I lived in the Middle East as an expatriate and I know what loyalty to a single ruler looks like and more importantly what it means, especially when the military throw their weight behind a single man. It is not democracy: It is a dictatorship.
This is not hyperbole. It is a public service announcement to all my fellow Americans who have not experienced life under dictatorship. We are dangerously close to it, but I saw this coming.
In 2012, I was stunned by Washington’s reluctance to take a leadership role in Syria. I was even more astonished by the lackadaisical response of American citizens to the bloody scenes coming out of Syria. Nothing seemed to move us. In 2012, I decide I would try to do something for Syria, but not purely out of altruism. I’m not Syrian, Arab or even Middle Eastern. There was no personal reason for me to care about Syria.
There was something else motivating me, but I was not able to articulate it at the time, and the reason tickled at the back of my throat for years. I was hoping to prevent some unknown calamity from happening in the US because we allowed Syria to continue to hemorrhage. I knew it would not bode well for us.
When Aleppo fell and Trump was elected president, I was finally able to name it. As a nation, we stopped caring and became complacent. Why is this so dangerous? It is because democracy demands participation.
In this past election cycle, the voter turnout was at a 20-year low. So many of us didn’t even care enough to vote. Syrians are literally dying for getting the ability to vote in a free election, a right we so cavalierly gave up. Dictatorships don’t happen overnight. They sneak up on you.
Many people didn’t take candidate Trump seriously and thought he didn’t have a chance of winning. I knew his chances were good because for the past four years I worked in community organizing, and spent a lot of time talking to people and realized just how ready we are for a dictator.
People are too busy to participate in a democracy, too tired to care about someone they don’t know, but above all the number one reason I knew Trump would win is because Republicans vote in larger numbers than Democrats.
Trump didn’t win the popular election, but megalomaniacs don’t care about that. However, the American people are resisting and reminding him that he has no popular mandate. The ACLU and other civil rights organizations are taking him to task on the legal front, and our judicial branch is thus far doing their job and overturning Trump’s unconstitutional orders. It is our Republican-majority Congress that needs to be reminded of its role, a role our Founding Fathers envisioned for them: Preventing a despot from seizing the executive branch. The legislative branch exists to check the power of the president, not to anoint a king.
This is no time for partisan politics and a false alliance to a party. The only alliance the Congress has is to uphold the laws of this nation, something it is failing to do. Trump demonstrated his recklessness when he threw the nation’s airports into turmoil. Congressional leadership must take steps now to remove Trump from office before he solidifies his power grab and becomes entrenched in the office of the presidency.
Republican leaders’ loyalty to their party, skin, color and class is reminiscing of the tribalism they criticize the Arab world for, and their now open hostility towards Islam is provoking sectarian violence throughout the U.S.
The potential for a civil war looms over America. The photo from Kentucky shows that elements of our military are not loyal to the U.S., but to Trump.
A long line of Middle Eastern dictators took power or held on to power with the support of the military. How long will we remain in a state of willing disbelief and think it could not happen here? We didn’t think President Trump could happen and here we are.
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Anisa Abeytia is a freelance writer who contributes to a good number of media outlets. Abeytia is actively engaged in advocating for the Syrian cause since 2012 and more recently for refugee rights. She produced/directed three documentaries on Syrian refugees. Abeytia is a graduate of Stanford University with an MA in Post-Colonial and Feminists Theory.
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