Remember history?

Trump says he intends to revitalize American industry and the economy over the coming four years. Not by engaging experts in multiple fields, though, nor by evaluating the country’s position in the global economy, and certainly without any understanding whatsoever of how the world is developing regarding trade, information, and power structures.

No, Trump is determined to do it by emperor’s decrees, i.e. ‘Executive Orders’: “I order this to happen, and as have been given divine powers, it will happen.”

Does this seem familiar? Substitute ‘four’ for ‘five’, and you get the old communist Soviet Union’s five-year plans. Did these work? Rarely. Most of the time they failed spectacularly. Not surprising, as the plans were drawn up by those in power and party apparatchiks, without a clue about how schools, factories, farming or foreign relations work. Because these people lived in their mansions and dachas, without any grasp of reality. Yet, when a plan failed, it was inevitably blamed on the people. Mind you, the same people who were ‘liberated’ following the bloody revolution, and who were then blamed for any failure and outright killed or starved to death. Or, in best case, made homeless and destitute, as they did not follow or understand the great leader’s vision.

A century later, history is repeating itself on another continent. Only history will show the outcome, and while I hope it will not end in pogroms of the masses this time, it doesn’t bode well for a country that used to be seen as the seat of modern-day democracy and the land of the free. A country where nowadays half of the population believes and repeats the president’s mantras, yet are as clueless as he is. I blame it on the nonsensical education system. For god’s sake (!), they still teach creationism.

Once upon a time, Julius Caesar usurped the power given to him by the Roman people and senators, abolished the republic and democracy, and saw himself as the absolute ruler of the greatest empire in the world. We know how that ended.