This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
It has been a good week for fascist leaders, by which I mean autocrats who mercilessly kill, arrest and persecute people they demonise and hate. They target as enemies those who oppose them in any way, especially ethnic, religious and cultural minorities whom they denounce as criminals and terrorists.
After his frenzied assault on the liberties and rights of all Americans this week, nobody should doubt that Donald Trump’s core beliefs and modus operandi mirror precisely those of fascist leaders past and present. Like them, he is to his followers a cult-like figure, posing as the saviour of the nation who can do no wrong and demands total obedience from all, and hunts down dissenters and critics.
In the past few days, Trump has deported Venezuelan immigrants – whom he denounces without evidence as members of a dangerous criminal gang – to prisons in El Salvador notorious for torture and abuse. On arrival in El Salvador, the victims of what amounted to state kidnapping, including a youth soccer coach without a criminal conviction, were ritually humiliated by their guards.
Fascist playbook
The fascist playbook invariably includes an attack on the judiciary and the rule of law, which seek to restrain those intent on monopolising power. In keeping with this authoritarian approach, Trump ranted against a federal judge, James Boasberg, who temporarily ruled against the El Salvador deportations, though this was ignored by the US government.
Trump described the judge on his Truth Social platform as a “radical left lunatic of a judge”, who is “crooked” and “a troublemaker and agitator”. He called for Boasberg to be impeached – a demand echoed by Elon Musk, who acts as his all-powerful enforcer.
Trump demonstrably believes that true Americans are all straight white males. The Department of Education is to be closed because it focuses on supporting schools for the poor and disabled, while most US school funding comes from the states themselves.
In a frightening sign of how US officials are now criminalising dissent, a French research scientist was denied entry to the US after immigration officials in Houston, Texas found messages critical of Trump on his phone and laptop, which they said “could be considered to be terrorism”. Diplomats say that the critical messages were about the Trump administration’s mistreatment of scientists and scientific research.
New Israeli offensive
Trump has set a new low bar for other world leaders, who, like him, seem to tick every box when it comes to identifying them as fascists, and they are swiftly taking advantage of the abandonment of all moral standards.
In Gaza, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ended the ceasefire which Trump’s own emissary, Steve Witkoff, had negotiated. Renewed Israeli attacks have killed at least 700 Palestinians, including at least 174 children, according to the enclave’s health ministry. The latest mass killing raises to 49,617 dead and 112,950 wounded the number of Palestinian casualties in the war so far.
“The ‘failure of Gazans to rebel’ against Hamas is a key component of the argument that there are ‘no innocents in Gaza’, which has become practically a rallying cry in Israel,” writes Dahlia Scheindlin in the Israeli daily Haaretz. She adds that this “is one of the most fraudulent themes in a war flooded with lies”. Despite having negotiated the original truce, the Trump administration has backed the new Israeli offensive.
At the same time as the slaughter recommenced in Gaza, another autocratic government, this time in Turkey, was brazenly moving to extinguish the last embers of democracy in the country. In Istanbul, police detained the city’s mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, the main political opponent of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003.
The sinister truth
Government-controlled media says that the detention of Imamoglu, set to be the opposition candidate in the next presidential election in 2028, was part of an investigation into his alleged links with terrorism.
I used to comfort myself by believing that the fascism of the 2020s, toxic though it might be, was less militarised and violent than that of the 1930s, when fascist paramilitaries were beating their enemies to death in the streets across Europe.
But now I fear the sinister truth may be that in the present era, fascist regimes face less resistance than they did in the 30s, so for the present they have less need for the use of unrestrained physical force against their domestic opponents. Look how swiftly and shamefully Democratic Party leaders have run up the white flag in their tame response to Trump’s ongoing evisceration of the American political system.
It is striking how many Trumpian tactics and strategies have already been successfully employed in Israel and Turkey, first to cripple and then demolish democratic government. Trump, Netanyahu and Erdogan are populist-nationalist demagogues who whipped up and exploited the fears of voters through simple-minded slogans and outright lies. But their populism has turned out to be merely a passing phase, while they awaited the chance to strip away judicial, parliamentary, institutional and media restraints on their power.
Levers of power
Elections may still be held in future, but they will be skewed in favour of the new rulers who possess so many of the levers of power.
One ingredient in fascist power grabs always remains the same. This is to identify, as an enemy of the people and source of all evil, some group such as immigrants in the US, or Kurds in Turkey.
At the heart of the fascist appeal is fear and hatred of outsiders, combined with a sense of superiority over them as despised and dehumanised pariahs. “If you want to feel 10 feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day,” wrote the American author Kurt Vonnegut. “Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.”
