No, Trump is Not a Fascist

Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. He is not attempting to establish a Fascist dictatorship in America. There is not a rising tide of Fascism in the United States. No mainstream politician of either political party is anything like Hitler or any other dictator. I shouldn’t have to write these obvious and common sense statements but the lunatic notion that we on on the verge of a Trump Fascist dictatorship has migrated beyond the fever swamps of the unhinged left and is becoming the consensus opinion in the Democratic Party.

One might suppose that the fact that the people who are calling Donald Trump a fascist are not currently in a concentration camp awaiting execution might be sufficient evidence to disprove the idea that Trump is any kind of a dictator and perhaps only the most delusional leftist believes that the dictatorship os already established. Instead, there are numerous articles in left wing sites like Slate or Huffington Post detailing all the ways in which this or that policy of Trump’s is what a Fascist would do and is a sign that we are far down the road to dictatorship, even if we haven’t quite reached the destination yet.

I have no interest in trying to refute these kinds of articles. Any democratically elected leader could be made to seem a potential dictator my making superficial comparisons in policies. Any government, whether democratic or not, has the same sort of problems to resolve, often with similar solutions and even the most despotic government has to maintain basic infrastructure. Nazi Germany was a world leader in legislation to protect the environment and discourage cruelty to animals. Does that mean that an American politician who supports such legislation is a Nazi? Of course not.

It might be more useful to compare the first year and a half of Adolf Hitler’s regime with the Trump administration to see whether or not Trump is indeed taking down the road to Fascism.

• January 30, 1933-Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor.
• February 28-Hitler given emergency powers after the Reichstag fire.
• March 22-First concentration camp opened in Dachau.
• March 24-Enabling act passed giving all legislative power to the Chancellor.
• April 7-German civil service purged of Jews and Communists. Central government takes control of states ending German federalism.
• April 26-Gestapo created in the state of Prussia
• May 2-Trade unions banned.
• July 14-All political parties except for the National Socialists banned. Germany becomes a one party state.
• November 30-Gestapo given authority throughout Germany.
• June 30-July 2 1934-Night of the Long Knives. Enemies of Hitler both within the Nazi Party and outside murdered. Hitler gains uncontested power in Germany
• August 2-President Hindenburg dies. Office of President combined with Chancellor making Hitler head of state as well as the head of government.

As you can see, Hitler began the process of gaining absolute power in Germany almost as soon as he was made Chancellor. WIthin a year of his appointment, Hitler already had the powers of a dictator, banning opposition parties and imprisoning critics of his regime. By the time Hitler was in power for eighteen or nineteen months, he was the Führer, the absolute master of Germany.

Meanwhile, in the year and a half that Donald Trump has been president, he has done none of these things, not one. Trump has not been given emergency powers. He has not opened concentration camps for dissidents nor has he gained control of the media. The Democratic Party has not been banned and none of the “Never Trump” Republicans has been murdered. If Donald Trump aspires to be a dictator, he is taking an awful long time to go about it.

Does it matter that millions of Americans are convinced that we are on the verge of a Fascist dictatorship? I think it does matter quite a lot. In order for democracy to work the loser of an election must concede power to the winner. The faction out of power may oppose the policies of the faction in power, acting as the loyal opposition, but they ought not to question the legitimacy of the government itself. The faction in power must not use its political power to punish the losers. There has to be a certain level of trust between all the participants in the process that the opposition are not the enemy but fellow patriots who happen to have different ideas and priorities. There also has to be a certain willingness of various factions both in and out of power to compromise with one another or to participate in the give and take of democratic politics. If you believe the the other people are Nazis or Fascists or whatever, then you don’t compromise with them, you fight them. If the party in power are Fascists bent on creating a dictatorship, you do not act as the loyal opposition, but as the Resistance. If the party out of power are Nazis waiting for the chance to seize power, you do not treat them as the loyal opposition but as traitors potentially guilty of sedition. Either way, the normal rules no longer apply and the enemy has to be fought by any means necessary, including violence.

