Blueprints for Authoritarianism: Mein Kampf and Project 2025

by Melvin Goodman

 August 1, 2024
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Image Source: The Heritage Foundation – Public Domain

“Christians, get out and vote.  Just this time.  You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what?  Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” 

– Donald Trump, July 27, 2024, Speech to a gathering of religious conservatives sponsored by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action.

I am not arguing that “Project 2025” is directly comparable to Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf,” but there are some similarities in their political ideology and their political plans for the United States and Germany, respectively.  Both documents are “blueprints for authoritarianism.” As the saying goes, often you need to be forewarned in order to be forearmed.

The antisemitic ravings of “Mein Kampf” are quite different from the unconscionable anti-immigrant markers in “Project 2025.”  However, the language of the documents as well as the language of Donald Trump reveal a contempt for groups of individuals that is evil and ugly.  Hitler wrote about the “Jewish peril,” which isn’t far removed from Trump’s racism going back to the “American Carnage” speech of 2017 as well as the Project’s call for mass deportations.Trump’s language has only worsened over the years, and we never should forget his Muslim ban and the reference to “shithole” countries in his first year in the White House.

The important role of Stephen Miller on behalf of Trump and the Project is stunning; Miller is Jewish but he would have made a good Gauleiter for any Fascist party.   Miller has been working for years to get a nationwide crackdown on immigration.  He has vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to recent articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker.  Project 2025 calls for “stringent reinforcement” of immigration and deportation measures, including “ramped-up workplace inspections,” and penalties for employers hiring undocumented workers.

The United States was alerted nearly a decade ago to Steve Bannon’s Leninist “destruction of the administrative state,” and Project 2025 moves in this direction, calling for partisan control of the Department of Justice and the FBI.  The Project wants increased military participation in domestic law enforcement, stressing the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to put down revolt or even civil unrest in the United States.  Even peaceful protests could be targeted.  The Germans had nearly one decade of warning regarding Hitler’s interest in destroying the parliamentary system, but never took his views seriously.  We seem to be following the German pattern.  Are we Germany 1933?

Even a cursory look at Project 2025 regarding U.S. governance reveals a dystopian view of American democracy and American freedoms.  Trump and Project 2025 are in complete agreement regarding the plan to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington.”  Senator J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee has gone even further, saying he would “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.  Replace them with our people.”  In Trump’s first term, he issued an Executive Order to allow the president to remove “rogue bureaucrats.”  Trump created a “Schedule F” to eliminate civil service protections.  President Biden revoked this schedule in one of his first acts as president.  Trump will certainly restore it.

Trump and Project 2025 favor the round-up of millions of immigrants in detention camps on the way to deportation.  They advocate for abolishing the Department of Education, and the promotion of Christian white nationalism in public schools.  All climate change progress, considerable under the Biden administration, would be reversed, and the words “climate change” would be banned.  

Trump and Project 2025 would destroy the Voting Rights Act, and ban abortion and IVF.  Gerrymandering, the filibuster, and voter suppression tactics would close down the channels of democratic change in our democracy.  It would be very difficult to reverse this damage.  Trump 2.0 will be worse than the first time around because Trump will be appointing far more right-wing troglodytes than the first time around.  There will be no Gary Cohns on the economic side, or conservative military officers who were the adults in the room between 2017 and 2019.  Trump has tried to distance himself from the Project but he hasn’t identified any Project proposals that are anathema to him, and virtually every key member of the Project worked in Trump’s administration and was identified as a super-MAGAn.

In at least one respect, Project 2025 must be taken just as seriously as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”  The latter was the hatred and musings of a narcissistic paranoid.  Project 2025 is a product of Trump’s acolytes who have created an entire institutional framework to put their agenda into place.  The Center for Renewing America was formed to “end woke and weaponized government,” and to address the threat from critical race theory, which it terms “vast, real, and increasingly existential.”  

CRA’s founder, Russell Vought, Trump’s chief of the Office of Management Budget in the first term, wrote an oped for Newsweek titled “Is there anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?”  Vought’s group works closely with the Conservative Partnership Institute that is populated with such troglodytes as Mark Meadows.  Stephen Miller runs America First Legal, which has been called the ACLU of the MAGA movement.  The Conservative Partnership Institute was created in 2017 by former senator Jim DeMint, who left the Senate to run the Heritage Institution.  According to Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker, these groups have invested $50 million in real estate in and around Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill, to construct their empire.  

This poses a far more dangerous threat than Trump’s first term, which was destructive in its own right.  But the mainstream media continue to dismiss Trump’s ability to turn ideas into actual policy.  The Washington Post, still runs opeds with such titles as “The GOP still doesn’t know what it would do with power.” The Post ran an oped last week, indicating that Trump has softened his stance against abortion, and that Trump has “distanced himself.”  But these are campaign statements with no real meaning whatsoever.  The key is that, while many of the personnel in Trump’s first term ignored his ranting and ravings, the zealots in any second term will be counted on to support the rants and ravings of Trump and Vance.  Hitler and Trump both benefitted from societies that refused to take them seriously, and from a press corps that underestimated the threat.

