Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

By Charlie Barber
Contributing Writer
                         
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” - W.B. Yeats

“Ordinary people…cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, the nation, the race, the religion.” - Milton Mayer

“My greatest fear is that domestic extremists…will [carry] out a mass-casualty attack.  That is what keeps me up at night.” - Former Homeland Security Analyst
     
On October 12, 1933, U.S. Ambassador to Germany William Dodd spoke at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin to a large audience that included foreign correspondents and Nazi officials like Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and two men from Joseph Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda.

Before he left the University of Chicago and Washington, D.C., Ambassador Dodd had been requested by President Franklin Roosevelt to “be a standing representative and spokesman (on occasion) of American ideals and Philosophy.”

As poignantly narrated by Erik Larson in his In the Garden of Beasts, this evening was one of those occasions.

A trained historian, Dodd went down a list of tyrannies from Rome’s Julius Caesar to France’s Louis XIV.  He concluded that: “...one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse. To fail to learn from such blunders of the past was to end up on a course toward another war and chaos.”

It is safe to say that this speech did not go down well with Hitler, but it was scarcely noticed by Americans at the time on our side of the Atlantic. Nor did American tourists notice when they were given tours by Nazi officials that allowed them to keep their blindfolds on as to the real brutality that lay behind the smiling faces, enthusiastic parades, and song festivals of the “Nazi New Order.”

In addition, there were American corporations quite willing to do business with Hitler. One of the most infamous was IBM. As detailed by Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust, that corporation and its subsidiaries: “helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.”

William Dodd, as a Woodrow Wilson progressive, was a good man sent abroad by his country to a very bad place.  A liberal who held fast to the values of our Founding Fathers and of 19th century Humanitarianism, Dodd believed that reason and human sympathy were the keys to mankind’s advancement. His exposure to the real world of the Nazis was crushing: “I had no delusions about Hitler when I was appointed to my post in Berlin…but I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards.”

Dodd had put his hopes on Germans waking up from the Nazi nightmare in 1933, but it took World War II for that to happen. Too late, he realized another lesson from history, attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

What Burke actually said was: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

Close enough.

Today there are many good people - liberals, moderates, genuine conservatives, who are beginning to see the need to “do something;”—to prevent a well-organized group of malefactors of great wealth from completely undoing the work of the New Deal and the Great Society.

Unfortunately, failure is an option.

Like many things that matter in our lives, we have “to use rational approaches to democracy or lose them” to American versions of demagogues and dictators.
If it comes, it won’t come with storm troopers. Contemporary politics uses a loud trumpet, as before, but now dresses in coat and tie.
 
Uniforms won’t be the same as the fascists of old, but the thinking will be, if a critical mass of Americans begin to care more about jobs than they do about freedom.   

There also will likely be more violence than even Americans are used to, organized and exploited by Political Action Committees and TV and Radio Talk Show Hosts. A friend of mine in North Dakota recently told me that she no longer visits a friend from High School, because of violent language visited upon her by the sons, one going so far as to say that “all Democrats should be shot.” My friend can take care of herself, but she is disgusted by such violent mindlessness from a man in his forties, taking his hostilities directly from talk radio into the living room of her friend.

Anecdotal violence in word and deed is common enough, but the organized variety plagues us as well, even when opposed by our strong Anglo-Saxon traditions of the rule of law. We are in for a very bad time if lawmakers attempt to turn the clock back one hundred years to when the rule of law was so often trumped by rule of the gun.

A worst case scenario is referred to by Milton Mayer in his discomforting book, “They Thought They Were Free”, about ten men who welcomed the Nazis in his hometown in Hesse, which he, as a Jew, was obliged to flee: “With the civil service and the military safely ‘faithful,’ it took so few at the administrative level and so few more, a million at most, of a population of seventy million, to carry out the whole program of Nazi persecution, a million ex-convicts, future ex-convicts, poolroom hoodlums, disheartened young job-seekers, of whom every large country has its million.”
                             
Fortunately for us, our military are still faithful in service to our democracy, and that goes for the vast majority of our civil service as well.

However, determined wealthy aristocrats in charge of all branches of our government could compromise the integrity of those “non-political” institutions from the top. One needs only to remember the performance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales under George W. Bush, to see how far a tilt away from democratic justice can be managed in a short period of time.

Democracies abhor violence. It is the antithesis of the reasoned debate and careful consideration necessary in majority rule and minority rights.

Autocracies love violence. In fact, they cannot survive and flourish without it.

The signs are there, and neither the American people nor the Obama Administration, one of the right wing’s principal targets, is taking this spreading resort to the favorite tool of autocracies with the seriousness it deserves.

We “get” terrorism directed at us from overseas.

We still don’t “get” terrorism directed at ourselves, from ourselves.

We have forgotten the Ku Klux Klan. But their thinking and behavior, if not their bed sheets, have made a comeback.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has not forgotten, nor has the ACLU or other human rights organizations who chart and decry the rise of organized violence in the United States. Right wing terrorism is on the rise in this country, both in intensity and in numbers of groups, and they know it. The rest of us need to know it as well.

While few in Oklahoma City or in parts of southern Arizona need to be reminded of the devastation of domestic terror,  we watch the Nazis on the History Channel, and they seem to be from outer space.

They were not. 

The Nazis were men corrupted absolutely by absolute power.

Lurking on the right wing in this country today are far too many powerful men (and some women) with lust in their hearts for total dominance of their neighbors.

One of the problems of staring into the abyss is that it sometimes stares back, and cuts one off from any signs of hope. The same thing can happen from watching too much network news.

The good news is that there are economic and democratic alternatives already up and running, despite the efforts of the rich and powerful to thwart them, and their captive press lords to keep us from finding out about them. 

In addition President Obama has publicly cast aside any cares about a second term in order to deal even handedly with America’s problems.

Once upon a time that used to be called “leadership.”

I will explore these and other recent developments in Part IV: “Two Cheers for Democracy.”

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