Attacks on the Free Press: How Dictatorships Begin

Numerous fact checking organizations have documented that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer on this blog, lies 76 to 80% of the time.  Often the lies are gratuitous and one wonders why the issue addressed even merits mention much less lying about it.  Others are far more sinister and it should be apparent to all except Der Trumpenführer's most extreme and/unthinking supporters that the man has an agenda: attack and destroy anything and anyone who sees through his lies or who diminishes his insatiable and delusional self-promotion.  The goal?  Much like that of Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels: destroy the free press and anything that can oppose their false narrative.  Sadly, Fox News and Breitbart are only too happy to fuel the false narrative.  Those that do not are now labeled "false news" as is every fact that undermines Der Trumpenführer's narcissistic view of himself or that calls into question his actions or self-enrichment.  An op-ed at CNN looks at the severe danger posed as does a piece in the New Yorker.  Here are highlights from CNN:

If you watched President Trump's astonishing press conference on Thursday, you might be forgiven for concluding that the most urgent problem facing America is that the media "is out of control." Some media "is fantastic," the president allowed. But on the whole, journalism is plagued by "false, horrible, fake reporting."

It's clear that America's new President has chosen his new best enemy. Now that the campaign is over and it's not very useful to drive the crowds into a frenzy of hatred against Hillary Clinton, Trump has found the new direction in which to focus his supporters' animosity. But this time, the anointed enemy serves an even more useful purpose.

On Friday, he made his point even more directly, tweeting "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!"

The advantages of having an enemy are well-known. In Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" -- suddenly a new best-seller in the Trump era -- the masses engage in a daily mandatory ritual, the "Two Minutes of Hate," during which their anger is feverishly stoked against the foe of the moment. Dictators, strongmen and autocrats have practiced the art of drumming up loathing toward others to great effect.

Trump . . . . .  knows that perceived enemies can help him fire up the base, rally the crowds and shift responsibility. Don't look at me, this script cries out; look over there, there is a threat, a danger, a foe.

When it comes to enemies, a demonized media is even more useful than the average antagonist.

Trump's real nemesis is the truth. By attacking the media, he opens up a new line of attack against facts, his true target. He is, after all, the Gaslighter in Chief. He is trying to confuse the public so that they will not believe inconvenient truths.

What he wants is to manufacture his own pseudo-truth; to create a reality where he always wins. Where the only polls that count are the ones where he's doing great. Where the only comments about him are compliments, and where anything negative is false, the work of an out-of-control media.

During Thursday's press conference, Trump unleashed torrents of lies, distortions and fabrications. When he said he won by the biggest Electoral College victory since Ronald Reagan, it took a reporter to point out that the last three presidents, Obama, Bush and Clinton, won by larger margins. He dismissed it all with a flippant, "Well, I don't know, I was given that information."

As the scandal surrounding his campaign's ties to Russia grows, Trump wants the public to think it's all the doing of the dishonest media. But journalists are not letting up, and the vast majority of Americans are not going to fall for Trump's tactics for very long. Even on the generally-supportive Fox News channel, the brave Shepard Smith called him out. "It's absolutely crazy," Smith said. "He keeps repeating ridiculous throwaway lines that are not true at all and sort of avoiding this issue of Russia as if we're some kind of fools for asking the question."

When Trump says the people don't trust the media, he doesn't know that the media outlets the people don't trust are the ones he likes -- and like him in return; probably the ones he described as "fantastic."
Trump wants America to think that it is the media that is out of control, because he wants to control what people view as true and false. It seemed like a good plan, but it has a fatal flaw. People are learning the difference between good journalism and bad. 

 
The piece in the New Yorker looks further at the issue and the history of past distortions of the truth that have lead to horrific results.  Here are excerpts:

When the leaders of the Bolshevik movement—Lenin, Stalin, and the rest—used the term vrag naroda, an “enemy of the people,” it was an ominous epithet that encompassed a range of “wreckers” and “socially dangerous elements.” Enemies included clergy, intellectuals, monarchists, Trotskyists, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and well-to-do farmers. To be branded an enemy of the people was to face nearly inevitable doom . . . . . To be called an “enemy of the people” did not mean you had to hold oppositional thoughts or commit oppositional acts; it only meant that the dictator had included you in his grand scheme to insure the compliance of the population.

