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La classe de TEPC du lycée Daniel Balavoine

de Bois-Colombes vous présente son projet pédagogique.

Les élèves dans le cadre de leur chef d'œuvre ont voulu

mettre à l'honneur M. Charles Coste, cycliste médaillé d'or aux jeux olympiques de Londres en 1948 et avant dernier relayeur de la flamme olympique lors des J.O de Paris 2024. Il réside dans leur ville.

Cette page vous livre la démarche de la réalisation d'une fresque symbolisée par trois cyclistes emblématiques. Ceux-ci représentent:

Le passé: Major Taylor.

Le présent: Charles Coste.

Le futur: Eyeru Gebru.

Le triptyque s'accompagne des typographies propres aux périodes, elles sont rédigées en français, anglais et espagnol, les langues vivantes enseignées au lycée Daniel Balavoine.

Comme pour les olympiades, les lycéens attachent aussi des valeurs à cette réalisation:

- Le vivre ensemble, la parité, la diversité et le dépassement de soi.

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One of the key locations of Game of Thrones is the wall at the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. Three hundred miles long, seven hundred feet high, and built of ice blocks, it is here that the Night Watch hold the line against the 'wildings' that lie beyond and whisper rumours of the undead White Walkers. The viewers know by now that these super-zombies exist, that the wall has been breached, and "winter is coming".

Game of Thrones' wall evokes Hadrian's Wall, which separated the Romans from the Barbarians

In George RR Martin's novels, the historical inspiration is Hadrian's Wall in northern England. It marked the northern limit of the Roman Empire, dividing conquered land from the unbeaten northern tribes. Although a more modest affair, stretching 70 miles (113km) and rarely standing more than 10ft (3m) high, it was built in about six years from 122 CE. Manned with castles at every Roman mile, Hadrian's Wall was a mark of imperial power and was intended, as one early chronicle records, 'to separate the Romans from the Barbarians.'

This has long been the function of walls. Announced as defensive structures and imagined as vast impenetrable barriers, instead they are often gestural markers that serve more social, psychological and symbolic purposes. They help a culture to define itself by keeping what it's not at bay.

The wall in Game of Thrones might be a fantastical barrier, but this - so far - is the status of that other wall that dominates contemporary debate: Trump's pledge in the election campaign in 2016 "to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it". Although some suggested designs for Trump's boundary wall have been released, it is still unclear how this vast infrastructural project will be funded and managed. Its purpose, so far, has been entirely about symbolic conceptions of nation and belonging.

Trump's wall has, of course, many historical precedents. The Great Wall of China was started as early as 481 BCE, although the iconic stone sections date from about 400 years ago. This wall, too, was used to mark the civilised world from the impure tribes beyond. At over 4000 miles long, sparsely garrisoned and sometimes little more than raised earthworks, it was not much use as a physical barrier or defensive structure, but operated more as a symbol that defined Chinese nationhood, which was premised for centuries on ethnic and cultural exclusion. This is why the Communist Party since 1949 has continued to add to the wall and preserve its historical sections as an emblem of the nation: it defines the People of the People's Republic.

The Greeks called those beyond the city walls barbarians

The Greeks had similar motivations. They called those beyond the city walls barbarians- the word mocking the "bar-bar" stutter of those barely civilised enough to speak. Greek horror deepened the further they went from home. Beyond the known world of the Mediterranean sea were the Anthropophagi, the cannibal men who were little more than beasts hungry for human flesh. This horror still haunts contemporary Gothic fiction: beyond the walls or fences of every final refuge after the apocalypse, zombies mass in indifferent, devouring hordes. On The Walking Dead, the stripping away of all civilisation beyond the walls applies forcefully to human survivors who are nevertheless still strangers, not of the group. Walls have always offered a way of dividing the human from the inhuman.
Divide and conquer
The Cold War era was haunted by the building of the Berlin Wall by East Germany, which was started in August 1961. It was designed to prevent the mass migration of Eastern bloc citizens to the West, the structure being continually reinforced and rebuilt for three decades. Hundreds were killed trying to cross the 96 miles of wall that enclosed West Berlin, and the border zone became the iconic setting for many spy thrillers, from John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) to Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015). The Berlin Wall wasn't just geo-political, but served as a handy psychological emblem of alienation and self-division, as in Pink Floyd's concept album The Wall (1979).

