American Dictatorship: The Homegrown Edition

I was born in Greece in 1973, seven months before the dictatorship ended. So technically, I have lived through a dictatorship. The 80s was a time when memories of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, our own Papadopoulos and countless other psychofascists were still pretty raw. Although people in my generation did not experience dictatorship directly as adults, we absorbed the intergenerational trauma passed down by our parents through their cautionary, often personal tales: fear of persecution, self-censorship, nepotistic work promotions and terror, utter terror: the daily fear of what may accidentally slip through your lips and who may hear it or, what someone may say about something you may or may not have said to someone else who may or may not have heard it correctly or pretended to hear something you never really said. As stories of people who vanished became commonplace, the fear of the junta took a firm hold. You either obeyed or risked “being disappeared”.

This recipe for dictatorship was replicated throughout the world and is still the good-old favourite: across continents tens of millions of people have been jailed, tortured or “disappeared” because they were “a threat to democracy”. From China to Chile, Germany to Greece, Spain to Soviet Union and Cambodia to Libya, entire ethnic minorities, vulnerable groups and dissenters were all but exterminated in remote concentration camps. Resistance to these dictatorships was often left to university students who often gave their lives trying to overthrow juntas across the world. One such bloody uprising in November 1973, 22 days before I was born, ended in the death of 40 bright, beautiful, courageous students in Greece. They were run over by military tanks and gunned down like wild game in the streets of Athens. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in the following months precipitated events which eventually gave Greece back its democracy as the people told the fascists to f**k off and never set foot on Greek soil again. They haven’t, since then, and we actively make sure they don’t. Their parties are officially illegal, in the same way that the Republican party must be declared illegal and disbanded, having violated the constitution multiple times now.

Fast forward to today, and we see symptoms of all the above in the US. But Americans have no recent history of a dictatorship. How can they recognize the signs of what is building up? They have no idea what is coming to them, even though their country has been instigating dictatorships across the world for decades. Authoritarianism may have traditionally been an American export to the world as an imperialist instrument, but for the first time we see it being deployed on Americans themselves: a homegrown version of dictatorship has taken hold, looking more menacing each day. As one government authority after another is shut down and ICE becomes the rule of law much like Gestapo was an instrument of fear and suppression, the end of freedom is here already. It may start with the Mexicans, the LGBTQ and the “Left”, but it continues with all Americans.

Let me tell you how bad things will get: you will be afraid to say what is on your mind. You will become suspicious of co-workers and neighbours and of the Big Brother of the internet. You will have to shut up and take abuse at work. You will have to hide who you are. If you are LGBTQ or “Mexican-looking”, you will fear for your life. Every day. But whoever you are, wherever you are, whichever state you live in, white or black, you will never leave your house again without checking left, right and behind you for the rest of your life. This is the trauma that a dictatorship leaves on an entire society.

But there is an alternative. You can choose to live in dignity, organise in your community and fight for your rights, because no one else will do that for you at this point. Don’t expect anyone to come to your rescue while you watch democracy die on YouTube. You have to resist. This is an opportunity for America to become truly free, which it never was. Because a country whose political class had whored itself out to its sponsors and whose militarised police was already an instrument of fear had all the parts of a dictatorship already in place for decades now. Republicans and democrats were in this political game for their corporate buddies all along, and this is why authoritarianism finally showed its true face. The decades-old brutal rule of corporate capital in America finally nested itself within government and became the brutal rule of dictatorship. Trump may be an elected president, but make no mistake: America is a dictatorship because only a dictator can violate the constitution and ignore the justice system on a daily basis.

The big question is, can the American people wake up from their Netflix coma and rise up? This elected dictatorship had been in the making for decades: it was unavoidable that a nation who knows more about what Beyonce is up to than about the history of fascism would be caught in its sleep and turn into a breeding ground for hate rhetoric and extremism. This entertainment dystopia is not benign: it is fascism’s best hiding place. The more you are entertained, the lower your political IQ crashes. You soon begin to confuse entertainment with politics as the two seamlessly merge. But this is not a movie. This is your life. “These are your rights”, as The Clash once said in their punk-rock classic “know your rights” where they listed them out: the right “not to be killed.” The right to food and money. The right to free speech. Americans have lost them all.

If the Jan 6 insurrection had happened in any European country, its instigators would have been behind bars within hours, weeks at minimum. We may have our own problems with the far right in Europe, but at least we can clock fascism from miles away and call a spade a spade. Sometimes I get the sense Americans have no idea what has just dawned on their country. I lived in the US 11 years, and it never ceased to astound me how low the political IQ of Americans is. It was unavoidable a dictatorship would happen here.

But Americans have spirit. And when they are angry, they will show it. So get off Netflix and go out in the streets if you want at least some of your freedoms back. And you need to stop voting for either the blue or red toothpaste. You need to educate yourself on what a dictatorship is, so that you recognise it in the voting both, not when the ICE van comes to pick up your daughter. You may want to do this now before Google burns the history books, like Trump has been erasing government databases.

As for the immediate future, the worst may be yet to come for both sides of the Atlantic. Much of Europe is already fascist, and hard-right parties are frontrunners in the polls in UK and Germany. World war has become easier than ever as these authoritarian psychos burn the democracy rulebook and aim for each other’s throats.

But otherwise, yeah, keep on working your job as the climate collapses and conflict becomes normalised. You may think this doesn’t get any worse but it does, very quickly, unless we resist and throw the dictators back where they naturally belong: the trash. This is a warning from someone in Europe that survived an American-backed dictatorship. Now it’s happening on your own soil. Nip it in the bud, because democracy, however imperfect it is, takes many decades to rebuild.