Donald Trump's 100% tariff threats against BRICS could seriously backfire

Donald Trump has announced the threat of 100% tariffs on imports from BRICS countries unless they commit to the perpetual superiority of the US Dollar in international trade.

There’s nothing new about Donald Trump threatening extreme protectionist measures against other countries, in fact he’s about to shatter the USMCA trade agreement by imposing 25% tariffs on the United States’ neighbours and allies Mexico and Canada.

However the extreme threat of 100% tariffs on products from Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Iran, Indonesia, and a multitude of other BRICS aligned economies just goes to show how threatened his administration feels by any kind of transnational economic cooperation that doesn’t involve the United States.

Despite all of Trump’s assurances (lies) that the tariffs he imposes will be paid by the countries he’s trying to economically sanction, the reality is that they’ll be paid by US businesses and citizens when they purchase imported products.

Raising the price of imported goods via tariffs incentivises consumers to buy domestically produced goods and services by making them artificially cheaper, however it’s impossible to boost US output overnight, so more tariffs mean more price rises.

And 100% tariffs would mean that prices would literally double.

Take China as an example. Over the last few decades US capitalists have made fortunes by closing down domestic production and importing from China instead, where lower wages, weaker regulation, and poorer environmental standards mean much higher profit margins.

In 2023 China exported $501 billion in goods and services to the US, while the US exported $147 billion to China in return, meaning the US trade deficit with China is over $350 billion.

If Trump were to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, that would end up lumbering US consumers with hundreds of $billions in extra taxes.

Then bear in mind that it wouldn’t just be China either. If you add up US imports from the BRICS member states alone (setting aside the 9 partner states and 8 more that have applied for membership), it adds up to over over $660 billion per year in imports.

It’s beyond fantastical to imagine that US companies that rely on Chinese manufacturing and $160 billion+ in imports from other BRICS member states would be either capable of, or willing to close down their overseas operations and build replacement factories in the US overnight, so prices will go up.

You can’t just expect production to shift back to the United States overnight. Neither for high tech electronic components, nor cheap mass produced consumer goods.

You can’t just slam the door shut on global supply chains and expect factories producing hundreds of $billions worth of goods to spring up in your own country overnight.

Who is going to pay for their construction? Who is going to staff them? Who is going to train up all of these new workers, especially in high tech manufacturing and services? Who is going to cover the additional costs of the required machine tools if they’re produced in countries that are subject to Trump’s sanctions? Where are the raw materials that the US cannot produce for itself in sufficient quantities (rare earth metals for example) going to come from?

Trump’s repeated threats to impose tariffs are akin to the behaviour of a local mob boss trying to bully their local community into conformity. Either everyone does as he says, and conduct business through his cartel, or they suffer reprisals and punishment beatings.

And the punishment beatings aren’t just being meted out on rival economies like China either. Trump’s economic sanctions on Mexico and Canada illustrate the fact that the new US administration is prepared to sanction and destabilise its allies, as well as geopolitical rivals.

There are quite obvious parallels between Trump’s tariffs and Brexit. Both raised trade barriers between themselves and their neighbours; both have been sold to the public with a pack of outright lies about the consequences and exaggerations of the benefits; both can be seen as self-applied sanctions with dramatic effects on domestic businesses that rely on imports and exports; and both diminish the country’s reputation and diplomatic standing by unilaterally tearing up previously agreed treaties and agreements.

Then there’s the fact that previous US attempts at protectionism have backfired spectacularly, like the embargo on the sale of advanced AI chips to China, which seemed to force the Chinese into coming up with better and more efficient AI language models, and the $1trillion implosion of US tech stocks after the release of DeepSeek-R1.

It’s vanishingly unlikely that countries that are targeted by Trump’s tariffs would just lie down and take it, without replying with tit-for-tat tariffs of their own, which would seriously damage US exports.

And seeking to bully other countries into subservience to US interests could end up being highly counter-productive to the stated aim of weakening BRICS.

If the US gains the reputation of a bully that purposefully disrupts and damages other countries economies to pursue their own agenda, or simply due to the whims of their unstable and unreliable President, doesn’t that make it more likely that countries will turn towards BRICS for stability and mutually beneficial trade, rather than against it?

Wouldn’t Trump’s trail of disruption and broken trade agreements hasten the development of a global currency "to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar" rather than dissuade it?

