Is Trump a Closet Bolshevik? Just a thought!
Over the last week or so, and as Trump’s “policy” seems to be emerging into the light, I found my memory going back to 1964, when I was a pupil at Kibworth Beauchamp Grammar School in Leicestershire. The school was organising a skiing trip to Switzerland for pupils in my year, in the New Year, and I so wanted to go!. It was not the sort of trip a child of my background would have considered possible back then. My mum was keen for me to take the opportunity. But there was a big problem!
Mum felt that Dad needed to agree too because of the cost and he was working abroad, for some months, at an Exposition in Communist China, representing his employer – a major manufacturer of industrial knitting machines. No internet. Just snail mail. Luckily for me, she managed to get a message to him and he said “yes of course”. I had an experience of a lifetime and Dad came back with fascinating stories of life as it appeared in Communist China. Within a couple of years, Mao had started his Cultural Revolution and everything changed.
Why this overlong introduction? Are we insulting Trump by calling him a Fascist? Might it not be more accurate to call him a communist of sorts?
The appointment of seemingly unsuitable heads of branches of Government, including the military, is incomprehensible if you assume their task is to run the Government, but it does make sense if their actual purpose is to dismantle good governance, to break it totally, so that something different to a representative democracy can be built. The parallels are increasingly looking far more in the range of Mao’s China, Lenin and Trotsky’s Russia or Pol Pot’s Cambodia than Hitler’s Germany. After all, Hitler strengthened central government so that it could be utilised for the benefit of the Leader, the Party and their ideology. The Reich was to last for a thousand years, whilst in contrast, Lenin and Trotsky preached “permanent revolution”
Was it not Bannon who has said that he wants to dismantle the administrative state? Far more in tune with the actions of Communism as it was practised by Lenin and Mao, but enabled in this case by the Republican Party. Now there is an irony!
Helen Chapman, Devon UK
I think Hitler allied himself with corporations, which Trump has certainly done and to the extent it could be said that they own him. But he's the guy who borrowed money all over town and it's as much a question of whose goons show up first as who has the gooniest goons. Evangelicals have some great goons. Highly armed enforcers, as good Christians would, I guess. And Trump isn't ultimately owned by anybody, not even himself, because he's basically mentally ill and VERY sensitive to slights. Man, what a situation.
I was intrigued by your title and take on this because I've suggested that if Marx is looking down from commie heaven he has a MAGA hat on. Republicans are about to prove Marx right, that capitalism always leads to unsustainable concentrations of wealth and booms and busts and massive social stratification and we all end up killing one another, which I think is his central belief, in the inevitability and transcendence of the class war. Not that the rich get killed, because the clever bastards play the 'little people' off against one another.
But, what do I know.
Having a skeptical side, I used to argue that we had no idea what Plato's Republic was really about. His ideal government? Or a teaching tool in the context of the times. The Socratic Method, and all. I DO believe that things meet up at the extremes, and that people who lose their souls through submission and those who do so through a desire for domination are together at the punchbowl in the end. And I hope that supports your point, Helen, because that was my intention, but when extremists show up it can be a muddle.
Big government or small government, tyrants will do whatever works in the end, improvising along the way until they cast up at the top and have nowhere to go but down and are scared out of their pants. Which is why sane people resist this stuff, but probably also why they're at a disadvantage because they aren't powered by the rocket fuel of fixed ideas and delusions. Who invented this game, anyway? I'd like to opt out.
Trump ultimately has no ideology other than to feed his sociopathic-narcissistic-self-only first above all others mentality.
That being said your observation has significant merit, when applied to Socialism; if socialism has as a primary objective the centralized ownership and control of all means of production and distribution, then the Republican Party has been projecting socialism for decades, as they have slowly been working towards this moment in time wherein everything that is coming out of the current illegally occupied White House Maladministration is bent on controlling as many things as possible, all presumably for the intent purposes of controlling the flow of money, so as to fill the coffers of the super wealthy first and foremost above and before all the poors, as Cheryl of Archer would say.
From my perspective, anyone who has a net worth of less than 100-million dollars will soon become fair game for Trump and his Capital Cabal.