HOW FAR IS IT THAT WAY?

President Trump's  political programme now is going much as we saw it at the beginning of his term of office .  The pattern includes : indentifying enemies , menacing them, inventing fresh enemies and doing the same with them ; after this comes Presidential conflict with helpers, staff, state organisations etc., suddenly annouced sackings, saying what will be done today, saying something different tomorrow, all geared to showing who is 'boss' and making every decision depend upon his will today rather than his perceived policy yesterday. 

 Each element in the pattern has an important thing in common : what is done and what has to be done  depends - and clearly shown to depend - not on firm policy but on the often changeable will of the President.

Staff , advisers , policy-makers and agents of government become afraid  and insecure. So do friends and allies. A development of  the pattern  has been the recent  creation of  unease, disagreement and conflict between  international allies of the USA. This is the ultimate of power seeking for a personal, rather than a state presidency.  When  this pattern is set up - as President Trump has set it up - we are forced, probably unwillingly , to look at similar histories  elsewhere  and find the way dictators rather than presidents behaved. 

Europe has plenty of examples of dictators. So has the rest of the world but we Europeans are more aware of our own. Many fellow Europeans lived in their time and with their long sad legacies.   From ancient history until our own lifetime it has been happening , Julius Caesar still works towards monarchy today and thrusts the crown aside disdainfully tomorrow, selecting  the way of life that is most profitable. Our public opinion is now being  trained to expect presidential decrees rather than presidential policies, we are learning  that international treaties can be walked away from without shame, although we struggled hard to make international treaties mean something more than selfish grabbing, we are getting used to state security displacing personal , communal and human , rights, getting  used to the slogan, a good guy with a gun is the only remedy against a bad guy with a gun, profitable arms traders selling arms to both, nuclear weapons as a necessary deterrent , diplomacy as a disposable  presidential gift, not a human right that  all of us own.  One after another  we have given  away to profiteers what we believed we had won for  good of our whole people. Our financial systems are constructed to  create poverty while carefully manipulated riches can be created for a systematically selected few . Institutions  that should be our shield and protection - and were often meant to be- are either bought over by money or rendered powerless by the threat of  removing it,  the decision-making power of small and medium-sized nations is given over to the  most financially and militarily powerful - a reversal of what we should be doing.

The empire builders are in town, every town, every state, every institution. The British empire, the French, Portuguese, German, Italian empires followed the Persians and the Romans,  the Greeks, even the Celts. In order to help the rise of yet more empires - as if we did not get our fill of their ingrowing  evil- we have not just allowed but encouraged our governments to increase conflict and do it with weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in an afternoon. The starkest  difference between empires old and new is that our present empire-builders want to control not just part of our world but all of it.

Throughout their programme of power manipulation the manipulators must know how far they can go without provoking a reaction they cannot deal with ?

Maybe the presidential separation of children from parents of immigrants crossing the US border and the angry reaction to it may show if there could be a limit to people's tolerance?

 

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