Take a look at how the World has changed since the beginning of the neoliberal era in 1980 when China was a trading minnow compared to the United States.

By 2018 China was already doing more trade than the United States with well over half the countries in the world.

If the United States becomes a global bully that doesn’t just destabilise China and its allies on the whims of its increasingly deranged President, but attacks its own allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico too, doesn’t that further strengthen the Chinese?

If the US seeks to bully a country into coming over to their side of Trump’s new isolationist iron curtain with the threat of tariffs, but China is their bigger trading partner, and doesn’t resort to intimidation and threats of economic destabilisation, who are they likely to choose?

It seems that all China and BRICS need to do for now is to maintain respectful relations with their trading partners and offer a stable alternative to increasingly erratic Trumpian chaos, and they get to expand their sphere of influence by default, right? 

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Why are Twitter censoring criticism of Saudi Arabia?

With over 10,000 Tweets to my name I'd never been blocked by Twitter for 'misconduct' until today.

The offending Tweet I've been locked out of my account for was a sarcastic criticism of Donald Trump's sickeningly cosy relationship with the brutal, misogynistic, homophobic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, democracy-repressing, journalist-dismembering Saudi Arabia war criminals, putting it in contrast with the hate and lies he continually spreads about the socially liberal and progressive Muslim figure Ilhan Omar.

My Tweet was posted in reply to one by Medhi Hasan, which provides the context for my sarcastic reply.

And here's my response that Twitter have deemed to be so unacceptable that they've blocked me until I remove it:

I've already had one appeal rejected (they don't tell you why, just as they don't tell you what rule you've supposedly broken when they put you in Twitter purgatory in the first place). But I'm appealing again.

And suffering this Twitter censorship for the 'crime' of criticising Saudi Arabia has made me determined to redouble my efforts to criticise this disgusting regime, and the western politicians (like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Emmanuel Macron) who support them.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

"Politics is Broken" and guess what? Only they can save us!

The 11 (and counting) squatter MPs are all pushing this populist "politics is broken" trope as hard as they can, and positioning themselves as the heroic saviours.

In this article I'm going to look at the absolute chaos this "politics is broken" trope has already unleashed in three other major economies, before looking at the squatter MPs and their Independent Group (AKA 'Tinge') in more detail.

What I'm not going to do is argue that politics isn't broken. Britain wouldn't be in this farcical Brexit shit-show if the political establishment class hadn't put us here, and anti-vaxxers, grifters, and smarmy charlatans would never have got their hands on the levers of power in Italy, the United States, and France had their political systems not been flawed enough to allow them to either.

The point is that just because someone is repeatedly saying "politics is broken" doesn't mean you have to unquestioningly accept the way they position themselves as the only possible saviours.

Italy

The Five Star Movement is a populist anti-politics political party founded in 2009 by the stand-up comedian and polemicist Beppe Grillo.

This party has used the big tent political strategy to build a disparate coalition of all kinds of people with eurosceptics, anti-globalists, direct democracy advocates, and anti-vaxxers making up several of their core demographics.

Initially attractive to people on the left for their anti-establishment, environmentalist, and direct democracy advocacy, it soon became clear that this party was shifting rapidly towards the extreme-right.

This rightwards shift became absolutely indisputable when the 5 Star MEPs in the European Parliament joined Nigel Farage's rag-tag band of far-right eurosceptics in 2014, but unfortunately, as in Britain, Italians pay very little attention to the internal machinations of the European Parliament, so this collusion with far-right fanatics and outright fascists went virtually unnoticed.

The March 2018 Italian General Election was the huge M5S breakthrough moment, they won the most votes and landed enough seats to make them kingmakers in the Italian parliament. In May 2018 they created a coalition with the fascist party Lega Nord bringing fascism back to the Italian government for the first time in decades.

Since then the popularity of Five Star has waned (although they're still extremely popular with the anti-vaxxer movement for the radical anti-science policies they've enacted) while the fascists they enabled into power have soared in popularity from the 3rd most popular party to by far the most popular.

So the lesson from Italy is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get anti-vaxxers and fascism.

United States

I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain all that much about the last few years in US politics.

Donald Trump used "politics is Broken" style populism to position himself as the ideological saviour who was going to "drain the swamp" and "bring the jobs back" to places like the rust belt.

