The light at the end of the tunnel: Authoritarian regimes never last
On the 1980 album by The Jam 'Sound Affects', Side 1 track 4 is a track entitled 'Set the House Ablaze'. In it Paul Weller warns of the cyclical rise of authoritarianism. Prophetically he sings 'Promises, promises they offer resolutions, but hatred has never won for long. How right he was. We are seeing this play out in real time.
May 1st 2025. Day 102 of Trump's second term.
The bunting’s long gone. The flags have wilted. The motorcades still scream, but nobody’s cheering anymore. It’s been just over 100 days since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, carried back into power on a tidal wave of manufactured grievance, billionaire cash, and a hollowed-out opposition too scared to name fascism when they see it. Now we’re living in the blueprint: Project 2025 is no longer a theoretical manifesto. It’s a live autopsy of American democracy. Civil servants have been purged. Environmental regulations gutted. Trans people demonised. The Department of Justice functions like a personal hit squad. And the Heritage Foundation, a cult masquerading as a think tank, is running the show like it’s the fucking Spanish Inquisition.
There’s a myth peddled by weak men with strong fists: that authoritarian regimes are eternal. That if you just seize enough power, rig enough systems, and build enough camps, the whole rotten structure will stand forever. But here’s the truth, chiseled into history with the broken teeth of dictators, authoritarian regimes never last long. Unless they take everyone down with them, it'll never end well for them. What’s rolling out in Washington under the sinister name of Project 2025 is authoritarianism with a suit and tie. A right-wing wet dream of purges, executive supremacy, and ideological purity. It’s a fascist blueprint pretending to be a policy plan, and it reeks of the same perfume worn by Mussolini’s ghost and Stalin’s spectre. Far left or far right - oppression is oppression.
Trump, Musk, the Dark Enlightenment, the Heritage Foundation freakshow and Christo-fascist lawyers who think God wants them to outlaw abortion and burn books seem to have skipped the last century of cautionary tales. Because if there’s one iron law of authoritarian regimes, it’s this: the longer they oppress, the more people they piss off, the longer they cling on, the more violently they go. Ceaușescu. Batista. Hitler. Gaddafi. Pinochet (almost). You can’t suppress an entire population without one day hearing the knock of history on your own bunker door.
Trump’s 2nd term – the 47th Presidency isn't just be a rerun of incompetence and Twitter tantrums. He is carrying out a clearly defined and planned strategic dismantling of democratic mechanisms, orchestrated through the Heritage Foundation 'Project 2025' which is in the process of gutting the civil service, eliminating independent departments, and replacing thousands of professionals with Trump loyalists (Heritage Foundation, 2023).
History has news for these jackbooted fantasists. No regime built on repression, scapegoating, and paranoia lasts for long without imploding, or dragging its country to hell with it, it always ends in collapse, often violent, always ugly.
Authoritarian Collapse Is a Feature, Not a Bug
The pattern is always the same. First, they promise order. Then, they deliver oppression. Eventually, they unravel, usually under the weight of their own paranoia, corruption, and incompetence. Authoritarianism doesn’t fail in spite of its controls – it fails because of them. The club Trump wants to be part of is full of historical footnotes: Hitler didn’t go quietly. He dragged Germany into total war and demanded a scorched earth in retreat. His last days were spent in a bunker, muttering about betrayal and ordering phantom divisions to defend a dead cause (Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography, 2008). Franco only dodged collapse by dying in his sleep, but Spain’s wounds lasted for decades. Pol Pot emptied cities into death camps and left a nation traumatised. These aren't exceptions. They're blueprints for what happens when the powerful fear accountability.
Warnings from history: clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
Despots burn books, and sometimes they burn people. The irony of burning books though is that you aren't reading them, and if you aren't reading the history books then you sure as hell aren't learning from the history. The 20th Century is littered with dictators who came to a sticky end. Here's just a few:
Ceaușescu: Shot Like a Dog in a Courtyard
Few regime endings are as violently definitive as Nicolae Ceaușescu’s in Romania. A tinpot tyrant with delusions of grandeur, he ruled from 1965 until 1989, running the country like a personal fiefdom while his people starved. Under his 'systematisation' policy, entire villages were bulldozed. He built a giant, useless 'People’s Palace' while children died in orphanages with rats eating their feet. By the end of 1989, the mask had slipped. The people finally rose: a workers’ revolt in Timișoara, brutally repressed, triggered a national uprising. Ceaușescu tried his usual tactic, speeches from a balcony while the Securitate killed protestors. But the crowd turned on him. The army switched sides. He fled in a helicopter, was captured, given a one-hour show trial for genocide and corruption, and executed on Christmas Day along with his equally vile wife, Elena. The revolutionaries filmed the moment. Grainy footage shows them slumped, blood-soaked in the snow. No pomp. No last words. Just justice, rushed and rough. Authoritarianism ending not with a whimper – but with a burst of AK47 fire.
