By Maung Zarni, Published by Yeni Safak on September 14, 2019
Western media, societies remain sound asleep as worst mistakes of 1930s Nazi Germany are repeated in US and the UK
Adolf Hitler was a figure on the fringe of German society and politics, lunatic delusions of his place in history. His companion in crime was Heinrich Himmler, a little-known chicken farmer who wanted to be a police officer. No respectable German who encountered or had any dealings with them early in their political career took them seriously.
Within a few short years they succeeded in dismantling all the political and government institutions that stood in the way of their total teardown and reconstruction of the German state -- the checks and balances of Germany's governing institutions including the independent judiciary, the intellectual class, progressive political forces, etc. These men hijacked a democratic society, effectively transformed the state’s levers of power (the ‘security sector’ and propaganda organs), and merged them into a totalitarian entity that would go on to commit mass-murder on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale. The rest, as they say, is history.
In the United States today, Donald Trump, before his entry into the political arena, was businessman with multiple bankruptcies under his belt, the front man for an inane reality TV show while parting with the likes of the late Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier and convicted sex-trafficker and offender.
In the U.K., Boris Johnson, a former newspaper reporter sacked by the Times for forging quotes about the 14th century King Edward II and the latter’s gay lover, was for a long time derided as a "buffoon", so much so that 10 years ago his own father, a former EU employee went on a BBC show to defend him and claim, "my son is not a buffoon".
Neither Trump nor Johnson ever cared about facts, principles, ideals or morals, because they got in the way of what they want to achieve. The Washington Post stopped counting Trump’s blatant lies. The legal department of British Broadcasting Corporation apparently approved BBC Two’s popular show The Mash Report to call the Prime Minister "a liar and a racist" as recent as last week.
Trump defeated Hilary Clinton, a seasoned (but not principled nor compassionate) opponent with a big war chest, and her Democratic Party's internally rigged election machine. He then went on to reshape the right-wing Republican Party in his image, and stacked his cabinet with individuals bent on dismantling the institutions of state (created to protect the people, the environment and the nation) in order to line their own pockets and those of their cronies, and to benefit America’s "military-industrial complex".
Johnson ousted from the mayorship of London, Ken Livingston -- a decent and progressive mayor and Labour politician. To gain the leadership of the U.K. Conservative Party he knifed Prime Minister Theresa May in the back and then gave it a twist to secure the keys to 10 Downing Street. Since taking power he has proceeded to use every legal executive power vested in the PM's office to dismantle the Parliament that directly -- at least in theory -- represents "the will of the people".
Furthermore, Johnson appointed to his cabinet borderline criminals who wear their depravity on their sleeves and wage war against decency, religious "others" (particularly Muslims), ethnic non-Whites, immigrants and asylum seekers.
Neither man has regards for Law, domestic or international.
Trump and his administration allowed his then National Security Adviser John Bolton -- fired as of Sept. 10 -- to declare the International Criminal Court "illegitimate" and "dead", revoked the U.S. entry visa for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Fatou Bensouda and threatened to deny entry to the U.S. any ICC staff who may investigate American war crimes in Afghanistan.
On this side of the Atlantic, Scotland’s highest civil court has just ruled unanimously that Johnson acted "unlawfully" by misleading the elderly Constitutional monarch -- Queen Elizabeth -- to give her assent in shutting down the British parliament this Monday.
Both Trump and Johnson are being sued in civil and criminal courts. Trump is facing a cascade of law suits for his (alleged) serial rapes, tax evasion, fraud, and other alleged crimes.
Despite all of this, despite the mountains of evidence available, despite the destructive path they are following, and despite the lessons of history, Western mass media have yet to call a spade a spade. By any objective criteria both men are Fascist dictators.
My own English father-in-law whose childhood home in Plymouth, Devon was destroyed in a Nazi-air air raid during the Second World War -- when he was barely five -- expresses his fear and dismay that the political and ideological climate the world over is far more frightening and troubling than the bad old days of the Second World War.
Regrettably for the masses, by the time corporate media and the journalists they employ wake up to the frightening reality in front of them, and apply the "fascist" label to these two depraved men, the "gestapos" in U.S. and U.K. will be knocking on the doors of their news outlets and pay midnight visits to journalists’ homes.
These new Anglo-American Fascist police corps will not be kind to let them publish or air their "Adolf Trump" or "Adolf Johnson" feature stories!
What follows will be a repeat of history that will destroy lives and societies, a history that could have been avoided had the "guardians of democracy" in the media opened their eyes to the truth before them.
* Author is a U.K.-based Burmese co-founder of FORSEA.co, Southeast Asian network of human rights activists and democrats.