People believed him, he got elected, he immediately filled the top administration jobs with more Wall Street bankers, corporate stooges, and inherited wealth billionaires than any government in US history, then he set about attacking the health care and social security systems, and then he implemented the biggest tax handout for the mega-rich ever.

Nothing for the little people who voted him into power, and a massive windfall for his mega-rich mates. Who would have thought such a thing could happen when you elect billionaire from the international speculator class as your President?

So the lesson from the United States is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get Trumpism.

France

The situation in France is by far the most analogous to what's currently happening in Britain.

Emmanuel Macron was a right-wing neoliberal who embedded himself within the centre-left socialist party. 

As minister of economy and finance in the socialist government he set about implementing spectacularly unpopular labour reforms that triggered mass protests and trashed the government's popularity.

After destroying the socialist government from within he walked away to set up a shiny new "centrist" party called En Marche which used the whole "politics is broken" and "we are the saviours" schtick to great effect.

What better way to sell neoliberalism to the public than point out all of the failings of neoliberalism (several of which you were personally involved with), then present yourself as the shiny new alternative?

The problem of course is that when you promise people change, but then deliver more of the same but even worse in the form of massive tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, fuel price increases loaded on the poor, even more ideological attacks on labour rights, deeply unpopular education reforms, and significantly collapsing living standards - people tend to get angry.

And when the French get angry they don't just unthinkingly vote in favour of a massive act of national self-harm and then grovellingly re-elect the bastards who trashed their living standards in the first place like us Brits do. They revolt, they protest, they riot.

France has been wracked by 14 consecutive weeks of mass protests and Macron has gone from winning the Presidency and an absolute landslide in the French parliament, to being the most unpopular President in French history with an approval rating only slightly better than cancer.

The most incredible thing about it is that he's managed to nose-dive his Presidency and reduce his nation to mass protests, riots, division, police brutality, and chaos in significantly less than two years!

So the lesson from France is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get absolute bloody chaos.

Britain

So the Independent Group ('Tinge') parliamentary squatters are pushing the exact same rhetoric as these other populist movements. "Politics is broken", and guess what? Only they can save us!

The problem of course is that every single one of them is an establishment insider to the core, with several of them being particularly to blame for the current shit-show.

Before the EU referendum Chuka Umunna added fuel to the anti-EU bonfire by fulminating against Freedom of Movement and scapegoating European immigrants. Now he actually expects us to believe him when he positions himself as the glorious saviour to the Brexit mess that he actually helped to create by actively turning Labour Party members against free movement!

Mike Gapes, Joan Ryan, and Ann Coffey are all responsible for the thing that created the biggest ever rift in trust between British people and the Westminster political establishment class. Despite the biggest public protests in British history in 2003, these people voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the grounds of terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, these terrifying WMDs were never found because they didn't exist, and Iraq was turned into a lawless terrorism breeding ground that eventually gave birth to the monstrosity of ISIS.

To make matters even worse these warmongers all repeatedly voted against holding an inquiry into their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all hate Jeremy Corbyn on the basis that he was absolutely right that Iraq was going to be a disaster, and because they simply can't bear to admit that they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands.

Anna Soubry is one of the three Tories to have joined the squatters citing her opposition to Brexit as a factor in her decision, but incredibly she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right EU Withdrawal Act in January 2018 while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench opposed it! Some brave and principled Brexit saviour eh?
 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that all 11 of the squatter MPs are either austerity-enforcers who actually voted in favour of the ruinous Tory austerity dogma that trashed British living standards and created the massive wave of public anger that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line, or they're austerity abstainers from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party who actually turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens to sit on their hands as the Tories voted though the biggest package of social security cuts in British history in 2015.

Anyone who imagines that this opportunistic group of pro-austerity fanatics, ideological contortionists, self-serving opportunists, and unrepentant warmongers from deep within the ranks of the political establishment class is going to fix our "broken politics" and lead a glorious British revival is clearly working at the same extraordinary level of delusion as those who voted in favour of Brexit thinking a Tory administered abandonment of the EU would immediately turn the UK into the land of milk and honey for all.

But the worrying thing is that there is already a lot of support for this fake political party (established as a private company in order to evade scrutiny of their financial affairs) with no policies, no members, no internal democracy, no leader, no respect for the people in their constituencies, and no disciplinary procedures for bigoted MPs who spout racist nonsense on the TV!

