Will Trump declare a "state of emergency" banning the truth? After fascist tweet, he personally may seem to have no need for it, but voters still do

Donald Trump has been whining long and hard against mail-in voting, claiming the “likelihood” of “fraud.” One suspects that his advisors and other far-right paranoids are pushing for in-person only voting in the belief that Trump’s fanatical base will be more motivated to come out in greater numbers in the case of complications due to the COVID-19. But Forbes notes that “While mail-in voting has risen substantially in primary elections held amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the practice dates back to the Civil War and has increasingly been adopted over the years, including for Trump's 2016 election win. While Trump purports widespread fraud through mail-in ballots, he has never shown evidence, and in fact, the Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 set the risk of fraud between 0.00004% to 0.0009%. Additionally, his repeated notion that mail-in voting hurts the chances for Republicans in elections, studies show that the practice doesn't help either party”—especially when it comes to 65+ voters.

Trump clearly is in fear of not just an election defeat, but the possibility—or probability—that he will be subject to prosecution for various financial crimes, which he would no longer be able to stop if he is no longer president. His various nefarious underlings, like Stephen Miller, know that their reputations make them virtually unemployable outside the far-right biosphere once Trump is no longer president. Thus when Trump tweeted that he would consider postponing the election on his own, the man who lorded over his business “organization” like a dictator who was the law unto himself, melded into the political dictator motivated by fear and paranoia when confronted by constitutional realities.

Within hours of Trump’s tweet, the cofounder of what some would say is the far-right Federalist Society, Steven Calabresi,  vented his outrage in a New York Times op-ed that Trump would even speculate on delaying the election for his personal benefit: "Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate."

Calabresi also asserted that any Republican senator who refused to speak out against Trump’s suggestion should resign “immediately.” Of course we can dream of such things, but in the meantime someone has to tell the truth. Fox News? Outside of Chris Wallace, hardly. Of course, even Fox News has felt the ire of Trump on occasion when it deviated one degree from the status quo, but in general reporting on his presidency is all “fake news” if it isn’t “positive” in every aspect.

Now, the Trump campaign website has been posting at various locations on the Internet “surveys” which I am not certain his people pay attention to if they don’t get the right responses. I once filled out one of these surveys, and all of my answers were in direct opposition to Trump World ideology. That was a mistake, because Trump campaign spam keeps popping up now in my email inbox. Another “survey” which the creators tried very hard to game is the “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey.” Most of the questions are “yes, no or no opinion,” and naturally I answered what I thought was the truth. Does the mainstream media care about working people? Yes. Do you believe the mainstream media has reported unfairly on our presidency? No. There were some questions that assumed the favorite Trump complaints were your complaints too: On which does the mainstream media do the worst job of representing Republicans? Well, I would say “religion” and “foreign policy” and “conservatism.” Naturally the question doesn’t allow for context; to me the media is at fault for not sufficiently highlighting Republican hypocrisies in regard to Trump’s policies, or his ideological, moral and ethical deficiencies.

As I went down the list it became quite obvious that how you viewed Trump skewed how you responded to the survey; it wasn’t really in search of the “truth.” If you disagreed with everything Trump is doing, then you might actually believe the mainstream media is not doing enough to expose Trump’s crimes, and if you are a Trump supporter, every bad story about him is simply there to make him look “bad,” regardless if they are “fake” or not. It just isn’t “fair” to harp on every instance of moral or ethical deficiency, or every instance of unlawful or unconstitutional behavior.

We need the media to keep exposing Trump and his crimes. Voters need to know what they will be voting for in November. Calabresi agrees with the anti-Trump coalition that he has fascist tendencies, and we can only surmise that any of his “base” who this does not matter to are little better than the German voters who in 1932 willingly fell victim to the Nazi Party propaganda  of nationalism, fear and paranoia,  putting the Nazis in power, and then the following year looked the other way when they unilaterally abolished democratic institutions by declaring a perpetual “state of emergency.” Now more than ever, voters need to listen to what the non-Trump media is reporting, because you won’t hear the truth otherwise; is Tucker Carlson talking about Trump’s fascist tendencies? No, he is too busy complaining about Barack Obama’s eulogy at John Lewis’ funeral.

