Category Archives: Adolf Hitler

2020 US Presidential Election, Adolf Hitler, American democracy, American Politics, Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, Fear, History, Impeachment, Liberals, Media, Politics, President Joe Biden, Presidential History, Putsches, Republican Party, Sedition, Treason, U.S. Government, U.S. History, Undemocratic coups, US Domestic Policy, Voting, Washington D.C., White Nationalism

Those who Organize Putsches Must Face Consequences. Will Trump?

Leave a comment

The Republicans Have a Chance at a Historical Coup Over. Will They Take It?

There was a moment in time when the German Weimar Republic could have kept the world from ever learning about Adolf Hitler. After Hitler’s November 8th 1923 ‘Beer Hall Putsch,’ (Putsch is the German word for a violent coup d’état) failed, the Weimar government captured him and charged him with treason. Had the government dealt firmly with Hitler, it is very unlikely that the world would ever have learned his name, but the Weimar government took a different approach: they vacillated between a need to enforce the law, and the knowledge that Hitler had damaging information on them and fear of what would happen if he used it. He faced almost no real consequences for his violent attempted coup d’état, and came out more popular and powerful than ever. Today in our own country, we sit at a similar crossroads as we consider how to judge Donald Trump for his own violent, illegal attempted coup. It is the Republican Party in the Senate that is caught between the desire to enforce and honor the law, and a fear of what Trump and his followers will do to them. If just 17 Republican Senators remember what happened to Germany almost a century ago, they will vote to convict Trump and bar him from ever legitimately attaining power again. Unfortunately, the signs are that most Republican Senators have forgotten history (if they ever knew it to begin with), and they’re most likely going to let Trump off the hook, further emboldening him and strengthening his hold on their Party. They are likely to let this golden opportunity slip through their fingers due to a toxic cocktail of fear, tribalism, and blinkered self-interest. We must help them remember…before it is too late.

The Historical Lesson: A ‘Struggle,’ Against Democracy

On November 8th 1923, in the Bürgerbraükeller Beer Hall in Munich, Hitler and his Nazis announced that a revolution had begun in Bavaria that would soon sweep on to Berlin and overthrow the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s plan was to follow the example of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome,’ from October of the previous year, and at this early state sought to put Erich Ludendorff – who was for all intents and purposes the military dictator of Germany during the last 2-years of World War One – at the head of a new, right wing dictatorship. But the heads of the Bavarian government who had signaled support for the coup got cold feet and bailed on the Nazis, leading the putsch to collapse and the death of 20 people and the capture of Hitler and the other high-ranking Nazis. The Weimar government quickly realized that Hitler had a lot of embarrassing information that he could reveal at a real trial, especially as regarded the fact that key Bavarian officials had shown favor to his attempt, and that Ludendorff (still a hero to many in the country) was involved. They therefore allowed the trial to descend into a farce where Hitler was in complete control due to his damaging leverage over them, and made sure that the focus was not on WHAT he did and the fact that he was an egomaniacal, rage-filled, fundamentally broken monster, but on WHY he did it. Hitler was therefore allowed to air his grievances against the Weimar government (which he primarily equated with Communists and Jews) and he blamed them for losing the Great War and all the outrages of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Weimar government wasn’t done helping set the stage for Hitler’s later horrifying rise. He was convicted of high treason, but instead of being deported to his native Austria (as he should have been), or given a long sentence in prison, he was instead sentenced to only 5-years for his crime at Landsberg Prison in accommodations noted Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw called, ‘more akin to those of a hotel than a penitentiary.’ There Hitler dictated his infamous book ‘Mein Kampf,’ (German for ‘My Struggle’) to fellow Nazi prisoners, making him more popular than he had ever been before when he was released only 8-months into his already lenient 5-year-sentence. Hitler didn’t come out chastened or repentant, but a celebrity who was now recognized as the leader of the Nazi Party and the most powerful figure of the ultra-nationalist, uber-right wing; the only ‘lesson’ he learned was to use more legitimate-seeming levers to gain power when he had his next chance to destroy the German republic and set up his own Fascist autocracy.  

Profiles in Cowardice

Donald Trump’s attempted coup culminated in the violent insurrection at the Capitol Building on January 6th, but it didn’t begin then. Trump began laying the groundwork for his attempt by spending years saying that the only possible legitimate outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election would be his victory and reelection; a defeat for Trump could only be the result of election fraud and not because more voters supported his opponent (who would eventually become now-president Joe Biden). When it became increasingly clear that Joe Biden had won the election and networks called it for him on November 7th, the GOP response was unprecedented, as the vast majority of Republicans in Congress refused to call Biden the President-elect and their mood was best articulated by an anonymous Republican Senator, who admitted that Biden won the election, but then rhetorically asked what the ‘harm’ would be for ‘humoring,’ Trump and not contradicting his false claims that he was the real winner. But as Trump kept going further down the rabbit hole and indicating that he would not agree to a peaceful transfer of power, no Republicans in power were brave enough to contradict what had become an openly telegraphed coup attempt.

The establishment GOP (the non-true believers) had followed Kentucky Senator and now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s lead during the entire Trump Presidency, and spent almost 4-years ignoring the most awful things that Trump did and said in order to achieve their 3 main goals of packing the courts with young Conservative ideologues (regardless of their qualifications), getting a large tax cut for the wealthy, and cutting regulations. They were prepared to do whatever it took to defend Trump regardless of his actions in order to achieve those deep goals. They even defended Trump when he illegally used Congressionally-mandated aid for Ukraine as leverage to get the Ukrainian government to help him win reelection by telling lies about President Biden. The House impeached Trump for his extortion attempt, but only one Senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, voted to convict him in the Senate; the rest, regardless of whether they had a reputation as being political moderates, hung together and made sure that Trump was not held accountable for his actions. When explaining her decision not to vote to convict Trump, Maine Senator Susan Collins (a supposed moderate), claimed that no conviction was necessary because Trump had ‘learned his lesson,’ by being impeached. The most charitable view of Collins’s stance is that she was naïve as to who Trump is as a human being, but it is more likely that she was actually cynically lying and her real reasons not to convict were that she was running for a 5th term in November and she couldn’t win without Trump’s base coming out for her.

