That article is ironic. It ignores decades of U.S. presidents doing the very same thing of which Trump is being accused. It's been the next step in the natural progression of an imperialist authoritarian government since at least Bill Clinton. Both sides of the political aisle are to blame. They are both fascist parties. One is just nicer on the surface. The author says everything is connected and affects each other and says he sees history, but then ignores history and everything that is connected and affects each other. Because Trump is so in your face and blunt, the Democrats have been able to ramp up their own bullshit because it's still "less vile" than what Trump says and does. The Democrats have funded everything the Republicans and Trump have wanted so far. They have thrown trillions of dollars to corporations while refusing to provide all their citizens with health care, approved tax cuts for the rich, approved bills during a pandemic that bail out corporations and give little to nothing to people who need money to pay their rent and mortgage etc. and now there is a housing crisis with millions of people on the verge of being evicted, increased the military budget, refused to cut it by 10% when Bernie introduced the bill for it recently, increased funding for the DHS while they are abusing constitutional rights in Portland while they offered no oversight or restrictions on the department, extended and voted for the Patriot Act, etc etc etc. All while saying he's a traitor. What sane person do you know that thinks someone is a traitor and then they fund that traitor and give him or her more power? It's endless, and fans of the Democrats refuse to see it. The Overton Window continues to move to the right. But hey, take solace in voting for the "lesser of two evils".

Not fun reading but very plausible. Brexit happened because foreign media moguls wanted it for their own selfish reasons. Trump and his policies happen because a very few immensely wealth people benefit from it. Covid and global warming will either exacerbate and fan the flames or hopefully dampen them.

While I find the article of great interest, I feel the statement of famines being created, seemingly as though these countries played an essential part to them, deceptive by the writer. In both cases these countries had underlining war issues and outside interference that played major roles in the famines.

{See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.}

{And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”}

{Trump is doing this in America.}

The problem with the above theory, that the writer is using from an inserted link, is that it, as with a fully functioning socialist governance, has never been able to reach fulfillment without underlining negative points of interest. Quite frankly, for the writer to go on and assume that the US is this far into being such a democracy is ludicrous. And to claim America is already great is vastly argumentative. Great to and for whom? Statistic wise, as he attempts to suggest, don't quite lean that way in many aspects of findings.

{On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.}

It didn't take Trump for us to get to this point. We've been here for some time. Trump has merely exemplified this fact and proceeding with the agenda towards extreme measures. He and the republican party face little to no opposition as they do so. So then, where does the real dictatorship lay?

Russia? Who is obviously the target of the westernized world. Who's country was turned into the capitalist state it is now under the attacks of Reagan and then Bill Clinton? I think at this point I would argue Russia is more of a democracy than the US and doing more to unite the world. Far from being a dictatorship compared to the US.

The battles of the US are that of imposing westernized imperialistic power over as many regions it and they can. The battles of Russia are all towards self defense and unifying with some of those victims of the westernized world. Within the past 2 decades I would feel quite safe out on a limb to claim that the US has considerably more blood on our hands than the Russian country does from worldwide involvement. And that we would have considerably more blood on our hands if it wasn't for the Russian's helping our victims.

{European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine}

Russia didn't attack Ukraine. Russia came to the aide of the genocide of Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians who asked for help to rid themselves of a fascist state government force hell bent on killing them off for being of Russian descent from the old USSR, breaking agreements from that time era. Would you deny a people the right to defend themselves from survival? Do we need to revisit dictatorship and blood spilled from above?

By the way, since it was mentioned, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia with a nearly 97% vote in favor of. Please!?! They wanted no part of the fascist state this writer is attempting to glorify towards a false narrative about Russia. Robert Parry would call this Yellow Journalism --- [consortiumnews.com]

{It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London, writing this, without wanting to run away.}

How could you sit in a nice café in London writing about this and manage to leave out the underlining participation of the very country you're sitting in? While blabbering only about Brexit.

{So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase.}

Many of us are attempting to expose aspects of this bad phase that he seems to be a part of. Fake news. I take back my initial statement. This article went from interesting to disgusting.

What delusional reality did that last paragraph come from? I need Chris Hedges help to confront all that bullshit.