The quotation is included in How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism, a prescient book by the Turkish author and journalist Ece Temelkuran, who foresaw all too vividly how what had happened in Turkey in 2016, after a failed military coup gave Erdogan the chance finally to do away with Turkish democracy, might be repeated in Europe and the US.
Patronising disbelief
Forced to leave Turkey, Temelkuran found that at first her suggestion that US and West European democracies were on the same grim trajectory to autocracy as Turkey, was treated with patronising disbelief.
When her book was first published in 2019, she still found that “the majority of Europeans still assume that the new leaders of hate are only a passing infatuation”. Nobody thinks that any more, but understanding of the danger may have come too late. The threat from “populists”, a disarmingly fuzzy word, with their vague contradictory promises, shady dealings and comic misstatements, was easy to underestimate, something that might not have been the case had the new political force been labelled as “fascism” from the beginning.
Western establishment elites have long refused to recognise how their own intellectual and political bankruptcy opened wide the door to a generation of politicians who have a potential for evil and destruction fully equal to anything witnessed in the 30s.
Further Thoughts
The increased number of dictators and near-dictators, irremovable by any means other than death, may soon fuel a new era of political assassinations.
This makes the final release of previously secret US government documents about the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963 feel more topical. These will soon generate headlines, if only because so many people remain convinced that the shooting of the president was the outcome of some dark conspiracy long concealed by the government.
Conspiracy theories never die so long as authors and publishers can make money out of them. Certainty that there is a substantial market out there made up of people convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone means that we will never run short of books claiming just that. The attempt by the original Warren Commission – the high-level investigation that reported on the JFK assassination in 1964 – to scotch conspiracy theories was always doomed.
I always believed that Oswald acted alone, in large part because no convincing evidence has emerged to the contrary, despite 60 years of investigations. Many successful assassinations are carried out by single individuals who told nobody else what they planned to do, thereby avoiding betrayal by co-conspirators or detection because too many knew about their murderous intention.
Crucial for success is the willingness of the assassin to die in the course of killing some hated leader. A reason why senior German officers failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944, despite fairly easy access to him, was that they did not want to be present when their bomb went off.
Cover-ups foster conspiracy theories about government complicity in assassinations. But what is most likely to be hidden is incompetence, or the unwitting possession of information originally unnoticed or cavalierly dismissed as unimportant, but which looks culpably incriminating in retrospect, long after the fatal shot has been fired.
Academics play down the impact of assassinations as unimportant when set against the broad sweep of history. Often this is, indeed, the case, but on occasion the elimination of a single individual means that history is forced to make a giant swerve.
I was in Israel in 1995 on the night prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv, his death opening the door to Netanyahu’s dominance of Israeli politics ever since. Fast forward to the present and imagine how different the future of the world might be had either one of the two assassination attempts on Trump last year succeeded.
Beneath the Radar
My late friend Christopher Hitchens once told me that fellow journalists in Washington sometimes expressed admiration for his speed in producing so many articles and books. “The reason I can write so much,” he said, “is simply that I never watch television.”
I knew this to be correct. The room where I normally slept in his apartment also contained the television set, an elderly device pushed away unplugged into a corner. Once I did want to watch some event on it, but Christopher was uncertain about how to turn it on. This was despite the fact that he often appeared on television himself and was an impressive performer.
Christopher’s rejection of watching television as a misuse of time came back to me during the current debate on banning mobile phones in UK schools. Contrary to general expectations, a recent survey showed that banning phones does not improve pupils’ grades or mental health.
Television remains a great time-waster because it is such a slow way of transmitting information. On average, the British watch four hours of television and streaming services a day and Americans a little less, though the figures are not wholly comparable.
On the odd occasion when I appear on TV myself, I have often thought ruefully that, given that the time on air is so limited, it did not matter if I knew everything about a topic or had just mugged up on Wikipedia. To plug into real expertise these days, I watch long one-on-one interviews with people I believe to be real experts on YouTube.
Cockburn’s Picks
As a violent fanatic and religious bigot, Meir Kahane died a political pariah in Israel 35 years ago. This piece in The Guardian by Joshua Leifer shows how his toxic ideas have helped shape the policies of the current Israeli government.
Patrick Cockburn has written a series of essays, illustrated by his son Henry, about the state of the UK. You can read his dispatch from Canterbury here; Dover here; Newcastle here; Herefordshire here; Salford here; and Barrow-in- Furness here. Patrick has also written an essay about the gig economy, which you can read here