There is no question that a second Trump term would be far worse than the first regarding expanded presidential powers, social conservative initiatives, and the use of the military in the domestic arena.  The personnel in the second term would be far more loyal and far more ideological.  After all, Trump didn’t have a political structure in the first term; the second term will be dominated by hard-core polemicists and ideologues, who will not be committing insubordination to their leader.  As for their leader, he is a dangerous demagogue. whose flawed character has been accurately described in books by family members. Trump, if elected, will secure the “American Carnage” that he predicted seven years ago.

POSTSCRIPT: A future piece on Project 2025 will deal with the threat to the Pendleton Act of 1883, The Civil Service Reform Act, and to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that prevented the use of the military in dealing with domestic violence.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Looming War Between NATO Allies: Greece and Turkey

by Evaggelos Vallianatos

 August 1, 2024
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NASA satellite photo of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. The islands Karpathos and Kassos, where on July 25, 2024, Turkey and Greece came very close to fighting a war, are located between the large islands of Crete, lower left, and Rhodes, lower right, in Southeastern Aegean. Karpathos is the larger of the two islands.

The relations between Turkey and Greece have never been normal. The legacy of Mongol Turkish conquest of Greece in the fifteenth century poisons all connections between Turks and Greeks. The Greeks remember their Turkish oppressors like other barbarians who invaded their country. They fought hard and long to free themselves from the tyranny of the Turks. Moslem Turks, however, remember they live on land they stole from the Greeks. They also remember their empire in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East and want to recreate it.

Erdogan trouble

Erdogan, president of Turkey, is consumed in becoming a Sultan. He apes Western diplomats in talking about peace and security while planning the exact opposites to peace and security. He also takes advantage of disunity and political and presidential chaos in America, which founded NATO as an arm of its foreign policy. Erdogan mocks the foolish American funding of the wars in Ukraine and Israel. He takes advantage of America’s delusions of planetary hegemony. He demands payments or Greek territory for staying a member of NATO. In 1963, President Lyndon Johnson agreed with Turkey and made it possible for Turkey to invade and capture a third of the Greek island of Cyprus. Fifty years after their 1974 conquest of northern Cyprus, the Turks want more. Erdogan forces the American leadership of NATO to prepare Greece for losing more land to Turkey. This time the objective of Erdogan is no less than capturing the entire Aegean Sea and its hundreds of Greek islands.

Greece and Turkey on the brink of war: July 23-25, 2024

Despite the American effort to have both Turkey and Greece in its military camp of NATO, the two countries barely tolerate each other. America’s obsession with fighting Russia through the proxy of Ukraine, leaves no time or interest in the State Department or the White House to resolve the outstanding strategic problems between these two NATO “allies.” The European Union also ignores Greece and its precarious relations with the Islamic rogue country of Turkey. It’s not surprising that the European Union ignores Greece. During the Obama administration, the European Union and America’s International Monetary Fund just about crushed Greece in order to use the money Greece borrowed from them to save failing American and European banks. All the participants in the debt tragedy of Greece, EU, IMF, and Greece, knew that the EU-IMF methods of debt “relief” were illegal and criminal, but they had the power and treated Greece like a colony.

Back to the Greek-Turkish drama in the Aegean. Left alone, the contest between these two enemies, Greece and Turkey, boils over every so often. The latest episode took place during July 23 to 25, 2024. An Italian research vessel, Ievoli Relume, was mapping the underwater area between the Greek islands Kassos and Karpathos in Southeastern Aegean Sea. The idea is to place a cable between Cyprus and Crete in order to move green electricity from one island to another. While the ship was investigating the underwater landscape, 5 Turkish warships arrived. They ordered the Italian boat to cease work. They claimed sovereignty over the sea around Kassos and Karpathos. We don’t know what exactly happened to avoid war. Two Greek warships arrived and faced the 5 warships of Turkey. Greek reporters speculate that the foreign affairs ministers of Greece and Turkey, George Gerapetritis and Hakan Fidan, spoke on the phone and defused the crisis. Turkey even issued its own Navtex, navigational warning, in which it took credit for avoiding conflict over the “violation” of its territorial waters, even thanking Greek and Italian authorities for recognizing its jurisdiction in the Aegean Sea. The Turkish Navtex said: “We would like to thank the Greek and Italian authorities for their respect for our maritime jurisdiction and their cooperation.”

Of course, Greek and Italian authorities did no such thing. What is to respect of such blatant lies? The Turkish warships were violating international law by being in waters in the exclusive economic zone of Greece. Moreover, their presence near the Greek islands was illegal, provocative, and insulting. They could have started war between Turkey and Greece. The Greek Ministry of Defense minced no words. On July 26, 2024, its spokesperson said: “No respect [to Turkish maritime jurisdiction] was shown or will be shown in the future by the Greek Armed Forces to Turkey’s illegal actions within the zone legally delimited between Greece and Egypt.”

