If we don't learn from the past we are destined to relive it. Apparently we didn't learn anything from how FASCISM destroyed Germany. Why?

Your country is a very long way from the Nazism of Hitler or the Fascism of that theory's inventor, Mussolini.

It is nearer chaos than the rigid, bureaucratic, military order of those dictatorships.

As to which came first, those two invented what they called National Socialism and Fascism, respectively, but the drives behind such regimes are by no means new. Communism preceded them by a decade or so; and is just as cruel. The Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution was well-named. For centuries before that, European countries were riven by first, intense theocracy then sectarian strife. These all have traits in common, mainly the desire by ruthless factions of very small-minded, greedy people to take control by brutal means, whatever the dogmas, methods or consequences. 

The Nazis' views on race were not entirely theirs either, but based on a mixture of common anti-Semitism and a pseudo-science called Eugenics, which had a widespread following from the early years of the 20C. to the end of WW2, when full horrors of Hitler's regime became known.

There undoubtedly is a growing nationalist streak in many Western  nations, more so perhaps in Europe for various reasons. The danger lies not in those ideas, but in governments failing to answer the concerns behind them, satisfactorily. Instead they tend to retreat behind sneers like "populist", which appears to be a word coined in your last Presidential-election campaigns to attack politicians who might dare to sympathise with fears raised by of all people, the electorate. 



Whatever might be going wrong in the USA now, and however inept and narcissistic your current President is, I would not accuse it of becoming fascist.  After all, I gather you are gearing up for selecting candidates for the next Presidential elections, and don't appear to lack candidates, according to one of today's BBC Radio Four news programmes. If your government was turning fascist, its first target would be candidates and elections!

I am perfectly aware I am a foreigner to America, which has two effects.

One is that I am not affected either way myself; but that does not blind me to the plight of those poor employees - especially as I was once a lowly-ranked civil-servant myself once. Until privatised, via a poor deal involving some shady bunch of New York-based money-traders.

The other is that it is harder for me to understand what is going on: we see more of the international, not internal, affairs. Also of course at the moment, most of our own news and current-affairs reporting is about something called "Brexit" - on which DJT himself has remarked.


Despite Brexit though, the whole matter including the stopping of so many people's pay and payments to contractors, etc, is being reported on the News here. We can only watch, wonder what the Hell the US President thinks he is doing, and have every sympathy for those poor people. The actual argument within Congress itself, is of course America's own business, though it is reported here, but our hearts go out to the innocent victims of the cross-fire.


I think our main disagreement is over the definition of "Fascist". I am from only one generation after World War Two, in a country that fought valiantly (later and very gratefully with American help) to destroy one of the most murderous regimes of the 20th Century. So we tend to see fascism nearer ist origins - we have small but intensely irritating and even dangerous, neo-Fascist / neo-Nazi groups in Britain and Europe, and they touch a very sore point, but I don't see American politicians behaving like them or supporting their ideology. There are huge differences between Hitler and Mussolini, and come to that Stalin, and your current president.

At a simple level, those three dictators needed to be, and were, clever as well as ruthless; but Trump seems to lack the organisational sense needed to overthrow a government and rule a whole nation.

Further, I would say that whilst he is undoubtedly callous by playing with so many people's livelihoods, I think it's more from sheer incompetence and petty party-political point-scoring than a wish to rule the USA as a single-party dictatorship.  

He praises some very unsavoury characters around the world, but also says he is proud of his own country - he has a strange way of showing it, and it's hard to know how he defines a "Great America" nowadays. It was simple in the electioneering: "Great America" was to be a nation of collieries, steelworks and major factories exporting around the world again. I don't know what it is now.  


I did not know he has undermined the FBI as you say - apart of course from the matter of not paying its staff - so it cannot function. I appreciate that is a very serious matter in an increasingly fragile world, with so many international influences in such a state of flux. I don't see that as being particularly patriotic, either.


I still feel he will come off the worst, that the USA will become so fed up with Trump's incompetence and gamesmanship that it will throw him out of office at the next opportunity. I would be extremely surprised if he wins another term, but if he does, that suggests he is by no means alone in his views and incomprehension about the rest of the world.

We Britons, like any other foreigners, cannot tell the US what to do internally. That's for you Americans. However, we do not like to see thousands of "ordinary" people in a rich, democratic nation pushed into poverty by their own leader, for his own, dubious reasons. And we are very concerned how the USA treats the rest of the world. Until recently it had a reputation for delighting in telling everyone else how to live, in usurping their cultures and histories, in foisting its own culture on all.  (The Communists used to accuse the USA of "hegemony", but that really was pot calling kettle black.)  It was already losing its world power before Donald John Trump, but I fear he is hastening the nation's decline, turning it into a mixture of horror-story and laughing stock, and himself into a complete fool.


"Fascist" though? Well, yes, he is deeply unpleasant. He might fit your dictionary's loose definition. He does share traits like narcissism, hard-line nationalism and intolerance of opponents or any who ask too many questions, with the real Fascist autocrats of the past, and modern ones in some countries now. However, I still think he is a far cry from Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and the USA is not ready to allow any such regime. 

I only hope events do not prove me wrong, for they do, it will be God Help, not Bless, America; and much of the rest of the world with her.