Contra Trump

揚幡招魂

 

In April 1994, the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University held ‘Mao Craze, Mao Cult? A Symposium on Popular Culture in China Today’. On 23 April 1994, I presented a paper on the theme of ‘The Irresistible Fall and Rise of Mao Zedong’. The title was inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 ‘parable play’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. In my presentation I argued that the popular Mao cult that had flourished in the wake of the bloody repression of the 1989 Protest Movement was a mixture of nostalgia, resistance and misplaced ideological fervour. I also suggested that, despite all of the cosmetic changes to the political and social life of post-Mao China, Maoist habits, ideas, language and politics remained the bedrock of contemporary China.

The paper I presented at Harvard formed the basis of the introduction to my book Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (1995). There I observed that:

The shade of Mao Zedong continues to cast a long shadow over Chinese life. Although the MaoCraze of the early 1990s has faded, replaced, for example, by such things as a passing fashion for late-Qing heroes like Zeng Guofan, some discussions of Mao and his legacy have continued in the public arena. Wang Shan’s China Through the Third Eye, a controversial best-seller in China in the summer of 1994, took as its central theme a comparison between the Mao and the Deng eras, often expressing sympathy if not outright support for Maoist policies. One of the constant refrains of the book was that the Chinese have failed to understand and appreciate Mao fully!

Meanwhile, outside China the publication of Li Zhisui’s magisterial memoir in late 1994 elicited a new wave of debate about the Chairman, and his place in the nation’s history, among overseas Chinese, especially within the dissident diaspora, and the Chinese version of the book was much sought after on the Mainland. Committed intellectuals continue to debate the heritage of Mao, and many are concerned that the Mao heritage, reformulated by an ideologically bankrupt Party in terms of a crude nationalism, may be a dangerous factor in China’s future. To paraphrase William Bouwsma, however, Mao, much like water and electricity, is now a public utility. …

I concluded the introduction with the observation that:

Chinese cultural history, like that of many nations, is rich in examples of objects, symbols, and individuals who have been “lost and refound, overvalued, devalued, then revalued.” The battle for China’s past, over Mao’s reputation and the history of the Communist Party, will continue in both the public forum and among archivists and scholars in and outside China. One day Chinese readers will gain access to that unfolding past. In the meantime, Chairman Mao has entered the stream of Chinese history as man, icon, and myth, and there is little doubt that the Cult of the early 1990s is only the first of the revivals he will experience in what promises to be a long and successful posthumous career.

A number of the other participants in the gathering at The Fairbank Center at Harvard University in April 1994 scoffed at my suggestion that the popular Mao cult, and even elements of Mao Thought and the Maoist tradition in Chinese politics, would continue to play a significant role in Chinese life. These noted scholars were my seniors both in years as well as academic standing — at the time, I was a mere postdoctoral fellow at The Australian National University in Canberra working in Boston part-time with a small documentary company on a film that would eventually be released under the title The Gate of Heavenly Peace. After my session, two senior scholars privately dissented from their colleagues. They were Lucien Pye and Benjamin Schwartz.

The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and, with the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama had announced ‘the end of history’. America, attended by its western allies, was embarking on its ‘unipolar moment’ as the world’s unchallenged superpower.

I disagreed with my esteemed colleagues at the time, and I have continued to do so ever since. Just as Mao Zedong went to ‘meet Marx’, they too have now all gone to meet their various makers. However, the shade of Mao continues to cast a long shadow over Chinese life and, under Xi Jinping, over the whole world.

— from Geremie R. Barmé, Tedium Continued — Mao more than ever,
in the series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium

Three decades later, Harvard University would be one of the leading academic institutions confronted by an authoritarianism that in certain regard promised to be as daunting as that of Xi Jinping (see A Glum Convergence — Donald J. Trump & Xi Jinping), although in Harvard’s case the assault was carried out in the name of ‘antisemitism’. Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, declared that Donald Trump, a ‘would-be dictator’ , was ‘cynically exploiting the fight against antisemitism as a ruse to stamp his will on top-flight universities.’ In a statement issued on 1 April, reproduced in full below, Nadler said that the Trump was ‘weaponizing the real pain American Jews face to advance his desire to wield control over truth-seeking academic institutions’.