Robespierre, one of the architects of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, set out to “horrify” the opposition, and his instruments were the epithet, righteousness, and the blade. 

In 1917, the same year as the Bolshevik seizure of power, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published an essay in Pravda called “Enemies of the People,” in which he lionized the Jacobin Terror as “instructive.” His party, “the Jacobins of the twentieth century,” he wrote, should follow suit, if not with the guillotine, then with mass arrests of “the financial magnates and bigwigs.” Once in power, Lenin was far more brutal than the revolutionary French.

Now, Donald Trump, the elected President of the oldest democracy on earth, a real-estate brander and reality-T.V. star, has taken not to Pravda but to his own preferred instrument of autocratic pronouncement—the tweet—to declare the media “the enemy of the American people.” 

For months, cool, responsible heads have been counselling hot, impulsive heads to avoid overreacting to Trump. We must give him a chance. We must not in all our alarm compare him to all the tin-pot dictators and bloody authoritarians who have disgraced history.  . . . . we were assured that everything was fine. He was simply fulfilling the agenda of his campaign. Calm down. Don’t react to every tweet. Don’t take the bait.

Then came his press conference, last week . . . . Trump instead took it upon himself to denounce repeatedly and at length the sinful, dishonest press and the “very fake news” it produces. It was unforgettable.

What Trump resembled at the lectern was an old-fashioned autocrat wielding a very familiar rhetorical strategy.

Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, makes the point that autocrats from Chávez to Erdoğan, Sisi to Mugabe, all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a more oppositional tone and role. “And then that paves the way for the autocrat’s next move,” Simon told me. “Popular support for the media dwindles and the leader starts instituting restrictions. It’s an old strategy.” 

At the same time, there are distinct signs that Trump is losing ground among members of the conservative media who had initially cut him some slack, not least because they felt the liberal media had been besotted by Barack Obama. The attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, on the intentions of the intelligence agencies, and on the patriotism of the press have become too evident, too repulsive to be discounted as mere sideshow. 

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as in every genuinely authoritarian state, there are no “enemies”—or, at least, none with the capacity to challenge power. Calling on all the repressive means available in such a state—compliant courts and legislatures; the elimination of political competition; comprehensive censorship of television—soaring popularity ratings are achieved. President Trump may wish for such means, just as he wishes for such popularity. For all the chaos and resulting gloom these past weeks, it has been heartening to see so many “enemies of the American people”—protesters, judges, journalists, citizens of all kinds, even some members of Congress—do their work despite Presidential denunciation, not necessarily as partisans of one party or another but as adherents to a Constitution.

The resistance must continue and Trump must be driven from office, preferably after being found guilty of treason in such glaring terms that he and his agenda will be rejected by all but the most extreme racists, Christofascists and misogynists who have been the bedrock of his base. The man is unfit for office.  Oh, and if we are lucky, Mike Pence will be implicated as well. 

The Lethal Personality Disorder Of Donald Trump

If you do some reading of various mental health journals and pieces, one will find some common traits among some of history's worse tyrants.  Here are a few snapshots:

It is argued that it is highly probable Adolf Hitler suffered from a multitude of severe psychological disorders including paranoid schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder.

Historically, this particular combination of 3 personality disorders was seen in all of history's worst tyrants (e.g., Hitler, Stalin etc.). These tyrants lust for wealth, fame and power, and callously destroy everyone that they suspect opposes them. As they gain more power, they become more grandiose, power-hungry, and paranoid. If unopposed, these tyrants initiate wars, which result in the mass slaughter of innocent civilians. The tragedy is that the public is easily seduced by these tyrant's grandiose fantasies of national "greatness", and their paranoid hatred of some scapegoated minority (e.g., Jews, Muslims, immigrants, or refugees). These tyrants know that is easier to mobilize people by teaching them hatred and paranoia, than by teaching them love and forgiveness. 

