What do you get when you have an incompetent immoral con artist running the world’s most powerful country? If you guessed chaos, you guessed right. And when there is chaos, although most people lose, some people gain. Keeping people fearful is a way to control them, and the more chaotic things become the more desperate people become, and the more they are susceptible to being manipulated. This is the way ruthless dictators can control people’s psychology - keeping them in thrall, distracting them to look away from the rampant state of corruption of their own regime, by stoking peoples anger and resentment in order to direct it at some convenient low status group like immigrants or refugees. And, although the “fearless leader” can control certain elements in his country's own population, it is a different situation in other countries where he lacks that psychological control.
So our "fearless leader" starts to aim wider, perhaps he decides that his country needs to grow bigger in order to gain much needed land or resources, and he produces propaganda that denigrates the people in other countries, in the same way that he denigrates immigrants. Pretty soon he has got his countrymen worked up to a frenzy about the foreign “devils”, the real enemy, who are taking advantage of us by ripping us off or by disrespecting our country. Whatever! It’s all in the service of mass mobilization: motivating and moving the masses into the psychology of war.
At a certain point in a tyrant’s career, war with other countries will begin to make sense as a means of controlling the population; making society more submissive and hierarchical, eliminating internal opposition, and giving the tyrant the means to commandeer the entire society’s resources in the service of defeating and conquering the enemy. Putin’s shadow war with Ukraine: the initial “civil war”, the surprise annexation of Crimea, the eventual invasion of Ukraine in order to root out the “Nazi Ukrainian government”, the concurrent destruction of independent media voices and non-govermental organizations in Russia, the mass imprisonment of government critics, the assassinations of prominent opponents - all as a means to concentrate absolute power in one man alone.
There are some pretty hair-raising examples of this over the last century and a half Hitler’s insatiable appetite for conquest that led to the second world war and tens of millions of deaths. The Japanese attempt to conquer the Pacific nations that also led to the second world war. The Iran/Iraq war. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They all begin with a flood of lies that are used to stoke anger against a manufactured “enemy” and motivate a change in the people’s psychology to ready them to agree to the necessity of violent conflict and then, inevitably, to convert production to a war-time economy.
We’re starting to hear the same kind of noises from Trump, a consistent admirer of Vladimir Putin; talks of “the enemy within”, talks of annexation of Canada, Greenland, and the Panama canal; talks of trade war and then making it a reality; then escalating the trade war with China.
What initiating and fomenting a global trade war does is it causes economic uncertainty and chaos which leads to a sharp break in economic activity, because investors, producers, and consumers, are not sure what to do. So they pause their investing, consumption, and production, people begin to lose their jobs, investors lose money, and more firms go bankrupt. People grow more anxious and fearful about the economic outcome, and they become easy prey for mass manipulation, which is most effective in times of war, as a war, even a trade war, galvanizes people, and leads them to be much more likely to agree to work together against a common enemy, even if that enemy is a figment of their imagination. This, in my opinion, is the greatest danger.
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