“A week is a long time in politics” is a saying attributed to my favorite politician in my youth: Harold Wilson, when he intimated a lot can happen in that time, making it difficult to work out what is going to happen next. When the other day a friend asked why people were so pre-occupied with Donald Trump and what is happening in the USA, when there is so much going on in the UK that ought to concern us, I couldn’t help thinking the reason for this is not just that events now unraveling each day across the Pond, where President Trump has played some key part, do not just have huge global implications but dwarf anything happening at home in terms of dramatic effect, and that Wilson’s observation is especially pertinent, making me wonder what will happen next?
What is clear, Trump has wasted no time implementing his agenda. For those who have been closely watching him these past few months, as election day loomed, there has been no let up in activity, but rather an increase since he has been in power. In terms of energy and purpose he has been relentless and inspirational. There has been so much that he has done in less than a week, much of it is closely scrutinized by a media, who in the main are unsympathetic, and it is difficult to take this all in without spending an inordinate amount of time doing so. Yet Trump continues to be a divisive figure. The likes of Alex Jones (Info Wars) and UKIP’s Nigel Farage have unsurprisingly been nigh ecstatic. Not only has he hit the ground running but he is delivering on his campaign policies, much more quickly than expected. It should also be added there is a significant silent cohort who have been rather pleased that he has. But there are many who see things differently, starting with a sizable number of anti-Trump protestors and a good deal of my friends on social media, some of who see Trump as their worst nightmare.
But before I go on, and in the words of Judge Jeanne, this is my opening statement: “I voted Brexit because I believed that was in the national interest and in the interest of others outside the UK too. My main qualm, which still remains, is will the UK government deliver a good deal? I did not vote Trump as I am not qualified to vote, but if I was he would have been my preferred candidate. Like most, I have qualms about his character and concerns about some of his policies, especially those that impact on the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies. Other issues also bother me, notably the environment. Yet I came to the view and have argued the case: Trump as President is the preferred outcome for America and the rest of the world.
I came recently to see how my Brexit and Trump preferences were related. I don’t like globalism or “progressive” politics; I don’t like being ruled by unaccountable elites, but I do feel it is best to allow people, especially the “little people”, to have real say in how they are to be governed, they should be have a say in who can stay in their country, and there should be freedom, notably that of being able to practice one’s religion and be able to follow their dreams without encumbrance and do so in safety, without being demonized for being politically incorrect or “intolerant” or shackled by having needless regulations imposed. I suspect there is an unholy alliance that include the Liberals elite, the Saudis, the Chinese, global corporations and the seriously rich that oppose such a reverse because of their new world order fixation, and that bothers me.
Brexit and Trump share many elements of what might allay my concerns. Sadly both have attracted bad types I disassociate from. Not always recognized is the many good people who are supportive. While I believe in being patriotic and having a national identity, I am no nationalist. While I may be more conservative in my views when it comes to security and the economy, I believe we should respect the aspirations of minorities and be compassionate, especially toward the poor and vulnerable. I believe we have a duty of care for all, because “love your neighbor” is the command given to us by God. My values include working hard to provide for our families, being good citizens in the place where we live and serving others. As for Trump, I respect his authority, realize his faults and limitations, and I intend to do my bit to make him accountable”.
I have just read a long list of things going around my social media feed concerning all the things Trump has supposed to have done wrong. Some concerns I share, such as his disregard for the environment, insensitivity toward causes and groups that he is not interested in much and hints of him shutting down dissent. Some of the executive orders I need to come to a full view on but none I strongly disagree with. Some I agree with, notably the one to defund Planned Parenthood. I believe he is right to take to task the press for misreporting but would counsel he doesn’t let his ego rule sound decision making; for that is a cross many of his predecessors have found they had to carry. As for investigating election fraud, he may have a point but I need to know the facts before agreeing it needs doing. I disagree with his views on water boarding. I am ok with most of his cabinet appointees and am pleased they have been subject to scrutiny and searching questioning. On the basis of what came out, I would not endorse his Secretary of State nominee.
