Comparing Dictators

And a wannabe dictator

These posts explore the themes set out in my monograph published in 2023, Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism.

I mentioned last week that a French scientist en route to a conference in Houston, Texas, was detained at the airport, his phone confiscated and searched, and he was expelled on the basis of texts he had sent to colleagues regarding the threats to scientific research in the US. The chances of a random search of your phone at an airport are about one in ten thousand. At about the same time, a German man with a multiple entries visa to the US was returning from a holiday in Mexico with his American fiancé. He was detained for 16 days, some of it in chains, before being deported. There have been other incidents but the interesting point is that Trump denies signing an order on March 20^th, invoking an act from 1798 regarding deporting enemy aliens in war time (starts at 0.50). Not remembering matters such as signing documents, and especially confabulating about it, is a classic feature of early dementia. He could also be lying of course but this is important as people are asking “What’s going on? Is this a fascist coup, a rerun of 1933?”

In Narcisso-Fascism, I built the case that fascism is not in itself a form of government, as socialism or liberalism are, but should be seen as an approach to gaining and holding power. This approach can be and routinely is used by any person who wants to gain some sort of influence over other people. By appealing to humanity’s worst instincts, fascist tropes convert a humdrum form of government into something wildly exciting. It is by this simple means that it becomes irresistible to otherwise balanced people. Yes, I do believe that is going on in the US at present. My view is that it is more dangerous to them than to us, but not in the way the Nazi party was dangerous to 1930s Germany and to the rest of the world. The biggest and most significant difference lies in the figurehead of each movement: the fat, bumbling and foul-tempered leader of the so-called MAGA movement is just not dictator material. In trying to work out what’s likely to happen in the US over the next few years, it helps to compare the lives of the two leaders, Adolf Hitler and Donald J Trump.

Adolf Hitler was born in a small town on the Austrian-Bavarian border on April 20^th 1889. His father, Alois, was 52 when his son was born, and died 13 years later. He was a middling grade customs official and was described as “hard, unsympathetic and short-tempered.” Perhaps this was because he had been born illegitimate but it didn’t stop him having three marriages, numerous affairs and at least one illegitimate child. He treated his various wives and children badly but it probably wasn’t unusual for the time. Adolf did not get on with his father at all. Alois Hitler wanted his son to enter the public service but Adolf refused as he wanted to be an artist, or even a priest, which infuriated the evil-tempered and violent old man. Not long after his father’s death, Adolf had to leave school and, after a few years fiddling around, he moved to Vienna in 1907 to study art. At the time, it would have been a massive move for him and it didn’t go well as he didn’t have either the academic record or the portfolio they required. He had to take any odd jobs he could find to survive but, a few months later, his mother died, which upset him greatly and convinced him to stop smoking.

The next six years were terrible. He worked as a casual labourer and porter, living in dosshouses and trying to earn extra money by selling his watercolour paintings. Life was tough but whenever he could afford it, he went to concerts or to the opera, or bought philosophy books and devoured them. He despised the Hapsburg monarchy and its polyglot empire as he strongly identified as a pan-German national. He went to a lot of political meetings which exposed him to an intensely racist atmosphere. In Ch. 2 of Mein Kampf [1], he says that there had been just one rather odd Jewish boy in his school in Linz. He had little to do with him and thought Jews were just Germans with a peculiar religion. When he arrived in Vienna, he said, he knew nothing about Jews but by the time he left, he hated them as a race and as a socio-political force. There will always be debate over why this happened but he is fairly clear in his book: he believed that through their doctrine of Marxism, Jews wanted to abolish national states to create a single, pan-national and multiracial government that they would control. That was anathema: still in his early twenties, for Hitler, the national state was race-based, so an attack on nationalism was also an attack on the race, and had to be resisted to death.

In May, 1913, he received a small bequest from his father’s estate and moved to Munich. When war broke out, he enlisted in a Bavarian regiment and served four years in an infantry regiment, mostly as a runner but he was injured a number of times and was highly decorated. When the Armistice was declared, he was in hospital recovering from a gas attack. The news devastated him but he managed to remain in the Army as an intelligence operative and was delegated to infiltrate a workers’ party. Politics quickly became his chosen career. The putsch in November 1923 came about because his party believed the Bavarian government was about to secede from Germany and join Austria to form a Catholic nation, which would threaten their idea of Greater Germany. This led to prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf. Eight years later, aged just 44, he was appointed Reich Chancellor.

