Early reports from Zimbabwe suggest the military has taken control of the country to prevent Grace Mugabe from becoming President Robert Mugabe’s anointed successor. She was scheduled to be nominated as ZANU-PF vice president at a party conference next month, after the expulsion of the previous VP, Emmerson Mnangagwa. The military take-over is preempting these moves. Mr Mugabe and his wife appear to be in military custody. There has been no public statement by him so far.

The coup was sharply criticized by the ZANU-PF Youth League, an ally of Grace Mugabe. Finance minister Ignatius Chombo, another ally, has been detained. The coup was supported by the War Veterans Associations, an ally of Mnangagwa, who has now returned to the country from South Africa, where he had been staying since his expulsion.

These political affiliations highlight the factional nature of the coup: It is not about ending Mugabe’s dictatorship, but about who within the ruling party will get to keep the spoils of the corrupt system. Grace Mugabe, whose luxurious lifestyle at the expense of the people made her deeply unpopular in the impoverished nation, would have been an extremely risky choice for the party. The military leaders feared she would redirect funding to herself and her allies, away from the military, other civil servants and other party factions.

Her opponents are anything but angels. Some have been involved in the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland in 1983-84, when over 20,000 people are estimated to have been killed. The so called War Veterans (many of whom are too young to have participated in the independence war of the 1960s and 70s) were involved in violent takeovers of farms and violence and gross human rights violations against supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the disputed 2008 election.

Even if the military were to force Mugabe to resign or to retire to a purely symbolic position, the real question will be if the military and the factions taking over from him will allow free and democratic elections to take place in the coming year. I think this coup is a milestone, but the struggle is far from over.

Karl Marx on Donald Trump:

“He behaved like an unrecognized genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton.”

Actually, he wrote that about French president Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, who in an 1851 coup turned the French Second Republic into the authoritarian Second Empire and had himself crowned Emperor Napoleon III.

I was watching an old re-run of “Columbo” on a commercial cable channel the other day. The ads in the commercial breaks were fundraising ads by Unicef, showing malnourished little children in Angola. I remember when civil war raged in Angola after independence and during the Cold War, with different countries supporting different independence movements. Cuba and the Soviet Union supported the Marxist MPLA while South Africa and the CIA supporting pro-Western UNITA. After the cold war ended, Angola finally found peace. It is still ruled by the MPLA but has become the second biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria.

Now why would a country whose oil wells bring in billions of dollars every year literally become a poster child for UNICEF fundraising for starving children? The truth is, Angola is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Little of that oil wealth finds its ways to Angola’s most vulnerable citizens. Much of it ends up in foreign bank accounts owned by the politically well connected.

For example, Isabel dos Santos, the oldest daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos, has made billions in government related business that her father had a say in. She has become the richest woman in Africa. Forbes did an excellent exposé a few years ago, based largely on the research of brave Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais that showed how she systematically received huge chunks of businesses due to favouritism by her father, the president who has already been in power for 38 years.

Hundreds of millions and billions of dollars from diamond exports, oil and other resources that should be funding health care and education for Angola’s poorest instead have ended up in the pockets of the president’s family members. This seems especially ironic, given that MPLA claimed to be a socialist party, which is supposed to be about equality. Now it’s just another kleptocracy and the world is looking the other way.

There has been no shortage of outrageous statements by Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential election campaign. However, the one that shocked me most was this boast about the loyalty of his supporters:

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.” (Donald Trump, 23-Jan-2016)

The statement says something about both Trump and his supporters.

It would never occur to most people to even think about murdering someone, let alone boasting about the hypothetical ability to get away with murder — not because murder is illegal, but because killing is wrong. It’s one of the most basic moral rules in any society. That this doesn’t apply to Trump is revealing. He doesn’t have this moral compass that most people at any layer of society have. He’s the ultimate narcissist who would do anything that he thinks benefits him, from stiffing his contractors to “grabbing (women) by the pussy”. That makes him totally unsuitable for the most powerful position on the planet.

Trump has said many things that would have sunk the campaigns of ordinary politicians, but this is not politics as usual any more. For a certain segment of voters, the fact that he does not behave like a regular politician is the very reason they vote for him. Decades of rabid propaganda and conspiracy theories on talk radio by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News have established an alternate reality for them where the system is totally broken and has to be trashed before it can be rebuilt from scratch. In this alternate reality crime is at an all-time high, rather than 50% below what it was under President Reagan as it actually is. Facts don’t matter.