However, the Berlin Wall appeared at the beginning of inter-continental missiles, mass air travel and global satellite communications, and these made the wall seem increasingly absurd in a seemingly 'borderless' world. It became a disastrous symbol of the coercion and control of East Germany over its citizens. Many US presidents used the wall as a backdrop for ideological statements of Western freedom, from John F Kennedy onwards. When Ronald Reagan spoke in Berlin in 1987, his injunction to "tear down this wall" was a crucial moment in ending the Cold War. Two years later, in November 1989, the borders were declared open and Berliners themselves began dismantling a wall that had divided the city for 28 years.

The new millennium has been marked by an extraordinary number of wall-building projects

For a while, in the 1990s, we believed in the rhetoric of a frictionless globalised world, the free movement of money, goods and people. This was what the sociologist Manuel Castells celebrated as "the space of flows". Yet the new millennium has been marked by an extraordinary number of wall-building projects around the world, in direct response to anxieties produced by open borders. The rhetoric of internationalism and free movement across borders has become very hemmed in by the simultaneous construction of physical barriers that often serve deeply symbolic ends.

Israel began its 'separation barrier' in 2000 - the government agencies that proposed and are building it tend to avoid using the word 'wall'. It was a response to the violent uprising of Palestinians on the West Bank, the Second Intifada, and the barrier was meant to separate the Palestinian population from territory assigned to Israel. It is projected to be 440 miles (708km) long when complete, although the building has been continually challenged in international law. Simone Bitton's documentary Wall (2004) ends with the everyday passage of people climbing up and over the wall, a silent evocation of how porous the barrier remains. Rather more apocalyptically, World War Z (2013) at first seems to regard the Israeli separation barrier and militarized check-points as robust defences against a zombie virus outbreak, but of course the wall is overrun by undead hordes - just as it is in Game of Thrones.
Concrete canvas
Of course, just as walls serve as barriers they become blank canvases, as well. The graffiti on the Berlin and the West Bank walls has become famous for the expression of resistance to separation. One of the most popular artists of our time, Banksy, has made a career out of stencilling art defiantly on walls. A few years before Trump, the science fiction writer Tom Disch imagined a massive wall built along the US-Canadian border becoming a vast open-air art gallery.

Meanwhile, in 2004, India finally completed their electrified fence along the Line of Control through disputed territory separating India and Pakistan. It is over 340 miles long. The refugee crisis since the collapse of Libya and Syria into civil wars has prompted a whole rash of wall-building to defend European borders, from the Spanish fence around the port of Melilla in Morocco to the various border fences built by the Hungarian government in 2015 and 2016. Nationalist reactions to 'borderless Europe' have been a mark of recent elections across the continent. For all the walls, millions of refugees have still made it through the perilous journey.

As for the history behind Trump's Wall, the border between the US and Mexico was first formally established in a treaty of 1848, and initially marked only by piles of stones and a handful of marble obelisks. The first fencing went up in 1945 to manage the large numbers moving across the border at Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. The building of a physical border was massively extended following the founding of the Department of Homeland Security and its 'Secure Border Initiative' of 2005. Since then, over 650 miles of fencing have been constructed, under both Republican and Democratic presidencies. For all the rhetoric of invasion, deportations have exceeded inward migrants since 2005.

The cultural representation of this southern border has matched this ratcheted anxiety. In the 1940s, Anthony Mann's liberal Hollywood film Border Incident (1949) imagined benign co-operation between Mexico and the US as the ideal to protect vulnerable Mexicans tempted by people smugglers. In Orson Welles' noir, Touch of Evil(1958), the film famously opens with an exuberant crane shot that travels across the US/Mexico border in a single, unbroken take. Now, in films like Sicario (2015) or TV series like Breaking Bad (2008-13), the border zone is highly militarised, and the place south of the border is imagined as a demonic world of violence, degradation and terror, where unimaginable torture and cruel death awaits the foolhardy American.

Walls retain their psychological value as demarcations of a dream of purity

In Gareth Edwards' horror film, Monsters (2010), the border becomes a gigantic wall, hundreds of feet high, trying to fence off America from the vast alien creatures that now roam the land. Of course this defence fails, and the film ends with the American south 'infected' by what seem gracious, sublime yet utterly alien beings strolling through an extended borderscape of abandoned towns.

All of which is to say that the mythical power of White Walkers coming from beyond to bring pestilence and death to the civilised Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones is hardly out of keeping with our contemporary wall-building frenzy.

