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, Papadopoulos and countless other psychofascists were still pretty raw. Although people in my generation may not have experienced dictatorship directly as adults, we absorbed the intergenerational trauma passed down by our parents through their stories: fear of authority, censorship in the media, nepotistic promotions at work, and terror, utter terror: daily terror and fear of what may slip through your lips, 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.
Oh, and hundreds of thousands of people jailed, tortured, or “disappeared” because “they were a threat to democracy”. It may start with the Mexicans, but Americans themselves are next.
Resistance was left down 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 40 bright, beautiful, courageous students being 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.
For a people whose country instigated and propped-up countless dictatorships across the world for economic gain, including the one here in Greece I just talked about, Americans sure are clueless about what fascism and dictatorship are. Well, they are finding out as we speak, not through history books, but through direct experience as decades later, dictatorship finally visits US soil.
It’s Here.
You will be afraid to say what is on your mind. You will become suspicious of coworkers and neighbours and of the Big Brother of the internet. You will have to shut up and take abuse. 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 ever again without checking left, right, and behind you, for the rest of your life. This is what briefly living in a dictatorship does to you. Yea, “American Freedom” my a**.
The Resistance must begin ASAP. I lived in the US 11 years and it never ceased to astound me how low (inexistent?) the political IQ of the vast majority of Americans is. It was unavoidable a dictatorship was coming to this country. You need to 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. I advise Americans to research some of the names I dropped earlier and start educating yourselves on what authoritarianism is, so that you know what you voted for. You may want to do this now before Google burns the history books. I wish I was joking, but I’m kinda not…
As for the immediate future, the worst is yet to come as nothing good ever came out of multiple simultaneous dictatorships across the world. Much of Europe is already fascist and hard-right parties are frontrunners in the polls in UK and Germany, so that’s only a matter of time. World war has become easier than you think as these authoritarian psychos burn the democracy rulebook and go for each other’s throats.
But yeah, keep on working your meaningless job as the climate collapses and conflict becomes more normalised with each passing day. Ignorance and fear are the favourite breeding grounds of fascism!
George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.
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George Tsakraklides 
If people think WW2 ended in Europe in May 1945, there was conflict of different kind up to three years after – not wars between nations, but ethnic cleansing on a monumental scale, bigger than Trumps threatened eviction of Gazans.
I highly recommend the book Savage Continent Europe in the Aftermath of WW2, by Keith Lowe, Penguin Books, 2012, ISBN 978-0-141-03451-5
So even the ‘defeat of fascism’ has potential horrors long after. It has been recently said that the Americans didn’t defeat fascism in WW2, they absorbed it, with the end result being the MIC (military-industrial-complex) and what we see today. As it appears DOGE isn’t going to investigate the DoD and the MIC, Amerika will may well become a militarised fascist state, bit like North Korea but with more energy and resources.
The only saving grace is that Gaia isn’t tolerating this bullshit and will sort it out one way or another, eventually. Within the timeline of most people reading this blog.
Brilliant analysis Mark thank you
Brilliant article sadly so true.
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Thank you Melvyn
Americans are tragically poorly educated in civics and history. But I think the problem is bigger than that. It is bio/psycho/social. We are still just primates with lots of baggage and are unable to use this big brain for true self awareness. Everyone of us needs psycho analysis by those few that are extremely self aware of all the wounds and trauma floating around in our big brains. Maybe along with psychedelics. Love Rick
This is the second time recently I heard of the mythical left. There haven’t been any “left wing” parties in power in the US or western Europe since the neo-liberalism at the end of the 1970s, except maybe in Greece and Spain.
If some commentators think Blair and Starmer are “left wing” then their understanding of what is leftwing and what isn’t clearly needs a revisit. Even Corbyn was left of centre, not particularly left wing.
All the British governments since Thatcher have been pro-deregulation, pro-privatisation, pro-neoliberalism, pro-corporations. Just the degree to which they allowed excesses and instituted mitigations varied from party to party.
Am in the UK, the man arresting for praying outside an abortion clinic was/is living under a right wing government, duh, with it’s rules and regulations. In fact those regulations were imposed whilst under the Tories (even if in this particlar case it wasn’t by the Tory party per say), which are an extreme right wing party. A police officer tried for an hour or so to persuade him to leave the restricted zone, before having to arrest him. He knew the risks and took them to make his point. Of which more Americans seem to have made a fuss over than us Brits did.
You do know that all British universities have been run as businesses since tuition fees came in? So the managers and admins that run these places and cancel meetings and expel people who diss them in public are products of the neo-liberal experiment, ie they are rightwing, not left wing.
Pro-populists blaming ‘left wing’ for the ills of right wing governance must be the latest disinformation or distraction. It’s laughable. So called “woke agendas” were allowed (& promoted even) by right wing governments to distract the masses from the fact that they were getting poorer whilst the government’s rich mates were getting richer, and that those same said governments have no answers to the problems of the poor (because of declining EROEI, resource depletion and overshoot). Never forget the Overton Window.
Yes, free speech and protest is being stifled, particularly here in the UK, but it’s by right wing governance, since there is no left wing governance existing currently in most so called western democracies.
And lest we forget, it doesn’t matter what kind of governance any of us has, none of them will come to help you when everything breaks due to overshoot. Unless you happen to be one of their rich mates. Even in an absurd scenerio, if the UK had 450 Green MPs, this would still apply as the realities of overshoot kick in, not withstanding the fact that power tends to corrupt anyway.
Aaaaaaarrggh!
just got to your message Mark…make sure you take deep breaths… we will all need them. I’m quite aware of the UK situation, lived there 18 years. The Universities are totally corrupt. A friend and activist was recently denied his PhD in air quality when he refused to go to an air quality conference BY PLANE. Yup, its a capitalist dictatorship