History Lessons Learned and Not Learned

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook may read the historical summary I post every morning. As a history buff, it always fascinates me to think about what famous figures were born and what significant things happened each day, and I share those with my readers in a short post in the hopes they find them equally interesting ... or, at least, entertaining.

This past Saturday, April 26th, was the date in 1933 on which the multi-hatted Nazi figure Hermann Göring established the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo. Translated from the German, it was called the Secret State Police, and is remembered for the fearsome brutality that has made it the historic standard for violent and unchecked government power ... and a warning of its dangers that must always be remembered.

Unfortunately, this lesson has been unlearned or ignored by the current administration, which has established quite a track record for bringing down the weight of the federal legal system on the heads not only of those who have displeased Der Furor, but of ordinary Americans as well. Consider these things that have happened just in the first hundred days of the Orange Airhorn's presidency:

At least five law firms have been targeted via royal decree executive order for their work on behalf of clients who have incurred Der Furor's anger. 

At least two individual citizens - Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor - have been specifically targeted via royal decree executive order for displeasing Der Furor. 

A noncitizen US resident married to an American citizen was arrested and deported (erroneously, by the administration's own admission) to a notorious prison in El Salvador ... from which the government refuses to free him and return him to the United States.  

Rumeysa Oztürk, a Turkish student attending Tufts University, was arrested by US immigration officials in civilian clothes on a city street near Boston and was shipped to a detention facility in Louisiana. According to the Department of Homeland Security, she is guilty of "engag(ing) in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans." She has been accused of anti-semitic activities, which appears to be the latest all-purpose excuse for the administration to arrest and deport foreign students.

A two-year-old girl, an American citizen according to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, was deported to Honduras with her non-citizen mother, despite the pleas of her father, who is an American citizen. In another incident, ICE agents arrested and deported to Mexico an undocumented family - including a 10-year-old girl suffering from brain cancer - while they were on their way to an emergency medical appointment.

The FBI arrested a Milwaukee judge they accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities by escorting him and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door; the man was later arrested anyhow. The Attorney General of the United States crowed that, “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me ... They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We are sending a very strong message today," and the Director of the FBI tweeted a photo of the arrest, loftily proclaiming that "no one is above the law*" ...

  

Der Furor has ordered the Justice Department to investigate "Act Blue," the primary fundraising organ of the Democratic Party, in an obvious effort to cripple his political opponents. 

And here we are.

Godwin's Law states that, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison  involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one," and is similar to the logical fallacy known as Reductio ad Hitlerum, which describes comparing the position of one's opponent, with Hitler or the Nazi party, usually for lack of a valid counterargument. Nevertheless, it is not hard to identify at least basic similarities between the current administration's weaponization of the law and the actions of the Third Reich, both in terms of its interpretation and manipulation of the law and its eager employment of the tools of coercion.

Listen to any news conference or public statement by the Attorney General, the Director of Homeland Security, the Director of the FBI, or the President's Press Secretary, compare them to similar statements from nearly a century ago, and wonder at the parallels.

And if, nevertheless, you find yourself thinking that this is all fine and those targeted deserve what they get, remember the admonition of history podcaster Dan Carlin:

Imagine all that power in the hands of someone you loathe.

As I've said here before, when the President of the United States gets around to turning his sights on you, your America won't seem quite so great.

Have a good day, and remember that it most certainly can happen here. And it is.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* Unless, of course, they are Der Furor, a member of his family, or are extremely wealthy.

The Road to January 6th

Like many of you, I watched last Thursday's televised hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol with a mixture of anger, sadness, and disbelief. The evidence of Der Furor's manifest unfitness for any position of adult responsibility ... much less the presidency ... is overwhelming, and the damage he has done to the nation and the world is almost beyond calculation.

But as awful as the legacy of Der Furor is, I think he was but the most recent logical bump in the torturous road down which the country has been heading since the creation of the Republic. 

