only people who do right now in America are us survivors. Let me remind you, by the way, what happens we speak out: we lose whatever credibility and status we have. The moment I began to warn of this, I lost my column in HBR, my cable news appearances, and so forth. Don’t cry for me. Understand me, my friend, know me. If we had a voice, we survivors, we would be warning you as loudly and strongly as we possibly could.
All of us. We would say:
This is not a joke. This is not a drill. When we survivors of authoritarianism experience, as a group, a class, a cohort, something that we never, ever should — the horrific deja vu that the horrors of our childhoods, that our parents knew, are happening, all over again, here, something is much, much more wrong than you know.
This is what four more years looks like.
READ THE WHOLE THING. It may be the most important thing you read all day or all week or all month.
Consider just this one warning:
The American Dream is now being turned into a nightmare — the better to justify the atrocities.
Why? They point to the complete breakdown of the rule of law. The rule of law only means something when an authoritarian can’t simply disappear people from the streets, ordering his paramilitary to do it, ignoring the constitution, discarding due process — with total impunity. But all that is exactly what Trump can do.
He now has the nascent powers of a Gaddafi or a Saddam. No, I’m not kidding. He doesn’t have the full powers, to be sure — but he certainly has the beginnings of them. Maybe he can’t have people tortured in jail yet — but he can have almost anyone he likes in America picked up and disappeared.
So how far away do you think even worse abuses of power are? When a tyrant can have almost anyone in a country they like disappeared, how far away do you really think torture is? Rape? Murder? I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m trying to speak to you like an adult. Will you listen?
Those words take on real urgency when you see something like this coming from the Trump administration. Via Talking Points Memo:
The Party of Lincoln is dead. It is the party of Trump now.
Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf stated that the Justice Department is looking into arresting leaders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) amid protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake by police officer Rusten Sheskey.
“Do you think the Department of Homeland Security is getting the help it needs from the Justice Department?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked. “Why haven’t we seen the leaders of antifa and BLM arrested and charged for conspiracy under, say, [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law], like the heads of the mafia families were?”
“This is something I talked to the AG personally about and I know that they are working on it,” Wolf replied, referring to Attorney General Bill Barr.
The DHS chief also stated that the Justice Department is “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.”
Carlson pressed Wolf on why the “funders” of the anti-police brutality protests “haven’t been punished.”
“Again, I would say that again the Department of Justice, who has the lead in all of those investigations, are certainly moving as quickly as possible,” Wolf said.
There is no evidence that the protesters are being paid by BLM leaders or anyone else, for that matter, nor is there evidence that BLM is directly responsible for violence at the protests.
emphasis added* Followup story here.
It can happen here. It IS happening here.
UPDATE: The NY Times Farhad Manjoo is also picking up the authoritarian warning signs.
