Yet it is incumbent upon us to recall that Trump is not the only one fanning the flames of hatred. Britons will be well served to realise that two of the baiters on Fox News are Steve Hilton, a one-time guru of British PM David Cameron, and the rabid pro-Brexiteer liar-in-chief, former Euro MP Nigel Farage. What is happening in the US is already happening in Poland, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere. Angela Merkel’s hold on power is now so eroded her anti-immigrant opponents may well oust her sooner rather than later.
An article in today’s Guardian highlights these issues and takes them further.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... e-migrantsThe signs are there, if only we can bear to look. Something is happening to our world. Others have noted the way the post-1945 global architecture is beginning to crumble, as Trump undermines the western alliance in favour of authoritarian tyrannies. But the postwar order is unravelling in another, more insidious way too.
Put starkly, the norms and taboos established after the world witnessed the Holocaust are eroding before our eyes. For 70-odd years, roughly the span of a human life, they endured, keeping the lid on the darker impulses that, we had seen, lurked within all of us. It steadily became taboo to voice undiluted racism and xenophobia. Those fears, those loathings of the stranger, never went away, of course. But they were held in check, partly by the knowledge of where such hatred, unrestrained, could lead.
Now, in the US, Italy, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere, the restraints are off. There even seems to be a macho thrill in breaking the taboo, in echoing the words and deeds of that darkest era in human history. It’s as if the boundaries that were drawn after 1945, demarcating acceptable human behaviour, were mere lines in the sand – and now the tide is coming in.
It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens bit by bit, word by word, each step taking us lower into the pit. It’s why every one of us has to fight today’s horror. Because if we don’t, who knows what terrors lie ahead?