In an interview published in The New Yorker, also in early April, Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, responded to what he made of the fact that ‘the conflict over Israel and Palestine has become the pretext for the current crackdown?’ by saying that:

I think anti-antisemitism is a very useful tool for the right. Many others have noted how comfortable these same people who are cracking down on antisemitism are with Nazis—real, frighteningly confident antisemites. But it’s a useful tool, because so many people in the liberal-to-progressive, educated coalition are divided about it, and it’s generational.

Anti-antisemitism can be appropriated by any political movement. They can use that as a vehicle for persecuting researchers and institutions that are not aligned with the ideology of the person in charge. It’s to show that you control them.

You have prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: “He’s good for the Jews.” It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.

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In March 2024, China Heritage quoted Pankaj Mishra’s essay on the fateful events of 7 October 2023, a day of murderous infamy, and what he calls the ‘rupture in the moral history of the world’ that unfolded in its wake:

All these universalist reference points – the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.

There are more earthquakes ahead. …

— Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza, London Review of Books, 7 March 2024

In tandem with that rupture, the administration of Donald Trump is wrenching the United States of America away from its own post-WWII history and the moral universe to which it aspired.

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Ben Ehrenreich (1972-), whose essay You Don’t Get Trump Without Gaza is reproduced below, is a journalist and novelist. His The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin, 2016) was the product of three years of reporting on Palestine-Israel. Yuval Noah Harari, a noted Israeli historian and public intellectual, said that it was

a heartbreaking account of the brutal and often surreal realities of life under the Israeli occupation. After reading it, you don’t know whether to despair at the callousness and self-righteousness of human beings, or to wonder at their resilience and creativity.

Ehrenreich frames the present argument using Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a theatrical work that brings to mind that symposium on Mao Zedong at Harvard University in April 1994. It also makes me wonder when Harvard will organise a symposium comparing and contrasting Xi Jinping’s China and Donald Trump’s USA (for a possible framework, see A Glum Convergence — Donald J. Trump & Xi Jinping).

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 April 2025

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Related Chapters in Contra Trump:

• Trump Redux — Who Goes Nazi Now?
• A Political Monster Straight Out of Grendel
• A Glum Convergence — Donald J. Trump & Xi Jinping
• ‘The brute has invaded the grove’ — Trump-era universities & the echoes of China
• Dwell not in a Country that is in Turmoil — an Historian’s Warning

Further Reading:

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You Don’t Get Trump Without Gaza

Fascism doesn’t just appear. It must be invited in—and the bipartisan repression of the anti-genocide movement did just that.

Ben Ehrenreich

3 April 2025

Of course, they came for a Palestinian first. I’m sure he didn’t want to be, not like this, but he’s famous now: Mahmoud Khalil, the activist disappeared from his Columbia University–owned apartment by Department of Homeland Security agents on orders from the White House.

Next came the Georgetown postdoc Badar Khan Suri, detained by black-masked agents on his way home from class. Suri, who is Indian, is married to a Palestinian-American and was accused by a DHS spokesperson of “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism.”

Next was Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian PhD candidate at Cornell who, less than a week after he filed suit against the government to block the enforcement of two Trump executive orders aimed at Palestine-solidarity activists like himself, was “invited” by the Justice Department to “surrender to ICE custody” and begin the process of his own deportation. Instead, he left the country.

Then came Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish grad student at Tufts who was grabbed off the street and flown to a private immigration prison in Louisiana. Her crimes appear to be limited to coauthoring an op-ed that asked Tufts administrators to engage honestly with a student senate resolution “demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”

None of these four are US citizens, and all have been the subjects of online smear campaigns by pro-Israel groups, which made them easy targets. But if you think that citizenship or relative anonymity will keep you safe, think again.

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On March 17, the Justice Department announced the creation of “Joint Task Force October 7,” which will be free to pursue citizens and noncitizens alike. Staffed by FBI agents and data analysts, it will investigate, among other things, “acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies, and their affiliates, as well as acts of antisemitism by these groups,” which sounds nefarious indeed but is, we know by now, established code for “taking a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

Like the devil, vampires, and the more timid varieties of ghost, fascism must be invited in. The Trump administration’s first political persecutions have all targeted individuals who were bold enough to believe that constitutional guarantees of free expression extended to solidarity with Palestine. This was hardly an accident. In the time-honored practice of predatory bullies everywhere, Trump’s minions went after the defenseless first, and specifically those made vulnerable not only by their immigration status but by a 15-month-and-running bipartisan campaign to repress opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, an effort in which nearly every political, educational, and cultural institution in American society has taken part.

