Trump’s election was just one more nail in the coffin of what was — according to humanistic idealists such as Winston Churchill — supposed to be a secular age of reason

Trump’s election was just one more nail in the coffin of what was — according to humanistic idealists such as Winston Churchill — supposed to be a secular age of reason and enlightenment. Instead of reason shaping our politics in 2017, we find ourselves at the mercy of white European nationalists, white supremacists, American white Christo-fascists and Islamo-fascists who may all hate each other but are united in one relentless activity: their global attack on reason per se.

Barbarians are at the gates of what was once quaintly called civilization once again. These days the war on reason, mercy and compassion is led by Putin, Trump, ISIS, white evangelicals, Russian Orthodox extremists, anti-EU European far right white nationalists and the likes of Trump’s war-monger sophomoric bottom-dwelling mentor– Steve Bannon.

Churchill dreamed of a united Europe…

When Winston Churchill was visiting the bombed out ruins of Coventry Cathedral, in September 1941, he believed that should Great Britain defeat Hitler, a new day of worldwide enlightenment would dawn. He would have been aghast by the rise of white nationalism in Europe in the early twenty-first century, let alone Trump’s Putin-assisted-American-suicide via the buffoonish Trump/Putin/GOP 2016 power grab.

Churchill was fighting for the survival of democracy and reason against fascism and “Germany First” nationalism. What Churchill had in mind if Britain won the war was an ideal of democracy and human rights rooted in the Magna Carta and the Enlightenment. He was one of the first to call for the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’. Following the Second World War, he was convinced that only a united Europe could guarantee peace. Churchill’s aim was to eliminate the European ills of nationalism and war-mongering once and for all….

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