Of course, walls remain practically rather useless barriers, rendered increasingly obsolete by new technologies like drones. Yet they clearly retain their psychological value as demarcations of a dream of purity, keeping out all those threats to self-identity. Let's just hope that with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and other stories formerly deemed fantastical that now look allegorical we can satisfy our violent fantasies of expulsion and purification through fiction rather than real life.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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One of the key locations of Game of Thrones is the wall at the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. Three hundred miles long, seven hundred feet high, and built of ice blocks, it is here that the Night Watch hold the line against the 'wildings' that lie beyond and whisper rumours of the undead White Walkers.

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Restrictions des visas expats en Australie

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Restrictions des visas expats en Australie

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Le premier ministre australien a annoncé mardi 18 avril que le visa 457, qui permettait à des personnes qualifiées de s'installer dans le pays, allait être supprimé.

Le Monde | | Par Caroline Taïx (Sydney, correspondance)

Le système d'immigration choisie de l'Australie a souvent été cité en exemple par Donald Trump et par les partisans du Brexit. Mais le gouvernement conservateur australien a annoncé mardi 18 avril son intention d'aller plus loin. " Priorité aux Australiens ", a déclaré sur Facebook le premier ministre Malcolm Turnbull, alors que l'économie ralentit (depuis la fin du boom minier en 2012, la croissance est passée de 3,6 % à 2,9 % en 2016) et le taux de chômage grimpe.

Lire aussi : Canada, Australie : quel est ce système de l'immigration choisie vanté par Donald Trump ?

Le visa 457, qui permettait à des personnes qualifiées ayant décroché un contrat avec une entreprise australienne de venir dans le pays, va être supprimé.

Près de 96 000 personnes se trouvent actuellement en Australie grâce à ce visa créé en 1996 pour combler des manques de main-d'œuvre. Les Indiens représentent presqu'un quart de celles-ci, suivis des Britanniques puis des Chinois. De nombreux Français en ont aussi profité. Ces travailleurs sont aussi bien informaticiens, ingénieurs que sages-femmes : plus de 650 métiers donnaient accès à ce sésame. Ces migrants ont été autorisés à s'installer avec leur famille. Ce titre temporaire, d'une durée de quatre ans, permettait d'accéder sous certaines conditions au statut de résident permanent puis à la nationalité australienne. Près de 28 % des Australiens sont nés à l'étranger, selon le Bureau de la statistique.

200 métiers seront supprimés de la liste

Ce visa était régulièrement critiqué, ses détracteurs jugeant que des emplois étaient pris par les étrangers. M. Turnbull semble avoir été convaincu. " Nous ne laisserons plus les visas 457 être des passeports pour des emplois qui pourraient et devraient aller à des Australiens, a-t-il déclaré. Un employeur ne doit pas faire venir un travailleur étranger simplement parce que c'est plus facile qu'embaucher un Australien. "

Lire aussi : Le gouvernement australien veut interdire les immigrés clandestins de séjour à vie

Le nouveau visa sera valable deux ans, et renouvelable une fois. Environ 200 métiers seront supprimés de la liste donnant accès à ce titre, selon le média public ABC. Pour l'obtenir, une expérience professionnelle de deux ans sera requise, le niveau d'anglais demandé sera plus élevé et le casier judiciaire contrôlé. Surtout, les bénéficiaires ne deviendront pas résidents permanents. Un autre visa pour les travailleurs les plus qualifiés sera créé, mais il sera lui aussi plus restrictif.

Le premier ministre, qui gouverne avec une très courte majorité, a démenti avoir agi sous la pression des élus les plus conservateurs au sein de sa formation politique. Le parti anti-immigration One Nation, lui, s'est attribué le mérite de cette réforme.

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S'expatrier en Australie pour travailler devient de plus en plus complexe

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Le premier ministre australien a annoncé mardi 18 avril que le visa 457, qui permettait à des personnes qualifiées de s'installer dans le pays, allait être supprimé. Le Monde | | Par Caroline Taïx (Sydney, correspondance) Le système d'immigration choisie de l'Australie a souvent été cité en exemple par Donald Trump et par les partisans du Brexit.

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"To have enslaved America with this hocus-pocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!" These words come near the end of Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America, but for some they could have been written yesterday. The election of Donald J Trump as president has been called "unimaginable", but the truth is many people did imagine the forces that have brought him to power, or versions of them; we just stopped listening to them.

In 1944, an article called "American Fascism" appeared in the New York Times, written by then vice president Henry Wallace. "A fascist," wrote Wallace, "is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends." Wallace predicted that American fascism would only become "really dangerous" if a "purposeful coalition" arose between crony capitalists, "poisoners of public information" and "the KKK type of demagoguery". Those defending the new administration insist it isn't fascism, but Americanism. This, too, was foretold: in 1938, a New York Times reporter warned: "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism'."