Even after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the election, receiving 7 million more popular votes than Trump, and winning 306-232 in the Electoral College, the GOP kept humoring him. They spoke platitudes about Trump being within his rights to challenge the election results in court, and even when court after court threw out his specious charges, they never contradicted his lies when he told his supporters that he not only won the election, but won in a ‘sacred landslide,’ or when he openly sought to influence Republican state legislators across the country by inviting them to the White House and heavily leaning on them to get them to ignore what the voters in those states had done and back him instead. Trump’s supporters in Congress didn’t even say anything when he was caught calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a Republican) to demand that Raffensperger ‘find’ him the 11,780 votes he needed to steal Georgia’s 16-electoral votes. It is hard to believe that Trump was not doing the same thing to other ‘Battle Ground,’ Republican Secretaries of State and Governors at the time, because just flipping Georgia’s 16-votes would not have swung the election to Trump: he needed several states to flip because he lost by a fairly comfortable margin in the Electoral College of 306-232.

From the moment the networks called the race for Joe Biden on November 7th until the January 6th insurrection forced their hands, the transparent hope of Republican non-believers, like McConnell and others like Representative Liz Cheney, the House Minority Whip, was clearly that they could just ride out the storm to January 20th without having the Party split over dealing with Trump.  

The Mad Mob’s March

Once the Electoral College certified Biden’s 306-232 victory in December, Trump became increasingly desperate. He threw his considerable weight behind 2 legal challenges he tried to have heard in the Supreme Court, where he felt that personally appointing 3 of the 9 Justices would guarantee that the court would have a second term that would find a way to give him a second term. After the Trump team’s failure in courts across the country, he and his closest followers began to talk of a last stand of sorts on January 6th, when Congress would meet to do the (normally perfunctory) job of reading out and accepting the Electoral Votes as submitted and certified by each state. Some of Trump’s most devoted followers, like disgraced former Lt. General Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law, but Trump instead sided with those, like his personal lawyer and former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who proposed the idea that Vice President Mike Pence – in his role as President of the Senate – would be able to do more than just announce the results (which is all he’s really able to do in that role) and could simply ignore the results from enough states to keep Trump in power. Pence publicly and privately poured cold water on this theory, but Republican members of the House lined up behind disputing the results of the Battle Ground States that Trump lost on January 6th. Their plan was always quixotic and doomed to fail, because the Democrats have a majority in the House and there were too few Republicans in the Senate who were open to the idea of stealing the election to actually get any votes thrown out, which is why McConnell told his caucus not to object because it had no chance of success and would only force members to either take a vote against Trump and anger their base, OR to back a coup that would destroy the government if it actually succeeded. But Josh Hawley of Missouri said that he would object to the counting of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, and he was followed by several Senators, led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, agreeing to object to the other Battle Grounds as well, meaning that the January 6th certification of the results would take longer and be more combative than ever before in our history. All the while, Trump, Conservative media, most Republicans in the House, and many in the Senate kept lying to their supporters by saying that Trump was the real winner and that they could help ‘stop the steal,’ on January 6th. Instead of telling the truth, they said that their meritless objections could actually keep Trump in power, repeatedly saying that their supporters need only march to the Capitol to pressure Congress and stop the certification of Biden’s win,   

The rest is, of course, what Trump was impeached for a 2nd time. He told the mob to march to the Capitol, where they arrived after the counting had begun and most Republicans in the House and 11 in the Senate were in the process of objecting to the votes of Arizona. The Capitol was evacuated while the rioters violently rampaging through the Capitol, their actions leading to the deaths of 4 rioters and a Capitol Police Officer, Brian Sicknick, was murdered while trying to protect Congress. While this was ongoing and members of Congress were being held in a secure location away from the mob, Giuliani was busy calling supporters like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville and imploring them to object to as many states as possible as soon as Congress resumed its Constitutionally mandated duty, in order to drag the proceedings into the next day (the 7th). We know Giuliani did this because he left a message on what he thought was Tuberville’s phone, but was actually that of Utah Senator Mike Lee – a Republican but one who wasn’t challenging the results or aiding Trump’s undemocratic coup. Giuliani claimed on the call that a delay into the 7th would give Trump’s team the time to present new evidence of wide-spread voter fraud. Giuliani was lying about the evidence (which he has never produced in court or anywhere else), meaning that the real reason is far darker: Giuliani and Trump wanted to give the insurrectionists more time to (in the best light) loudly intimidate Pence and Congress into illegally letting Trump stay in power, but could honestly have  been about giving the rioters more time to capture Pence and/or other key leaders and compel them at threats to their lives to keep Trump in power.

Republican Senators Have a Last Chance to Make it Right

All of these things happened and cannot be covered up or sacrificed in the name of superficial, self-interested ‘unity.’ Donald Trump tried to overturn a free and fair democratic election because he didn’t like the result, and most of the Republican Party was either complicit in his effort, or silently standing by and letting it happen. What originally started as a stupid, angry, pathetic man’s attempt to cope with losing turned into a psychotic and increasingly autocratic attempt to forcibly hold onto power at any cost. It is hard to believe that Trump ever truly believed he won the election, but it is hard to tell because for literally his entire life he has been able to ignore what he doesn’t like, and has had enough money to get people to accept his world view. He could say that he ‘won,’ even when he made terrible business decisions or his marriages blew up due to his narcissism and infidelity, and he could always find people to say that he was right. But here was finally a situation where he could say, ‘I won,’ as often as he wants to, but aside from a small and shrinking circle of sycophantic cultists, a majority of those in government refused to let him warp reality, declare himself a winner, and stay in power.