Troop reduction in Germany, regardless if it has any "merit," is just another example of Trump acting on his personal "issues" and not U.S. strategic interests

I spent the majority of my seven years in U.S. Army in what was then West Germany. First it was in Crailsheim, whose Army base closed in 1994. Then I spent time at a kaserne with few amenities outside the sleepy little town of Schwabach when it  first became operational; that facility would remain in operation for only another dozen years before it was shutdown. I also spent two years in Augsburg; I had requested being stationed there because I had heard that it was one of better posts to be at in Germany. But as they say, the best place to be in the Army is between the place you’re leaving and the place you’re going to. Germany was a beautiful country to look at, but as far as interactions with the locals, I just had to make sure I had enough Deutschmarks in my wallet when I made purchases in town.

When I left the service to go back to school, there was still nearly one-quarter million U.S. service members stationed in Germany; the first significant drawdowns began during the first Bush administration in 1989, and it was across the board, not just in Germany, in response to end of what we can probably call the first “cold war” and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. Yet it is still frankly astonishing just how few troops there are in Germany today, and Donald Troop wants to decrease troop strength even more, to one-tenth the former deployment when I was last there.

Reports now are that the Pentagon, whose opinion about anything military Trump does not seem to respect or care to know about, is groveling before his feet. Do the Joint Chiefs of Staff really want to pull another 12,000 troops out of Germany? Do they care that much that Germany is not paying 2 percent of its GDP on military defense? No, because first of all the U.S. presence in Germany was never a “choice” the Germans had; the U.S. decided unilaterally to maintain a large force there under the guise of NATO because American generals preferred commanding American troops over that of other countries, and having a large contingent of U.S. troops allowed them to call most of the shots. The fewer troops the U.S. has in NATO, the less say it has about its operations. And believe me, when I was there the leadership really did impress upon the common soldier that the “threat” was “serious.”

But then again, under Trump the U.S. is losing everywhere, and not just because Trump fears to use U.S. military strength, but because entities that the U.S. needs to a show of force against tend to be his “friends,” such as any tin-pot dictator in the world he wishes he could be like—unless, of course, it is the president of Venezuela, because he’s a “socialist.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper, meanwhile, admits that moving troops out of Germany and relocating them will take years and cost billions—and if Trump loses the election it might not even happen at all. Let’s remember what this is about: Trump has poor relations with virtually every European head of state, save in countries like Hungary which have anti-democratic autocrats that find in Trump a kindred spirit; his only real “friend” in NATO is Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and we know what that is all about. His antagonism toward Angela Merkel is well-documented, and petty vindictiveness seems to be the real reason behind the move. Pentagon officials admit that where the troops will be relocated in Europe will not be dependent on whether a country is paying their 2 percent. Belgium and Italy pay even less a percent on defense than Germany, yet they are slated to receive some of those troops.

Trump’s foreign policy moves tend to make no sense on any level, and abandoning  our European allies only provides further inducement for Vladimir Putin to meddle and regain the “glory” of the old Soviet empire; under the circumstances, central and eastern Europe are the more ideal locations to station reduced troop strength, regardless of Putin’s “hurt feelings.” Even most Republicans seem mystified by Trump “philosophy” in conducting foreign affairs, with his dealings with Iran and North Korea seemingly without point or aimed at any strategic advantage for the U.S.; Trump always seems to start some foreign adventure as a personal publicity stunt, then gets bored with it, and forgets about it. Foreign leaders are confused about what Trump’s ultimate goals are; note too that under the Trump regime the U.S. has not been a party to a single major international agreement—only reneging on the ones that we are in.

Meanwhile, this country’s standing in the world deteriorates, nobody trusts us or believes we mean what we say. Or at least what Trump says or does, and hopefully not for too much longer, before it is too late for this country to recover its international standing and credibility.

Erdogan's reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque takes a page out of Trump's playbook to placate a reactionary base

 

Last month, the government of Turkey ignored the pleadings of UNESCO and governments in the West by removing the designation of Hagia Sophia—the most popular tourist site in Istanbul—as a museum, and converting it to a mosque. The reasons for it are unsurprisingly “byzantine,” considering what Recep Erdogan has done to transform the country from a reliable democratic NATO member, into a virtual Islamic dictatorship.  I’m certain that most people in this country have no clue about why this is important, but there is some serious history behind it for the players involves.

