Divide and conquer is working as well as ever

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During his 2016 election campaign, Trump famously claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue in New York and shoot someone and it would not affect his poll numbers. Whether it was true or not at the time is open to debate, but he certainly seemed to believe it, and all the indications are that he still does. At times, it even seems as though he is trying to test the claim empirically, even if it isn’t himself who actually pulls the trigger. The insouciance and lies with which he dismisses any criticism of the armed gangs of masked men which he has sent out to seize people off the street, or at their place of work, or even in schools and colleges, isn’t really surprising. It is entirely consistent with his character.

What is rather more depressing is the ease with which armed government employees have fallen into a culture where they regularly exceed any lawful authority and are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. And that applies as much to the individual soldiers and airmen involved in sinking boats as it does to the ICE teams roaming the streets of major cities. We know that ‘following orders’ is no defence, and that individual officers have a legal duty to question patently illegal orders rather than follow them, but some of what has been happening goes beyond mere obedience to superiors and into the realm of ‘using their own initiative’, secure in the knowledge that, even if they weren’t specifically ordered to do something, it’s what the head honcho wanted them to do. And if you can be persuaded that the Reich, or the Trumpate, will last a thousand years, the possibility of being held accountable will always look low.

We shouldn’t really be surprised: history tells us that it has happened before and contains plenty of examples of people who do what they think their bosses want them to do. It goes back at least as far as Henry II and his turbulent priest. With the greater availability of alternative (rather than solely official) news sources, it might have been hoped that a more aware population would be more resistant, but some reports suggest that the US is, probably deliberately, recruiting people who are barely literate to carry out their programme of detention and deportation. For any tyrant or despot, a poorly-educated populace always has advantages (and lest we think that we in the UK might be immune from such attitudes, think about those politicians railing against the number of people educated to degree level who they consider to be ‘over-qualified’ for their allotted station in life).

Looked at rationally, in an economy run by and for billionaires it ought to be strange that so many people who have little or nothing to gain by facilitating a kleptocracy in which wealth trickles ever more quickly upwards are so willing to act as agents of the kleptocrats. But sowing hatred and division and blaming ‘others’ for all the problems has shown itself to have extraordinary staying power as a means of cementing authority and wealth in the hands of the few. There's no sign of its power waning.