The reason that Trump’s coup is so incredibly dangerous for our democracy is that it revealed that the majority of the Republican Party in Congress and in state Republican Parties across the nation were willing to go along with it regardless of the fact that he so clearly lost the election. And some of those Republicans who did stand up for democracy at the very end once it became clear that Trump was not going to accept his defeat no matter what would likely not have acted as they did if the election was actually close. As we just saw, Biden won by 7 million popular votes and 306-232 in the Electoral College and people like McConnell still wouldn’t publicly acknowledge his win for over a month, Trump appointees made the transition as difficult as possible, and Republicans supported Trump filing garbage lawsuit after garbage lawsuit. How would they have reacted if Biden won by the same margin as George W. Bush’s victory over Vice President Al Gore in 2000, when Gore received over 500,000 more popular votes, but Bush won in the electoral college 271-266? We know that Trump would declare a huge victory in that case (heck, he did the same thing this time even though Biden won by 7 million votes and the same electoral college victory that Trump called a landslide when he defeated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016), so how would he react if more Americans voted for him, but Biden won the Electoral College, and only by 537 votes in one state? There is no chance he’d leave willingly, and little chance anyone in the Republican Party would defy him in favor of Biden.

Because of all those facts, Trump needs to be convicted and barred from office ever again because far too many Republicans have proven that they no longer believe in democracy when it doesn’t go their way. Instead of coming up with a platform that a majority of Americans can support, all Republicans do now is tell people to hate Democrats and terrify them of Liberals so much that even a Trumpian lifetime dictatorship is preferable. We have seen that they will bend language enough so that they will continue to use the language of ‘liberty,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘independence,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘democracy,’ while they work to extinguish the real meanings of those words forever.

Republicans have the chance, though, to make sure Trump doesn’t run ever again, and give us the space to try to save our democratic republic. They need to look to the Weimar Republic to see what happens when coups go unpunished, and to their own history to realize that Trump didn’t, ‘learn his lesson,’ as Collins said last year during Trump’s first impeachment. Hitler had never been in power, so while the Weimar government failed horribly with him and the entire world paid for that mistake, there is even less excuse for Republican Senators in terms of dealing with Trump, because he was just in power for four-years. They know who he is: he does not learn lessons, grow as a human being, or get better. Just like Hitler he is empty inside except for hatred and narcissism. Our system truly cannot survive another Trump term, nor can it survive if the legal principle that presidents are fully above the law becomes precedent. Like Hitler, Trump attempted a coup, and like Hitler his coup failed and led to bloodshed. Weimar let Hitler use the aftermath of his failed Beer Hall Putsch as a springboard to total power over Germany in under a decade.

Republican Senators have the chance to forge ahead and to not repeat history. I just wish I could be optimistic that at least 17 of them will actually take it.  

2016 Presidential Election, 2016 US Presidential Election, Adolf Hitler, Alt-Right, American democracy, American Politics, Anti-Semitism, Climate Change, Conservatives, Democracy, Democratic Party, Economics, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, Fear, Football, Foreign relations, History, Holocaust, Immigration Reform, International Politics, Iraq War, Jewish people, Liberals, Media, Nazism, New York Giants, NFL, Plutocracy, Political scapegoats, Politics, President Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, Professional Sports, Republican Party, Science, Science-Denial, Society, Team ownership, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, US Foreign Policy, Voter Suppression, War, War on Terror, White Nationalism

Trump’s Moral Price

1 Comment

I was speaking to my cousin John about the most recent New York Giants game the other day when their kicker, Josh Brown, missed a 53-yard field goal attempt. Brown had just returned from serving a one-game suspension for domestic violence charges against his wife, and I expressed dismay when he missed the field goal. John correctly pointed out that 53-yards is far away for any kicker, and that Brown’s miss was understandable. However, while I acknowledged that kicking from such a distance is difficult, I explained that the Giants are paying a high moral price to employ someone as ethically questionable as Brown is, and that because of that cost, Brown does not have the luxury to be held to the same standards as the average kicker. For the Giants to justify Brown’s spot on the roster, he has to be a great kicker, and great kickers make 53-yard field goals, and while I personally do not believe that any performance, no matter how great, excuses domestic violence or other crimes, professional sports teams obviously disagree with me. The Giants are keeping Brown because he is good at what he does, the Pittsburgh Steelers have kept quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in spite of being accused of multiple rapes, and the Los Angeles Lakers kept building their team around now-retired superstar Kobe Bryant for a decade despite rape charges of his own. It seems that there are few crimes and moral outrages that will compel a sports team or a business to cut ties with its best players/employees as long as those players produce at a high level or make their businesses lots of money.

After the conversation, it occurred to me that such a standard could be applied to other aspects of life, and I immediately thought of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump has spent 70-years as an ignorant, lying, bullying, xenophobic, sexist, bigoted, racist, narcissistic, anti-semitic, buffoon, and has amply demonstrated his utter unfitness to become the President of the United States of America. For someone to cast his or her ballot for Trump in November, he or she must love other things about Trump so much that he or she is willing to shrug off all those other horrible things about the man. So I am asking Trump supporters (literally, this is not a rhetorical exercise): what is it that you like about Trump so much that you can suppor him in spite of all the frightening things he has done, said, stands for, and plans to do in the future? Is it Trump’s proposed economic plans? How about his stated environmental plans? Do you believe that his ‘wall,’ between the United States and Mexico will make things so much better here in America that his other flaws do not matter to you? Are you willing to put up with his past attitudes towards women, minorities, and people with disabilities (and pretty much everyone else on earth who does not share his last name, or is not Vladimir Putin) because you feel that he will make America stronger and more respected abroad?  What about him personally do you like so much that you want to vote for him in spite of all I mentioned before?

