Chris Hedges has warned us: 'fascists mean what they say'. Donald Trump has now issued NSPM-7, a presidential order that redefines dissent as terrorism and authorises the state to treat opponents as enemies. From Stalin's Article 58 to the Nazi Malicious Practices Act, history shows what happens when repression becomes law. We need to face facts: the US is very rapidly sliding into full-blown fascism — and the UK could follow.

This is the audio version:

This is the transcript:

Fascists mean what they say.

The US commentator, Chris Hedges, pointed this out recently, and he did so in the context of a new order from Donald Trump  called NSPM7, which was signed on the 25th of September.  And what that memo, that order does is lay out the future as he intends it to be.

And that future is dystopian. Dissent is recast as terrorism in Trump's world. This order makes that idea law, and terrorists are now to be eliminated by the US military, as he told them  in a conference when he assembled 700 or more generals and declared that they would now be fighting terrorism in the cities of the USA.

In effect, Trump is saying that there is a civil war to be waged in the USA now against what he calls the domestic terrorist threat, but which doesn't exist.

The truth is that the USA is now a fascist authoritarian state, and we need to take seriously what he's saying because, as Chris Hedges put it, "Fascists mean what they say".

This memo, this order, signed by Trump, starts with the words  'Heinous assassinations and other acts have dramatically increased'. He lists Charlie Kirk's murder, an attack on the Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 and recent attacks on ICE,  the Customs Enforcement Agency in the USA, that is expelling people from the country.

He claims that these are the basis for the terror that he is talking about. But in a country where, frankly, violence is normalised, and death on the streets is not uncommon, to pretend that this is the case is just wrong. He's trying to build a highly selective, distorted, and self-serving story about left-wing terror, for which there is almost no evidence whatsoever. But as a consequence, he's criminalising dissent.

Anti-fascism is now defined as terrorism.

Opposition to expulsions by ICE and opposition to patriarchy, or to his idea of empire, is defined as violent revolution.  Anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and campaigns for gender equality - all these are branded as extremist. And truth becomes whatever he, as the arbiter of power, declares it to be.

In this situation, the law is inverted.  Instead of being a mechanism that defends our freedoms, the law becomes a weapon of repression. This order dictates that the Department of Justice seek to prosecute people who oppose what Trump is trying to do with maximum charges.

There is an instruction that the  Internal Revenue Service of the USA, the equivalent of HM Revenue and Customs in the UK, should strip the tax status of suspected groups, and that would include NGOs of the sort that campaign in the UK with regard to human rights,  or even universities that teach courses that suggest that people have the right to dissent.

The agencies of the USA are authorised to interrogate and detain people just because they don't agree with Trump.

Justice in this world becomes a means of persecution, and we've been here before, of course. There are massive historical parallels to what Trump is now doing.

Stalin had Article 58 in his penal code. It was a catchall for counter-revolutionary activity, and literally millions of people died as a result of being prosecuted under Article 58. Any form of dissent basically gave rise to their execution.

The same thing happened in  Nazi Germany. There was the Malicious Practices Act of 1933, the very first act right at the beginning of the Nazi era that made it illegal to criticise the Nazi government, its leaders or its policies, and which allowed for punishment by arrest and internment in concentration camps like  Dachau, which was in suburban Munich.

Trump's memo - his order - fits exactly the same pattern. It's vague and sweeping, and it's designed to criminalise opposition, but without precisely saying what anybody will have done wrong, except to offer dissent.

This is, in effect, a declaration of preemptive war. What the order says is that a new organisation,  the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, or the JTTF for short, must disrupt and dismantle networks of opposition to what Trump is trying to achieve.  That's not based on evidence of crimes, but on the basis of people's associations or their free speech or their ideas. Financial networks, NGOs and universities are all specifically targeted by this. This is the policing of thought.

And behind  all this, there is a very obvious ideology. A Christian nationalist worldview drives this agenda.

Those who support LGBTQ+ rights or who are indeed members of the LGBTQ+ community, people who are secular humanists or immigrants, all of them are labelled as deviants. Science and reason are replaced by biblical dogma, and patriotism is twisted into theocratic authoritarianism.

This has a paranoia behind it. Indeed, there is a paranoia that is gripping the elite in America. Narcissists and conspiracists are imagining that there are enemies everywhere to what Trump is proposing to do and what they wish to happen.

Pseudo-democracy is being created. Pseudo-courts, pseudo-media, pseudo-citizens, people who will, in fact,  support the lies that maintain the Trump regime, and I rightly call it a regime and not an administration, and these lies replace facts.

Loyalty is replacing law.

Liberal institutions are being hollowed out.

Rights are being reduced to privileges and are being revoked at will, and hope and silence will ensure that the repression spreads.

And all of this happens whilst we try to look the other way. And that is the big threat of this moment.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "Universal innocence gives rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won't take you. Maybe it will all blow over", he said.

But it won't. This is real. Fascists should lay out in advance what they intend to do, and then they do it, and that is what is happening in the USA.

This will happen. People will disappear. This is not a future danger. It's here and now, and the decree that puts it into place already exists.  The bars to freedom are being literally built before our own eyes at this moment, and democracy can't survive if the opposition to it is redefined as terrorism.

So, where are we? Let's face the facts.  Fascism cannot be reasoned with. It must be confronted. And hope is most definitely not enough. And silence is complicity.

Solidarity and resistance are essential, even though that does inevitably involve risk. Making this video involves risk. If these measures become the norm in the UK as well, I will, of course, be identified as one of the threats.

But we have to defend civil liberties, truth and institutions now and challenge our government to act to do so, or we will follow the path of the USA and head down the direct route to both fascism and everything that  follows from it, including the internment camps, which I am sure will be sprouting up soon in the USA and not just for those who are scheduled for deportation because they come from an ethnic minority.

We have to isolate the USA.

We have to call out what's happening.

We have to say we object.

Our governments must decide whether they can any longer align with a country which is so openly fascist.

We need to come to the point where we say, "This is not acceptable."

We need to say, "This is a country now built on lies, peddling myths and untruths and oppressing what is real."

We need to support independent journalism, which there still is in the USA, but which is under enormous threat.

And we need to support those who will stand up for democracy.

We need to demand accountability.

And we need to stand up for what was put in place after World War II,  which was the structure of human rights, which our mainstream political parties in the UK, including the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, both now question, even though this structure was put in place as a result of the influence of Winston Churchill, who wanted to make sure that never again would human rights be threatened by fascists. But they are, and our politicians are letting that happen.

We have to take action before the iron bars of fascism slam the door shut. That's the risk that we face, and our politicians have to rise to the challenge, or we're all in very deep trouble. The US is already a fascist state. We could be too. That's what we're up against.

What do you think? There's a poll below. Do you think the US has now moved into fascism? Do you think that the UK could follow in the same way? Are you willing to take a stand? Or will you stand by the wayside? We are at a point where we have to decide.

Please think about what you are going to do.

Poll

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Taking further action

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