The Greek government stands down

Despite this brave rhetoric, Greece must have given something to Turkey to withdraw its warships. Could it be that the Greek authorities secretly recognized some kind of joint Turkish-Greek or sole Turkish “jurisdiction” of the Aegean? This would be a dream come true for Erdogan. The fulfillment of his vociferous claim that the Aegean is his blue homeland. In the long-term war strategy of Turkey against Greece, the incident of July 23-25, 2024 was a “validation of its expansion” in the Aegean.

Despite this offensive policy of Turkey towards Greece, the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mtsotakis, plans to meet Erdogan in September in New York. One wonders why. To continue the meaningless dialogue of better neighborhoods and the Turkish celebration of 50 years of brutal occupation of northern Cyprus? What’s to discuss? Instead of launching an emergency campaign of strengthening the armed forces of his country and those of the Republic of Cyprus and creating alliances with countries that don’t like Turkey, Mitsotakis is living a nightmare of opening more doors to the genocidal policies of Erdogan. He keeps giving signals of collaboration with the millennial enemy of the Greek people. Perhaps he is brainwashed that the United States will put Turkey in its place on his behalf.

America without a president

Mitsotakis should know that at this pre-election moment, summer and winter of 2024, America is in no position to oppose Turkey. No one knows who the president will be next January. And the rulers of America are determined to keep pushing the wars in Ukraine and Israel. The thought of helping NATO Greece against NATO Turkey is probably alien to most Americans. Philhellenism is becoming rare in America. Even wealthy Greek Americans spend their money in furnishing churches and enjoying galas than lobbying for Greece or Hellenism, a foundation stone of Western civilization.

Pray to Athena or America but be ready to defend yourself

But more important than these realities, no country relies on others to save it from its enemies. And this is a tradition dating millennia in Greek history. United Greeks are invincible. They defeated the Persians 3 times and saved Greek and Western civilization. Alexander the Great conquered Persia and created a golden age of science and technology that sparked the scientific and technological revolutions of Western Europe since the Renaissance.

Konstantinos Grivas, an insightful commentator on international military politics and professor of strategic studies at the Hellenic Military Academy of Evelpidon, has nothing good to say about Mitsotakis and the disturbing relations he maintains with Erdogan. He suspects Mitsotakis is making Greece vulnerable to Turkish influence, nay Turkish invasion and potential conquest. He has been ringing the bell of danger of imminent war with Turkey. He is right that Turkey does not recognize the Law of the Seas, which becomes an excuse for Erdogan to argue that no Greek island in the Aegean has national sovereignty rights. This bolsters the other fake but strategically important theory that the Aegean is his blue homeland. In this geostrategic context, Grivas sees the latest confrontation of July 25, 2024, as crucial in documenting the more aggressive strategy of Turkey against Greece. That Mitsotakis remains passive speaks volumes in boosting the war party in Turkey. At the same time, Grivas says, the Greek government is brainwashing the Greeks that all is fine with Turkey. This propaganda is wasting time necessary to prepare the country to defend itself by being ready for war. This also convinces the Europeans that probably Greece deserves what’s coming, though any attack of Turkey against Greece is an attack against Europe and America. Grivas is right. Turkey is preparing for war against Greece.

Another critic of Mitsotakis is Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, former Greek ambassador to Turkey. Chrysanthopoulos says the hatred of the Turks for the Greeks is so deep, that Turkish TV blacked out showing the boat carrying Greek athletes during the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris. Like Grivas, Chrysanthopoulos is convinced that, during the crisis of July 25, 2024, Greece negotiated with Turkish officials her hegemony of the Aegean. He urged Mitsotakis to order the resumption of research in Southeastern Aegean and not tolerate the presence of any Turkish warships in Greek waters.

Epilogue

The Greek people need to hear the voices of reason and self-respect of Grivas and Chrysanthopoulos. Greece needs a government of national unity to prepare the country to face Turkey in the battlefield, if need be. This government should speak loud and clear about the danger Turkey represents not merely in the Aegean and the Mediterranean but all over the world. Turkey acts with impunity against the rule of law. Genocide is part of its policies. Greece, the Republic of Cyprus and other law abiding countries must throw Turkey out of northern Cyprus, allowing Greek and Turkish Cypriots to live together without a Turkish army of occupation, British military bases, and “protecting foreign powers.” The United States and other nations in the NATO alliance should expel Turkey from NATO or make it clear to Turkey that any attack on Greece will be an attack on NATO. They should also make clear that they would no longer tolerate Turkey killing its Kurdish citizens. In fact, the international community should create an independent country for Kurds.

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., studied history and biology at the University of Illinois; earned his Ph.D. in Greek and European history at the University of Wisconsin; did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US EPA; taught at several universities and authored several books, including The Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and its Demise.