Trump on Economics

When President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he made America’s rapidly growing national debt a major campaign issue, but even at the time economists and critics, including his leading opponent for the Republican nomination in ’80, George H. W. Bush, (who would be Reagan’s Vice President, and eventually his successor as president) who famously called Reagan’s supply-side economic theory, ‘voodoo economics,’ during the campaign, correctly protected it would greatly expand the national debt. Of course, Reagan’s policies did explode the debt at unprecedented rates  due to the not-so-shocking problem that if you take in $10 and spend  $15, you wind up deeply in debt, and his policies devastated American manufacturing by making it easier than ever before to outsource jobs overseas. We have now had over 35-years of evidence to suggest that former President George H. W. Bush and other critics were correct: ‘trickle down’, ‘Reaganomics,’ were horrendous for all but the ultra rich.

As a whole, the American public has been paying atention to the real cost of trickle down, which is part of the reason that the Democratic Party’s nominee for president has defeated the Republican candidate in the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Trump seems to understand the widespread distrust of the efficacy of huge tax cuts for the rich benefitting the middle class and the poorest Americans, and he has responded by speaking like a populist who is for bringing back American manufacturing jobs and undoing the free trade policies that have been supported by every president from Reagan through George H. W. Bush , Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and up to Barack Obama. But in spite of the language he used, the economic plan that Trump has proposed is just Reaganomics repacked in populist language, and not only is the core of his plan a new massive tax cut for the wealthiest American, but according to CBS, his economic plan would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plan would add $200 billion. And while I happen to share the belief of economists like Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that neither a budget deficit nor national debt is necessarily a bad thing, many of those who today worship at the Cult of Reagan, and who take it on faith that  ‘trickle down’ economics always works and profess to care so deeply about the national debt that they support a Constitutional Amendment mandating a balanced federal budget, intend to vote for Trump even though the economic policies he has announced publicly and on his own official campaign website lay out an economic policy that will further explode the debt and continue the pace of outsourcing more American jobs. So, if you truly care about the deficit and you are against free trade agreements like NAFTA or the TPP, then why are you voting for Trump? Trump may attempt to cloak his re-packaged trickle down economic plans in populist language, but what about his entire life history has convinced you that he would govern by populist policies? Why do you believe his populist talk when the plans on his own website prove what his actual intentions are? Can you really trust him on the economy?

Trump on the Environment

Once upon a time, environmental conservation was a non-partisan issue, with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act created and signed, respectively, by Republican President Richard Nixon, but those days ended long ago. Today the Republican Party is largely united by, at best, severe skepticism about climate change – especially man-made climate change – and at worst a total hostility to climate change and the very ideas of conservation and environmental protection. Trump’s environmental plan places him firmly in the ‘hostile,’ wing of the Republican Party, and he has declared an intention to abolish the EPA and dramatically weaken or totally abandon all environmental regulation in the United States. Combatting climate change is perhaps the most important issue to Millennial voters, and Trump is on what most of those voters consider to be the wrong side of it.

If protecting the environment matters to you, then why would you vote for Trump in November? Hillary Clinton’s policy is far easier to nail down, and is the most progressive environmental position ever staked out by a major Party nominee, and commits both Secretary Clinton and the United States as a whole to fighting to minimize the rapidly unfolding catastrophe (environmental, human, and economic) that has already begun. The Republican Party, many of its largest donors, and even some on the Democratic side of the aisle have tried to muddy the water – and compared to what some of the corporations on the anti-climate change side of the issue do to water every day, mud would actually be an improvement – on this issue by acting as if there is widespread disagreement within the scientific community about climate change. In reality, there is no real disagreement among scientists, who are in almost universal agreement about the threat that our nation – and our world – faces. If you care about this issue, then why would you vote for Donald Trump?

Trump on National Security

Our nation faces many threats, and simply having the most powerful military in world history does not eliminate all dangers to our nation. In today’s world, the idea of conventional warfare, with one nation-state at war with another, seems almost quaint. We have made ourselves so powerful that no nation has the ability to wage a conventional war with the United States, but that does not mean that we do not have committed enemies. The Islamic State in Syria, or ISIS, is one of these threats, and while under President Obama we have degraded and punished the group to near annihilation, but ISIS, like al Qaeda, is more about an idea, and as such simply killing their leaders (and we have) or taking their territory and weaponry (and we have) does not insure our safety. That we face such threats and others, including the cyber threats we are currently facing from Russia, makes the Presidency as important now as it has ever been. Not only has Donald Trump shown himself to be unworthy of the massive charge of being Commander in Chief, with his lack of temperament and tendency to fire off and attack all of those who criticize him for even the most trivial things, he has shown himself to be unwilling to criticize or stand up to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s strongman dictator.

If that does not raise any red flags with intended Trump voters, what about the fact that the man is actually running on a pro War Crimes platform! He has declared his intention to violate the Geneva Convention not only by torturing human beings, but he has proposed capturing the civilian families of terrorist suspects and either imprisoning, torturing, or killing them in an absolutely despicable attempt to keep their family members from attacking the USA. All the things that Trump admires about Putin are the things Trump wants to project about himself, but he has an inability to realize that just projecting strength does not make one strong. Putin grandstands and invades neighboring nations, and tramples democracy, but nothing that he has done has restored Russia to the superpower status once held by the Soviet Union. Trump sees Putin as his role model, his exemplar of strong leadership, while he continually attacks President Obama for perceived weakness. And yet, Obama has been the one to degrade ISIS and to kill Osama bin Laden, and Obama has killed more terrorists than any other president in American history. And while Russia’s economy has gotten weaker under Putin because his bullying invasions have led to economic sanctions, when Obama came into office in January 2009, he inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and has pulled us out of that fire. Yet Trump admires Putin, not Obama; is that not a red flag in and of itself?