So what are the traits of someone with Narcissistic personality disorder?  Here's a brief description:

They show an exaggerated sense of self-importance, insensitivity towards the feelings and needs of others, and callous exploitation of others. They alienate others with their arrogance, self-centeredness, greed, and lack of kindness. They have feelings of entitlement; they often expect to be catered to and are furious when this does not happen. They are attention-seeking and admiration seeking. Their manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and callousness is identical to the selfish, callous and remorseless use of others that is seen in psychopaths.

Sound familiar?   It should since it summarizes Donald Trump.  Sadly, too many in the public know little or no history and are refusing to see the warning signs that Donald Trump in the White House would be a catastrophe.  Whether or not you like Hillary Clinton, she doesn't have the traits as some of history's worse villains.  A very lengthy piece in Huffington Post looks at just how dangerous Trump would be if elected to the presidency.  The man is unfit for high office and America will likely face a catastrophe if Trump gains the White House.  Here are article highlights:

In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter for People, experienced a phenomenon familiar to her peers: calls from supposed PR guys named “John Miller” or “John Barron”, gratuitously boasting about Trump’s wealth, business success and romantic prowess. Most bizarre, all agreed, was that the caller spoke and sounded exactly like Trump himself. But this particular call was immortalized on tape.

As others had, Carswell recognized the distinctive voice and accent. Distinctive, too, was the callousness and narcissism of an abysmal- and unbalanced - human being.

Trump was 44 then, and living with his future second wife Marla Maples. Nonetheless, his boastful “representative” shared for public consumption that “Trump” had “three other girlfriends”, detailing at length his alleged romance with Nicholas Sarkozy’s future wife Carla Bruni. But not all women were so lucky- for the benefit of People’s readers “Miller” described how Madonna stalked Trump at a charity ball before facing the ultimate devastation: “He’s got zero interest that night.”

But here’s the thing which takes his performance from odious to pathological - Trump wanted a larger audience for his particular brand of self - aggrandizing swill, one in the millions, and was willing to assume a false identity to get it. It didn’t matter if he was lying; he didn’t care who got hurt. All that counted is what he needed in the moment.

To meet his needs, Donald Trump wants us to make him president. To meet its own needs, the media - particularly cable news - is helping him.

[T]here is nothing more “current” or important than Donald Trump’s psychological fitness to be president. All the hyperventilation of the media - parsing his “positions”, pontificating on his” strategy” and intuition- is a poisonous form of the “political correctness” he otherwise deplores, normalizing the abnormal by shoehorning him into the usual analytic boxes. And what it yields is, in great part, rubbish.

There is only one organizing principle which makes sense of his wildly oscillating utterances and behavior - the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder.

The Mayo Clinic describes it as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.” This is bad enough in selecting a spouse or a friend. But when applied to a prospective president, the symptoms are disqualifying.

With Trump ever in mind, try these. An exaggerated sense of self-importance. An unwarranted belief in your own superiority. A preoccupation with fantasies of your own success, power and brilliance. A craving for constant admiration. A consuming sense of entitlement. An expectation of special favors and unquestioning compliance.

A penchant for exploiting or disparaging others. A total inability to recognize the needs of anyone else. An incapacity to see those you meet as separate human beings. An unreasoning fury at people you perceive as thwarting your wishes or desires. A tendency to act on impulse. A superficial charm deployed to disguise a gift for manipulation.

A need to always be right. A refusal to acknowledge error. An inability to tolerate criticism or critics. A compulsion to conform your ever - shifting sense of “reality” to satisfy your inner requirements . A tendency to lie so frequently and routinely that objective truth loses all meaning.

A belief that you are above the rules. An array of inconsistent statements and behaviors driven by your needs in the moment. An inability to assess the consequences of your actions in new or complex situations. In sum, a total incapacity to separate the world from your own psychodrama.