These people are scared and prepared take their chances, almost regardless of the evidence. In reality, Trump has no solution for them. He will not bring back the lost industrial jobs that largely went to computers rather than to Mexico. His anti-trade policies would send the economy into a tail spin and his budget proposals would drown the country in debt. His victory would have foreign dictators cheering and would encourage imitators in other countries.

When Hitler came to power in my homeland in 1933, he did not win a majority in free elections, but he managed to get enough support from other parties and politicians who feared a communist revolution more than they disliked the Nazis. Most of Hitler’s plans that he executed so brutally once firmly in power, from “Lebensraum im Osten” (living space to the east, i.e. the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union) to the mass murder of Jews had already been openly announced in “Mein Kampf” a decade before the Nazi takeover, but people on the right did not care too much about that. They were happy as long as Hitler was going to smash the communists.

Likewise, most of what Trump says doesn’t really matter to his followers, as long as he is the anti-Obama. No other Republican candidate was as different from Obama as Trump is. People voting for Trump despite his glaringly obvious character flaws are willing to write him a blank check, the same way the German Reichstag gave Hitler a blank check when it signed the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) that effectively gave him unlimited powers and put parliament out of business.

Even if, as most of the world hopes, voters will manage to stop Trump this coming Tuesday, this alone will not end the problem. His voters and their alternate reality views will still be there. They will impact the political culture for years to come. The Republican party and its media circus has nurtured an ever more toxic political base that it now has trouble controlling. In some ways it reminds me of the jihadists the US supported in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1970s/80s against the Soviet Union, which now have become the West’s enemy #1.

Unfortunately, even if the most unqualified US presidential candidate ever is defeated at the polls it will take a long time for the US to recover from the political poison the Republicans have been brewing for decades in order to secure power to further the interests of the top 1%.

The situation in Syria is getting ever more complex, with the Turkish air force shooting down a Russian SU-24 bomber on November 24, 2015. Several foreign countries are taking sides in the Syrian civil war and their declared objectives do not necessarily match up with their actions or those of their supposed allies.

The US is divided over its involvement in the war. President Obama made his name in national politics through his opposition to his predecessor’s war in Iraq. Sending US ground troops into Syria would carry many of the same risks encountered in Iraq. Therefore the US has restricted itself to air strikes and support of local proxies, including the Kurds.

Initially the US was aiming for regime change in Damascus, but more recently the fight against the “Islamic State” (IS) seems to have taken top priority. If the government in Damascus was defeated before an acceptable political alternative was ready to take over, the risk is that IS would acquire a huge amount of weapons, ammunition, territory and infrastructure from the collapsed regime.

Trying to step up its air warfare against IS, the US struck a bargain with next door Turkey, a NATO member, to use its Incirlik Air Base for attacks in Syria, a request that Turkey had denied them for a long time. No sooner had the US launched the first attacks from Turkish soil that Turkish airplanes started bombing Kurdish forces in Syria. According to President Erdogan, Turkey’s goal is “fighting terrorists”, and by that it mostly means the Kurdish PKK in Turkey and the Kurdish YPG in Syria.

It soon became obvious that the Turkish government sees the Kurds and not IS as enemy #1 within Syria. This had already transpired a year earlier in the siege of Kobani, when Turkey delayed and restricted reinforcements for the Kurdish defenders of the city against IS and asked the US not to make any air drops in their support.

Most foreign fighters joining IS arrive via Turkey and exports of fuel to Turkey are a major source of hard currency for IS. Turkey seems to have done little to stop either the flow of recruits or cash to IS, the Kurds’ worst enemy in Syria. Right now, the Kurds are America’s closest ally in Syria and Turkey’s worst enemy, even though the US and Turkey — as fellow NATO members — are supposed to be allies.

President Assad of Syria is fighting a war on several fronts, against the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, the western-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA), IS and the Kurds. It is supported by Iran, by Hezbollah from Lebanon and by Russia. Assad and many members of the government and military are Alawites, a religious minority that is part of Shia Islam. The Alawites mostly live in the mountainous coastal region between Lebanon to the south and Turkish Hatay province in the north. Russia has its only naval base in the Mediterranean in Tartus, in the Alawite region. Regardless of whether the Assad family will remain in power or if the government can hold on to the capital of Damascus, the Alawites as an ethnic group have nowhere to go. Fear of Sunni Islamists taking revenge and maybe even committing genocide against the ethnic group of the current rulers ensures that Alawite forces will fight tenaciously to not lose control of their homeland in the west. Most observers agree that Syria is likely to end up divided, with a de-facto independent Alawite region established along the coast even if Sunni opposition forces conquer Damascus and set up a new national government.