Hitler came from what we would now call a very dysfunctional family in a poor rural background. His schooling was erratic, not least because he fought his father’s every wish. During his dark years in Vienna, he had no trade or training and essentially no life but he doesn’t appear to have had trouble with the police. The war made him, it took him from squalid anonymity in a vast city, and shoved him into a position where his talents could flower. Post-war, he remained close to his former Army comrades and always retained a close bond with working class people. Unlike many veterans of the brutal War, he hardly drank alcohol, had little to do with women, didn’t gamble and appears to have devoted all his energy and interest to increasingly nationalistic, race-based politics. He was intelligent, intensely single-minded, had a phenomenal memory for detail and was probably the ultimate control freak. Needless to say, he had no tolerance for lazy or dishonest people and was good at choosing people to do jobs. He had little interest in personal wealth and lived a fairly abstemious life, which further endeared him to the population. As a speaker, he was absolutely hypnotic and could easily bring a crowd to their feet, cheering and weeping. Finally, he was not at any stage psychotic, insane or anything else that people say of him. After the July 1944 assassination attempt, his health deteriorated but his physician, Dr Theodor Morell, was probably poisoning him with his bizarre mixture of drugs and tonics.

Now compare that with Donald Trump, an overweight and very unfit 78 year old with declining memory, who has just been appointed to the equal most demanding job on earth. He was born in 1946 and grew up in a mansion in New York. According to Wikipedia, his German-born grandfather “…amassed considerable wealth during the Klondike Gold Rush by running a restaurant and brothel for miners,” which gave him a start in real estate. Donald’s father, Fred Trump (1905-1999) expanded the family business into building, then into wheeling and dealing and rapidly became very wealthy. There was not a trick his company didn’t use and they were pursued legally a number of times for shady dealing. In the early 1950s, Fred paid each of his children $20,000 a year so that by the time he was eight, young Donald was a millionaire in modern terms. By a variety of subterfuges, Fred gradually transferred to his son, largely tax free, something like $460million. An equally important gift was a medical exemption from conscription during the war in Vietnam.

By the age of 26, Donald was appointed president of the family company. Without a break, he has continued the family tradition of shell game financing while dangling over the brink of illegality, with the amusing sideline that he doesn’t pay contractors. The recent court cases have shown that he cheats everybody all the time, and throughout, has acted with the moral restraint of an alley cat. In particular, there was his long-term friendship with the sex-trafficking Israeli spy and racketeer, Jeffrey Epstein [2], which, in true Trumpian form, he now denies ever existed.

Even stood against the high bar of the hereditary super-wealthy, Donald Trump is peculiar. He is grandiose, dim-witted and impulsive, but shows the classic Dunning-Kruger effect of thinking he is far brighter and more capable than he is (“a very stable genius”). He is poorly educated and hardly reads. He doesn’t know how government works and cares even less. He knows nothing of any other country but is quite sure he can make their decisions for them. He eats junk and watches junk on TV. He can’t drive. His only exercise appears to be walking to and from a golf cart, for which he needs a driver, and texting at midnight (Gore Vidal said “As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.” In Trump’s case, it seems texting fills the gap). He cheats, lies, steals, is/was insatiably promiscuous and treats women like dirt. He has absolutely no experience, knowledge or understanding of ordinary people, and even less empathy or interest.

His personal relationships are a complete mess and everything he does is “transactional,” meaning “What’s in it for me?” That’s his approach to everything except when he decides, as with Greenland and Panama, that he’s going to have them without any discussion or compensation because, due to his cosmic sense of privilege, he believes he is entitled to them. As a speaker, he is boring, rambling and unfocussed, the only constants being his unwavering conviction that every dumbarse idea that stumbles into his head is fantastic and beautiful and nobody else could possibly have thought of it (in the case of drinking bleach, he was right: nobody else would think that), and vengeance. He believes he is smarter than everybody else, especially experts, a belief held as strongly as his unwavering hatred of anybody who has upset him, especially politicians, lawyers, foreigners, businessmen, tax people … in fact, everybody. He believes nobody is allowed to correct him or tell him what to do or obstruct him in any way but those who do immediately become his enemies. This applies to all laws and moral principles. He is never wrong, it’s always somebody else’s fault. Oh, and he is utterly devoid of a sense of humour. Watch him: he never smiles or laughs, only a twisted grimace.

