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The key to it all is gaslighting the public by pulling the oldest trick in the fascist handbook: Use your supposed knowledge of what "the people" want to convince those people to give you complete power over them and, with it, everything you want.
In Germany, Adolf Hitler did it. In the U.S., Donald Trump is doing it. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre is taking notes.
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1 .Create a cult of personality
Either embrace an already well-known person or create and build one from within. In the U.S., Donald Trump fit the bill as the well-known person for this step. In Canada, Conservatives took their angriest Parliamentary attack dog, removed his glasses, asked his wife to hold his hand and, voila, an infallible leader. Hitler, on the other hand, built himself up to be that leader from within with the help of his inside circle, propagandist Joseph Goebbels in particular.
2. Find or invent an enemy to scapegoat and denigrate
This can be adjacent nations-states and/or competing ideologies and/or a vulnerable demographic within the nation. Trump did all three of this better than anyone in modern history, maybe, with the tarriffs and the 51st state. Also Democrats or anyone who doesn’t vote Republican, immigrants, racial minorities, the poor. Poilievre and his minions started with Trudeau and Laurentian elite, shifting to Mark Carney and the entire Liberal Party who are part of the cabal working hard to make life less affordable for Canadians. We know what Hitler did.
3. Take control of the media and the other democratic self-correcting mechanisms
Start with snide comments about the judiciary, the media, academia and other institutional experts. Then move to direct insults, then ostracize and start to tear down the institutions slowly. Trump had a judge arrested recently. He banned the Associated Press from White House briefings for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He’s attacking all the major universities in the country. In Canada, Conservatives are a little behind, but Poilievre wouldn’t let the media tour with his election campaign as they have with all others in all other elections. His candidates are not allowed to talk to the media without having answers vetted. The base of the party tend to be anti-science (e.g. pandemic) and thrive on misinformation and disinformation by eschewing actual experts and educated people who are elite enemies of “the people.” Again, Hitler did this slowly and methodically, one, two, three.
4. Stoke an existential crisis
Invent an internal economic catastrophe or seize on one that already exists and use fear-mongering to inspire the uneducated. Here you need to use what you’ve done in step 3 to promote step 1 to further your attacks on step 2 by spreading lies and confusion thereby creating a culture of division. In the U.S., Trump did this with Canada and the rest of the world. He seems to be using game theory to act crazy and unhinged making outlandish demands of other nations so that even when they offer even 1/10th of what he asks for, he looks like the winner. In Canada it’s similar but the existential crisis is hindsight, claiming it was created by Justin Trudeau who is responsible for “the lost Liberal decade,” an expression that, by my count, Poilievre used 11 times in the English leaders’ debate. Poilievre has also called this an existential election. A fourth Liberal term will literally destroy Canada so unless you hate Canada, you have to vote Conservative. Hitler did this slowly seizing both on the desperation from the great depression and the injustices Germany faced in the wake of the First World War, which made circumstances in the country in the early 1930s worse than other European nations.
5. Seize control
We aren’t here yet in the U.S. but the last step is for the infallible leader created in step 1 to seize on the emergency created in step 4 by using control gained over the judiciary, media, academia in step 3 to further the campaign begun in step 2, which will worsen 4 to the point of a national emergency. That's when our infallible leader, aided by sycophantic senior supporters and compliant others to allow a state of emergency or martial law or some other measure to be put in place to giving all control of the levers of government to the leader and/or oligarchy. In Canada, this is only a distant dream for far-right populists working to gain power. In the U.S., some see it frighteningly on the horizon. In Germany in the 1930s, the pieces of the puzzle were coming together then the straw that broke the camel’s back was when an unemployed Dutch construction worker set fire to the German parliament building, the Reichstag, and burned it to the ground. This led the Nazis and its coalition partners to claim the communists were planning a violent coup d’etat and convinced legislators to pass a decree eliminating constitutional protections, which paved the way to the most horrific dictatorship of the 20th century.
And if it doesn’t go perfectly smoothly, start over, rinse and repeat.
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Paul J. Henderson
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