In 1941, while waiting in exile in Finland for a visa to the United States, the German writer Bertolt Brecht penned “a parable play,” as he called it, titled The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. On the surface, it’s a Chicago gangland drama with monologues cribbed from Shakespeare, filtered through the tough-guy argot of a James Cagney film, then stretched to absurd proportions by a screwball plot involving the strong-arming of the city’s powerful “Cauliflower Trust.” Still, the allegory would have been impossible to miss: Arturo Ui, “the gangster of gangsters…direct from heaven in punishment for all our sins of violence, stupidity, and impotence,” is an obvious stand-in for Hitler. Brecht’s concern, as urgent then as now, was to figure out how such a buffoonish and cartoonishly evil figure could take control of a nation.

In Brecht’s version, the cauliflower bosses laugh off Ui’s initial offers of “protection”—he’s just a minor-league extortionist with a shrinking crew of goons. (Think Mar-a-Lago circa 2023, the indictments swiftly multiplying.) But when Dogsborough, the elderly mayor and an apparent paragon of honesty, cuts a crooked deal with the Cauliflower Trust, Ui sees his opportunity. Blackmail unlocks the door. Soon, the protection money is rolling in and, despite the “security” Ui promises to bring to the vegetable market, the bodies begin to pile up. Brecht’s point was hardly subtle: Germany’s elites, unified by greed, corruption, arrogance, and an eagerness to maintain dominance over an increasingly emboldened working class, had invited Hitler over the threshold. He knew where to go from there.

If we survive our present nightmare, we will likely argue for decades about the coalitions, ideological tendencies, and material conditions that combined to usher Trump to power this second time around. From adjoining cages at Guantánamo, we can bicker over whether fascism is the appropriate term for what Trump wrought. But one thing is already obvious. In the 13 months that preceded the 2024 election, the door was again and again pushed open, the invitation issued, copied, and posted for all to see. This time it wasn’t old-fashioned corruption that gave the gangsters their opening, at least not in any economic sense. Gaza opened the door.

The brutal silencing, manipulative dishonesty, McCarthyite pettiness, thuggish illiberalism, and general censorial repressiveness that liberal pundits currently associate with Trumpism have been rampant in the US since just after October 7, 2023, when it became clear that Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack would not be merely disproportionate but exterminatory in scope and intent.

Rot, famously, starts at the top. Joe Biden, sleepy guardian of empire and whatever remained of the liberal world order, had stayed comatose on nearly every issue of import to his constituents. But the genocide seemed to bring him briefly and sporadically back to life. It was as if funding and propagandizing for Israel’s slaughter were the only aspect of the job that still got his blood moving. He was, as Brecht wrote of Dogsborough, “Like an old family Bible nobody’d opened for ages—till one day some friends were flipping through it and found a dried-up cockroach between the pages.” The rest of the political establishment, Democrats and Republicans both, didn’t need to be told to follow Biden’s lead. The very few exceptions—we see you, Cori, Ilhan, Rashida—were disciplined and marginalized.

In an extraordinary show of class unity for a nation supposedly irreparably divided on party lines, our homegrown Cauliflower Trust closed ranks. It was almost as if American upper management, regardless of religion or politics, instinctively understood that maintaining the right of an ethnocratic settler-colonial outpost to exterminate an unruly subject population was essential to its own survival. Or perhaps they were more cunning and saw a ready-made opportunity to take down the left.

The major newspapers, television networks, and virtually all the prestige magazines did their part, boosting the credibility of nearly every outrageous lie invented by Israeli military propagandists while smearing protesters as antisemites, Hamas stooges, and terrorist sympathizers. “It doesn’t matter what professors or smart-alecks think,” pronounced Brecht’s Arturo Ui, “all that counts is how the little man sees his master.”

