Dictators who take your rights away want more than just your silence—they want your complicity. They want you to betray other people in your communities, to inform on them, to look the other way when your loved ones are taken by the secret police. But more than that, they want you to betray yourself. They want you to lose your moral compass. They want you to self-censor.
Dictators are very skilled at posing as saviors. They create crises—or exploit existing ones—and then present themselves as the only solution. Whether it’s an economic collapse or a perceived threat of social unrest, they step in with promises of order and protection.
One of the classic dictator narratives for the past hundred years is this: only the authoritarian leader can keep people safe from immigrants crossing the border. There’s always a grain of truth—they come over the border, yes—but dictators twist that truth. They say immigrants are coming to rape our women, to steal our jobs, to dilute the population with the “wrong” skin color or faith.
These same excuses have been used for generations to justify national purity campaigns. Mussolini, for example, talked about Black, brown, and yellow people—his words—coming across the border and having too many babies. These are old narratives, but they still work. Why? Because they make people afraid—afraid for their safety, their families, their way of life. And in that fear, the dictator says: “I alone can fix it.”
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat in History Professor Answers Dictator Questions
A clear and concise summary of some of the features of authoritarianism and dictatorships. Of course, it’s not a coincidence that this comes out now, a few weeks into Trump’s second term.
Personally, I have a few different things come up around this. Yes, I know people repeat history, including the type of history that is harmful to themselves. Yes, I know many – especially in the US it seems – don’t know much history. (This is partly by design since some political groups benefit from an uneducated population.) Yes, I know that not everyone had the same education and grew up in the same culture as me. (Learning about these kinds of things were central to my middle school education, and it’s part of Norwegian culture since we lived through a dictatorship during WW2.)
And yet, a part of me is baffled. Isn’t this obvious? No, apparently it’s not. Apparently, people need to make the same mistakes again, and again. I guess that’s a feature of this world that’s inherently changing, unpredictable, and has a mix of things our personalities likes and don’t like.