Today, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is No 1 on Amazon.com, while Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism has been selling at 16 times its normal rate since December. The Trump administration's use of Newspeak ("designed to diminish the range of thought", in Orwell's words), its partiality for "alternative facts", have sent readers diving back into history in search not only of explanations, but solutions.

One perspective fiction can offer is to imagine not alternative facts but alternative futures, based on shared pasts. These are the stories we call "counterfactual", the what-ifs that might have emerged had historical forces twisted in different directions. Nineteen Eighty-Fourwas Orwell's vision of postwar fascism, while Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, written just as European fascism began to consolidate in 1932, incorporated American culture into its dystopian vision, in which citizens of the "World State" pray to long-dead gods of technology ("In Ford We Trust") and entertain themselves with "Feelies" (a play on "talkies", the new sound films). Books are suppressed, but no one wants to read them any more anyway.

Books are the enemies of totalitarians, which is why they like to burn them. And there are certainly crucial lessons to be learned from Orwell, Arendt, Elie Wiesel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many of other writers of the last century who emerged from the first waves of modern totalitarianism determined to share their painful lessons. Consoling tales about defeating nazism remain perennially popular, but darker counterfactual stories have gradually been reclaiming our attention. Len Deighton's 1978 novel SS-GB, recounting an alternative history in which the Battle of Britain was lost and Germany occupied Great Britain, is being adapted for the BBC, while Amazon's version of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), which imagines the world after the axis powers triumphed, is filming a third season. Its plot hinges on propaganda films that literally offer "alternative facts", as history changes according to individual choices.

Alongside these fables of evil Nazis and heroic freedom fighters is the spectre of homegrown totalitarianism. And despite America's insistence that "it can't happen here", many writers have shown exactly how it could. The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood's vision of theocratic misogynists taking over America, is among the most powerful modern cautionary tales. One of its most quoted lines articulates the argument of authoritarians everywhere, that "there is more than one kind of freedom ... freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from." Atwood's parable was published a year after Ronald Reagan passed the "global gag" rule, restricting funding of reproductive rights - the same rule that Trump, surrounded by a group of men, was just photographed signing back into law.

American authoritarianism has always been entangled not only with patriotism, but with the country's two most familiar belief systems: religion and business. "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," someone once observed, who might have added that it would also be waving a dollar bill. That person was not, as is often reported, Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here, a furious satire of the idea that American exceptionalism might inoculate it against fascism. But Lewis's novel does make a similar (if less pithy) observation, declaring that in America, fascism's most dangerous supporters would be those "who disowned the word 'fascism' and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty". American fascism will necessarily be shaped by capitalism - or, as Lewis memorably puts it, "government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits".

It Can't Happen Here lambasts the "funny therapeutics" of trying to "cure the evils of democracy by the evils of fascism". Senator Buzz Windrip runs for president on a populist campaign of traditional values, making simplistic promises about returning prosperity ("he advocated everyone's getting rich by just voting to be rich"). A newspaper editor issues futile warnings: "People will think they're electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror!" Once in office, Windrip makes good his authoritarian threats, creating a private security force called the Minute Men and imprisoning his political enemies in "concentration camps". As the midwest grumbles about secession, the administration decides to arouse "that useful patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside attack" by arranging "to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned series of deplorable 'incidents' on the Mexican border, and declare war on Mexico". Windrip was inspired by Huey Long, the charismatic populist from Louisiana who was assassinated in 1935 and to whom Trump has been frequently compared. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946) told another tale inspired by Long's rise and fall: "Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys," politician Willie Stark is cynically advised. "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more."

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Sean Penn as Willie Stark in the 2006 film of All the King's Men. Photograph: Allstar/Sony

More recently, Roth's The Plot Against America, set at the beginning of the second world war, imagines Charles Lindbergh winning the White House on a slogan of "America First", the antisemitic platform he supported in real life. In fact, the phrase "America First" was originally associated not with Lindbergh, but with the 1916 campaign of Woodrow Wilson, and then echoed four years later by the first businessman to become president, Warren G Harding, who said during his campaign that "patriotic devotion" meant "to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America first". Harding's version of putting America first was to allow the rise of the Ku Klux Klan while creating a graft-ridden cabinet responsible in 1923 for the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, the worst corruption scandal in American political history so far - but then American history isn't over yet.