But it did matter: University administrators across the country banned student groups, investigated and fired professors and staffers, suspended and expelled students, handing them over to riot police and, at UCLA, to a violent right-wing mob. Remember when the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in the country were ritually humiliated by Congress for not doing enough to “atone,” in the words of one Virginia representative, for the sin of allowing criticism of Israel to persist on their campuses? In retrospect, it looks like a practice run for the groveling required by the current regime. And, of course, it was endorsed by both parties; Democratic governors were imposing their will on universities long before Trump returned to office.

It didn’t stop in higher ed. Months before Elon Musk emerged as the surgically enhanced face of American neofascism, tech industry executives were revealing the brown shirts they kept zipped beneath their hoodies. Google, Microsoft, and Meta, among others, offered their services to the Israeli military while firing employees who dared express support for Palestinians. The one major social media platform that did not enthusiastically censor and throttle news from Gaza would be banned by Congress, with overwhelming support from both political parties.

The repression was nearly universal. An imprudently candid social media post, a keffiyeh around the shoulders, or a watermelon pin on the lapel was enough to bring down the axe. Journalists, cable news commentators, and editors lost their jobs, but so did staffers at synagogues and Jewish organizations, nurses, school teachers, baristas, museum workers, the editor in chief of Artforum, the star of Scream 7. Events were canceled, awards rescinded, contracts broken. For 15 long months before Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, advised his students not to say anything about the Middle East on social media, Americans from all walks of life were getting tuition-free lessons in the tricks of survival in an authoritarian state: silence, self-censorship, submission. All that matters is how the little man sees his master.

And here we are. The obscene weaponization of antisemitism helped bring actual Nazis to power. The Anti-Defamation League felt compelled to defend Musk’s Sieg Heil salute at Trump’s inauguration “as an awkward gesture [made] in a moment of enthusiasm.” Some veteran inquisitors are now suffering buyer’s remorse. (“You holler for meat,” scoffs one of Arturo Ui’s lieutenants, “then curse the cook because he walks around with a butcher knife.”) Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who spent months fulminating for ever greater repression of “the cancer of antisemitism”—evident in the use of supposedly hateful words like genocide, Nakba, and divestment—confessed to being “profoundly saddened and alarmed” by Columbia University’s recent capitulation to Trump’s demands. The Atlantic, the thinking man’s propaganda organ for the exterminatory wars of empire, made sure to bludgeon student protesters even while criticizing the DHS’s kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil—not for its cruelty and manifest illegality, but, in Graeme Wood’s words, for its “simultaneous failure to grasp the spirit of America and of academia at their best. Some countries repress dissent; others tolerate it.” Indeed.

[Note: For an example of the elite academic Doublethink, see Lawrence Summers, Harvard Must Not Yield to Trump, The New York Times, 3 April 2025.]

In 1944, with the war still on and the Nazis reaching for unprecedented peaks of butchery, the still-anti-Zionist leadership of the American Jewish Committee had reason to worry that fascism might not be a purely European problem. They hired Brecht’s fellow exile Theodor Adorno and a team of scholars to investigate antisemitic, racist, and authoritarian tendencies within the United States. (The president of Columbia University at the time, it’s worth noting, was an admirer of Mussolini who invited the ambassador to Nazi Germany to campus and had protesting students arrested.) After six years of research and analysis, their conclusions were not exactly reassuring, but they are encouraging, almost. It takes more than the complicity of the powerful, they determined, for a whole nation to fall to fascism. The latter, they wrote, “must have a mass base. It must secure not only the frightened submission but the active cooperation of the great majority of the people.”

[Note: See Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, 1950. — Ed.]

If they are right, we are not there yet. But what we are seeing is just the beginning. Trump’s lackeys are not going to stop unless someone makes them. “It is up to the people,” Adorno and his coauthors wrote—in 1950, though it might have been yesterday—“to decide whether or not this country goes fascist.” In the last few weeks, we have watched one institution after another bend at the knee before this latest “great historical gangster show,” to borrow a phrase from Brecht. Did you really expect more from the Cauliflower crew?

It is not at all clear how to proceed when the institutions most capable of offering organized resistance are so thoroughly corrupted, or what, in their absence, “the people” might still mean. But those are the questions before us, and they cannot be answered unless they are asked.

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Source:

• Ben Ehrenreich, You Don’t Get Trump Without Gaza, The Nation, 3 April 2025. Notes added by China Heritage.

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