Some 80 years ago a bunch of evil buffoons ruling assorted countries in Europe unleashed a massive war and plunged the whole world into a catastrophe. It wasn’t that long ago. My father was in that war on the Soviet side, and a recently deceased cousin was a fighter pilot and a prisoner of war on the American side. Yet, we’ve already forgotten the lessons of history and have placed a new bunch of evil buffoons to rule over us on three continents, to great popular acclaim.
An important difference is that they’re now armed with weapons of mass destruction. Once they decide to go to war with one another, they’ll likely bring the history of human civilization to back to square one.
Similarities with the 1930s are popping up all over the place.
Vladimir Putin, the doyen of this new crop of dictators who will mark 20 years at the helm in Russia, is a kind of Russian Benito Mussolini, who became Italy’s prime minister in 1922 and ended up ruling for 23 years. Like Mussolini, who famously claimed that the sky would darken when hundreds of Italy’s fighter planes were in the air, Putin is given to empty boasting about Russia’s military might. Like the Duce, who sent Italians to die in Albania and Ethiopia, Putin has been bogged down in open-ended military misadventures in foreign lands, one next door in Ukraine and the other far away, in Syria.
Italian writer Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist (and Bertolucci’s film) centers on the assassination of an Italian dissident living in France. The story seems to have come straight from today’s headlines, from stories about Putin’s enemies who keep dying in Britain.
For a while, Putin was a relatively unusual phenomenon on the world stage and he tried to keep appearances of democracy and decency. But suddenly a kind of Fascist International has emerged of similarly minded evil buffoon rulers. Note that Putin has abandoned all restraints, starting to talk and act like a wannabe “thief in the law” – a Russian career criminal.
Just as the cause of fascism got a massive boost in 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, so the current Age of Dictators, Part II dawned in earnest in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. And now, suddenly, rulers of the same mold are everywhere. They’re easy to spot – just see whom President Donald J. Trump has chosen to praise: Putin, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, China’s Xi Jinping, who is taking steps to become a president-for-life, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump has just agreed to meet. We may soon add to this list Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, depending on how his current legal problems are resolved.
Dictators of the 1930s had their grandiose ideologies and attempted to create a secular religion. Nothing so fancy for the current crop of Buffoon Dictators (even though Putin’s rhetoric about rebuilding the Soviet Union and Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan comes close to Mussolini’s promise to revive the Roman Empire). Instead, they rely on fairly primitive, gutter-level us-against-them nationalism and populism.
That was plainly on display last week when Trump imposes tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, accusing America’s closest trading partners and allies of taking advantage of the United States, the world’s richest and most powerful nation. Most experts talked about the economic impact of a potential trade war that Trump’s tariffs may unleash, but to me it’s the parallels with the 1930s’ beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism and the aggrieved nationalist rhetoric that matter most.
Nationalism aside, the buffoons who rule us are increasingly finding a common language. The Russia Investigation by Robert Mueller is uncovering layer after layer of connections and collusion between Trump and Putin. The latest – the alleged meeting between Blackwater founder (and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother) Erik Prince with a Russian businessman to establish a secret channel to the Kremlin for the Trump Administration – is especially telling as Prince is an American version of Evgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s mercenary force and one of the thirteen Russians indicted for meddling in the 2016 US elections.
And now comes the meeting between Trump and North Korea’s current Kim. Trump has touted this as a result of his strong leadership, uncompromising stance on North Korean nukes, tougher sanctions and pressure on China to lean harder on Pyongyang. But there is less benign explanation for the meeting, currently scheduled for May. As someone asked on Twitter: What did Putin and Xi promise Kim to get him to meet with Trump?
Indeed. Besides, note that North Korean leaders have been trying to get an American president to meet with them. A meeting like that would confer a huge amount of prestige on the tiny, impoverished, isolated dictatorship and its rulers. No American President has been willing to grant the Kims this measure of recognition. That is until now.
For now, card-carrying members of the Buffoon Dictators’ International need one another to solidify their power and fool their trusting semiliterate masses. Putin seems secure in Russia, but Trump is plagued by scandals and is fighting a rearguard action against Robert S. Mueller’s relentless investigation – kind of like Rodion Raskolnikov against Porfiry Petrovich’s. Similarly, Xi may be facing problems in China – otherwise, why would China decide to change its power transfer arrangement that has served it so well for over two decades?
But let’s wait and see. Remember the great friendship between Hitler and Stalin? They successfully partitioned Poland and even held a joint military parade to mark their iron-clad alliance – something Trump should get Putin to do in Syria, given his love of parades. Anyway, the Stalin-Hitler axis didn’t last long.
