Crazy things have happened this year. The people of United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The American people voted for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. Turkey is planning to change sides. Russia’s sphere of influence grows, and here we are in America, the world’s most powerful country, crying and having our feelings hurt.
There is nothing wrong with feeling the pain. I feel it too, but we cannot let it control. There is going to be a time when we must stand our ground and fight.
A day after the election, Sen. Bernie Sander (D-VT) posted on his Facebook page:
“To the degree that Donald Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”
Fascism is something that many of us have forgotten. We forgotten it because the allied nations of the world destroyed it 1945. We fought a world war across continents to defeat this menace, and here we are in the 21st century, and Austria almost had a far-right nationalist party win their election, the far-right National Front in France has a chance of winning election next year, and scenario is happening in Germany. Rodrigo Duterte is violating human rights and pardoning it. Vladimir Putin will likely stay president and continue to influence foreign elections in his favor, and here’s President-Elect Trump claiming them are great leaders.
What is going on? Why is this happening, and why are we letting it happen?
We may excuse these occurrences because these leaders have been democratically elected. They made through our own system, but you know who else ascended to power democratically? Adolf Hitler.
Fascism and authoritarianism are returning. Trump’s rhetoric during his campaign is undeniably a new form of American fascism. While they distract us from the imaginary threat of Sharia law or communism, they begin to nationalize their voters and then we become complacent as are freedoms are taken away, our democracy becomes non-existent, and our republic becomes something else.
I personally do not believe that Donald Trump will be the racist bigot that this campaign presented him to be. I believe that he is in for a wakeup call once he spends his first year in office. However, he ran a campaign that was supported by racists, xenophobes, and generally everything that is under the category of fascism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won four elections without having to succumb to such levels. He did so by resisting, defeating, and dying in the global struggle for our democracies.
If this does happen, if Trump becomes the president he campaigned to be, if our constitution is disregarded, then we must resist. We fight with the ballot, and then dismantle the democratic systems, then we fight we fight as we did in North Africa, Normandy, and Bastogne. In moments like this, I remember the calm and determined words of Winston Churchill.
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”
Let it be known that our freedom, our democracy, and our republic is precious, and anything precious is worth fighting and dying for.