My interest in this subject began back in my much younger days when my principle pastime was reading books, and my favorite literary genre was history. I first became acquainted with the fascinating history of the Byzantine Empire, which comprised the remnants of the old Eastern Roman Empire, and how it was said to have served the old “western,” Christian portion of the empire during the Dark Ages as a bulwark against the predations of the Muslim tide, through the work of 18^th Century British historian Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon, of course, did not have the benefit of modern scholarship on the subject, but his history is written in the “classical” style and is an entertaining, opinionated read for the most part. I was particularly fascinated by the emperors Justinian I, Heraclius and Basil II, but in between the modern use of the term “byzantine”—“labyrinthine deviousness”—was typical of the power plays behind the scenes.

The empire remained the most powerful in the region until its defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 to the Seljuk Turks; interestingly, the Seljuks initially had no intention of occupying Anatolia (which comprised the bulk of the empire, and modern Turkey today), instead hoping for a border “deal.” But the Byzantines were so busy fighting amongst themselves that the Seljuks decided to just move in against virtually no opposition. Afterward, the empire would hang on by a thread until the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Other books I enjoyed reading on the subject  were J.B. Bury’s History of the Later Roman Empire, George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State (probably the best single volume history of the empire), Steven Runciman’s The Fall of Constantinople 1453,  military historian Walter Kaegi’s biography on Heraclius, which is about the most “exhaustive” available given the dearth of contemporary written information on his rule and military campaigns,  and John Julius Norwich’s three-volume popular history, which I still have laying around somewhere.

Now back to the issue of the Hagia Sophia. In 1934 the secular government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk converted it into a museum, as a token to the West, since he was attempting to transform Turkey in its image. Why he would do this is obvious: built in 537 AD during the reign of Justinian,  Hagia Sophia stood as the grandest Christian church in world until the conquest of Constantinople, after which the church was converted into a mosque, with its Christian iconography either removed, destroyed or painted over. This was typical of the Turkish conquests of Christian areas, where existing Christian churches were usually converted into mosques.

Before the start of World War I, Constantinople (it was not renamed Istanbul until after the fall of the sultanate) retained its cosmopolitan past, with nearly 40 percent of the city non-Muslim. Ottoman territory as a whole was 18 percent non-Muslim, the majority Orthodox Greek. Non-Muslims, mainly Greek, Armenians and Jews, were for most of the Ottoman period treated as third-class non-citizens, but permitted to practice their religions. Since the Turks were on the losing side in World War I, the Allied powers took temporary possession of parts of the country after the sultanate was abolished. British, French and Italian forces decided to assist Greece in “reclaiming” parts of the Anatolia that had large Greek populations, but the failure of the Greek army to secure a quick victory over the supposedly weak Turkish national army under the leadership of Ataturk convinced them that Greece could not win and withdrew their support, and Greece suffered a series of military disasters and was forced to abandon Anatolia, and the Greek population that was still there.

Although the Armenian genocide by the Turks receives much attention, a deliberate desire by Turkish nationalists to kill all Greeks who remained in the country led to many massacres, and the dead included Bishop Chrysostomos of Smyrna, who the French soldiers present reported that a Turkish mob “began to beat him with their fists and sticks and to spit on his face. They riddled him with stabs. " Chrysostomos was subsequently deified by the Greek Orthodox Church as a martyr. Although it is usually claimed that the dispute over Cyprus is the principle sticking point in relations between Turkey and Greece, this ignores long-standing animosities that dates back to Ottoman rule over the Greeks both in the Balkans and in Anatolia over a period of close to 500 years.

And it isn’t just Greeks, but Bulgarians too. I once worked at a warehouse that employed a husband and wife from Bulgaria; in 2002 there was the infamous traffic accident involving the wife of a Bothell police officer who crashed into a stalled vehicle on I-405 while traveling 70-75 mph (“with traffic”) and talking on her cell phone, causing it to explode into flames, killing a family of four, including two children. King County prosecutors refused to press charges because there was no “law” against driving while being inattentive using a phone. In any case, the family was identified as Bulgarian immigrants; when asked about how they felt about the tragedy, the Bulgarian couple just shrugged it off and said “who cares.” Why? Because the names of the deceased identified them as Turks—not "real" Bulgarians.