I can understand why some people don’t like Hillary Clinton, but for me there are more than enough things that I can find in her readily accessible and detailed policy positions on the environment, minimum wage, foreign policy, and more that I whole-heartedly agree with, which allows me to support the former Secretary of State even though I feel that she often acts entitled (as if rules do not appy to her), is seemingly allergic to transparency, and is too closely aligned with the financial powers that reside on Wall Street. Of course when she is compared to Trump, with his flat refusal to either release his income tax returns or any legitimate health records, the notoriously guarded Clinton might as well be running her campaign from within a glass house under an electron microscope. But to support Trump, one must truly love something about his positions, since it is hard for me to understand how any non-racist, non-hateful/fearful person can tolerate Trump’s racism, bigotry, sexism, dishonesty, xenophobia, attacks on people with disabilities, homophobia, Islamaphobia, bullying, narcissism, megalomania, and ignorance just because he or she hates Hillary Clinton. If someone does not love Trump’s stated positions, and trust that he will hold to them if he is elected, then how can he or she give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s not really an anti-semite in spite of having Alt-Right, Breitbart hero Steve Bannon, as his campaign manager or flirting with David Duke (who has made no secret of the fact that he believes his chance has come again because of Trump)? That he’s not really a racist in spite of his nakedly racist championing of Birtherism? That he’s not really a bigot when he calls all Latino immigrants rapists and drug dealers? That he’s not really a sexist when he calls women dogs and pigs? That he’s not really a bully when he mocks a journalist for having a physical disability? That he’s not a liar when he claims that he saw hundreds or thousands of Muslims across the Hudson River in New Jersey celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11th, 2001? That he’s not classless and temperamentally unfit to be the President of the United States when he questions the impartiality, loyalty, and even citizenship of an American judge, Gonzalo Curiel, because he ruled against Trump’s bogus university, or attacks the Khan family because they were critical of him? That he’s not a demagogue trying to turn Americans against each other when his initial response to the deadliest mass shooting in American history was to brag about his plan to ban all Muslims from traveling to the United States?

It is cliché to say it, but neither this election nor any other has ever taken place in a vacuum. Hillary Clinton is not running against a perfect candidate who will be the best possible choice and with whom one can agree on every single policy position: she is not even running against Senator Bernie Sanders, her opponent for the Democratic nomination. Instead, former Secretary Clinton is running against Donald Trump, and regardless of whether or not one decides to support either Libertarian candidate, former Governor Gary Johnson, or Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, neither of them is going to be president on January 20th, 2017, and if anyone says otherwise, and concocts a scenario where either Third Party candidate, or someone else entirely, will be the 45th president of the United States, then that person is not telling the truth. It will either be Hillary Clinton who, warts and all, has shown the intelligence, skill, capacity for hard work, and temperament to do the job, or it will be Donald Trump, a dangerous demagogue who has shown ignorance, hatred, bigotry, an unpredictable temperament, displayed extreme narcissism and megalomania, has a notoriously short attention span, and has lied more often and more easily than any major Party candidate in history. If you love Trump’s stance on immigration, crime, the environment, the economy, and foreign policy so much that you are willing to live with endless stream of offenses he has committed just since he entered the race in June of 2015 (not to mention all the horrible actions and statements he’s made in the 69-years he lived before last June), then perhaps voting for him makes sense to you, but remember also that there are plenty of people in this nation – people who deserve to be called ‘deplorables,’ as former Secretary Clinton recently called them – who are voting for Trump because he is a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, insults the disabled, is a bigot, a liar, a bully, a narcissist, and has surrounded himself by anti-Semities and White Nationalists who believe Eugenics is a real science and that ‘less desirable,’ people should not be allowed to reproduce so that they do not ‘pollute,’ or ‘contaminate,’ our bloodstream. Perhaps you love his policy proposals so much that you honestly don’t care about any of this, but you would have to have chosen willful ignorance to pretend that there are not plenty of people voting for him because of his most vile views and the despicable Nazi-wannabes like Bannon who now have his ear.

And if you really do abhor the grotesque things that Trump has said and done, but you are going to vote for him anyway because you hate Clinton and hope and expect that a President Trump’s most dangerous and vile tendencies would be kept in check either by the job itself, the other branches of government, social norms, his top advisers, or some other mitigating factor, please remember that such logic was precisely the reason that many educated, intelligent Germans elevated Adolf Hitler to power in 1932/33. I despise comparing anyone or anything to Hitler and the Nazis because some people tune out as soon as the comparison is made as it is over-used, so I do not do it lightly, but it fits here scarily well because the things those Germans knew better, and were personally disgusted by Hitler’s views on Jews, Communists, eugenics, and more, but they supported him anyway because they felt his most harmful, hateful, and deadly tendencies could be contained. If one cuts out all the noise and analysis and just reads everything Trump has said and done in this campaign concerning Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, women, people with disabilities, soldiers, war heroes, Jews, and more, and simply decided to take him at his words, it should be impossible to support the man with a clear conscience. Put another way: unless Trump starts kicking field goals from 99 yards away and makes 30 of them each game, he shouldn’t have a place on our national team, and I would honestly feel dirty if, outside the election, he simply  purchased any of my four favorite pro sports teams, but there is not enough soap in the universe for me to feel clean with Donald Trump as my president.

