“He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with protesters in Portland, Oregon. Those camouflage-clad federal law enforcement agents were evidently from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service and the Customs and Border Protection agency.

Soon, hundreds of them are evidently going  to “surge”– a term that should sound eerily familiar — into Chicago and other cities run by Democratic mayors. In such a fashion, the Administration is quite literally bringing this country’s wars home. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump recently described everyday violence in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan, by far.” He was talking about the country the U.S. invaded in 2001 and in which it hasn’t stopped fighting ever since, a land where more the 1000,000 civilians reportedly died violently between 2010 and 2019. By now, violence in Chicago (which is indeed grim) in the mind of the Great Confabulator, become “worse than anything anyone has ever seen”, and so worthy of yet more militarized chaos”. (William Astor, Tomgram july 26, 2020).

My comment:  I happen to have a history degree, one of my tutors having been a senior translator at the Nuremberg trials.  He was an expert on Europe in the period leading up to the Second World War.   All the time I am reminded of his horrific stories and regret that Americans have such superficial knowledge of the history of fascism, enabled as it was by the aftermath of the 1929 financial disaster.  The modern parallels are truly scary, the personalities involved weirdly parallel, the activities of Q-Anon little different from German, Italian and Spanish fascism of the 20s and 30s.  Epicureanism  is partly about peace of mind.   Hard to maintain!