Recognize anyone?

If your life’s work is building hotels and casinos, this pathology can work for you -especially if your dad has started you out with a few million dollars in chips. . . . . The annals of business are filled with such people, some of whom wind up in jail, others of whom die rich. But however puissant they become in their chosen realm, their sickness of mind and spirit cannot ruin a country. That power is reserved for presidents.

By the consensus of mental health experts, this emotional impairment has a last fatal ingredient - there is no cure. For a man like Donald Trump, life offers no lessons, no path forward save to continue as you have until, like Icarus, you fly too close to the sun.

He is afflicted with a comprehensive and profound character disorder which leaves no corner of his psyche whole. And this dictates - and explains - every aspect of his behavior.

Take his recourse to bullying and slander. “I’m a counterpuncher,” he rationalizes. “[I]’ve been responding to what they did to me.” Now we understand, Donald - your enemies made you do it.

This astoundingly graceless and unpresidential behavior is far too pointless and indiscriminate to qualify as strategy or tactics. The common thread in all this lashing out - often at those who can’t fight back - is that it has nothing to do with issues, or anything else one would expect from a normal candidate. It is another symptom of Trump’s pathology - the visceral reflex to humiliate and degrade anyone who displeases him, no matter the context or situation.

Opposition of any kind enrages him. He incites reprisals against protesters. He threatened violence in Cleveland as payback for the GOP’s “unfairness.” He fuels anger against Hispanics, Muslims, and other minorities whom he perceives as inimical. And never - not once - does he take any responsibility for stirring these toxic pots. For one of the symptoms of his disability is an absence of conscience or accountability.

Which brings us to a central problem of Trump’s warped psychology - he believes that filling the presidency requires nothing but the wonder of himself. This gives the lie to GOP’s most craven rationalization of its own capitulation: that a suddenly docile Trump will, as president, defer to a cadre of wise and experienced advisors drawn from the party establishment.

This is pernicious nonsense. Consistent with his character disorder, Trump proudly insists that his chief advisor is himself. Even were he so inclined, in order to learn from others he must know enough to discern good advice from bad. But such is his pathology that he feels no need to learn much of anything from anyone. And so, from the beginning, he has plunged us down the bottomless rabbit hole of his intellectual emptiness.

His ignorance and grandiosity form a lethal compound. He disowns NATO, unaware that he is playing into Putin’s hands; blithely proposes nuclear proliferation in Asia; muses aloud about using nuclear weapons; and imagines negotiating one-on-one with North Korea’s psychotic leader. He proposes a trade war potentially ruinous to the world economy. He abets ISIS and Al Qaeda by scapegoating all Muslims at home and abroad. Oblivious to the appalled reaction around the globe, he promises to compel the respect of world leaders through “ the aura of personality.”

His equally spurious domestic “proposals”, such as they may be, reflect nothing but the unreality of his own self-concept. His tax plan is absurd on its face. His astonishing proposal to trash America’s credit by defaulting on our debt reveals an inability to differentiate between running a casino and a country. His posturing for the NRA is as dangerous as it is dishonest.

One can forecast the inevitable day to day damage to our country - the lashings out, the abuses of power, the mercurial and confidence- destroying lies and changes of mind, the havoc his distorted lens would wreak upon our institutions and our spirit. But most dangerous of all is the collision between a volatile world, a leader unable to perceive external reality, and the often unbearable pressures of the presidency. That Trump’s judgement would crack time and again is certain - the only question is how dangerous the moment.

So how have we fallen prey to a man who, by the damning evidence of his own behavior, is psychologically unfit to be president? When did boasting top coherence; mindless posturing become strength; a talent for ridicule supplant experience or judgement; a gift for scapegoating surpass wisdom or generosity? Why must we even contemplate someone with this stunted inner landscape as the world’s most powerful man?

[T]wo institutions deserve special condemnation.

