An America dying in dictatorship is fraught with horror, denial, angst.

 Countless Americans now live in terror of the totalitarian state coming at us full bore.  

 As a people, we’ve flirted with homegrown fascism in our literature, arts and imagination.  But we’ve only briefly confronted it in real time.

 Obviously, it sucks.  

 But on a karmic level, based on what we have done to other peoples and nations, don’t we deserve it?  

 And won’t this Trumpian nightmare force us to confront the faults that have powered his rise?

 America’s core freedoms have been a long term assumption.

 Based on gender, sexual orientation, class, race, involuntary servitude, religion, national origin, etc, for millions that freedom has been a cruel illusion.

 But in the larger flow of human history, we inherited from Indigenous America a unique sense of liberty.  Few North American tribes were authoritarian in nature.  

 The Ho-de-no-sau-nee (Iroquois), Cherokee, Hopi and many others were largely run by women.  Their fluid cultures flowed from a nature-based harmony that stunned European newcomers.  “Freedom,” says the Iroquois Holy Man Oren Lyons, “that’s what the whites found here.”

 Through Washington, Franklin and other Founders who could see it, the spirit of the People of the Long House and other matriarchal tribes permeated the new nation, whose ultimate worth has flowed from a single sentence:  

 “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

 Infernal exceptions have included the entire slave/Jim Crow South, the ghastly Woodrow Wilson’s dictatorial Red Scare of 1918-20, the Cold War monstrosity shaped by Joe McCarthy’s hideous henchman, Roy Cohn…Donald Trump’s mentor (see Jeremy Steele’s genius portrayal in The Apprentice).  Innumerable glimpses into the abyss have been scattered along the way.

 Today the toxic venom of Big Money has got us shuddering in the death grip of hateful monsters like Trump, Musk, Bannon, Thiel and their unholy rhumba of Hitlerian serpents, whose ultimate targets are social democracy and human decency. 

 Their claim to absolute power is rooted in Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures, Lewis Powell’s 1971 Memo, and now in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.  

 With unlimited billions to fund their pathological greed, contempt for human compassion and nuclear powered disdain for ecological harmony, Trump’s Midas cabal is hell-bent on dictatorship.  Everything they touch turns to death.  

 But while we fight back, we must remember this:  we’ve done far worse to other countries.  

 Mostly oblivious in the womb of our own Indigenous-inspired republic, we’ve indulged a violent empire that’s imposed on other nations the gruesome likes of the Shah, Pinochet, Mobutu, Assad, Saddam, Somoza, the Duvaliers…a satanic parade of murderous kleptocrats too unbearable to list in full.

 Since Washington proclaimed our “Empire of Liberty,” we’ve sunk our red-white-and-blue fangs into the necks of countless nations whose dictators we’ve designated, whose inexcusable brutality Trump has yet to even vaguely approach.

 For us to now mourn an impending dictatorship without acknowledging the pure Hell we’ve imposed on so many others would be beyond disingenuous.  Somewhere along the way, we need to grok that the likes of what we now face have been perpetrated by us elsewhere throughout the centuries.  

 Yes, we must recoil in horror and resist to the utmost the prospect of losing all we cherish in terms of freedom, justice, dignity, sustainability, grace.  

 But that fight-back must admit that the terror now shaking us has been—-and continues to be—-imposed by us on too many others….including the very Indigenous who instructed this new nation in the freedoms now endangered by Trump and his evil minions. 

 We might also take full note of the sickening bigotry and sleazy tricks these monsters use to divide and conquer us en route to absolute power.  The path to dictatorial hell is clearly paved with divisive frailties we can no longer afford.

 Ridding ourselves of the bulk of them, and subbing in the green-powered realities of empathy, compassion, social justice and ecological wisdom will be at the core of winning back our democracy.

 As always, today’s ultimate enemy is us.  With Trump, we finally face him in real time.

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 Most Mondays, 2pm PT, Harvey “Sluggo" Wasserman convenes the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zoom (www.grassrootsep.org).  He wrote The People’s Spiral of US History, and Solartopia!  Our Green-Powered Earth.