Are We The "Good Germans"?

There are armed troops in the streets of the nation's capital. And we check our texts and feeds, and read articles and posts on twenty minute meals, which of 42 tested earbuds is best and how to stop being so judgy. Both National Guard and active military were deployed in Los Angeles, with no enemy to face but the people of Los Angeles. We troop off to the grocery store for increasing expensive and scarce vegetables--up 38% just in the month of July. And the President of the United States is threatening to send troops to occupy Chicago.

And so I wonder: are we becoming the "Good Germans"?

I was born less than a year after World War II officially ended.  The full extent of what happened in Nazi Germany was still being exposed during my childhood, and there were movies and plays about it.  The Diary of Anne Frank was a hit play in 1955, the feature film came out in 1959 when I was 13, and I recall seeing it, or some other dramatization, on our black and white TV.  Judgment at Nuremberg was an episode on Playhouse 90 in 1959 and hit the silver screen in 1961.  I watched it, breathless, from a fake velvet seat in the Manos Theatre.

One thing I remember being talked about for years was this: everybody knows that Hitler was a tyrannical madman.  Why did the bulk of German people--the ones who weren't Jews and otherwise persecuted, but who didn't belong to the Nazi Party--go along with everything he did?  Hitler was elected, and within months had established his dictatorship. His hate-filled speeches and his actions were increasingly crazed and violent, well beyond the norms of a country whose citizens prided themselves on being the most civilized society in Europe. Why didn't the so-called "Good Germans" stop him?

First, let's review our situation.  As I've been saying for months, one key to dictatorship is control of the army.  The Chaos administration is often called inept, incompetent and clownish.  But that should not obscure what it accomplished in this regard.  It began by boldly and without reason decapitating military leadership, a process that is still going on.  Apart from the intimidation this causes, it leaves leadership gaps to be filled by absolute loyalists.  And so while the Chaos administration turned ICE into the American Secret Police and got it enormous funding from a compliant congressional majority, it was able to send troops to be seen on selected American streets.  With nary a peep from military leadership.  

The US military is already being coopted in the creation of American concentration camps, one of them on the very installation where Japanese Americans were imprisoned for no other reason than that they were Japanese Americans in World War II.

A second and simultaneous step to dictatorship is neutralizing and defeating those elements of constitutional government and civil society that might stand in the way.  That process reached a crescendo in July with the simultaneous surrender of Congress and the Supreme Court.

So now bolder moves are in process.  The attempting firing of a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors will test the extent of the Supreme Court's surrender.  As will any deployment of troops in Chicago, where the mayor and the governor have made it quite clear there will be vigorous legal challenges.  

Another key to dictatorship I've emphasized and followed is the predicted attempt to steal the next election, and eventually to end real elections altogether. That's being very actively pursued, with gerrymandering and direct threats against the conduct of elections, with attacks on the rights of voters to come. Again, the Supreme Court is complicit.  Deploying armed and masked federal troops at an official California government event featuring the Governor signals to everyone the likelihood that the fattened ICE and dumbed down FBI and other federal forces will be menacing political events and at the polls in the coming months.  

So far American society has held together pretty well under all these assaults.  But these two actions--as well as any number of other vulnerabilities created by this administration--could lead to real and consequential chaos that will be very hard to stop.  According to Paul Krugman, political control of the Federal Reserve alone could lead to inflation the likes of which America has never experienced, though Germany did in the 1930s.  

Everyone knows that Chaos is a tyrannical madman.  A recent poll shows that nearly half of the respondents strongly disapprove of his actions (with less than a quarter strongly approving), and nearly 60% disapproving. So why aren't the good Americans stopping him?

Part of it is the reality of time.  In one sense this is happening in a continuous assault, meant to stun.  In another it is happening between the necessary events of our lives, and we must deal with it in ways that allow us to keep on living.  But it is emerging that the greatest weapon of Chaos is intimidation.  There are clearly those who are active collaborators, especially the billionaires who seek protection and advantage. Tech billionaires (says Wired editor Katie Drummond) are actively contributing technology to enhance authoritarian control.  Others are simply intimidated and extorted, like every university except George Mason.

But there is also resistance: in Illinois, in Maryland, in California, at George Mason, in the editorial offices of Vanity Fair, and in the streets of cities and towns and suburbs across America.  Three-count 'em, three--separate grand juries in DC refused to indict a protestor accused of assaulting an FBI cop during the DC occupation.  Some of it is symbolic but heartening, some of it is creative, and some of it--as in the various efforts to stymie ICE--is locally effective.  But so far it is not enough to stop the madman.

Some are taking major risks, including members of the National Guard who are resisting or speaking out.  More of this needs to happen.  But any resistance is helpful, if only to suggest to others that they are not alone.  As Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny, his depressingly prophetic little book of 2017, twentieth century dictatorships thrived because people and institutions conceded in advance.

There are those who are going to be more active in their resistance.  And there are the many others who for one reason or another will not.  But all of us may at any time be faced with a moment of decision, when tyranny and intimidation confronts us directly. In those moments we will learn if we are among the "Good Germans" or not.

If the Republic survives or reemerges in a world in which history is still written, the long list of names of traitors to democracy will include Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. But if the Republic is to survive, it will require heroes whose names will likely never be known.