First, the Republican Party. For too long it fed the GOP’s middle and working class base easy scapegoats - Washington, minorities - while the Paul Ryans of the party contravened its voters’ interests: pushing free trade, reduced entitlements, and tax cuts for the rich. Trump is what happened to the party when its electorate spat this pablum out. . . . . Even more contemptible is the party’s embrace of Trump. For we have reached, as David Brooks wrote, the GOP’s “McCarthy moment” - a turning point when concern for country should override grubby pragmatism. 

But, with honorable exceptions, the broadcast media has been even more shameful and complicit. Worst of all is cable news -in pursuit of revenue and ratings, they have given Trump $3 billion in free advertising, feeding his candidacy - and his ego - by spreading the mythology of his imperviousness and power. . . . . Wallowing in self interest, they have shrunk from saying what must be said: that Trump is unfit for higher office. 

The Republican Party is beyond redemption. The media have five months left. Let them use it well.

Never in my memory have I been so frightened by a candidate for the White House and never do I remember a comparable blindness of so many to the threat that the nation faces. 

Putin is Reprising Hitler and Stalin's 1939 Invasion of Poland

Some are saying that Vladimir Putin has derived his play book for reviving Russian imperialism on the tactics of two of the most horrible figures in world history: Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin.  Both mass murderers on a horrific scale.  It's been noted that Putin's claims that he seeks to protect ethnic Russians mirrors Hitler's pretense of protecting ethnic Germans in 1938 and 1939.  But Putin's model also follows Stalin's excuse for invading Poland in 1939 as Germany invaded from the west.  Some, thankfully, remember their history.  Sadly, far too many do not and seem doomed to see history's horrors repeated.  The Daily Beast looks at Putin's effort to reprise Stalin's brutal regime.  Here are excerpts:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey said Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new use of Russian military force inside Ukraine harkens back to 1939 when Joseph Stalin led a Russian invasion of Poland, and Dempsey predicted Putin was far from finished.

Dempsey was speaking to the Aspen Security Forum and responding to the news that the U.S. government is accusing the Russian military of firing artillery from Russian territory into eastern Ukraine in support of separatists there. The latest development represents a dangerous escalation of the crisis on the part of Putin and the Russia-Ukraine crisis is now a global problem, he said.

“It does change the situation. You’ve got a Russian government that has made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. It’s the first time since 1939 or so that that’s been the case,” Dempsey said. “They clearly are on a path to assert themselves differently not just in Eastern Europe, but Europe in the main, and towards the United States.”

Joseph Stalin used similar rhetoric and justifications when he invaded Poland in September 1939, only days after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army invaded Poland from the other direction. Stalin and Hitler had signed a secret pact of non-aggression and proposed to carve up Europe between them, but Stalin said his goal was to protect ethnic Russians in his near abroad.

“The Soviet Government cannot regard with indifference the fact that the kindred Ukrainian and White Russian people, who live on Polish territory and who are at the mercy of fate, are now left defenseless,” read the note from the Soviet Foreign Ministry to the Polish Ambassador to Moscow on the day Stalin invaded.

“Putin may actually light a fire that he loses control over,” he said. “There’s a rising tide of nationalism in Europe right now that has been created in many ways by these Russian activities.”

State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Thursday that U.S. intelligence showed that the Russian military had now fired artillery from Russia into Ukraine, but she declined to provide any details about the source of the intelligence.

“We have new evidence that the Russians intend to deliver heavier and more powerful, multiple rocket launchers to the separatist forces in Ukraine, and have evidence that Russia is firing artillery from within Russia to attack Ukrainian military positions,” she said. 

“Putin’s problem is that he is right now on the verge of military defeat. So he has two choices right now, neither of them good,” Saakashvili said. “He could move in his troops, after which he would become an international pariah with no certain outcome. The second choice he has is to live with military defeat, but that could trigger a process inside Russia that he can no longer control… Putin cannot afford to lose.”

Like so many of his predecessors, Putin's rule will ultimately harm the Russian people.  They need to find a way to overthrow his rule before it is too late.