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There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing… And this seems to be the final revolution (A. Huxley)
When you think that you’ve lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door (Bob Dylan)
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother
It is murder (Leonard Cohen)
November 5 will be judgement day proclaimed Donald Trump at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. He was right, November 5, 2024, was judgment day indeed. Up to that date, I thought that we had already seen it all as far as the sinking of democracy in the West was concerned, but when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more, as Nobel prize Robert Zimmerman once wrote.
On November 4 I had dreamed that that could not have happened, that the game maybe was not over yet. But the following day I close my eyes and I wonder, if everything is as hollow as it seems. With my eyes closed, my train of thought took me back to what Aldous Huxley wrote in 1956, pieces of his writings echoing in my mind randomly. The best of constitutions and preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing pressures … imposed by growing numbers and advancing technology. The constitutions will not be abrogated and the good laws will remain on the statute book; but these liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. … we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. … by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense.
When I started writing about the shrinking of democracy in the Western World in 2013 I had already been witnessing Silvio Berlusconi’s rule for the last twenty years. At first, I thought it was a local phenomenon, even if an unbelievable one, but all the seeds of Western nations slowly turning into painless concentration camps for entire societies were already there because people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing. And this seems to be the final revolution… Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
In my book Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy there is a chapter dedicated to the dystopian novelists of the XX century, from Huxley and Orwell onward. In it I wrote: These works of art portray a society ruled by Big Business, legal or illegal, which is to say dominated by what in the real world are multinational corporations and by their brand philosophy that imposes a standard lifestyle on the planet based on implanted needs and profit. They describe a society that has reached almost perfection in mind manipulation and control through the media; a society whose public representatives, being actually appointed by Big Business and not by citizens, are ready to carry on the policies ordered by the multinationals, a political caste soaked in corruption and privileges whose main aim is to maintain social stability and erase dissent. These writers foresaw that it is the concentration of the political, economic and media powers in the same hands that would allow tomorrow’s – today’s – only apparently democratic societies to exist, a new form of social order which can be defined as a non-violent dictatorship … [and that it witnesses] the inadequacy of the democratic institutions in today’s hi-tech globalized social environment.
First Silvio Berlusconi, and now Trump/Musk, are cristal clear examples of Huxley’s prophetic predictions: when a business tycoon and media mogul, with pending criminal cases and drenched in vice, has the possibility to become a politician and then President/Prime Minister it obviously means that business controls politics and that politics, in turn, has in the modern media an extraordinary propaganda tool for brainwashing, made of fake news and post-truth. Do we need a further example of the inadequacy of democratic institutions?
In those days I did not know Berlusconi would provide a template for Donald Trump’s political career, that Trump would, and will, do on a planet scale what Berlusconi was doing in Italy. Now I have to surrender, knowing we have gone a step too far: Trump’s heir apparent, Eilon Musk, possesses everything and he is also the owner of most of the satellite world network used by states and armies, a true deux-ex-machina and indirectly a warlord. Besides, the shocking Trump’s Cabinet nominees, all hyper-rich business and media stars, with macro conflicts of interest and zero public experience, represent a provocative inverted logic. When you appoint, for example, an anti-vax person like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services or oil industry executive Chris Wright, a climate change negationist, as Secretary of the Department of Energy, it really means that when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.
These days, to further strengthen my scenario, I have seen the Rust Belt working class, the blacks, the Latinos, all the desperate people vote for a narcissistic egocentric multimillionaire, truly convinced that the people at the top of the social ladder are the ones who care for the bottom rung. I have seen the astonishing development of the factories of lies reaching everyone via social networks like a new invasion of the body snatchers. I have seen people believing that Filipinos eat their American neighbours’ pets. I have seen Trump and his likes praising racism, xenophobia, mass deportation, hate and scorn for women using vulgar language far worse than the John Wayne-ish tough guy lingo. I have seen the killing of the welfare state, the denial of climate change, and the promise to end the ongoing wars by backing up Putin’s and Netaniahu’s dictatorial stances.
Not only the next president will have widespread control of the media and economic endless power, he will also have complete control of Parliament and the Supreme Court: in Huxley’s words, again, a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. He is going to be the first president to be elected with four hard criminal cases in the course of action and a failed impeachment procedure for assaulting Capitol Hill and attempting democratic institutions: indictments he will probably be able to wipe off, Berlusconi’s style, through his indirect control of the magistracy. And, as Berlusconi’s template, he has practised bunga-bunga a lot in his career, a sport which took him to court, even if The hush money Mr. Trump allegedly paid to Stormy Daniels seems almost mundane compared with the time Mr. Berlusconi called the police claiming that Karima el-Mahroug, a 17-year-old guest of one of his infamous “bunga bunga” parties who had been arrested, was a niece of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. To whatever charge, Mr. Berlusconi always had an answer (Farewell to the Man Who Gave Us Trump, The New York Times, June 13, 2023).
If November 5 was judgment day, all I can do is tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door (closing time will be, of course, January 20, 2025). But is there any kind of heaven left? At least Give me back the Berlin wall // Give me Stalin and St. Paul // I’ve seen the future, brother // It is murder. Before that deadline, anyway, let me ask Mr. Trump one question I borrow from Bob Dylan once again, from the 1963 song Masters of War, so unbelievably contemporary today:
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul