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Back To The Future | Chaos at the US Capitol was a Trumpian farce, with shades of Mao
- Sensing a disconnect between elites and the masses, a populist leader losing his grip appeals to the grass roots to save the country. Sound familiar?
- While there are parallels between today’s US and Mao-era China, it’s not clear America will heed the warning. This is Biden’s biggest challenge
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Karl Marx’s famous line that “everything happens twice in history: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” again proves to be right on the nose.
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Two weeks after the storming of the United States Capitol in Washington by riotous Trump supporters, the world is still reeling and trying to make sense of it all.
Numerous comparisons have been made. Some have likened the scenes to the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455 while others, such as former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, have compared them to the “Night of Broken Glass”, Nazi Germany’s November 1938 pogrom against Jews.
Yet the closest historical parallel perhaps is to be found in China’s Cultural Revolution 55 years ago.
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Schwarzenegger compares US Capitol siege to Nazi violence, calls Trump ‘worst president ever’
Schwarzenegger compares US Capitol siege to Nazi violence, calls Trump ‘worst president ever’
To readers in the West, this may sound strange or even sacrilegious. How dare I compare what’s happening in the world’s greatest democracy to that in Communist China? But if you look beyond the outward differences in the countries’ political systems, the two events bear some eerie similarities.
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