The Plot Against America begins as Lindbergh wins the election, thanks to "carnival antics" that leave Republican leaders "in despair over their candidate's stubborn refusal to allow anyone other than himself to determine the strategy of his campaign". The president-elect heads immediately to Europe for "cordial talks" with Hitler, agreeing to peaceful relations. This leads to protests at home, but establishes "a new order in Europe". Still, Americans insist that "America wasn't a fascist country and wasn't going to be" because the president and congress were "bound to follow the law as set down by the constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were antisemites ... but that was a long way from their being Nazis." The story concerns the gradual erosion of norms and acceptance of oppression: "Now they think they can get away with anything. It's disgraceful. It starts with the White House." For all its brilliance, however, Roth's Plot evades its own central quandary, which is that of history: what is the solution? Roth settles for an easy optimism, one of the US's national hallmarks, in which American virtue asserts itself and Lindbergh literally disappears.

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Trump speaking in front of a picture of his own face at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

We call such facile resolutions "Hollywood endings" for a reason, but it's also true that the dream factory has been the source of some of America's most powerful stories about domestic fascism, including the one that Trump has named his favourite film, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane(1941). When Trump appeared at the Republican National Convention last July in front of a colossal picture of his own face, many were startled by his conjuring of fascist iconography. It seems more likely that he was visually quoting Citizen Kane's invocation of fascism, in its famous scene of Kane holding a campaign rally with a giant self-portrait behind him; Welles's satire appears to have been lost in translation. When Kane loses his bid for governor, brought down by a sex scandal, we learn that his newspaper had prepared two headlines, depending on the election outcome: either "Kane Elected" or "Fraud at Polls". Trump has said he identifies with Kane, overlooking the fact that Kane destroys himself in his quest for greatness. Kane's only friend says of him after his death: "He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life." It wasn't intended as a recommendation.

Citizen Kane was more about megalomania than the autocracy to which it almost led. (Like Lindbergh, for whom he was instrumental in reviving the phrase "America First", William Randolph Hearst - on whom Kane was based - spoke approvingly of Hitler, and an early draft of the film reveals that Kane's son became a card-carrying Nazi.) But during the second world war, Hollywood produced many stories about the defeat of totalitarianism at home, as well as abroad. Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, also released in 1941, offers a more sentimental version of a similar story. A business tycoon called Norton tries to harness a populist movement for his own purposes, but the people reject him in the name of democratic ideals. "I get mad not just for myself but for a guy named Washington, and Jefferson, and Lincoln," declares a freedom-loving newspaper editor. Norton believes that "what the American people need is an iron hand" and tries to manipulate the crowd into hating John Doe, their populist hero. But in the end, Doe is saved by a handful of Americans who believe in him, leading to the editor's valedictory line: "There you are, Norton, the people! Try and lick that!"

These stories continually depict the people rising up to assert their decency, with journalists as their spokespeople. The free press saves America from fascism again and again, as in an all but forgotten film called Keeper of the Flame (1942), the least well known of the screen partnerships of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. As it opens, a successful businessman who has become a popular demagogue dies under mysterious circumstances. Eventually his widow reveals that he was, in fact, a secret fascist, supported "by a few private individuals to whom money didn't mean anything any more but who wanted political power. Knew they could never get it by democratic means." While movies like Meet John Doe allow that individual authoritarians might occasionally spring up, Keeper of the Flame is one of the few Hollywood films that explicitly imagines a fully fledged homegrown American fascist movement. The demagogue's campaign is managed by a media manipulator who plants fake stories to stir up hatred, including an "antisemitic paper attacking the Jews", a Farmer's Gazette that savages "the city dwellers", a "Southern appeal to the Ku Klux Klan," along with plans to create "America's first storm troopers". "Of course," the widow explains, "they didn't call it fascism. They painted it red, white, and blue, and called it Americanism."

Media provides both sides with their weapons: the fascists in Keeper of the Flame are defeated when the truth is revealed by the journalist who speaks for democracy, once again. The power of the press drives another political film Hepburn and Tracy made a few years later, State of the Union (1948), which begins with an authoritarian Republican newspaper tycoon's failed efforts to become president. Just as reporters were the voice of the people, so American fascists were often imagined as newspaper tycoons, thanks to the toxic mix of capitalism, media and politics, the perversion of America's cult of business, against which people such as Henry Wallace cautioned.

