Daily Times

This has to be a cosmic joke. The same year Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf comes back into print in Germany after a 70-year ban, Donald Trump is crowd surfing his way to the Republican presidential nomination by peddling Nazi-lite propaganda. Pakistan got its first, true taste of ‘Trumpism’ when California police accosted noted film director Jamshed Mahmood (aka Jami) in a Palm Springs café on January 8. Apparently, some customers within snooping distance heard Jami and his friends use the words IS (Islamic State), Pakistan and Afghanistan while discussing a movie script and quickly called the cops.

The interrogation itself was brief and his party was soon free to leave, but Jami’s after-the-fact comments to a Pakistani daily were both chilling and thought provoking. He mused: “Thank God I was not in New York otherwise things would have been bad. Our American friend started crying because he knew that his career would be at stake now because he was sitting with us.” Trump, clearly, is not just corralling Republican voters by reprising white nationalism and promises to “make the US great again”. He is fundamentally rewiring their political consciousness.

Trump and IS are not so different in their approach to seeking power. IS uses potent, pan-Islamic symbolism to rope in Muslims angry at the west. Trump, meanwhile, fuses Monrovian isolationism with Wilsonian exceptionalism and a red, racist cherry on top to sway white American voters weary of President Barack Obama’s milquetoast foreign policy. Both would love the idea of a new-look Iron Curtain dividing the Atlantic because fear has many patrons in the post al Qaeda world.

The real worry is that although Trump may not make it to the national vote, Trumpism is here to stay. There are already signs that his divisive rhetoric is taking effect, especially after the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) accused the Depart of Homeland Security (DHS) in December of “informally implementing” Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US. This followed reports that a British Muslim family had their visas revoked by DHS personnel minutes before boarding a flight from Gatwick airport. Local media in the UK alleged that this was merely one of 20 such instances in recent months.

This would be a good time to revisit the original Iron Curtain and its two architects, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Marshal Joseph Stalin. Churchill coined the phrase on a US trip in March 1946 after being dumped by the British public in the first post-World War II (WWII) vote. Still smarting from defeat, Churchill grimly intoned at a college address in Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

Singular orator that he was, the idea caught on quickly but more curious was his change of heart on Stalin. Two years earlier, Churchill had admired the Soviet leader as a “realist” and someone he could talk realpolitik with. Later, he painted him as the marquee villain, despite kick-starting the Cold War himself through a handwritten note. Churchill knew that Stalin would play hardball in the post-WWII settlement, not least because Russia lost 20 million soldiers and civilians, a number 20 times that of the US and UK combined.

Moreover, Stalin wanted to reverse the shame of Brest-Litovsk, a 1918 treaty that allowed Russia to exit World War I in return for Germany and Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states, territory part of Russia’s old empire. In an attempt to appease “the great bear”, Churchill pulled out his ‘percentages’ plan to divide Europe in a private Kremlin meeting with Stalin in October 1944. With him on board, two arbitrary spheres of influence emerged on the continent without public consent and through cursive scrawled on an ordinary piece of paper.

Trump’s Hitler parody, of course, would lack context without a Neville Chamberlain redux and German Chancellor Angela Merkel played that role admirably until mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were pinned on immigrants, thereby ratcheting up political pressure to curb the flow of refugees. Ironically, Germany, as the birthplace of Nazism and facing real social upheaval by embracing one million refugees, has shown remarkable humanity under Merkel when compared to US politicians who cannot stomach the thought of a mere 10,000 new Syrians.

Much as modern historians remember Chamberlain with greater fondness than their forerunners, Time magazine got its 2015 Person of the Year selection spot on with Merkel. Germany’s leader realises that the age of globalisation mandates inclusivity, since shunning close to a quarter of humanity will have dire financial costs. Conversely, if Somali militant group al Shabab’s recent propaganda video featuring Trump’s anti-Muslim sound bites is any indication, jihadists everywhere are overjoyed at his success. With Trump’s knack for creating divides, he may as well be running on the IS ticket.

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad