We’re all worried about rising fuel prices, and yet, I’m sorry to say, there’s one more, let’s say, primary cause for alarm. The two countries that have 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, more than enough to end human life, are very crazy. Mental instability is what defines the United States and Russia today. The question is: which of the two is experiencing the greatest political instability? Or which is closer to the civil war?
Russian Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the KGB agent assassinated by order of Vladimir Putin, told me last week in London that her country is on the conditions for a repeat of the 1917 revolution. I suspect that Litvinenko has succumbed to a bit of wishful thinking, of believing that whatever you want to happen will happen. But I don’t know. What will happen in Russia ?, is the question of the million and no one has the answer. Churchill’s description of Russia in 1939 is still valid: “A riddle, shrouded in mystery, in a riddle.”
In the United States, on the other hand, they do not hide dirty rags. They take them out, almost bragging, in broad daylight. They are like this, on an individual level and as a nation. People who are open, without shame and, in too many cases, without much contact with reality.
Like, for example, the addicted audience to Fox News, the TV channel that is for Donald Trump like all Russian channels for Putin. The most disturbing episode in the political world of the United States since, at least, the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 was the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 last year. The broadcast of the findings of the House of Representatives committee, which was set up to investigate what happened, began on Thursday. Of the major national news channels, Fox News is the only one that has refused to broadcast it live.
Because? For fear of exposing his audience to the truth, for not diluting the polarization that both Fox and Trump feed on, to prevent devout Trumpists from questioning his faith, the absolute certainty that his sacred orange cow would continue today the White House if not for the Big Steal, the great robbery he suffered at the hands of Joseph Biden and his accomplices throughout the American judicial system. Fox News doesn’t want them to find out about the committee’s report because Trump doesn’t want them to see what his attorney general was saying that the election fraud charge was bullshit, a ridiculous thing, they don’t want his followers to have to suffer the displeasure of feeling that the bloody insurrection of January 6 was, according to the information gathered by a thousand witnesses, the culmination of an attempted coup.
Trump and his people have refused to accept the rule that all electorally-defeated American presidents have adopted for 200 years: shut up and leave. The show that Trump presented was about a little boy who refuses to go to bed. He yells at his parents that “no, no and no”, throws the porridge on the ground and, as this is the United States, pulls out his gun and starts firing.
Today, half of the United States is made up of angry children whose political habitat is a darker version of Alice’s Wonderland. The other half is made up of adults – or at least children – who still believe in the peaceful transfer of power as a fundamental pillar of democracy.
The research agency that provides the most reliable social radiographs in the United States, Pew Research, said six months ago that “partisan polarization remains the dominant, perhaps unalterable condition of U.S. policy … Republicans and Democrats they agree very little and when they are usually in the shared opinion they have little in common ”. It remains true today. The situation is as follows: If your party loses the next presidential election, you will feel as if your country has fallen into the hands of a foreign occupation regime.
So civil war? In October of last year, I published a column here in which I stated that the old concept of an indivisible nation was in ruins in the United States. I quoted two articles from two sober Washington magazines that warned of the possibility of a civil war. I quoted the Financial Times as saying, “The fashion question in Washington today is, ‘Are we Weimar?’ Is America, like the Germany of the 1920s, a declining democracy? ” So there is war and dictatorship in sight?
Today these same questions continue to be asked, but with more insistence among more and more people. Alarming becomes routine. Not just one, not two, but three books have just been published in the United States entitled How Civil Wars Begin, This Will Not Happen: Trump, Biden and the Battle for the Future of the United States, and The Next Civil War: future of the United States. They all warn that the classic conditions are in place for a civil war, that the country is inhabited by two radically different worlds divided between countryside and city, that there has been a recent explosion of armed militias, that political language is becoming more and more violent. that the concept of loyal opposition has led to hatred of the rival, that when Trump came to power in 2017 one in ten Americans said that violence was justified to achieve political goals, and that today he is one in every three.
Given the information we have, Marina Litvinenko’s omen seems more applicable in the United States than in Russia. We see a clue in a popular T-shirt among trumpeters that says, with a double meaning both unconscious and revealing: “I’d rather be Russian than Democrat.” With this scenario, would there be any consolation? In the event that Trump’s fascism triumphs after a war, maybe one. With two psychopathic dictators in command of 90 percent of nuclear weapons, they might agree and reduce the chances of Earth being as inhospitable as the moon. Now, if this is really a consolation, everyone will say it.
