History will record that when states murdered journalists or used the conspiracy theories of terrorists to fool their subject populations, they could expect reprisals from something called “the west”, an alliance that lasted from 1945 to 2016. The west’s great weakness was that it depended on American power. It died when Donald Trump became the US president, freeing illiberal democracies and actual dictatorships to follow their worst instincts to a grim destination.
Fashion affects the powerful as well as the powerless. They look at each other and learn what they can get away with. “Did you hear what happened in Germany?” Stalin asked Anastas Mikoyan in June 1934, after Hitler had ordered the murder of his enemies in the Nazi party. “Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!” Inspired by Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, Stalin began the executions of tens of thousands of communists who posed a real and imagined threat to his power. The west taught, albeit intermittently, albeit with immense blind spots in which crimes against humanity were committed with impunity, that governments had to pretend to protect human rights, freeish trade and democracy.
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