If I recall correctly, Donald Trump threatened to obliterate Iran recently: a threat of genocide. Then came the phony ceasefire, and nothing really change. Should we not worry about Trump's promotion of his genocidal capacities?

Trump 2.0 appears, in the history books as they are presently written, as an attempt to make good on the "fascism" claims of Trump 1.0. But it's all Donald Trump's relation to his own fantasy world, and we are suckers and rubes if we decide he's actually in charge. The problems appear to be 1) Trump is hindered from making good on his "fascism" claims by today's declining stage of capitalism, whereas the Fascists of old (and by "old" I mean the inter-war period, 1919-1939) were in an expanding stage of capitalism (which allowed them to do far more damage), and 2) Americans (including the current political class) are just too simple-minded and anti-intellectual to produce anything other than a sort of loser fascism, even if Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are planning to rebrand it as "end times fascism." Now, don't get me wrong, we shouldn't underestimate loser fascism. It sucks, it's killed a bunch of people, and it will go on killing more people and making everyone's life Hell. But the problem appears to be one of how loser fascism promotes this puffed-up image of itself that is aided and abetted backstage by "leaders" in the Democratic Party in the United States, e.g. Chuck Schumer.

One way of understanding the Trump 2.0 phenomenon is through what I would call Big Philosophy. The philosophical question that matters in this understanding appears to be one of when was the most pivotal time in world history. The pivotal time for Big Philosophy appears to have been the aftermath of World War II -- or at least it was this way for Jurgen Habermas, who received a lot of press recently by dying. The general argument for Habermas was that, now that Hitler is out of the way, you know "it's going to be all right": we have constitutional democracy, we have the US "security" umbrella, we had 500,000 or so troops defending the American Way in southern Vietnam until the elites shifted gears and pulled out, we have the UN, we've ended the Jim Crow regime in the southeast US, and we had the economic prosperity and cultural revolution of the Sixties. So everything's kewl now, and if Trump 2.0 appears scary at this time, well, this too will pass. History since 1981, you see, is all just a temporary downturn, and things will improve at some point. Here's John Lennon telling the Maoists they're wrong, and telling us that social democracy is the best we can do:

There was recently this academic fad called the "Anthropocene" in which 1945 was declared as the beginning of a new geological era, because of the acceleration of industry that happened after that time. So that is a theory of how 1945 was a pivotal year in history too.

Now, however, you see people starting to see that, you know, it's not going to be all right, anymore, because Trump loser fascism is scary and things could get worse. So, to incorporate it in our overall view of history, I would endorse another theory of history, in which maybe it wasn't 1945 that was the pivotal year after all. Let me suggest, here, an alternate pivotal period for our history: the 1880s. This is a much darker view of history.

The 1880s was the period of history when the alternative version of a better world, the one where the workers of the world can live comfortably, was supplemented by a technotopia, the "better world" in which those who possessed the technology would make the rules.

The 1880s:
1) 1882: first large-scale power plant, upstate NY, Thomas Edison
2) 1883: Karl Marx dies
3) 1885-1886: first mass production of cars, Carl Benz
4) 1888: "Looking Backward," the bestselling technotopia of Edward Bellamy

The 1880s, I would argue, changed the world like no decade before or since. The profound transformation of the 1880s eventually became 1) the conquest of Africa by Europe, 2) the two world wars, 3) the dystopias of the 20th century, "We" and "Brave New World" and "1984," and 4) the Cold War, and, basically, a world in which there was an ongoing struggle over who controlled the technology and who would therefore be making the rules. That didn't change in 1918, nor in 1945, and it's not changing now. This version of history sees the period after the 1880s as making a bunch of hectic transitions, one after the other, in really spectacular years: 1918 and 1933 and 1945 and 1992.

Okay, I wanted to say some more things about fascism. Fascism, with a capital F, existed in a world of expanding capitalism, the world between World Wars One and the end of World War Two. That Fascism was motivated by a nostalgia for the "good old days" when Europe conquered Africa and the US settler-colonials wiped out the "Indians" of the old West -- hey, it's our turn now, said Hitler, and so the Nazis tried to wipe out the peoples of eastern Europe in the Forties. The present-day Donald Trump Benjamin Mileikowski fascist translatio imperii in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, however, takes place amidst a declining capitalism, far from the atmosphere of the 1880s.

One important byproduct of the distinction between Trump loser fascism and the before-1945 type is that the economic dreams of global conquest of the present-day fascists lean on an economic elite that behaves as a pack of hyenas picking clean the carcass of a dying ungulate rather than looking like the conquests of Hitler or Napoleon Bonaparte. The proceedings of World War Three offer a stark contrast with those of World War Two. Hitler, commanding a relatively small country, Germany, conquered large swaths of territory and looked quite able to conquer the world, and the rest of the world was allowed to ask "what if Hitler had been a bit smarter? What if Hitler had waited until 1942 to start the war? What if Hitler had finished off the West before proceeding to the East? What if Hitler had ignored his hardliners and developed a nuclear bomb?"

On the other hand, Trump, building upon the Biden proxy defeat in Ukraine and with proxy regimes and military bases everywhere to start with, has on the other hand accomplished damn little. Venezuela? Here is Aurelien's estimate as regards the war(it's in the comments below):

The military side is not really important either, because the crisis will be resolved eventually by economic factors. The US cannot achieve its objectives militarily, now or ever, even if it could articulate them properly, but by contrast it could take a lot of damage. But as long as geography remains unchanged, Iran controls Hormuz, so they have possession of the ball. The flights into the region are probably rotation of personnel and equipment, spares, remaining missiles and such basics as food. There is no further reserve of military capability that the US could call on to improve its chances of winning. Thus, there is no “trap” because in reality the longer the US stays in the region the more its forces will become degraded. The Iranians have time and Hormuz, and they can afford to wait. They may well have their own reasons for whatever the undertook to do in Islamabad, but those don’t include weakness or naivety. It follows that anyone who can write that the “ceasefire” is a “pretext for preparing the ground invasion to seize control of the Persian Gulf and occupy Iran for US-Israeli joint exploitation” is, to put it politely, living in a parallel reality.

Sp, no, no military victory, just a slow, steady rise of the regime in Iran and, at some point, a rebuilding of what was destroyed there.

To be sure, Trump and his loser fascism have done a lot of damage to the interests of the consolidated elite class, by screwing the economy and by making Iran stronger just as Biden made Russia stronger, but also by unmasking the elites and revealing them as a collective Epstein Island monster with an ICE gestapo. Its frightening outcome does not look like it will be the one depicted in Philip K. Dick's famous novel The Man in the High Castle, therefore, but rather it looks like a return to the Great Depression upon the conclusion of Operation Epstein Fury. The question with loser fascism, then, is one of who will be actually to champion the interests of the great mass of citizenry, in the US and elsewhere, once loser fascism disappears from politics. In this regard the American people will invariably encounter their real enemy, yet to be unmasked: the top slice of the Democratic Party.