We Americans are a feisty and contrarian lot, with a baked-in suspicion of and disrespect for authority that goes back to our successful revolt against a king who tried to exercise power and authority over us that we were unwilling to accept. Once we'd become an independent country, though, we needed to figure out how to govern a loose confederation of states that didn't really want to be governed by anyone else. Our first attempt to form a government resulted in the Articles of Confederation, which produced a national administration too weak to manage thirteen fractious former colonies, each with a "you're not the boss of me" attitude. We went back to the drawing board and came up with the Constitution, a flawed document we've managed to make work partly because of periodic amendment to fix major issues and partly because - until the advent of Der Furor - we've had presidents, legislators, and jurists willing to cooperate within a shared set of values and united by a love of country. 

But the suspicion and disrespect for authority that's baked into our national DNA has never quite gone away, and we've allowed it to grow and fester until it manifests itself in things like heavily-armed militias, Second Amendment zealots, white supremacists, "constitutional sheriffs," election denial, and the utter lunacy of the QAnon movement. How did we get to the point at which our sanity check has bounced?

Mistrust and suspicion of government authority - even within the government - has been building at an increasing rate since at least the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his assertion that "In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." The fundamental difference between the conservative/Republican and liberal/Democratic approaches to governing has hardened into a belief on the right that government should be as small, cheap, weak, and non-intrusive as possible, and on the left that government should be large and powerful enough to better the lives and fortunes of ordinary citizens ... and the twain ain't meeting.

But it's more than that.

Look at our popular books and films, and consider that a major theme of many of them is government malfeasance and abuse of authority. As far back as 1962, the novel Seven Days in May (and its 1964 film version) envisioned an attempt by a military-political cabal to seize control of the US government. Rogue government agents and their flagrant violations of the rights of American citizens are a popular theme, as are corrupt government officials, police on the take, etc. Is it any wonder that impressionable Americans believe their officials and institutions are irredeemably corrupt?

The news media fuels this public cynicism by focusing relentlessly on the things that go wrong, rather than on - or at least, mentioning in passing - the things that go right. This reflects a belief that the job of the fourth estate is to hold government's feet to the fire and courageously expose its wrongdoing, not to applaud it for doing its job ... but it contributes to the perception that everything is wrong and everyone, everywhere is corrupt.

And, of course, our political parties have done their part. Members of Congress are elected noncompetitively in districts gerrymandered to provide safe party control rather than to represent the actual choices of the electorate. Time that might be spent in legislative work is devoted to fundraising to cover the huge cost of political campaigns. Popular legislation is blocked for spurious political reasons in order to prevent the opposition party from achieving any successes that might improve their approval ratings. "Debates," when they are held, consist of ad hominem attacks and scripted talking points often unrelated to the softball questions asked by the moderators, who are selected so as to be the least objectionable to both sides. The right and duty of a sitting president to nominate Supreme Court justices is shamelessly blocked to allow the packing of the court with religious conservatives who will advance a blatantly religious agenda in defiance of the Constitution.

And the vast amounts of money needed to fund election campaigns leave officeholders beholden to the special interests who provide that money, ensuring that legislation reflects the interests of corporate and special interest donors rather than those of ordinary citizens. 

All of these things, taken together, have created an electorate with a cynical, yet sadly realistic view of a government owned by special interests and completely uninterested in any concerns more complicated than arranging tickets for a White House tour or obtaining a flag flown over the Capitol. The realization that elected officials have no particular interest in the welfare of the average citizen made even an unqualified and egotistical blowhard like Der Furor, whose only real skill was riling up crowds by sticking a finger in the eye of the status quo, seem worth betting on. That appeal was summarized by New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens in this insightful article, in which he admitted having misunderstood why the 45th president was (and remains) so attractive not only to his most devoted followers, but to ordinary citizens desperate enough for something better than government as usual that they would elect a boorish ignoramus like Der Furor to the chair once held by towering figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

As journalist Henry Mencken observed many years ago, 

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

And,

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Thus, we find ourselves menaced by the shrieking hobgoblins of Critical Race Theory, migrant caravans, Antifa, BLM*, and satan-worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles, which serve to distract us from the very real hobgoblins of climate change, drastic economic inequality, surging gun violence, and a general worship of ignorance.

It's taken 233 years, but we seem finally to have reached the culmination of the pressures and desires and political cognitive dissonance that drove the founding generation. We've paved for ourselves the road that led to January 6th, 2021, and beyond it to a future darker than I could ever have feared.