It's looking a lot like the shiny but empty promise of Macronism all over again, built by another bunch of hopeless charlatans desperately trying to keep orthodox neoliberalism alive by rebranding it as a wonderful new form of 'centrism' that will somehow miraculously "fix our broken politics".

Unfortunately this blatant con trick has been shown to work effectively in other major economies with predictably disastrous results, so only the complacent would imagine that it couldn't possibly work here too.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Right-wingers just ended up owning themselves with their Sadiq Khan balloon

When some Lefty-liberal protesters decided to crowdfund a Donald Trump baby blimp for his state visit to the UK, right-wing Trump supporters absolutely shat themselves with rage.

How dare Sadiq Khan allow people the freedom to protest with a silly blimp they raged. 

And then they concocted a master-plan: "Let's crowdfund a blimp of our own to put Sadiq Khan and the lefty-liberals in their place once and for all".

So that's what they did. They actually invested their time and their money in creating a blimp of Sadiq Khan wearing a yellow bikini.

Oh how they must have anticipated the lurid victimhood narratives they could spin to their gullible followers when the horrible leftist tyrant Khan banned the balloon. 

The extreme-right know that once they've inflated people's victim complexes to the size of ... well ... inflatable parody blimps, then it only takes the slightest puff of hot air to get them all floating in the direction they want them to ...

So all it would take would be Sadiq Khan banning the balloon in a fit of rage and they'd be able to hark on endlessly about how the liberal-left allow protest against the right, but ban protest against themselves ...

But then disaster struck for them. Instead of banning the balloon in a fit of rage Khan just laughed at it."If people want to spend their Saturday looking at me in a yellow bikini they're welcome to do so, but I don't really think yellow's my colour though".
 

And Khan's not the only one who is going to be laughing at these deluded right-wing idiots for wasting their time and money on this, because not only did their protest backfire when Khan just laughed at it, it's also a demonstration that they've got no ideas of their own, and rely on pathetically ripping off ideas from the liberal-left rather than doing anything innovative or remotely useful of their own.

In fact they've not just ripped off a leftie-liberal idea, they're so dull-witted that they've ripped off a pretty rubbish lefty-liberal idea, because a 20ft odd balloon is way less impressive that it sounds (more of an oversized child's helium balloon than a Goodyear Blimp), and whether you're right-wing or left-wing, crowdfunding tens of thousands of pounds to create an underwhelming parody balloon is an absolute waste of effort when that time and money could be used actually helping needy people, or supporting grassroots political activism.

Conclusion

The right-wingers behind this pathetically derivative balloon idea were hoping to own the left, but they've simply ended up owning themselves by nicking a rubbish idea off the lefty-liberals and making it even more lame than it already was.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Why are the mainstream media not talking about how this extreme-right fanatic was radicalised?

A fanatical extreme-right hate preacher has been jailed for two years after numerous disgusting anti-Muslim rants and a threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn.

Jonathan Jennings was jailed by Swansea crown court for his social media postings, and for lobbing a brick at a local police station after he was warned to stop posting vile abuse and threats.

Here are some of the things that Jennings wrote:

• Called for Muslims to be sterilised

• Claimed Adolf Hitler was "born 100 years too soon"

• Promoted the idea of a "bomb a mosque day"

• Threatened to "Jo Cox" Jeremy Corbyn if he ever becomes Prime Minister

• Said that Muslims should be gassed

• Praised a racist thug who kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach as a "national hero"

• Changed his Twitter handle to "Muslim Slayer"

• Called for Gina Miller to be executed as a traitor

• Called for JK Rowling to be hanged

• Called for Muslims to be burned on bonfires

One of the most interesting and important aspects of this case is one that has received no mainstream media coverage whatever is the question of how this extreme-right fanatic was radicalised.

This is an important question because we already know that the Britain First hate chamber helped to radicalise at least two murderous extreme-right terrorists, and we also know that the Finsbury Park killer had Tommy Robinson quotes in the hire van he used as his murder weapon.
So who was Jennings radicalised by?

It's actually spectacularly easy to see who Jennings was radicalised by given his (bold/reckless/stupid) decision to not wipe down his social media accounts once it was clear he was facing prosecution for his online ranting.

