History is always your friend. It is a fact that we can often predict the outcome of things by studying similar events and eras in the past. And when we apply this truth to studies of those who promised to make their countries “great again”, what we learn is chilling.
In general, the “great again” figures have several common points of view, which leads them to operate in much the same fashion. Among their common notions, we can find the following:
- A tendency to assign blame to minorities and/women for deteriorating conditions.
- The assertion that they alone can restore the society to “greatness.”
- The perception that they are the state, and the state is them, and any dissent against them is by definition treason.
- A very distorted view of the past, usually colored by exaggerations and outright untruths.
- A perception that their ideas are never at fault, and any failures in policy are the result of treason and/or weakness on the part of those who are under them.
The notions I mention above are integral components of the personalities of those who peddle “make us great again” to gullible segments of the population. We know how they think. We also know how their thinking usually turns out in real-world terms. As history furnishes us with the ideas these leaders had, so history furnishes us with the things that they ultimately accomplished once they’d reached power. Let’s take a look now at several men who promised to make their countries “great again”, and what they ultimately managed to achieve in real terms.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler came to power in a Republican Germany still stinging from a defeat in the World War, and struggling economically because of the burden of war reparations it was assigned to pay. Hitler assured Germans that they were never defeated, but were instead “stabbed in the back” by unpatriotic elements at home. He blamed the German Jewish population, especially, as the source of German defeat, and assigned them the blame for all German problems in the aftermath. Hitler promised to crack down hard on the Jewish population of Germany, as well as restore German military might to allow Germany what he claimed was its destiny of colonizing the east of Europe. The Slavic, Roma, and Jewish peoples living in those territories weren’t “Aryan” Germans, so they could safely be displaced, disenfranchised, and disposed of in the quest to make room for the “superior” German race. As a result of Hitler’s quest to Make Germany Great Again, some 20-25 million Soviet citizens lost their lives, and 12 million Jewish, Roma, gay, disabled, and assorted other human beings were gassed to death in a system of camps set up for that purpose across eastern Europe. And in the end, many millions of Germans lost their lives in the ferocious battles of World War II set off by Hitler’s quest. Hitler, himself, committed suicide as the Soviets were closing in on his Berlin bomb shelter.
Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini was the creator of Fascism, a virulently nationalist political philosophy that was modified to include virulent racism to form Hitler’s Nazi ideology. Mussolini promised the Italian people that he was going to restore the glories of ancient Rome, and to that end he attacked and occupied Albania in Europe and Ethiopia in Africa. But his alliance with Hitler eventually got his country invaded by the Allies, and Mussolini himself was killed by partisans and strung up by the feet in a town square by local Resistance fighters in 1945.
Pol Pot
Pol Pot dreamed of the reformation of the Khmer Empire, which stretched across much of southeastern Asia and encompassed great swaths of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. To accomplish this, he set the clocks back to “the year Zero” when his Khmer Rouge forces captured all of Cambodia in 1975. His first act was to empty the cities of residents and put them to work as agricultural laborers, who he slowly starved to death so he could export the grain they produced in order to have the currency necessary to purchase weaponry in his quest to rebuild the great empire of the past. He was also a racial and cultural purist, meaning that ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and Laotians either had to flee or be massacred. Even ethnic Khmers that were in his point of view “tainted” by too much education and/or contact with the outside world were killed in his quest to reconstruct the “pure” ethnic Khmer. Between the years of 1975-1979, he probably killed around 1.5 million Cambodians, and completely wiped ethnic minorities off the Cambodian map. Being a virulent racist, Pol believed that his “pure” Khmer Army would wipe out anything in front of it, so he began attacking Vietnam and Thailand in an attempt to regain the territories of his dreamed-of Khmer empire. Attacking Vietnam would prove to be a fatal mistake: after an attack that killed several hundred Vietnamese in 1978, Vietnam responded ferociously, and drove Pol Pot out of power in Cambodia in a 2-week war that started on Christmas Day in 1978. Pol Pot was forced to flee the capital city Phnom Penh in a helicopter and retreat to the jungle, where he waged low-intensity warfare for the next 20 years before dying in 1998. At the time he died, his own forces had placed him under house arrest due to murders of other Khmer Rouge leaders (and their families) at his instigation.
These men are not anomalies. Some combination of their racial and territorial ideas can be found in just about anyone who preaches “great again” rhetoric. Those who blindly follow such men are quite likely to follow their delusional leaders over a cliff.
Sadly, a whole lot of innocent people usually suffer and die as they make their way to their inevitable ends.