Borrowing a Cup of Hope #13: Putin As Hitler, Trump as Chamberlain

Trump the Chump, All Munich, All The Time.

Forewarned is Forearmed.

George Orwell said somewhere that “Those who control the past, control the future.” We see this in Trump’s attacks on the National Museum of African American History, where artifacts are being removed and the director has been fired. It is So Obvious this is the move of a Dictatorship, like when Stalin would have people airbrushed out of official photographs after he had them executed. It was also the goal of White Supremacists to repaint the Civil War as a conflict about State’s Rights; but the right that the states were insisting on was the right to treat Black Americans like cattle, sell them and buy them and beat them and rape them and kill them at will. But that is a hard thing for White people to process, that they were a part of that. So they try to forget it ever happened. And “Gone With The Wind” becomes noble truth instead of pulpy soapy romance fiction. I remember talking about the truth of slavery to an elderly woman, in her mid-nineties, and her eyes started to mist and she said “But it wasn’t such a Bad thing, was it?” She had been brought up believing slavery was benign, that everyone was like Uncle Remus, that Black folk were happy being slaves and that we did them a favor by bringing them here and making them Christians. And this was in Minnesota, hardly the Deep South.

That is a gigantic crock of shit that American people still swill down, and are happy to do so. And that is what Trump and the Project 2025 people are intent on teaching the next generation.

As an historian, I find the need to make the preservation of historical wisdom to be a Sacred Ethical Commitment. A major frustration with being an historian is that you realize how lousy everyone’s memory is. “The Lessons of History” aren’t very meaningful if no one knows any of it. They once asked George W. Bush how he thought history would treat him, and he said “Who Cares? We’ll all be dead.” That sounds like a man who would very much like his own history to be painted out of the collective picture.

Let’s take a little detour into 1920s and 30s Europe to try and glean some insight into how we got into this Fine Mess we got ourselves into. I’ll just skim a few highlights.

First and most important is Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a socialist and journalist, and in 1922 started his own newspaper with some corporate overlords- always the best partners for fascism. He found that he could have a very strong opinion one week, and then something completely the opposite two weeks later, and no one would notice, because no one remembered what he had said. Just like sermons in a church, no one cared to remember what was said, as long as it made them feel okay in the moment. They just liked reading his lively and exciting prose. He turned from socialist to nationalist, and went from class warfare to believing in a top-down totalitarianism- that is, one-man in charge, a one-party state. He drew on imaginary images of a past that could be brought back to life; “Make Rome Great Again.” He projected hazy memories of the Roman Empire, revived the Roman salute, and taught people that Violence was the answer to getting things done. The Italian people, plagued by unemployment, impoverished by WWI, restless at what they perceived to be a weak, impotent government, and desiring to rise up to empire status like the Brits, were enthralled, and gave him the dictatorial powers that drew them into war, destitution, and disaster.

He founded fascism in Italy, and he was Hitler’s role model in how to build the German version. Hitler followed Benito’s plan closely. Mussolini had thugs that beat up the opposition, stylishly clad in black and identifiable as The Black Shirts; Hitler put his guys in a kind of baby-poop brown and called them the Brown Shirts. They went around and beat up communists, and got the Nazi Party into the newspapers. No publicity is bad publicity, said Hitler; people thought they must be sincere and dedicated. Hitler took the Roman Salute and tilted it a bit higher. He tried to bring a mob to the Munich City Hall to take over the Bavarian Government and then march on Berlin the way Mussolini gathered in Naples and marched on Rome. But they shared a belief: We will take over, I will be the only decision maker; what I say is Law; or as Trump said in Michigan this week, “Nothing will stop me. I run the country and the world.”

Trump also has effectively partnered with the Evangelical Church in order to posture as the moral high ground as he pillages our rights and evaporates due process; both Mussolini and Hitler made common cause with Pope Pius XII to legitimize their naked power grabs. Mussolini carved Vatican City out of Rome and gave sovereignty to the Pope in exchange for his blessing. Hitler’s first treaty was with the Vatican, where Hitler promised not to mess with the Catholic Church if the Pope left him alone to do what he wanted with the Jews. Hitler of course did not keep that promise; many dissident priests were sent to Dachau along with the communists and the LGBTQ while the rest of the church, Lutheran and Catholic, looked the other way, afraid for their bodies but not their souls.

When the Spanish Fascist Fransisco Franco took over Spain, with the significant help of both Mussolini and Hitler, Pope Pius XII sent a message to to him: “My sincere thanks for the victory of Catholic Spain” Pius saw all three dictators as opponents of Communism, which was atheist and following the teachings of the Jewish Karl Marx. So it was okay to be a dictator and kill a lot of people; some of them must have deserved it. Eggs must be broken to protect the Catholic Omelette. So it is with the “Christian” Nationalists that dominate the Republican Party.

Things are so crazy that even Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is calling out the gutless Congressional Republicans for handing over their prerogatives to the corrupt Executive Branch. Karl Rove, the Bush’s Brain mastermind of a lockstep loyalist party membership, is calling out to Trump that his poll numbers stink; but the infection Rove spread so far into the party has made them allergic to truth, making Karl another Cassandra, someone who can tell the future, but whom no one believes anymore.

Trump sells the idea that he is bringing back traditional values like the White Christian dominance that blessed genocide of “pagan” Indians and enslavement of “Primitive” Africans. And White Christians see themselves as advocates of a Purity Movement that wants to cleanse the nation of impure immigrants, people of color and the LGBTQ. This will take us back to the original sin of Puritans burning witches at the stake. That’s part of our history too, and Trump is taking us back to that.

The best conversation I heard this week is from Masha Gessen and Jason Stanley. Gessen is the acclaimed Russian historian and NY Times Opinion writer who is a refugee from Putin’s Russia, in danger here as an immigrant (though a citizen) and as a trans person, despised by Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Gessen says we are running out of time: we are hurtling towards autocracy in "a catastrophic acceleration" that is "Very Likely Irreversible." That window is closing. Jason Stanley is a history professor at Princeton who is taking a job at the University of Toronto because his kids are Black and he is worried bout their future in America. Watch it here:

The Central Message this week is Trump’s attempt to broker a peace with Ukraine and Russia. Trump is trying to get Ukraine to give up the Donbas region and Crimea. The UN and EU both reject this idea because it would legitimize military conquest as a means of acquiring territory from a neighboring country, which has been illegal for 80 years. It is Ukrainian land with 3.5 million Ukrainians living there. If Putin got it, thanks to Trump, the rest of Ukraine would be vulnerable to a tank-led invasion across the flat steppes of the Ukrainian heartland. This is eerily reminiscent of when Britain’s Neville Chamberlain gave the Sudetenland to Hitler, leaving the rest of Czechoslovakia totally vulnerable to invasion a few months later. So if you can’t picture Trump as Hitler, think of Putin as Hitler and Trump as Chamberlain, as Putin’s Chump.

A great resource for building hope is a book: “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” By Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan(ISBN: 0231156839) It quotes statistics about how 70% of non-violent protests work, and 40% of violent protests succeed. So there is a track record for a path forward. (Available at Thriftbooks).

And please, remember to put your oxygen mask on first. Here’s an online yoga class every MWF Noon Central with the lovely and talented Leslie Ball: Here's the Zoom link ~

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6122203126?pwd=NFZtT1F2TUFRUG16SEp3aExUcHZFUT09

Stay Committed. It’s Up to Us.

#30#