So it's no surprise whatever to find that Jennings is a Tommy Robinson acolyte, as well as being a Facebook follower of several other extreme-right agitators like Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yianopolous, Sargon of Akkad, Mike Cernovich, and Count Dankula.

It's hardly surprising that Jennings follows the Muslim-fearmongering Leave.EU campaign, other Brexity Facebook pages like "Leave Means Leave", and "Get Britain OUT of the EU" and two vitriolic anti-Labour pages too.

The only currently elected politicians that Jennings follows on Facebook are Donald Trump and the Tory Brextremist-in-chief Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Just think about it. If a Jeremy Corbyn following leftist had been jailed for issuing an online threat to kill Jacob Rees-Mogg, do you think the mainstream media would have completely ignored that angle?

Even forgetting the threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn, if this vile anti-Muslim anti-Semitic ranter had been following Jeremy Corbyn's Facebook page rather than Jacob Rees-Mogg's, do you really honestly think the mainstream media would have failed to mention it at all in their report on his sentencing?

Given that his Facebook likes are clear for everyone to see, it's not even remotely difficult to find out who this guy was radicalised by. Yet the mainstream media have absolutely failed to cover it for some reason.

Of course reactive defenders of the extreme-right will try to argue that not all Tommy Robinson followers end up spewing vitriolic bigotry, issuing social media death threats, and/or carrying out acts of extreme-right terrorism, but the evidence is absolutely clear now that a percentage of them do.

If the online agitators who inspire disgusting tirades of bigoted abuse and online threats to kill (Jonathan Jennings), and actual terrorist atrocities (like Darren Osborne) had been Salafi Islamist hate preachers rather than extreme-right fanatics, then there's absolutely no way they would be given platforms to spew their hate and conspiracy theories on the BBC in the way Tommy Robinson was on the very day that one of his followers was jailed for carrying out a deadly terrorist atrocity.

In the end part of the blame for this rise in violent and abusive extreme-right fanaticism must be apportioned to the social media platforms that host these extreme-right hate preachers, and another part of the blame falls squarely on the mainstream media outlets like the BBC that actively help to boost their profiles, and inject their extremist politics into mainstream political discourse.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The modern extreme-right are just copying ideas straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook

There's absolutely no doubt that the extreme-right is on the rise. Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Israel have elected extreme-right ethno-nationalists into government.

In Britain it's not all Brexit voters were vile extreme-right fanatics, but there's no doubt whatever that the extreme-right demographic were numerous enough to tip the balance in favour of Leave in a very close 52%-48% referendum vote.

In the United States Donald Trump was propelled into power with the support of the KKK and the 'alt-right', and he returned the favour by appointing the alt-right ideologue Steve Bannon as his most senior adviser, and then actually claimed that the Swastika-carrying "Jews will not replace us" thugs and murderous extreme-right terrorists in Charlottsville included "some very fine people".

One of the most extraordinary things about this resurgence of fascism is that the modern extreme-right are doing little more than lazily copying tactics straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook, presumably because they don't actually have any new ideas of their own, and just want another stab at world domination via the methods that almost succeeded for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The censorship fallacy

One of the most blatant examples of the modern extreme-right ripping off Nazi propaganda tactics is the continual refrain that their ideas are being censored, often expressed through sound systems on stages and glitzy websites (where the money actually comes from to pay for all of this extreme-right propaganda is the subject for another article ...).

Even worse than standing on a stage to claim that you're being silenced is the extreme-right tactic of screaming "censorship" whenever anyone else dares to use their own freedom of speech to criticise what the extreme-right fanatic was talking about. 

Freedom of speech means that you're free to say whatever you like (within the bounds of the law), but it certainly doesn't provide freedom from criticism if what you chose to say was a load of absolute shite.

Just like Adolf Hitler in 1928 the modern extreme-right are pretending that their views are being unfairly censored, and if these dangerous fanatics ever did assume political power, we can be absolutely sure that their very first moves would involve launching their own clamp down on free speech and setting about the ruthless persecution of their political opponents, just like Adolf Hitler did before them.

Free speech and criminality

Of course extreme-right fanatics will immediately try to counter criticism of their victims of censorship posturing by citing Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon).

"But we are being censored" they'll wail "because our beloved Tommy has been jailed for free speech".

