Forward to the Past

In the movie Back to the Future, a machine makes it possible to travel through time and change history. It was so successful that it spawned two sequels. The idea of time travel has fascinated societies for a long time. We should have been warned by The Handmaid’s Tale that traveling through time is not necessarily a fantasy, in the sense that, quite obviously, we have the technology to reorganize society in ways that could revive horrible practices from the past.

With Trumpism 2.0 and its allies, we are witnessing an attempt to use modern technology to “travel to the past,” in the sense of reorganizing societies to replace our imperfect democracies with something else. This “something else” might, if it prevails, bring us back to the values and institutions of the pre-Enlightenment era, with modern technologies under the control of a tiny elite of plutocrats.

The racist colonialism and imperialism in Rubio’s speech in Munich provided a fitting justification for the “Board of Peace,” an attempt to privatize diplomacy and replace the United Nations. This initiative has reportedly been rejected even by the Vatican, yet it finds support in a new global “church”: FIFA.

Trumpists and some technological leaders appear to be colluding to build a political system that would take the place of democracy and give a seal of approval to the dismantling of science, public health policies, rational philosophy in schools, and climate policies.

Detention camps are being built and may, in the future, be used to confine various categories of “undesirable” people, such as political opponents, entire racial groups, or people with mental health conditions, as has happened in the past.

Unless they are defeated, we may return to times of racial segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, and women’s rights may no longer be protected. The separation of powers could be replaced by an autocracy in which there are no objective rules.

There is hope that they will not succeed, because their takeover is gradual and we are aware of the dangers of the past. This gives us time to resist and counterattack. However, the “Dark International” (now allegedly financed by the U.S. State Department) will not disappear and will continue trying—not only in the United States.