I look forward to his meeting tomorrow with UK’s Theresa May with hope and optimism. While 90 days to strike a trade deal is better than the 10 years some Brexit skeptics have been saying, I await the detail when it comes to a USA – UK deal, believing good trade deals, the very thing that worries many anti-Brexiters, can be struck, especially when dealing with the likes of Trump. I await expectantly and with concern regarding how he will impact hot areas like Russia, China and the Middle East (especially concerning the refugee crisis we have been seeing deepen in recent months) and will watch carefully concerning developments in Israel. I am looking forward to learn who his nominee for the Supreme Court is and expect to be pleased. I like it that one of his first visits was to CIA headquarters and, vanity aside, felt that he struck the right note when there. I don’t like when he imposes his agenda on others e.g. the President of Mexico, when he needn’t, for this tendency could be his downfall.
I can go on for there is much to merit consideration. It is early days and while I am more optimistic than many concerning an America under Trump, I do have concerns and reservations, especially when it comes to how America treats the most vulnerable. In terms of unifying the country, he has not started well. Indeed, without being melodramatic not only do I fear we are close to a new World War, but we are seeing the seeds of a new Civil War too. There has sadly been signs of discord when now is the time to put the result behind us and move on in the national and international interest. The only way he will win over detractors is by demonstrating that America is better off with his policies being implemented than that by the previous administration.I like to think they will come around.
He has shown he means business and is simply doing what he said he would, but then we expected he would. But he needs to be scrutinized and held to account. I hope while being sympathetic toward him, I have already started to do this. But I will stick my neck out and say on balance he has started well. I am glad I don’t look to any leader to bring us all into a better place, both because of my theology and simple observation I live in a world that has gone mad. I will therefore continue to look to God and pray that President Trump will succeed in office and that God will indeed bless America. (Just read: “Pastor John Piper Prays to God to Give President Trump ‘Spirit of Brokenness and Humility‘” – I add my Amen – ed)
JRB Publications 
This is rather long, but this is what I am afraid of -.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/history-tells-us-what.
Sorry I have put on the wrong quote
Sorry but I am not sure how to just put the quote on, so here it is in full, as I said a bit long so please remove it.
Tobias Stone
Entrepreneur, Academic, Writer
ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
Note: this essay contains a lot of links out, which are underlined. Consider them further reading or me backing up my opinions.
It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals.
My background is archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples’ perspective of history is limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so 50-100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study and learn to untangle the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at university I would fail a paper if I didn’t compare at least two, if not three opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn’t wash in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British academia. (I can’t speak for other systems, but they’re definitely not all alike in this way.)
So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self-imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague, it must have felt like the end of the world.
[Trump is] a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself.
But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now, it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here:
By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,” …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.
But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape.
At a local level in time, people think things are fine — then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this, it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later, it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.
My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50-100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit and Trump are dismissed now.
A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit.
Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail, and drums up anger and hatred. Soon the masses start to move as one, without any logic driving their actions, and the whole becomes unstoppable.
That was Hitler, but it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe and so many more. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20-40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.
But at the time people don’t realize they’re embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction period. They think they’re right, they’re cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:
They are only looking at the present, not the past or future
They are only looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally
Most people don’t read, think, challenge or hear opposing views
Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening. Read this brilliant, long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics. He is using passion, anger and rhetoric in the same way all his predecessors did — a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society, politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it’s ready for Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.
On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.
We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way — all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say, “Oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??” But they don’t realize that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.
We are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination.
Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.
An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:
Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honor NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.
With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends “peace keeping forces” and “aid lorries” into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).
A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?
This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.
It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London, writing this, without wanting to run away. How could people read it and make sarcastic and dismissive comments about how pro-Remain people should stop whining, and how we shouldn’t blame everything on Brexit. Others will read this and sneer at me for saying America is in great shape, that Trump is a possible future Hitler (and yes, Godwin’s Law. But my comparison is to another narcissistic, charismatic leader fanning flames of hatred until things spiral out of control). It’s easy to jump to conclusions that oppose pessimistic predictions based on the weight of history and learning. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It’s an easy route but the wrong one.
Ignoring and mocking the experts, as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human.
We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.
So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.
What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media.
We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t. We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.
(Perhaps I’m just writing this so I can be remembered by history as one of the people who saw it coming.)