Complacency killed the cat
A quick ramble, otherwise, I won't sleep...
Who hasn’t seen the batshit crazy and utterly disgraceful AI-generated video that the White House published yesterday (February 26, 2025)? The AI-generated video shows Trump and his rich friends, among which is the Nazi-saluting Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rejoicing in a rebuilt Gaza Strip. The video shows, what would appear to be Hamas fighters belly dancing, portrayed as Trans women with beards (?), Trump flirting with an Arab woman, Elon Musk throwing money, and even a casino. If all this is not already weird and completely fucked up, we also see Trump’s face in gold in full dictator mode, and then several of the same faces all at once.
This is not a made-up story or a dystopia; this is politics in 2025. The video rightly sparked social media frenzy and outrage. It is shocking, and we should be shocked. However, I have been thinking about the level of normalization surrounding Trump and his dangerous politics lately. His entourage and allies feel a sense of indefensible godlike prowess and power. Let’s face it, the world’s most powerful country is run by a dictator and his rich friends. Other Western politicians, whether Keir Starmer in the UK or Macron in France, cannot stand up to him. The European Union’s Ursula von der Leyen seems to be stuck in her reverence for the United States and Atlanticism, notwithstanding that an actual despot is in power.
The shift to right-wing politics and the general acceptance that this conservatism will save us are not new. Yes, the election results in the UK, France, Germany, and, earlier, Hungary and Poland have shown that we were, for a while, headed toward ultraconservative politics. And yet, if history can teach us anything, it is that we never learn from the mistakes of the past. Why?
Can it be our complacency?
Recently, I was having dinner with a group of friends. As with most conversations these days, they usually involve a great degree of gossiping and are thus insular. Then suddenly, we open up to the world and what is happening around us. After all, with social media down our throats, living under a rock and enjoying it is impossible.
One friend mentioned how they had turned off the news apps nine months ago. Another friend, outraged as they were with world developments, felt powerless, as if our agency to stand up to the injustices of the world, is illusionary and elusive.
While we wallow in our defencelessness, of course, we can blame this on capitalism, which has completely ripped us of any imagination and critical thinking. It has brought us to our knees, asking us to be good and frequent consumers, whether that is buying a new Zara dress or engaging in another algorithmically derived online content that knows our state of mind, our online habits, our worries, and our most private thoughts.
In the face of it all, we have become complacent. Disturbed but comfortable in the view that the world is experiencing turmoil and that, this too shall pass. But, at what cost?
The last time we were at the precipice of a world war was in the 1920s and early 1930s. Think about Italy in 1923 and Germany in 1933. Today, parallels are being drawn to those times, to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Historians and political analysts are crying the death of democracy.
Although, I have done a fair bit of crying these days - it might be PMS, who knows? I don’t think it is the death of democracy that I am crying about.
What I think I am crying about is this distilled and quiet acceptance that I feel around me. Political analysts, activists, and organizers on the left have been ringing alarm bells for a while. It did not start with the inauguration of Trump in January 2025. It did not start with the dismantling of the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI) programs that then followed. It started much before. In fact, on this side of the Atlantic, we could go back to the Thatcher years. The demise of socialism, the rampant rise of privatization, and the blinded adherence to austerity as an answer.
For right-wing politics to take hold, you need to demonize the Other. Both Hitler and Mussolini feared spreading communism, seen as a real menace on political and ideological grounds. Both men (ahem!) are remembered and in a way have been recreated, through the lens of their military and political grand plans. Yet, their partnership was deeply cultural, even predating by centuries, their most understood tie, which was the Italo-German partnership in the Axis. In 1938, under Mussolini, Italy passed racial laws, segregating Italian Jews and African inhabitants of the Italian empire. Meanwhile, in Hitler’s Germany, racism fuelled Nazi ideology and politics, culminating legalistically in the Nuremberg laws.
More able pens than mine have been able to document this partnership, and so I won’t attempt to do so here. The dehumanising of the Other is an age-old trope. In today’s Europe, the demon is Arab Muslims. A whole constellation of people and forces from the Le Pen clan to Trump, to Rupert Murdoch and the alliance of the tech bros, has ensured that our public conscience and imagination strip certain people and groups of their basic humanity.
Therefore, what we are getting complacent about is not merely the results of an election, it is about homegrown hatred for the Other, and sometimes, we’re not even privy to our biases and prejudices. The next election will not save us. Fascism and its derivatives, whether you want to call it neo-fascism or something else, is here to stay and will stay unless and until, on the Left, we’re able to unify and provide our people and communities with a real alternative.
Now is certainly not the time to get complacent. It is time to get organized, to talk to people around us, especially those with different worldviews. We need to understand each other better so that we can build a present and future that holds space for our plurality and multitudes without self-destruction.