After seeing and reading yet more reports of Donald Trump's utterances in the American election, I came across the following comment...
"…We can hear his voice, we can hear him persuading, exhorting and attempting to reason from the numerous … records that were made of his speeches. It is a raucous, strained voice, talking violently but incoherently. It is the voice of a vulgar, limited, illiterate man, lashing himself to fierceness, shouting, threatening, beating his fists at the window, smashing the furniture about him, to escape from perplexity and despair. He was perfectly simple and honest in his quality. And that was perhaps the secret of his career. He gave vent to the [nation’s] overstrain. He is the voice of [the nation] losing control.
He denounced foreigners, … Cosmopolitans, Communists, Republicans, owners of property and leaders in finance with raucous impartiality, and nothing is so pleasing to perplexed unhappy people as the denunciation of others. Not their fault, their troubles. They have been betrayed. … [H]is answer was, “…[E]xpel foreigners, arm and get more arms, … and increase and multiply.”
One has to remember that he never carried with him even an absolute voting majority of the … public. But the people permitted him to seize power and shatter their republic, stifle public discussion and destroy their liberties. They had no energy to resist him. They had no conception left in their fagged and hope-starved brains of any finer rôle than that which his bawling nationalism, his violent campaign against … imaginary … plots, against … speculators and Liberals, presented to them. …"
These words sound like an up-to-date description of Donald Trump, but they were written in 1933 by H.G.Wells in chapter 7 of his The Shape of Things to Come, describing the rise to power of one Adolf Hitler...
- Brett Knowles