He appears to have no interest in the natural world. I’m sure he’s never climbed a hill to see the view, ridden a pushbike on a misty day, watched birds on a lake, caught a fish, surfed, cooked a meal, looked after a sick child, helped an old lady across the street, stood on a street corner in a boy scout uniform selling drinks, played a team sport, run a race, donated to a beggar in the street, changed a wheel, planted vegetables, taken an injured animal to the vet, driven a tractor or a truck, slept in a tent, washed under a waterfall, waited for anything … in short, he is a parody of a human being. So apart from money, how did he get to where he is? It was simple: he told everybody to hate. For people whose lives aren’t going well, that’s what they wanted to hear. Why did he choose that emotion? Because he himself hates. Virulently. He hates the established rich, and foreigners, and witty or talented people (especially witty), and gays, and intellectuals, and experts, and women, and pretty well everybody who doesn’t go down and kiss his feet. He is where he is today because enough stupid people, especially stupid people with money, couldn’t see this. Some think he likes them, some think they can control and use him, most hope he will clean up their enemies and the rest go along for the ride – but he doesn’t like any of them. He doesn’t actually like anybody. He just wants their money so he can get more votes and stick it up his enemies but if he doesn’t get the votes, who knows, he might just go out on Fifth Avenue and start shooting. He’s not joking. He really would like to see a heap of people mown down by machine guns and the rest quivering to one side. Then everybody would know he’s the greatest.

The contrast with Adolf Hitler could not be more stark. Hitler wasn’t in it for himself, he wasn’t interested in chasing children or boys or money or anything like that. He had a vision which went far beyond himself and he had the determination to put it into effect. If he had died, the plan would have gone ahead, perhaps not as ruthlessly but it would not have come to a halt. Yet beyond wanting to be as lawless as a medieval king, Trump has nothing to offer. Apart from a silly hat and a wrecker’s ball, Trumpism doesn’t exist. He doesn’t even have a campaign song, not least because he doesn’t like music and can’t sing himself. The instant he dies or is disabled, his “movement” will implode as all the crooks and the power- and money-grubbing vermin around him leap in to get what they can, or to make sure their swarms of enemies don’t get it. What’s left of the US Government will start to creak and crumble, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will be too busy knifing each other to put it together again.

Where nothing could turn Hitler aside from his ambitions, in a stunning turn of events, Trump has dumped Ukraine and is insisting on a peace deal, essentially on Russian terms. That’s a complete reversal of US foreign policy for the past 80 years, in particular, a total break with everything Obama and Biden did. People are saying it’s because he likes Putin, or that the Russians have a pile of dirt on him, or he thinks he can get that hotel in Moscow. They’re possibly factors but his loathing for his predecessors would override them. Mainly, he thinks he can lever Russia away from China, his main enemy, and prevent them forming a Eurasian alliance. Good luck with that, but if he’s insisting on settling the Ukraine war, why isn’t he doing the same thing with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza? Is it because he got so much money from the Zionist lobby, such as $100million from the fanatical Miriam Adelson? I doubt it, everybody knows he’s too erratic and impulsive to stay bribed for long. No, I think it goes back to his cosmic narcissism. Remember, he was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years, they were great party mates. He went to Epstein’s island many times and, as everybody knows [2], everything that happened there was recorded in a dozen different formats. Every twitch, gasp and spasm, every grubby stain, the whole lot was taped and sent for safekeeping with Epstein’s handlers and paymasters, Mossad. We can be sure Epstein and his team knew all about DNA evidence.

Mossad have vast files on Trump, they have the lot. Which means, of course, that one Benjamin Netanyahu has been looking through it for the past 30 years. He and the arch-fanatics and religiofascist cultists who now control Israel and its nuclear weapons know all the juicy bits. They can sink Trump in a flash if it suits them, not just for underage sex, they don’t give a shit about that, but for much, much more serious stuff. Trump knows they have it, and he knows that as long as he plays their game, they’ll look after him. He’ll do what they want because it’s a win-win deal. Backing the genocidal Zionist campaign to carve out Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) got him in power and keeps him there, which means he can go after his many enemies without worrying about his back. He may even get his hooks into the newly cleared and ploughed land of Gaza. What happens to the US while he’s thus engaged is anybody’s guess because, as a supreme narcissist, he thinks his business is always more important than anybody else’s business.

OK, that’s not nice but it’s normal politics and not an existential threat to humanity. The real danger to the world is that Netanyahu may decide that in order to keep control of the murderous psychopaths in his government, or to keep the police away from his door, he needs to let the Zionazis fulfill their grandiose fantasy of attacking Iran. For that he would need American permission but he knows, and Trump knows, and everybody in the world needs to know, that, just as with the resumed bombing of Gaza, Trump will not say no, cannot say no. If that happens, then the Doomsday Clock will jump to about three seconds to midnight.

For the nervous, here is a count down to liberation but meantime, the message is: Dig in, hang on, hold tight. Make sure you stock up with candles and toilet paper, the rough part of the ride is still to come.

1. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition: Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

2. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

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