This is what the future looks like: the past

Waco, Texas, Saturday, 25 March 2023. Donald Trump takes the stage to announce his second bid for the presidency. Behind him his supporters wave signs – “Trump 2024” and “Witch Hunt” – as he rants for what seems an eternity in the warm sunshine.

He wastes no time in outlining who the enemies of the people are: “the Marxists and communists”; “the stupid war-­mongers and the neocons and the RINOs [Republicans in Name Only], the big-­money special interests, the open-­border fanatics, crazy people”; “the fake news media”. And he warns them: “2024 is the final battle. That’s going to be the big one. If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over, and America will be a free nation again.” The reckoning is coming.

"In 2016 I declared I am your voice. And now I say to you again tonight, I am your warrior. I am your justice . . . And for those who have been wronged and betrayed . . . I am your retribution . . . Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state. That’s the way it’s got to be. You’re at a very pivotal point in our country. Either we descend into a lawless abyss of open borders, rampant killings, super hyperinflation . . . and festering corruption. Or we evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we make America great again."

It was as if his speechwriters had been reading histories of the 1920s and ’30s.

25 April 2024, Hungary. Some 3000 attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s global conference in Budapest watch on admiringly as their unofficial leader, Viktor Orbán, takes the stage and addresses the packed, cheering crowd. In the audience are many major figures of the global right-­wing populist movement – former and serving presidents and prime ministers, journalists, TV talking heads and opinion columnists. The bulk of Orbán’s address is in his native Hungarian, but at one point he breaks into English: “Make America great again, make Europe great again! . . . Go Donald Trump! Go European sovereigntists! Let us saddle up, don our armour, take to the battlefield and let the electoral battle begin.”

Twelve days later, 7 May 2024. Vladimir Putin stands defiantly at the Kremlin podium at the inauguration ceremony after his latest presidential victory, which was tainted by electoral manipulation and the murder of Alexi Navalny. Just twenty-­four hours before, he had announced that Russia would be holding a tactical nuclear weapons drill as a warning to NATO to keep clear of the Ukraine conflict. With the confidence of a bully whose bluff is never called, he puffs out his chest and declares to the world: “We are answering to our thousand-­year history and our ancestors . . . We will not allow anyone to threaten us.”

It’s not hard, is it, to see where this might be heading. What will the full consequences be this time? But maybe, just maybe, those consequence are already being felt. Maybe the endgame has already begun.

Southwest Israel, 7 October 2023. Hamas gunmen arrived at the Nova music festival near the Re’im kibbutz after breaking through the border fence at 6 a.m. and started shooting the young music lovers. Their mission? “To kill . . . anyone we saw.” Recordings show them gunning down those fleeing across the desert and shooting into the portable toilet cubicles where others were hiding. It’s hard to think of a worse way to die. By the time they moved on to other targets, around 260 festival goers were dead, some raped, others decapitated and otherwise mutilated. Many more were wounded.

At the Be-­eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz kibbutzim close by, the gunmen entered the perimeters and slaughtered many hundreds more, including children, babies and the elderly. Young military trainees at the nearby Zikim military academy suffered a similar fate. All up, eleven military bases were attacked, with four being overrun and their occupants slaughtered. Everywhere they went that morning, the killers seized hostages and dragged them into tunnels on the other side of the border.

It is estimated that more than 1100 people, some of them tourists and guest workers, were killed on this day, and more than 250 kidnapped. Learning of the unexpected success of the attacks, one Palestinian in Gaza City said: “We were ecstatic. It’s like a dream that is hard to wake up from.”

The antisemitic pogrom, banished from the world since the Germans retreated across the Oder in early 1945, had returned.

At 11.35 a.m. that same day, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his nation. “Citizens of Israel, we are at war . . . The enemy will pay an unprecedented price.” Gaza, he said later, is “the city of evil . . . We will turn all the places where Hamas is organised and hiding into cities of ruins.”

Netanyahu was true to his word. The bombing began. On 27 May 2024 the world’s newspapers carried reports of Red Cross workers collecting burned pieces of dismembered children’s bodies from the smouldering remains of a Rafah tent camp in the Gaza Strip following an overnight Israeli airstrike. The camp’s Palestinian population had been assured their refuge was safe from attack, but the reality was that no genuine shelter remained in Gaza. This was only the latest incident in Israel’s retaliatory offensive: just as dozens of cities were razed and millions killed by aerial bombardment in the six years following the invasion of Poland, Gaza had by this point been flattened and around 36,000 people (the exact numbers are disputed) killed in the eight months following Hamas’s brutal incursion.

Not only has the age of pogroms returned, but so too the age of murderous mass retribution and indiscriminate aerial bombing.

Do you ever stop to ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

This article is an extract from Repeat: A Warning from History by Dennis Glover, published next week by Black Inc Books. Buy it here.