Civil Commotion

Five years ago, soon after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, I published a set of quotes from former President Dwight Eisenhower; my aim was to point-out how wildly the contemporary GOP has abandoned its historic conservatism and become, in truth, no more than a pack of nihilist vandals. In view of the GOP’s apparent inability to dissociate itself from, even, an incandescent nutjob like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a refresher seems in order.

Not everybody can be Eisenhower, of course, but he was the best in the tradition of Burke — one eye on the future, as evidenced by his support of computing,the Interstate Highway System, and space, while preserving the best of proved traditions: respect for law and the legal process, science, engineering, civilian control of emerging technologies. It would be a very good thing for the GOP to survey its history and think about what’s gone wrong.

Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, loathed Dwight Eisenhower with a passion. He was, in Welch’s view, a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.” Even William F. Buckley, who hated Eisenhower’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative mindset with an equal intensity, thought Welch went too far and led the campaign to push the John Birch Society out of Republican politics.

So: Would the Republicans today nominate as its candidate for the presidency the man who pushed development of the Interstate Highway System, funded America’s lead in computer science, and insisted that NASA be under civilian control? Not if these quotes tell us anything about Eisenhower’s thinking.

• This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

• Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

• In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

• You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

• When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

• Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

• Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

• We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

• Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

• When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

• In most communities it is illegal to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

• The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

• How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

The Republicans have ceased to be the conservative political party in any meaningful sense of the word; they are the radical party, intent upon dismantling all the things that actually made America exceptional, and replacing it with a plutocracy guarded by pious morons.

MS. Greene, incandescent nutjob, has at other times expressed her support for the QAnon lunacy, for summary execution of Democrats, adoration for the First Felon … you know, all the standard-issue fever-swamp madness. Unhappily, the GOP is now in the hands of cowards incapable of saying she is plainly unfit for elective office, so I guess she’ll be replacing the daily offenses against common decency formerly committed by @realDonaldTrump.

Today is the 4th-Anniversary of the Bowling Green Massacre. Anybody remember that?

It was 76 years ago today, as Germany collapsed before the combined forces of Russia on the east and the Allies on the west and south, that Soviet troops entered and liberated the complex of death camps now known as Auschwitz. There, roughly 1.1-million Jews were systematically murdered in service of the “Final Solution” — the Third Reich’s mad plan to exterminate Jewry.

Other camps were liberated by advancing Allied troops and, as the stories and photos trickled out and the world recoiled in horror, the Allied governments denied knowledge of the camps.

That was a lie. The American writer Thomas Wolfe, who loved Germany, wrote this in the mid-1930s in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again:

After a while, however, in the midwatches of the night, behind thick walls and bolted doors and shuttered windows, it came to me full flood at last in confession sof unutterable despair. I don’t know why it was that people so unburdened themselves to me, a stranger, unless it was because they knew the love I bore them and their land. They seemed to feel a desperate need to talk to someone who would understand. The thing was pent up in them, and my sympathy for all things German had burst the dam of their reserve and caution. Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbors’ quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage, stories of well-bred Jewesses despoiled and turned out of heir homes and forced to kneel and scrub off anti-Nazi slogans scribbled on the sidewalks while young barbarians dressed like soldiers formed a ring and prodded them with bayonets and made the quiet places echo with the shameless laughter of their mockery. It was a picture of the Dark Ages come again — shocking beyond belief, but true as the hell that man forever creates for himself.

It isn’t believable that a novelist on the fringe of polite society knew, but the officials of foreign governments stationed in Germany never caught a whiff.

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel reached the same conclusion. From his Nobel acceptance speech:

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: “Can this be true?” This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

And now the boy is turning to me: “Tell me,” he asks. “What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?”

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

The Allied governments have finally acknowledged that they knew of the death camps, and claim that they were quiet because public outrage would have demanded immediate military action with a corresponding disruption of the military strategy.

Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t; I can’t judge. I admit that, when I look at how widespread and commonplace anti-semitism was then, I’m skeptical. I can more easily believe that the systematic extermination of European Jews was as remote from American sensibilities as that unpleasantness between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.

This is a good day, then, to reflect on Wiesel’s words. After all, it wasn’t the innate decency of Donald Trump or of ICE functionaries that (mostly) ended the family separation policy at our southern border — it was the vocal indignation of the American people. It wasn’t the innate decency of Donald Trump or of ICE functionaries that narrowed the Muslim Ban — it was the vocal indignation of the American people. It wasn’t the innate decency of Donald Trump or DOJ officials that ended the use of non-uniformed, unidentified paramilitary forces against demonstrators in Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. — it was the vocal indignation of the American people. It wasn’t the innate decency of Donald Trump or of ICE functionaries that protected the “Dreamers” from immediate deportation — it was the vocal indignation of the American people.

So, today, thank the Founders for the First Amendment, thank the generations of educators who have practically trained backtalk into American DNA, and vow to always be worthy of that gift.

Trump loyalists are finding it hard to find work in corporate America.

Tainted by Trump’s reputation, several Trump aides described an increasingly bleak job market with virtually no chance of landing jobs in corporate America and some even having seen promising leads disappear after the rampage at the U.S. Capitol. A second former White House official said they knew of “people who got jobs rescinded because of Jan. 6.” A Republican strategist was blunter.

“They are really f—ed,” the strategist said, pointing to some top officials who stuck with Trump until the bitter end.

That is as it should be; it’s the old birds-of-a-feather thing. Trump is sewage all the way down, and there is probably something amiss with people who enjoyed his approval or approved of him.