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The TV adaptation of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Photograph: Amazon Studios

McCarthyism engendered a whole new cadre of warnings against authoritarianism, with a specifically ideological cast. By 1959, this had inspired books such as The Manchurian Candidate, made into a film in 1962, andalso frequently invoked in recent weeks by those who argue that Trump is, in fact, a puppet of the Russian state. These fears were hardly assuaged by his shouts of "no puppet" during the presidential debates, perhaps because they brought to mind a line from The Manchurian Candidate: "You just keep shouting 'Point of Order, Point of Order' into the television cameras and I will handle the rest." As the sinister brainwashing scientist observes: "His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it's been dry-cleaned."

McCarthyism camouflaged itself as a story about external enemies infiltrating peaceful American society, so that "Americanism" could define itself against "un-Americanism" and pretend this was a cold war rather than a civil one. As the rifts created by the Vietnam war deepened, however, so did the sense that America was fighting an internal, not an external, battle, an existential struggle for the nation's soul that drove many people towards a crude nationalism. This is the lesson of a forgotten popular novel written in response to Watergate, another historical shock to America's democratic spirit. In The R Document (1976) by Irving Wallace, a power hungry FBI director plans to overturn the Bill of Rights with a new constitutional amendment: "No right or liberty guaranteed by the constitution shall be construed as licence to endanger the national security." He tries to shut down all press opposition and fakes statistics to make his case. Eventually, in another Hollywood ending, a crusading district attorney reveals the truth and shocked congressmen defeat the amendment, but not before Wallace has warned his readers: "If fascism ever comes to the United States, it'll be because the people voted it in." Or, as Wallace's epigraph from Benjamin Franklin puts it, the founding fathers gave us "a republic, if you can keep it".

These parallels between fictional pasts and our political present may seem eerie: they aren't. There is nothing surprising about people trying to replicate the oldest models of power. Wallace also quotes the observation of the writer Charles Péguy, killed in the first world war, that tyranny is by definition better organised than freedom. To this it could be added that tyranny is always simpler than freedom, because it decides its own rules, or whether to have any at all.

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Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in the 1962 film of The Manchurian Candidate. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists

What all these stories demonstrate - and what their resolutions rely on - is that democracy depends on good faith. Individuals operating in bad faith are nothing new, but these stories trust that the majority work in good faith, and will prevail. Only in Preston Sturges' The Great McGinty (1940) is the whole system riddled with bad faith, so that a corrupt politician has to flee the country when he tries to go straight. The crisis facing America today isn't ultimately about political differences: it's about ethical ones. Faith in business, or religion, or nation means nothing if those faiths are deployed for cynical or vicious ends; it turns out our idealism was there to protect our ideals. "Common decency," after all, means not only basic decency, but a decency that is held in common. American history is not on Trump's side; his own favourite film isn't even on his side.

There are two ways to learn: one is by direct experience, otherwise known as the hard way. The easier way is to read, and pay attention. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism. In Bradbury's dystopian near-future, books were neglected as people's attention span shortened, until finally they were banned ("a book is a loaded gun in the house next door"). Gradually a fireman who burns books realises they may contain lessons that could save society from repeating the mistakes of the past: "The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are ... When they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run."

During the writing of It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis was married to Dorothy Thompson, one of the most influential American journalists of the late 1930s, and the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn's character in her first pairing with Spencer Tracy, Woman of the Year (1942). Thompson interviewed Hitler in 1931, calling him "the very prototype of the little man"; by 1939, Time magazine named her the second most popular woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1941, Thompson wrote an article for Harper's magazine, called "Who Goes Nazi?", in which she recommends a "somewhat macabre parlour game" for social gatherings, "to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi". Cataloguing various sub-groups (born Nazis, persuaded Nazis, never-Nazis), Thompson notes that nazism was not a matter of nationality but of "a certain type of mind". She describes Person A, Person B and so on, predicting each one's potential for fascism, before arriving at "young D", who is, Thompson declares, "the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others."

There is also a young immigrant: "The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them." Along with the Americans who understand their own values, one of which is kindness, the immigrant is the greatest opponent of nazism in the room. Only together, Thompson implies, can they recognise, and defeat, young D.
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'It will be called Americanism': the US writers who imagined a fascist future

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"To have enslaved America with this hocus-pocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!" These words come near the end of Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America, but for some they could have been written yesterday.

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https://prezi.com/kdvlsz5kjiyw/edit/#17_175231284

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GB Scottish Devolution and Independence Referendum

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4- GEORGE CATLIN (Native americans) - 19th C

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3- American Constitution 1787 and Founding Fathers

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2- American War of Independence and Paris Treaty 1775-1783

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1- The Declaration of Independence July 4 1776