“We could have had a trial with witnesses, but then again we might still be arguing about it now. This was justice in revolutionary time.” — Romanian Army Officer, 1989
The Communist Catastrophe: Stalin’s Legacy of Ashes
And what about Joseph Stalin? A paranoid butcher who industrialised terror. Millions died in his purges, gulags, and engineered famines (Applebaum, Gulag, 2003). He ruled for three decades with an iron fist and a broken soul. The rot set in even while he breathed. The USSR became a zombie empire: massive, militarised, and hollowed out. Stalin's reign of fear destroyed trust, talent, and initiative. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union was a crumbling shell, economically sclerotic and ideologically bankrupt. Even the KGB couldn’t keep it stitched together. What both these regimes had in common, and what Project 2025 is stupid enough to echo. is the belief that you can systematise cruelty and get away with it forever. That bureaucratised tyranny is somehow sustainable. It isn’t. Because when you’re at war with your own people, history is just a countdown.
Fulgencio Batista: Fled While Havana Burned
Now let’s take a stroll through Cuba, where another authoritarian crook thought he could snuff out revolution with guns and gold. Fulgencio Batista, backed to the hilt by the Americans and Mafia bosses ruled Cuba like a casino. Political repression, torture chambers, and disappearances were all par for the course. Havana became a playground for foreign capital and organised crime, while rural peasants lived in feudal misery. Batista’s greed birthed resistance, a motley coalition of guerrillas led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Despite brutal repression, the 26th of July Movement slowly chewed away at Batista’s army. By late 1958, it was all over. His soldiers were deserting. His cronies were packing their bags. Havana was on the edge. On New Year’s Day 1959, Batista fled the country with 180 allies and $300 million looted from the treasury. He ended up in Spain, where he lived in luxury until 1973. But not everyone got out. As revolutionaries marched into Havana, collaborators were captured and tried. Some were executed in front of cheering crowds. The old regime’s power evaporated overnight.
“He didn’t even say goodbye. He just took the money and ran. Like the coward he was.” — Cuban worker, 1959
These aren’t exceptions: they’re warnings. The longer an authoritarian regime clings on, the more violently it ends. Sometimes with bullets. Sometimes with nooses. Always with blood. Trump, Musk and all the rest of the fuckers currently creating a Christo-fascist coup in the USA should remember that history is littered with corpses of strongmen who thought they’d live forever.
Project 2025: The Coup happening in real time
So here we are, just over 100 days into America’s Project 2025 experiment, and already the cracks are showing. Trump’s new federal agencies are stuffed with unqualified loyalists and Christian dominionists. The Department of Education is led by people who want to ban evolution. The Justice Department is jailing protestors while letting white-collar criminals walk. Labour unions are under open assault, with executive orders that make Reagan look like Mr Bean. The purge lists have gone operational. The war on 'woke' is code for class war, and climate collapse is accelerating while fossil fuel lobbyists write energy policy. At day 102 these maniacs have done the following:
- EPA abolished, environmental laws shredded.
- DoJ turned into Trump’s personal law firm, pursuing enemies real and imagined.
- ICE given expanded powers, now operating as an unaccountable paramilitary force.
- Mass surveillance reintroduced, under the guise of "extremism prevention."
- Union organisers arrested in Texas, branded as "domestic threats."
- Abortion banned nationwide by executive interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
- DeSantis running HHS like the Onqisition with an iPad.
- Christian nationalists embedded in every department, from Education to Energy.
And yet, the US isn't going quietly. There are many people who won't give up the Constitution without a fight. Military brass are grumbling. State governors are resisting federal overreach. Hundreds of thousands are marching, in spite of repression. Underground unions are spreading. Whistleblowers are leaking. The spell is wobbling. This is exactly how these things fall apart.
A House of Cards. Project 2025 - 50 years in the planning from the Heritage Foundation
The Ending Is Always the Same
Project 2025 is not a masterplan. It’s a suicide note written in fascist font by people who don't seem to realise they've signed thier own death warrant. It imagines that a few hundred white men with God complexes can reshape reality. But like every authoritarian fantasy before it, it mistakes domination for stability. But the night is always darkest just before the dawn: The end will come. It might come fast, like Ceaușescu, with Trump and his cabal begging for mercy in a courtroom they can’t control. Or it might come slowly, like Batista’s collapse, all champagne one night, all sirens the next. But it will come. And when it does, the rest of us will remember who collaborated. Who cheered. Who enforced. And who resisted. Because if they think they’re building a regime to last forever, they’re forgetting the last words of every dictator dragged out of hiding: “I am the state!” No mate. You’re just another parasite heading for the dustbin of history.
Project 2025 isn't sustainable, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be devastating. Authoritarian regimes burn out fast, but they burn hot. And unless they are stopped early, they can torch the whole system on the way down. That’s why complacency is collaboration. You can’t vote this stuff away once it takes root. You have to organise. Resist. Sabotage. Mock. Expose. Bring it down before it brings you down.
So Authoritarian regimes don’t last but they can destroy everything before they die. And with Project 2025 in full swing and the air thick with smoke, let this be the lesson to anyone still pretending this is normal:
The arse of every tyrant ends up with bite marks. It’s just a matter of how many they take down before the teeth sink in.
References
- Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915–1945. Penguin, 2005.
- Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. Doubleday, 2003.
- Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: A Biography. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
- Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025). 2023. https://www.project2025.org/