The problem with this "free Tommy" narrative is that it's pure deception. Yaxley-Lennon wasn't jailed for free speech, he was jailed for attempting to disrupt the prosecution of child sex abuse gangs as a personal publicity stunt.

He risked collapsing several linked trials and freeing monstrous child sex abusers, he did it as a publicity stunt despite having been previously warned to stop disrupting trials by judges, and he pleaded guilty to the crimes he was charged with.

The fundamental deceit here is the claim that free speech gives people a blanket right to say and do whatever they like, but that's not how free speech works. Nobody is free to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, nobody is free to threaten to rape or kill people when they disagree with them, and nobody is free to deliberately disrupt child sex abuse trials for their own personal advantage.

Anyone who pretends that free speech does cover these things is simply misusing the term to excuse criminal behaviour.

Victim complexing

One of the most effective extreme-right propaganda techniques is victim complexing, which constitutes an effort to instil extreme levels of self-pity within the victims of their propaganda.

Pretending that certain minority groups are receiving favours is one way of doing it, pushing the fiction that the most privileged people in society are the biggest victims of discrimination is another, and pretending that certain political views are being banned is another.

The whole point of victim complexing is to inflate people's levels of self-pity as much as possible, because once you've got your intended audience walking around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of wind to get them all floating in the desired direction.

Xenophobia and anti-Semitism

Stoking fear of foreigners has always been a core tactic of the extreme-right, as has anti-Semitism. It's absolutely clear that this kind of rampant xenophobia and bigotry is on the rise again.

Look at Donald Trump's use of grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric to whip up his extreme-right base (despite the fact that his mother was an immigrant, and two of his three wives have been immigrants!).

Look at the way both Brexit campaigns used anti-immigrant fearmongering to achieve their aims (the Nazi style Leave.EU posters & the recently exposed Vote Leave campaign of highly misleading anti-immigrant fearmongering targeted social media dark ads).

Consider the wave of racism and racist attacks in Italy that have accompanied the rapid resurgence of Italian fascism there.

Consider the use of anti-immigrant rhetoric and vile anti-Semitic propaganda by the extreme-right Hungarian government of Vikton Orbán to provide cover for his ever more tyrannical and anti-democratic political agenda. 

The parallels between Orbán's massive anti-Semitic poster campaign declaring the Jewish billionaire George Soros as an "enemy of the people" and the two minutes hate against Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's 1984 are impossible to ignore.

Cultural Marxism

The threat of "cultural Marxism" is another fascist trope pulled straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook.

The Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) was a way of railing against modernism and progressive values. 

In those days allegations of "Kulturbolschewismus" were lobbed at modern art, Bauhaus architecture, and anything resembling socially liberal values. Today the same allegation of "cultural Marxism" is used to disparage issues like gay rights, transgender rights, and gender neutrality.

Given that Marx's economic philosophy centred on exposing the inequalities and abuses of the capitalist economy, and steered well clear of architectural aesthetics and transgender issues, it's absolutely clear that the term "cultural Marxism" is just a way of invoking scary red bogeymen in order to fearmonger against progressive and modernist trends that the extreme-right see as threats to their traditionalist hyper-conformist mentality.

Normalisation of Nazi propaganda

One of the most shocking things about this resurgence of fascism is the way in which Nazi propaganda is being rapidly normalised within political discourse.

Donald Trump is the obvious example, with members of the Republican Party ever willing to excuse, or even parrot Trump's extremist rhetoric out of their desire to ride on the coat tails of his success. It's not necessary to rehabilitate the reputation of the hard-right warmonger George W. Bush to note that at least the previous Republican President never resorted to racist Trumpian anti-immigrant abuse to whip up support from the extreme-right, nor sought to impose constitution defying anti-immigrant legislation.

In Britain the story is the same. The once centre-right Tory party has passionately embraced the extreme-right, welcoming the fanatically right-wing ultranationalist blue-kip demographic into the Tory fold with open arms.

from Theresa May spewing vile anti-immigrant rhetoric, through the disgusting BNP-inspired fearmongering of the Tories' 2016 London Mayoral election campaign, to young Tories openly spreading Nazi propaganda tropes without fear of recriminations, it's absolutely clear that the Tory party has shifted so far to the right, that what was until recently the domain of the extreme-right is now considered perfectly normal and acceptable, not just among the Tory rank and file, but more worryingly, within the party leadership too.