 

2016 Presidential Election, Adolf Hitler, American Politics, Conservatives, Democratic Party, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, Fear, Free speech, History, International Politics, Liberals, Nazism, Political scapegoats, Politics, President Barack Obama, Presidential History, Republican Party, U.S. Government, U.S. History, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, US Foreign Policy, Voting, Voting Rights Act of 1965

Together We Will Beat Trump

2 Comments

I must admit, I was rooting hard for Donald Trump to win the Republican Primaries and become the Party’s presidential nominee. I’m a Liberal Democrat, and I thought that anything that might make it more likely for the Democratic Party’s nominee to win the presidency was worth cheering on. It was clear to me that Trump was (and is) a ridiculous candidate and completely unworthy of winning a major Party’s presidential nomination, let alone deserving of becoming Commander-in-Chief of the United States, but if the Grand Old Party was incapable of realizing the threat Trump posed to it, then I was happy to sit back and watch Trump do as much damage to the Republican Party as possible before it realized the danger it was in. I savored the schadenfreude of the Republican Party’s collapse until very recently, brushing aside Trump’s increasingly offensive and occasionally horrifying remarks because, in my view, each one made his defeat in November more likely; I scoffed at Trump/Adolf Hitler comparisons as alarmist and inaccurate. I viewed the man as a joke, but now that Trump has victory in sight, my eyes have finally been opened and I am not laughing anymore. In fact, I am begging forgiveness for my failure to see the man for how dangerous he truly is, and to properly appreciate the threat he poses to this country and even the world; Trump’s rise started out as a Republican Party problem, but it has now become an American problem. I am therefore asking all Americans, especially my fellow Liberals who have been silently applauding the moral disintegration of the GOP to realize what is at stake right now and come together to stop Trump, because together is the only way to beat him.

One might wonder how we came to this extremely dangerous place, with Trump – after another dominant performance this past Tuesday – on the cusp of winning the Republican nomination. Our country arrived at this cliff because the Republican National Committee, its chief donors, and its chairman Reince Priebus defended Trump even when it became readily apparent early on that Trump was a demagogue running a campaign dedicated to tearing the United States apart along race, class, gender, and religious lines. The Republican Party froze over an inability to decide what to do about Trump’s rise: should the RNC give the billionaire its full support? Should it marshall its considerable resources and use them to defeat him? Should it rally around another candidate and back him to the hilt? The RNC was either unwilling or unable to decide on any of those options, and instead of taking action, the Party seemed to hope that someone else would handle their ‘problem,’ for them. It hoped to rally around a candidate who could beat Trump, but it just never happened, and with the loss Marco Rubio, seemingly the Party’s last real hope against Trump, the Party has reluctantly realized its predicament. It means that, unless the Republican powers that be (if any remain) contrive to steal the nomination from Trump in Cleveland this July, he will be the nominee of a supposedly great national Party.

What can we do to check Trump’s rise and keep him from attaining the presidency? I believe that the first step requires the kind of hard self-analysis that Americans don’t necessarily love. Introspection is necessary – especially for Liberals – because it reveals that the anger driving Trump’s supporters is real, and that it is not some phantom movement that Trump has created. Trump has given voice to a deep anger that was already there among many people in this country; Trump is turning that anger towards the very worst human impulses and thereby enhancing it, but we as Liberals must acknowledge the validity of that anger to combat him going forward. Anger CAN be useful and can lead to positive ends if there is a mature and capable leader to harness it and wield it skillfully: a great example of such a leader is President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was finally able to use the accumulated righteous anger of Americans to end most vestiges of Jim Crow segregation in the South with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. LBJ could easily have turned that anger against African Americans and other minorities by using coded language and saying things like, “We’re locked in a Cold War against the Soviet Union and Communism, which is now spreading like a weed in Vietnam, and nuclear war may be around the corner. Now is NOT the time to be distracted by a divisive issue on the home front, and those who are pushing for civil rights in such a dangerous time are both unpatriotic and selfish.” Instead, LBJ chose a different course and used that anger to make the greatest contributions to civil rights of any president since Abraham Lincoln, and he did it in spite of his conviction – which has proven correct – that his Democratic Party would lose the south, “for a generation.”

If Trump was a real leader like LBJ, he would say (based on some of his campaign’s themes), “I hear your anger and I share it too, because we have had too many hardworking Americans see their paychecks shrink, or their jobs move overseas, and they have watched opportunities for success disappear in front of their eyes. Let us focus that anger toward making changes and giving the average Americans a real chance to make American great again.” But Donald Trump has not only never said any such things, he does not appear to have even thought them. Instead of bending voter discontent and frustration toward useful goals, Trump is using them as an opportunity to gain power, stirring up the already present anger of his supporters through demagoguery. His message may go all over the place, and he changes his ‘positions,’ not only from day to day, but from speech to speech and even sometimes from sentence to sentence (here against free trade and there for it, etc). But Trump has been frighteningly consistent on who is to blame for our problems and for making America ‘great,’ no longer: illegal immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, are those primarily at fault.

It is Trump’s scapegoating some of the poorest and weakest among us that more than anything else led to me giving a second and third look to some of those Hitler comparisons that have been flying around almost from the moment Trump announced his campaign with a disgusting speech calling all illegal immigrants killers, rapists, and drug dealers – although he did allow that he assumed that ‘some’ were good people…something that I used to find funny but no longer do. The comparison to Hitler has taken on new meaning the last few weeks as the anger and violence at Trump’s rallies has been stirred to new heights, resulting in his audience violently assaulting protesters, the removal or ban of groups of African Americans from attending his events, and a level of fear and danger for the journalists who are covering him. I must confess that I did not initially look too closely at the ‘Trump is like Hitler,’ comments because I have seen so many people described as being like Hitler that the meaning of such criticisms began to fade into meaninglessness. I was also rooting for Trump to win the nomination and destroy the GOP, so I did not care too look too closely for what it might say about me. But I have forced myself to look closer, and I have been frightened by what I have seen.

