Maga's Reichstag Moment: Week 1, Day 2
A Personal Reflection on the eminent victory of American Fascism
It's absolutely evident now that the frequent comparisons we hear between 2025 America and 1930s Germany are pretty much spot-on.
But over the course of 35 years of being an anthropologist working and sometimes living in Guatemala, and studying and teaching Latin American Studies to hundreds of university students, I also see another analogy that in some ways fits just as well or even better between Trump and the stereotypical Banana Republic Dictator of Latin America. That's partly true just because Trump, in all his buffoonishness, seems more like a Banana Republic dictator to me than he does Hitler. But it's also true to some extent at the level of political philosophy and the nature of Trump's plan to rule Americans. That's especially true this afternoon, and a morning in which clownishly disorganized toddler Trump and his ever-immature adolescent Minister of War Hegseth revealed themselves, once again, as proponents of the same kind of “National Security Doctrine” (NSD) that made Latin America famous in the 1970s-1990s for its brutal dictatorships and bloody repression of anybody who disagreed.
The basic tenet of the region's NSD was that the military's primary reason for existing is to protect the nation against existential threats … to include internal domestic threats “as they are defined by national leaders.” Of course the leaders ALWAYS defined existential threats in self-serving terms that first and foremost defended their own power, class, and economic interests. Tragically, the NSD of repressive Latin American leaders usually coincided with the Cold War policies of U.S. leaders, meaning that time and again the U.S. aided and supported dictators and cruel military juntas who murdered tens of thousands of their own people.
I'm acutely aware of this because of my work in Guatemala, where soldiers and secret police murdered more than 200,000 murders out of a population of between 13 and 15 million, making the little Ohio-sized Republic the bloodiest repression on a per capita basis that took place in the Americas. Even that horrible number hardly captures the scope of the damage, however, as more than 10% of the total population was displaced, with at least 1.5 million people becoming internal refugees in hiding from a government trying to kill them, or through emigration to the U.S., or by taking shelter in huge refuee camps across the border in Mexico. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan and U.S. evangelical churches and organizations such as Pat Robertson's 700 Club provided literally hundreds of millions of dollars to Guatemalan government efforts to eradicate these “communists” … the great majority of whom were Indigenous Mayan peasants or agricultural day laborers, and had no idea at all of what a “communist” was.
There are other good examples of the horror of countries adopting a National Security Doctrine that directed military actions against their own citizens. Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic all had violent seizures of internal repression that resulted in tens of thousands of “extra-judicial executions” and one-sided battles of soldiers with guns against peasants with sticks. Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela and other countries had horrible episodes of grossly repressive military reprisals against citizens, along with regular incidents of people being tortured or “disappeared.”
And now, Trump and his berserk “Minister of War” are sounding very much like the Latin American dictators who actively persecuted the people and destroyed the economies of their countries. And like the dictators he emulates, Trump wants to turn the military he technically commands inward, to fight HIS enemies in the name of preserving HIS interests and promoting HIS wealth. And there's no question that if he is successful, the U.S. will indeed become a massive Banana Republic, with the same intrinsic instabilities and same downward spiraling quality of life, and on the same fast highway to hell as the dictators of Latin America inflicted on their countries.
Every day I express to myself the hope that the orange buffoon will one way or the other just disintegrate … and that the enthusiastic spasms of hate that animate his followers will subside. Because we … as a town, state, nation, and world … don't need violent mob-administered tyranny.
At this moment, we would be foolish not to fight those who would force fascism on us with every ounce of resistance we can muster.
So Please … Hang on to your hats, my friends, and brace yourself for what is certain at this point to be a rough road ahead. And try to remember that as rough as it gets, it will be even worse, and even longer term pain, if we allow the Maga Fascists to win.