The paradox of tolerance

We've already seen how the extreme-right resort to victim-complex crying over their freedom of speech when they are imprisoned for their lawless behaviour, or even when others use their own freedom of speech to argue back against their propaganda.

It's absolutely clear that the extreme-right want to exist in an unlimited tolerance environment where they are free from the constraints of the laws of the land, and free from any criticism of their views.

Essentially they're demanding absolute tolerance of their ever increasing use of Nazi propaganda, and their unquestionably lawless behaviour.

But as Karl Popper pointed out in 1945, "unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them".

It's hard to argue that he was wrong given that he witnessed Adolf Hitler's rise to power using the victim complexing narrative that his ideas were being unfairly censored, only to immediately set about silencing and executing all of his political opponents to create one of the most deadly and intolerant autocratic regimes in human history once he got into power.

The lessons of history

Now that the same process is repeating over again, with the modern extreme-right using the exact same propaganda tactics to spread their intolerant ideologies, it's worth remembering Winston Churchill's warning: "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

Now that almost all of the generation who witnessed the disgusting barbarity of fascism first hand (which obviously included Orwell, Popper and Churchill) are now dead, with the very youngest of the WWII veterans into their 90s now, it's becoming increasingly clear that the lessons of history are indeed being forgotten, and the extreme-right are perfectly prepared to use the exact same propaganda tactics as the Nazis before them in order to attack and undermine socially liberal democracy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The timeline of shame

In March 2018 the Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman began a month-long tour of Western nations, securing new arms deals with Britain, the United States, and France.

In early March 2018 the brutal Islamist tyrant received a warm Tory welcome in London. Against a backdrop of widespread criticism of the repressive Saudi regime and their ongoing campaign of war crimes in Yemen, Theresa May agreed a new arms deal with the Saudi regime to supply them 48 Typhoon jets. This deal was signed off by the UK government despite their full knowledge that the Saudis have been using British-manufactured weapons to commit horrific war crimes.

Later that month Bin Salman rocked up in the United States to meet Donald Trump. The President of the United States demeaned his office and his nation by begging the Saudi tyrant to "share the wealth" by buying more American-manufactured weapons. The trip concluded with a new $670 million deal to supply the repressive kingdom with anti-tank missiles and spare parts for tanks and helicopters.

And then Bin Salman appeared in Paris to meet Emmanuel Macron. The trip concluded with the French government agreeing to essentially scrap their managed arms export strategy in order to hawk weapons to the Saudi tyrants directly. Of the three leaders Macron is under the most domestic pressure to halt arms sales to the Saudis because of their appalling human rights record and their war crimes in Yemen, but he ignored public opinion in order to make French arms sales to Saudi Arabia even easier!

And then just one week later France, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to launch missile attacks on Syria (including targets that had been declared free of chemical weapons just weeks earlier by the OPCW).

It's absolutely obvious that the main beneficiaries of these attacks on Syria are the Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists who have been losing the war there. We know they're Saudi backed because the US government admitted as much in the leaked Hillary Clinton emails.

We also know that Saudi Arabia has produced the second most ISIS fighters (after Tunisia), and that the country is the single biggest source of pro-ISIS propaganda on social media.

Within five weeks of starting his arms deal tour all three of his major arms-dealer nations have decided to bypass their own parliaments in order to militarily support the Saudi destabilisation agenda in Syria.

The truly alarming thing about this scandalous situation isn't that France, the US and the UK are selling weapons to tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia (they're three of the five biggest arms dealing nations on earth), nor that they're actively assisting the Saudis in their strategic destabilisation of their Middle East neighbours (they've been happy to watch Saudi Arabia spread Salafi Islamist extremism all over the globe for decades), but that the mainstream press in all three countries simply refuse to explain the Saudi role in all of this.

All three leaders cynically bypassed their parliaments to carry out these attacks. All three leaders defied public opinion to carry out these attacks. And all three leaders are sickeningly close to the vile and repressive Saudi regime whose Islamist proxies in Syria are the main beneficiaries of these attacks.

If mainstream media hacks were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the scandalous involvement of democracy-hating Saudi Arabia in all of this would be a central theme of the Syria airstrikes coverage, but it simply isn't.

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