Donald Trump is appealing to a dark and twisted part of the human psyche, and he is feeding on the hate and anger of his audiences and their resentment of whomever has upset Trump that day, the person he designates as the ‘dangerous other,’ to be hated in that moment. The ‘other,’ may be Black, like President Barack Obama, whom Trump has tried to delegitimize by casting doubt on whether the president was born in Hawaii – as the birth certificate says – or in Kenya, which is what the racist ‘Birther’ movement that Trump once connected himself to believes. The ‘other’ may be a Muslim, and Trump has declared that all members of the religion, which has 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, be banned from entering the USA. The ‘other,’ might be someone with a disability, like New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who Trump openly mocked for having the congenital joint disease, Arthrogryposis (a disease that I was born with, and suffer from myself). It goes on and on, as there is literally no one, no group, and no thought that is too small for Trump to attack; he is the kind of person who would boo at the end of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol because Ebenezer Scrooge shares his wealth with the impoverished Cratchit family instead of stealing Tiny Tim’s crutch, mocking him when he falls over, and leaving with the family’s meager meal.

Trump has been able to say and do almost anything without facing any consequences, but he is far from invincible. We must start with acknowledging that the people are angry, then on understanding the root of that anger, and moving to address its cause and not just control its symptoms. We need to resolve to accept the humanity in all other human beings and not to let Trump use superficial differences to tear us apart. In 1932 the German people chose Hitler and the hatred and fear of the Nazi Party to lead them out of the Great Depression, while in the United States of America we chose the hope and optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was a short time that it seemed that the American system of government could not survive the Depression and that we would eventually turn to Fascism just as Germany, Italy, and Spain had, but we rejected that choice. We chose FDR and hope, and when he died the USA was the most powerful nation on earth, our economy working at full capacity, and our troops came home to build a better world; we chose hope and we raised America to greatness. Trump is running on hatred and fear, and we have a lot of evidence to show that such a candidate would not, ‘make America great again,’ but would instead be like an alternate version of 1932 where we sided with hatred instead of optimism. We must loudly reject Trumpism with one voice – one voice made out of millions of people of different races, genders, religions, and creeds; in English our national motto is rendered, ‘Out of many, One.’ Splitting that one great American voice into many small and angry ones, with each one attacking the other, is not greatness – it is the cowardly action of a man desperate for power at any price. We have the ability to put our differences aside and work together to stop Donald Trump from ever gaining the presidency, and by rejecting that lying, angry, faithless, hateful, bullying, demagogue, we will prove that America was, will be, and still is great.

2015 Israeli elections, Adolf Hitler, Anti-Semitism, Dreyfus Affair, Foreign relations, French anti-Semitism, German anti-Semitism, History, Holocaust, International Politics, Jewish people, Nazism, Peace, Pogroms, Political scapegoats, Politics, U.S.-Israeli relations, War, World War I

Playing with Fire: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is Risking the Future of Israel and the Jewish People

Leave a comment

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is playing with fire by imploring Jews all over the world to leave their homes and move to Israel. His recent statement that he speaks for ALL worldwide Jewry is not only arrogant, but absolutely untrue, and regardless of whether or not Netanyahu and Likud win re-election in two weeks, the fact that many Israelis – both Jewish and otherwise – will vote against Bibi (as Netanyahu is also known) shows that a good many Israeli Jews don’t want him to speak for them either. Anti-Semitism is nothing new, and it has existed as long as there has been a Jewish people, but the most dangerous threats to the Jewish people have mostly come about since the rise of the modern conception of the nation-state during the 19th century. The birth of nationalism (which, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, became increasingly fanatical) led to dark questions about whether the Jewish people were truly loyal to the nations that they called home, or if they had extra-national ties to other Jews that trumped any true national devotion. Desperate and failing regimes had an easy scapegoat to explain any societal ills, and whether the populace was poor, starving, or angry about a corrupt government, the response was often the same: ‘Blame the Jews! Those dangerous and untrustworthy others are the cause of all of our problems!’ I believe there are three major historical examples where the loyalty of the Jews of different nations was questioned and where it led to dangerous consequences for the Jewish people: those are the Dreyfus Affair in France, the publication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in Tsarist Russia, and perhaps worst of all, the ‘stabbed in the back’ legend that planted dark seeds in the soil of Germany after its loss in World War I that grew into the Holocaust under one of the infamous fallacy’s true believers: Adolf Hitler.

The Dreyfus Affair that would soon expose a deep, calcified anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of French society, began in France in 1894 when Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested (and rapidly tried and convicted by a military court and sentenced to life in prison) on the charge of treason for selling state secrets to Germany; the only problem was he was absolutely innocent of all the charges. The complete and utter lack of proof did not matter to the French officer corps that decided Dreyfus’s fate: it had simply decided that because Dreyfus was Jewish, his allegiance to France was tenuous and he must be guilty. The Officer Corps even refused to alter its opinion when it discovered in 1896 that Dreyfus was innocent and that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy; the resulting attempt by the army to cover up the exculpatory evidence exploded in the French press, as famous writers like Emile Zola lined up behind Dreyfus and accused the Officer Corps of blatant anti-Semitism for its attempt to hide the evidence which proved his innocence. France was split between liberals who rallied to defend Dreyfus and conservatives who either were members of the Catholic, traditional officer class or who sympathized with them, but the pressure grew to the point that the French President pardoned Dreyfus in 1899 even though it would take seven more years before the anti-Semitic officers would finally clear Dreyfus’s name and withdraw the conviction and all the charges. However in spite of Dreyfus’s vindication, the reflexive reaction of the elements of society who sought to bury him and tar his name laid bare the dark and powerful vein of anti-Semitism that lay in the heart of France and that has never truly disappeared even to the present day.