Russia’s objective in supporting Assad is to remain relevant as a geo-political player. It has little to gain militarily, politically or economically by propping up the current bankrupt regime. But as long as Russia can be a thorn in the side of the US, Putin can demonstrate to Russians that their country is still a force to be reckoned with. In some ways Putin benefits domestically the same way as Erdogan, both burnishing their image as the local tough guy. That makes the Turkish-Russian clash even more dangerous. Just like Turkey, Russia got involved militarily to “fight terrorism”, only in its case the main target have been anti-government forces operating to the West of the IS-controlled territory, as opposed to the Kurds to the east. This also includes Turkmen, ethnic Turks in northern Syria, who were the target of the bombing run before the SU-24 was shot down by Turkish jets.

Neither Assad nor Russia place a high priority on fighting IS: If they were to defeat the barbaric hordes of IS, achieving regime change in Damascus would instantly rise to become the top priority of the US in this war again. Keeping IS in the mix is like a life insurance policy for Assad.

Shiite militia Hezbollah in Lebanon is supporting Assad with fighters. Shiites in Lebanon feel threatened by the prospect of militant Sunnis taking over next door. Lebanon suffered through a long period of civil war starting in the 1970s and is host to more than a million Syrian refugees now.

Talks have been ongoing for negotiating a cease-fire towards a political settlement. The idea is that all parties but IS would stop fighting each other, then gang up on IS and wipe it out. Finally they would agree to a new government, presumably led by the Sunni majority with some kind of autonomy for the Alawites and the Kurds. The shooting down of the Russian bomber has made this even less likely to happen any time soon. Erdogan is not particularly keen on any settlement that will create an autonomous or independent Kurdish entity south of the border, or linked up with Iraqi Kurdistan. As long as IS is there the Kurds will keep bleeding as a proxy for US ground troops that won’t get deployed.

IS will keep fighting as long as it can keep up the stream of recruits from outside the region and money from whatever sources they can lay their hands on. The more the west and Russia retaliate with military strikes and troops for acts of terrorism such as the ones in Paris or against the Russian tourists in Sinai, the easier it is for IS to sell its story as defending the “caliphate” against western “crusaders”. The war in Syria is still young compared to the jihad that has been going on in Afghanistan since the Russian invasion in 1979 and the US invasion in 2001.

I haven’t said much about Saudi Arabia and Qatar yet, two countries that would like to see a Sunni victory in Syria but are denying that they support Islamist extremists such as IS and al-Nusra Front. What mostly differentiates Saudi-Arabia from IS is not its ideology, but its oil wealth and its royal family. Ideologically they are actually quite close, for example both the Saudis and IS still practice crucifixion and neither tolerates other religions. The Saudi government opposes the likes of IS and Al-Qaeda not because they had different values, but because those militants regard the Saudi royals as corrupt and don’t recognize their authority. Saudi Arabia’s major rival in the Middle East is Iran, Syria’s main supporter. Supporting Sunni Islamists against Assad is a way of hurting Iran.

So, what will the outcome? Frankly, I am not hopeful. When next door neighbour Lebanon erupted into civil war in 1975, it took 15 years before the country could return to a fragile peace again. There are too many external powers involved in a proxy war in Syria and so much blood has been shed already, that a political settlement is unlikely any time soon. The conflict between the Saudis and Iran has recently escalated, following the execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, while Turkey has escalated its conflict with the Kurds and Russia. Even if Assad lost control of the capital, Russia is likely to keep supporting an Alawite rump state on the coast to keep its naval base and a seat at the table.

I would not be surprised if the war in Syria lasts another 10 years or more, if not for the sectarian and ethnic divisions within the country then because of the countries running the Syrian war as a regional proxy war, turning Syria into a burnt-out graveyard.

I’m a bit puzzled about the timing of Turkey’s recent attacks on Kurdish bases in northern Iraq, right after finally permitting the US to fly attacks against IS from Turkish bases. That sounds like playing both sides of the war to me… Weaken IS and its major enemy at the same time.

Does Erdoğan think the US will have to shut up about Turkish attacks on Kurdish forces if they don’t want to lose the long demanded use of Turkish bases against IS? Use of Turkish bases for the war in Syria will allow the US to step up attacks against IS, which might strengthen the position of Kurdish forces. During the siege of Kobanî, Turkey seemed determined to block Kurdish reinforcements against IS, as if it saw genocidal IS as the lesser of two evils.

Or is it simply payback time for the parliamentary triumph of the (Kurdish) People’s Democratic party (HDP), which deprived Erdoğan’s AKP of a majority in the general elections in June? Ending the peace process with Kurds may be an attempt to drive a wedge between the HDP and non-Kurdish voters, to split the opposition.