When WWI ended in utter destruction and death at the hands of the militaristic Fascists that waged it - Generals, Maréchals, Emperors, and other criminal "great men" in fancy uniforms - the world took stock of the carnage, 40 million deaths and many more millions of amputees and maimed people.
Just like the Russian soldiers who refused to continue fighting so that some nut is recorded as a "great man" in the history books, most western societies in the 1920s and 1930s turned to pacifism, socialism, liberalism. Women were granted the right to vote, workers got many of their rights we take for granted today, and a great sense of human solidarity swept through the continent.
But the forces of military, religious, colonial empires and upper-class evil began a reaction, which included assassinations of pacifist political leaders, attempts to send women from the factories where they replaced the men during the war back to the kitchen, the demonization of socialist and other human solidarity ideas, which gradually led to rearmament and remilitarization and the buildup to World War II.
The cycle then repeated itself. World War II netted 85 million deaths, far worse than World War I. And humanity again took stock of the carnage driven by right-wing empire builders and Fascists. In the aftermath of WWII, societies again rebuilt themselves with a remorseful sense of solidarity. The United Nations was created to prevent further wars. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, colonial empires were dismantled, white western supremacy was denigrated and human solidarity and equality were promoted. Many nations of the Third World that were crushed and dispossessed by colonial Europe became free and independent. There were exceptions, of course, like the creation of the European colony in Palestine, the Fascist Jewish supremacist and socialist state of Israel, by the ethnic cleansing and mass genocide of the Palestinian people.
All Arab peoples in the Middle East acceded to independence from their Turkish, British and French colonial masters, except the Palestinian people whose tragedy was essentially a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon colonialism and greed for Middle Eastern oil. Iran was not spared. The current hatred between the West and Iran was seeded when the English and the Americans mounted a coup d'état against a duly elected Prime Minister for the sole objective of keeping control over Iranian oil. Just as they did in Chile with Allende in 1973, or as they tried to do with Nasser of Egypt in the 1950s for control over the Suez Canal.
Since WWII the winds of liberalism that swept the world scored many gains but have only partially succeeded in deeply rooting a peaceful world. The forces of regressive conservatism and evil were buoyed by the defeat of the last empire, the Soviet Union whose immaturity and barbarity prevented it from achieving the otherwise lofty goals of the Russian revolution of 1917. The rightwing Fascists used the Communist Soviet Union as the scarecrow with which to prevent and deny serious progressive change for people around the world.
And as we write these lines, the wave of rightwing conservatism and backward Fascism is again sweeping the world. Every country either has a Fascist at the helm or tried one for a brief period in recent years. Democracy's weakness is that it is not Fascist and cannot impose itself with Fascist methods, hence its vulnerability to its Fascist enemies.
Donald Trump and his coterie of Fascists, religious neanderthals and regressive primitives represent the climax of this wave in our time. With the House, Senate, and Supreme Court in his pocket, Trump is likely to erase all the achievements and progress made over the past few decades. He already has with the abortion issue. Viktor Orban in Hungary has been sowing seeds of disunion in the European Union and backing the other Fascist in Russia, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump's very best friend.
The cycle will in all likelihood repeat itself. At the peak of their power, the Fascists of this world will behave exactly like the Fascists of yesteryear, people like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin of the 1930s. Using their testicular integrity of "great men" (a.k.a. butchers of millions) instead of their cerebral or moral integrity, they will bring the world down into the abyss once again.
Hitler kept repeating that he wanted peace, but because he had to defend Germany against its enemies he went ahead, with his macho-suicidal Asian friends in Japan, to devastate the world with grandiose hallucinations of empire, absolutism, racial purity and disregard for human frailty. Trump, Putin and Xi Jiping are also justifying their wanton hatred and greed by pretending to defend their countries against hypothetical enemies and "other" lesser humans, cultures and countries. Netanyahu and his ultra-religious Jewish neanderthals also claim self-defense as they continue to perpetrate their genocide of the Palestinian nation and the theft of its land: the absurdity of the foreign invading colonizer posing as the victim of the resisting indigenous colonized. With all these criminal half-demented autocrats, the world is heading to a major catastrophe.
Trump always accuses his opponents of the very things he does. He accuses Biden and Harris of driving the world to World War III, when in fact, he himself is acting in ways to accelerate the advent of WWIII. Trump says he wants to restore family values while he is an adulterer, a prostitute addict and a repeat divorce expert. His Evangelical bigots, especially those of the backward state of Texas, have been exposed one after the other of being pedophiles, sexual harassers, and abuser of women, just like Catholic priests. Yet his campaign accused the Democrats of being a collective pedophile club actively working to destroy the "family".
The world is set to go through another period of conservative barbarity - Israel is the perfect prototype - with a toll much higher than the previous World Wars because weapons have become much deadlier. Millions of ordinary people stand to die because criminal mad men want to go down in history as "great men", and only then, after the harm is done, will some sense be restored to the discourse, progress will again be made and the world will again move forward. The trajectory of human species has been two good steps forward and one bad step backward. The human species is unique in that it is capable of looking back and studying its own history, but it doesn't seem to ever learn from it.
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