Published in Russia in 1903, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” may be the most infamous forgery in history. Purporting to reveal a secret meeting of powerful Jews in which they discussed plans for Jewish global domination, the book was popular among anti-Semitics all over the world, including among Americans like Henry Ford, who helped expose the book to a wider audience in the US. While the book was revealed as a forgery as early as 1921 – when it was proven to have plagiarized many of its passages directly from Maurice Joly’s “Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” – the fact that it was a lie did not lessen its popularity in anti-Semitic circles, and even today the translated book is still a bible of sorts for Jew haters everywhere. The lies put forward in “Protocols,” have remained fruitful into the present and whenever one hears comments (either serious or joking) that the Jews dominate the world through secret control of finance, the media, manufacturing, and more, he or she is feeling the continuing ripples of this century-old canard. In its day, “Protocols” helped spark many Russian pogroms in the final decade and a half of the Tsar’s rule and led  to violence, death, and destruction for Jews all over Eastern Europe; needless to say, it was also quite popular with Hitler and the Nazis

The ‘Stabbed in the Back’ legend in post-World War I Germany is perhaps the most deadly lie about Jewish disloyalty in history. Because of the brutal effects that Germany endured as a result of losing World War I and signing the Treaty of Versailles, many angry and ashamed Germans needed to come up with a reason to explain their hardships, and they found one in the lie that the ‘undefeated’ German Army was on the brink of winning the war in 1918 when Jewish traitors in Berlin betrayed Germany and sold it out to the Allies. Since the German army was still on French soil when the war ended and no Allied forces had set foot in Germany, the people chose to ignore the myriad causes of Germany’s loss and convinced themselves that the only reason that they lost the war was because they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by traitors at home; specifically, they were betrayed by Germany’s Jews. For angry veterans like Corporal Hitler, it was far more convenient to blame the Jews than to look inwardly and admit the failures of the Kaiser, the generals, and themselves. Hitler bought into the ‘stabbed in the back’ lie without reservation and it confirmed for him the belief that Jews were not and never would be true Germans, but rather an internal enemy of the state itself, which caused Hitler to resolve to remove the Jews from all phases of German life.

Now we have Benjamin Netanyahu claiming to speak for all of the world’s Jews and calling for the Jews of Europe and elsewhere to undermine their home governments by recognizing his status as the true voice of the Jewish people and then moving to Israel. What reason could he possibly have for suggesting that non-Israeli Jews basically become the insurgent element that the anti-Semites of the recent past have vilified us as? I believe it is all for his immediate political survival and that he either does not notice or does not care that his short-sighted actions – and short-sighted actions have been a hallmark of Netanyahu’s rule – are bringing back many of those old lies about the lack of patriotism and loyalty of Jews. Bibi seems to be saying, “You Jews may live in the USA, Europe, or elsewhere, but in truth you’re all Israelis and your first loyalty must be to us,” which is untrue, subversive, and dangerous. He is pumping life into the old myths that were so catastrophic for the Jewish people, and forcing every Jew to make a choice by basically asking: “Are you an American Jew are a Jewish American?” The order of the words may not matter to some, but there is actually a difference between being an American (or European, or anywhere outside of Israel) Jew and a Jewish American. An American Jew is someone who is an American above all, in spite of his or her religious or cultural identification as Jewish, views Israel as a foreign country that takes a backseat to the United States; he or she may support Israel, but the USA comes first. A Jewish American is someone who is Jewish first and, and while he or she may not necessarily support Israel over the USA (or at all), their loyalties might indeed be tested if the alliance between the United States and Israel was dissolved. A Jewish American may agree with Bibi and feel that a preemptive strike against Iran is preferable to peace talks, and that the USA must be involved in such a military action from the start. An American Jew is more likely to side with President Barack Obama than Bibi, and to feel that going to war as a first option against a nation with almost 80 million people in order to aid the war-mongering Administration of a nation of just over 8 million people (not all of them Jewish) is a terrible idea.

If the peace talks with Iran fail – which, based on his speech to Congress last Tuesday and all his past statements and deeds, is what Bibi is aiming for – it would mean that a military ‘solution’ to dealing with Iran’s nuclear program would become far more likely, and Israel simply cannot fight that battle alone and win. Due to that fact, it means peace is by far the best option here, because the only way Israel even might win a war with Iran without active U.S. involvement would be to use nuclear weapons against Iran, and if Israel were to launch first strike nuclear warheads against Iran, it would completely end American support of Israel while simultaneously turning it into a universally despised rogue state trailing even North Korea in the eyes of the international community. However, as long as Bibi believes that all Jews are in favor of every action that his regime takes, he will continue to act as if there will be no negative repercussions to trying to destroy any legitimate chance at peace, undermining President Obama’s attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement, and encouraging Jews to leave their homes for Israel. Netanyahu seems to believe that his political future, the future of Israel, and the fate of the Jewish people as a whole are the same thing and that only his victory can secure them.

I am Jewish, I support Israel, and I have many friends there; I believe its survival is as vital today as it was in 1948, but I am an American, my brothers serve in the American military, and regardless of how much I care for Israel, I believe that heading into war with a nation of 80 million on Israel’s behalf would be catastrophic. I think the best course for the USA is to make it absolutely clear to Netanyahu that we are not giving him a blank check of support and that if he chooses to initiate a war with Iran, he’ll be on his own; maybe if we make that clear to him, he might think twice before pursuing aggressively pro-war policies. Israel cannot go to war with a nation as large as Iran without U.S. help and, unless Iran strikes first, we must deny Bibi that help if we are to have a legitimate chance for peace. If Iran strikes first then Israel should be able to count on vigorous U.S. support, but not only would a U.S.-Iranian war be a disaster for Americans, such a war would be far worse for Israel because it would devastate the nation in the short-term and threaten the long-term U.S.-Israeli alliance since, once the bodies start to pile up, how long will it be before Americans turn against the war and then against Israel entirely? How long after that will it be before Americans start looking for a scapegoat and find one in the millions of Jewish people who live here? Bibi is playing a very dangerous game here, and if he’s not careful it will be the Jewish people, whether Israeli or not, who are going to get hurt.