Have a good day. Think hard about the country you want for your children and grandchildren, and vote accordingly.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* Not, of course, the Bureau of Land Management, which surely receives its share of threatening phone calls from idiots who assume it's burning down our cities to combat racism.

A Firefighter Summarizes the Problem

Many years ago I read "Report from Engine Company 82," the fascinating memoir by a New York City firefighter named Dennis Smith. It was a marvelous book that looked at the funny, sad, infuriating, and fascinating adventures of 20 years spent as a first responder. One of the things that I found interesting was his description of how often his crew would arrive at a fire, only to have their equipment stolen, or be pelted with rocks and bottles by some of the onlookers while they tried to fight the fire and save lives. He described the lesson he took away from these events in this quote that has stayed with me over the years:

“I used to believe that people who threw rocks at firemen were motivated by conditions - the lower depths of American society. I used to believe that the fundamental problems were housing and education, and that people would stop throwing rocks if they had a decent place to live and were given equal educational opportunities. But I don’t believe that anymore. That, to me, is prescribing for symptoms. The disease is more seriously latent, more pernicious than uncaring landlords, or bureaucratic, apathetic school officials. The malignancy lies in the guts of humankind at all levels. We have unlearned the value of a human life.”

We have unlearned the value of a human life.

That line summarizes where we remain today, 50 years after Dennis Smith published his memoir. A human life has less value than the guns and ammunition that are a holy sacrament to many of our fellow citizens. We have built up dense layers of emotional scar tissue from years of violent movies, television shows, and video games. We excuse the mass murder of children as "the price of freedom." "Christians" have deliberately abandoned the love and empathy of the New Testament for the self-righteous and angry thundering of the Old.

In the terms of the "pro-life" movement, the value of a human life can be compared to that of the shiny new car that loses value the moment you drive it off the dealer's lot.

We have unlearned the value of a human life.

And as far as I can see, we won't be re-learning it any time soon.

Have a good day. Value the right things.

More thoughts coming. 

Bilbo

"Nobody Cares About This Except You"

There was a very interesting and thought-provoking article in last Thursday's Washington Post. The print title was "For President Right Now, No Profit in Learning from Past," while the online title was "Why Trump Expected Only Applause When He Told Comey, ‘You’re Fired.’"

The bottom line of the article is summed up in the print title: Donald Trump is a man who lives entirely in the present, which allows him to blithely shrug off things he said and did in the past as if they never happened ... because to him, they didn't, and therefore they don't matter. Only the present matters. Here's a key quote from the article:

"Confronted with his past statements that stand in direct conflict with his current positions, Trump has always reacted not with remorse or embarrassment. Rather, a look of almost innocent surprise sweeps over his face and he says, as he has to reporters who remind him that he once promised to release his tax returns but then decided that he never would, 'Nobody cares about this except you.'"

and,

"'I’m just not interested in the past,' Trump has said. 'I’m interested in the present.'"

Philosopher George Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." That's why we study history - to learn what has happened before, to see what worked and what didn't, and to identify and avoid making again the mistakes of those who came before us.

Of course, paying attention to the wrong historical precedent, or interpreting it in the wrong way, is not a good thing, either. Historians Richard Neustadt and Ernest May made this point in their excellent book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, which ought to be required reading for anyone in government. But that's no excuse for totally ignoring historical precedent. Were Donald Trump not so totally driven by the now, by what he sees on his favorite, fawning Faux News programs, he might have realized that his ham-handed firing of FBI director James Comey would draw immediate (and not completely inaccurate) parallels to Richard Nixon's firing of officials during the Watergate scandal.

Sadly, many millions of people - like Trump - don't care about the lies and the distortions and the nepotism and the ignorance ... people who are so blinded by a visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton and the liberal elite that they'll swallow anything Mr Trump says and then ask for a bigger second helping.

And yet, Mr Trump is wrong when he says that nobody cares about things. I care very much about getting to the bottom of possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. I care about Mr Trump's total lack of transparency about his family's business dealings and how they could affect his presidential decision-making. And I am not alone. Many other people really do care ... people who actually care about the Constitution and about flagrant abuse of authority by a narcissistic and delusional president.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo