Dear Progressive Reader,

Last Tuesday marked the first anniversary of the second Inauguration of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. The past twelve months have been marked by a whirlwind of activity by the White House and Trump’s supporters in the federal government. Even those of us who anticipated a campaign of “shock and awe” by the incoming administration have been a bit shocked and awed by its speed and range. The independent website that tracks the status of the plans and proposals embodied in the 920-page “Project 2025” (which I wrote about last October) now notes that, as of this week, 51 percent of the 320 objectives have already been achieved across the thirty-four affected government agencies. And we are only one-quarter of the way through, with three full years left to go.

In his first year, Trump, the self-proclaimed “peace candidate,” has ordered the bombing of seven different nations, sometimes more than once; used the military to extract the sitting president of Venezuela (also destroying at least 125 boats from last September through today). He has also deployed the National Guard to numerous cities in the United States—including Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, New Orleans, Louisiana, Charlotte, North Carolina, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, California (where Marines we also deployed), and Chicago, Illinois; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have been also deployed to these cities and others, including Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Renée Good was tragically killed (and news is breaking of another man shot multiple times and killed by ICE in the city this morning as I write these words), and where huge protests are continuing. Now ICE is being deployed most recently to the state of Maine which has among the nation’s smallest immigrant population at about 56,000, of whom about half are naturalized citizens.

In the small but densely packed 1969 volume Civilian Resistance as a National Defence (published in the United Kingdom), Ernest K. Bramsted pens a long chapter on the similar aspects between various totalitarian systems: “an ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.” Bramsted goes on to note, “It is the combination of these traits, rather than any of them in isolation, which is the decisive characteristic of totalitarian systems.” While we are not quite at that point, the recent attempts to politicize and gain control of the Federal Reserve, and the efforts over the past year to bring all of the mainstream and public television networks to heel, leave one wondering if we are not getting close to a “full house.” Bramsted offers a number of other important insights in the piece, making it, and the entire book, well worth reading carefully at this historical moment. “Totalitarian regimes do not spring up overnight with a single seizure of power,” he notes, “but develop in stages, their complete totalitarian traits only emerging after a period of time.”

Writing in CounterPunch in September 2024, geographer and historian Zoltán Grossman describes his trip to Germany to try and better understand how the Nazi Party was able to rise to power so quickly in the 1930s. “[T]he first lesson I learned [was] that it was the mass deportation of foreign citizens that ultimately set Kristallnacht [when fascist paramilitaries carried out a violent national pogrom against Jews] into motion,” he explains, “which makes me shudder now every time I hear Trump promote the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” Five months after Grossman’s excellent article, retired journalist and historian Mike DuPre' wrote in an opinion piece for Madison’s Capital Times, “Students of twentieth century history might be reminded of the German industrialists who flocked to the support of Adolf Hitler and reaped the rewards of military industrialization and slave labor. If historians weren’t reminded by the tech executives’ presence at the Inauguration], Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes should have jogged their memories. Then comes the pardon for at least 1,500 traitors and thugs of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The President has released an effective cadre of loyal criminals who can easily don brown shirts. Besides his capos, the President now has his soldiers.” Two weeks ago, DuPre' followed up with another column, titled “All those warnings about dictatorship? Yeah, we're there.”

In his forty-two page essay, first penned about six decades ago, Bramsted offers some insight and hope: “Any consideration of resistance to a totalitarian system must begin with the truism that such a system has vastly superior instruments of physical power at its disposal to enforce its will. The term ‘resistance’ covers a variety of attitudes, which range from an inward refusal to accept conformity, [to] organized passive resistance, to active resistance.” The book details many of these forms of resistance and explains their variety in detail. But as Bramsted, Grossman, and DuPre' all detail in their writing, there are opportunities to resist creatively and effectively. We are seeing many of these play out this week in Minneapolis. As Grossman notes in his 2024 article, “By preparing and organizing for these grim possibilities, we can have more proactive ways to respond than relying on our weakened legal system, and not be caught surprised again.”

This week on our website, Nyki Duda describes mutual aid project begin developed in Gaza as Western aid falls short; Hassan Herzallah writes from inside Gaza about the development of solar energy electricity sources; and Kaitlyn Salazar reports on the threats to U.S. energy systems from private equity firms buying up local utilities. Plus Shaquille Nelson pens an op-ed on the gaps in our social safety net; and housing policy researcher opines on how HUD is making a mess of U.S. housing policy.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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