Some Muslim countries, like Egypt, know that their culture and history cannot be disentangled from the past glories of pre-People of the Book without losing something of their identity. Ancient Egypt is a valuable part of their historical legacy, probably the most valuable part. This is why when the Aswan High Dam threatened to engulf the temples of Abu Simbel and other ancient monuments, they were cut up and restored to either higher ground or moved to other countries. It is not certain to what extent Egypt’s president Nasser was actually interested in the project, or his Russian bankrollers, but UNESCO urged the saving of the sites, and Nasser allowed it since international sources were paying for it, and performing the work.

On the other hand, we have the Taliban, who for no reason save pure religious fanaticism, blew-up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. In Turkey, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque was a deliberate political act to shore-up Erdogan’s Islamic base. According to Politico, Erdogan had initially balked at the idea, “scolding” its supporters that they should be trying to fill Istanbul’s other 3,000 mosques. But then Erdogan seems to have taken a page out of the Donald Trump playbook:

Earthly concerns may have changed his mind. Last year, during a bitterly contested mayoral election, the president reversed course and said the Hagia Sophia should be a mosque again. His party still lost the vote, the first time the secular opposition won control of the city in 25 years. Istanbul’s new mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu — a member of the secularist party founded by Atatürk — has said the Hagia Sophia should remain a museum. He called on the government to refrain from using the controversy “as a domestic political device” at a time when it should be focused on problems like the coronavirus pandemic.

The outbreak has dramatically slowed Turkey’s economy, already wobbling from a recession last year. Discontent with double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate above 13 percent have driven support for Erdoğan's ruling party down to levels it last saw when it first took power in 2002. “Erdoğan is anxious to shore up support, and his preferred strategy has been to harden his illiberal, nationalist and Islamist positions. The conversion of Ayasofya would bolster that image on the international stage and fail to win him points in Europe,” said Merve Tahiroğlu, Turkey program coordinator at the Project for Middle East Democracy in Washington.

Erdogan sought a fig leaf of judicial “legality” for the move, but observers knew the courts would provide a blank check for anything Erdogan wanted. Two weeks after a 17-minute hearing, a court in Istanbul made the bizarre ruling that Hagia Sophia was the “personal property” of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who had conquered the city in 1453, and the 1934 law was thus “illegal.” But the sultanate has long since been abolished, and the claim that any private person “owned” Hagia Sophia was insulting on its face. Although it is being claimed that visitors can still enter the Hagia Sophia outside of prayer services, most Christian art is to be covered up. Nevertheless, the “mystified” Erdogan is correct in saying that Turkey can do whatever it wants to do in its own territory.

Other former Byzantine church museums have been “reconverted” into mosques under Erdogan’s rule. Another Hagia Sophia, in Iznik, is one of these.  One local who runs a restaurant near the building offered this opinion in Eurasianet:  “There are so many mosques in the city and around here. In my opinion, it was utterly unnecessary to turn the Hagia Sophia into one as well.” Another town resident, a historian  named Ömer Tuncer,  said “This is a question of respect. What would Muslims say if the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] was turned into a church now? The Hagia Sophia in Iznik is an important symbol in Christian faith, a place of pilgrimage. It is clear that a building like this needs to be protected as a museum.”

But as we are seeing with Trump playing to his white nationalist base, Erdogan believes that the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia and erasing Turkey’s past will shore-up his narrow Islamist base during these times of the pandemic and economic turmoil. It remains to be seen just how this unnecessary action is supposed to accomplish this, but it falls in line with Erdogan’s support of hardline Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, whose remnant he has allowed in Turkey to antagonize Egypt’s present regime, and he has been accused of “secretly” reneging on agreements to end outside military intervention in Libya, and illegally shipping arms into that country. Foreign Policy notes that Erdogan’s intervention in Libya serves no Turkish national interest, save Erdogan’s personal antagonism with Egypt’s current secular government and its regional ally, the United Arab Emirates, whose government also sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a destabilizing threat. All of these activities in recent years have shown that Turkey has chosen not to be a reliable partner in either NATO or the West’s open democratic principles.