I began writing this article on Saturday, December 10, 2016; I finished the next morning, Istanbul time. I wrote the first three paragraphs last. The planned breakfast did take place, quite pleasantly. The death toll in the bombing rose to 39. No matter how much I read drafts of my articles, I usually want to make changes after they are published. I made one such change visible in the first paragraph. After a friend left some comments, I made some other small changes. Again these are visible. Last I heard, the policy on Diaspora* is that published posts cannot be edited at all, because there should never be any question about which version of a post any resulting comments refer to. WordPress is not so strict, and in future I may just remove all signs of editing. There may not be any point in doing this in an essay that does not say everything that seemed worth saying at the time of writing. Better perhaps to leave the signs of work in progress. In any case, I shall retain access to the older versions.
Everything changes so fast, at least when one has an internet connection and a Twitter feed. As I try to wrap up this essay, I learn of a bombing outside a football stadium not too far from us here in Istanbul. Deaths are said to be in the teens, mostly of police officers. Twenty-nine persons are said to have died, all but two being police officers. Turkey has been in a state of emergency since the summer. Rescue vehicles had trouble getting through the normal traffic. The nearest hospitals are not operational.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his would-be appointees are called treasonous; but it is mainly liberals and lefties who are saying this. Russia was the big enemy when it was Communist; now some Republicans do not seem too concerned with its hold over Trump, while Democrats are reinventing the Red Scare.
If I hadn’t hooked up the internet connection, I would just be looking forward to a breakfast with friends later this morning, over on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I expect this event to happen as planned, despite the bombing.
Now I just want to think a little bit about what fascism means, historically. It does seem to me that if Donald Trump has any ideology at all, it is fascism. Fascism is the doctrine that will guide his Presidency, if he is allowed to assume it. What this means is the main subject of this essay.
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Polytropy 