By chance, I found myself reading the news of what some observers described as the most fascist gathering again in a small café adjoining a museum in the historic Jewish quarter of Krakow devoted to the heritage of the Galician Jews. The horror of Auschwitz, some sixty kilometers from the city, and the destruction of that community, is what comes most immediately to mind when one thinks of this story, but, as the museum makes clear , “more than nine centuries” of life preceded when, despite occurrences of anti-Semitic violence, Jews formed an important part of the social fabric of this part of Eastern Europe. The museum has photos of dozens of ancient synagogues in towns and shtetls in the region. Around the block, at the Old Synagogue of Krakow, there are portraits and biographies of rabbis dating back centuries, at least one of them among the most famous Talmudic commentators in Jewish history. .
The point, or so it seems to me, is that we can be tricked into believing that really terrible things won’t happen because they didn’t quite happen, and then they happen. Even now, six years into the Trump era, it’s hard to believe he’s serious. The event he hosted on Saturday, in Youngstown, Ohio, was nominally aimed at rallying voters behind the candidates he backed, including JD Vancethe Republican Senate nominee, but, in fact, Trump took the opportunity to demonstrate his dominance, remarking to the crowd, “JD is kissing my ass. He wants my support so badly. As usual, Trump really seemed to be campaigning to soothe his own hurt ego; now that he’s been caught lifting of classified documents from the White House, he has to raise the rhetorical bar if he wants to change the subject. And so he stopped saying that he knows nothing about what the QAnon conspiracy theory is and, instead, started kissing her. Earlier in the week, he had been ReTruthing (this is apparently how the retweet is called on Truth Social, his rickety social media platform) images of himself wearing a Q pin covered in the words “The storm is coming.” As “PBS NewsHour” Explain“In QAnon lore, the ‘storm’ refers to Trump’s eventual victory, as he regains power and his opponents are tried, and potentially executed, on live television.”
At Saturday’s rally, Trump also decided to play music that reminded many observers of QAnon’s theme song, “Wwg1wga” — which stands for “Where we go one, we go all.” Trump aides claimed the song was “Mirrors” and said it had previously been used in a video played by the former president, but the Time describe as “almost identical” to the QAnon song. A spokesman for Trump, with his usual aggressiveness, told the newspaper: “The fake news, in a pathetic attempt to create controversy and divide America, is preparing another conspiracy over a royalty-free song of a popular audio library platform”. Regardless, the crowd responded to the music by raising their index finger — a gesture that was interpreted as a reference to the “1” in the QAnon song title — in a scene that sounded like something out of the ordinary. ‘a Leni Riefenstahl film. Meanwhile, at another event last week in Post Falls, Idaho, Eric Trump and Michael Flynn were joined by a pastor, Mark Burns, who introduced the elder Trump at rallies, and who this time insisted, “I come here to declare war on all demon-possessed democrats who come from the gates of hell! It all sounds so absurd it makes you want to turn away, but the message from the Jewish Museum of Galicia in Krakow is: don’t dare. At the moment, Trump’s arguments seem a little desperate – the Ohio arena was not full (the rally was at the same time as an Ohio State football game), and his Senate candidates are struggling – but we may be just a bad fight of more inflation, or an unexpected global crisis, far from enough people in some states deciding that we better put the hand on the wheel. Hitler also lost an election and then came to power; and, like the new Documentary series on Ken Burns reminds us that America was fatally slow to respond to the all-out threat of fascism the last time around.
And that was before social media. Today, even among some people who perceive threats to democracy, it has been difficult to maintain solidarity, and a Time investigation this weekend reports that social media manipulation is part of the reason. The paper examines how Russian disinformation experts in Internet research agency and other trolling operations used on women’s march, in January 2017, in an attempt to sow division. First, trolls tried to exploit race, with messages such as “Aint got time for your white feminist bullshit” and “A LIL LOUDER FOR THE WHITE FEMINISTS IN THE BACK”. America’s racial divides are raw enough to still be playable, and, like the Time notes, there were tensions and divisions in the movement at the beginning. Yet, according to estimates, more than four million people across the country took part in the Women’s March. Undaunted, that same month, Russian trolls targeted Linda Sarsour, a Muslim woman who was one of the organizers of the march. A tweet purportedly from a right-wing southerner claimed that Sarsour wanted to impose Sharia law on the United States. The Time reported that the post had been picked up by “a small army” of right-wing accounts and that by spring the backlash had “morphed into a divisive political spectacle that easily drowned out the ideas behind the Women’s March” . The process was repeated when Sarsour, speaking at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America in Chicago in July, called for peaceful resistance to anti-Muslim government policies (this was at the time of Trump’s travel ban) “the best form of jihad”. “Jihad” is an Islamic term which, Time says, “can denote any virtuous struggle”, but, online, such nuance can be easily overcome. By the time it was all tweeted and done, the Women’s March was no longer the powerhouse it had been.
In the summer of 2018, Twitter suspended nearly four thousand accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, and a few months later suspended over four hundred accounts produced by the Internet Research Agency. GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. According to Time“With that, a chorus of voices fell silent – stories that for years had helped shape American conversations about Black Lives Matter, the Mueller Inquiry and NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The recording of messages around the Women’s March comes to a halt there too, frozen in time. In truth, however, Russian professionals are only part of the endless roar of social media thunder; there is many American amateurs eager to join this storm.
So as Trump continues his campaign, those who fear what might happen in this country will need to be vigilant against all ongoing efforts to divide it. Post-war Poland is a reminder of what Solidarity can achieve, and the museum in Krakow is a stark reminder of how quickly the center can break down. The fact that we have survived Trumpism so far does not guarantee anything. ♦
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