If we keep going on the path we have been, it won’t be long before large numbers of people will believe that violence is an acceptable means to effect political change. If political unrest and violence become the norm, we really will end up with the dictatorship Trump’s critics claim to fear. People crave security and public order, even over liberty and if constitutional government cannot provide the security they need, they will turn to a strongman who can. Remember, people turned to Hitler and Mussolini because they seemed to be the only people in Germany and Italy who had their act together.

Maybe part of the reason that so many people want to believe that Trump is a dictator is because they feel it is somehow exciting to be part of the Resistance fighting for liberty against the Evil Empire. This is definitely one of those cases where people should be careful what they wish for. Believe me, you do not want to live in a country that is tearing itself apart. You do not want to live in a country in which a dictator seems like the best option available. There are many places in the world in which dictatorship and civil strife are real threats. Let’s not let America become one of them.

 

Suicide is Painful

My brother committed suicide last week. I am not going to relate the details on when and how this tragedy happened nor will I speculate on his motives. I will respect his privacy, and the privacy of his family. The only reason that I am writing this post for the sake of any reader who may be considering suicide

Contrary to what the theme song of M*A*S*H declares, suicide is not painless. It is painful, very painful, perhaps for the person who has killed himself but certainly for the loved ones left behind. They are left with questions that will never be answered. Why did their friend or relative choose suicide? Was there any way it could have prevented? Did they do anything to trigger the decision? When a person takes their life, they leave a hole in the hearts of everyone who was close to them.

No matter how bad things may seem, they can get better. As long as there is life, there is hope, that whatever problems you may have can get resolved, but once dead, that is the end of any hope. The problems do not go away, however. They become other people’s problems, along with the mess that any death creates. If you believe that your burdens are too much to bear, why would you want to shift them onto the shoulders of the people you love most?

My brother meticulously planned his death, for over a year. In hindsight There were signs that he was preparing to end his life, but no one put the pieces together until it was too late. How could they? He seemed content with his life, despite some setbacks. He hid his distress well.

Part of my brother’s planning was insuring that his children would be well provided for after his death. He believed that his death would ensure an inheritance large enough to take care of them. I do not know how much money they are going to inherit. I do know, looking at their faces, that they would rather have their Dad back thaany amount of money

If anyone reading this post is considering suicide, please, please get help. Talk to someone, a friend, a counselor, clergy, anyone. If there is something eating away at you, don’t keep it to yourself. Open up to someone. If everything seems hopeless, think  again. You cannot know what new reasons for hope tomorrow may bring. If you do not care about yourself, think about the impact on the people around you. Suicide is never the answer.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

1-800-273-8255

 

A Forgotten Battle

We ought to know history fairly well. While there may be all sorts of details to be filled in, the broad outlines of wars and revolutions, the rise and fall of empires, great migrations of peoples, etc, must surely be as well known as anything can be. Of course, our knowledge of history largely depends on written records and if no one thought an event was worth recording or if it occurred before the invention of writing, we may not know anything about it. For all we know, all sorts of things might have occurred before anyone was able to make written records. They may be whole cultures we know nothing of.

This article at Sciencemag.org about an forgotten battle in Bronze Age Northern Europe illustrates nicely how little we may actually know about our past.

About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.

Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.

When the fighting was through, hundreds lay dead, littering the swampy valley. Some bodies were stripped of their valuables and left bobbing in shallow ponds; others sank to the bottom, protected from plundering by a meter or two of water. Peat slowly settled over the bones. Within centuries, the entire battle was forgotten.

This epic battle was forgotten until the twentieth century.

n 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a single upper arm bone sticking out of the steep riverbank—the first clue that the Tollense Valley, about 120 kilometers north of Berlin, concealed a gruesome secret. A flint arrowhead was firmly embedded in one end of the bone, prompting archaeologists to dig a small test excavation that yielded more bones, a bashed-in skull, and a 73-centimeter club resembling a baseball bat. The artifacts all were radiocarbon-dated to about 1250 B.C.E., suggesting they stemmed from a single episode during Europe’s Bronze Age.

Now, after a series of excavations between 2009 and 2015, researchers have begun to understand the battle and its startling implications for Bronze Age society. Along a 3-kilometer stretch of the Tollense River, archaeologists from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Department of Historic Preservation (MVDHP) and the University of Greifswald (UG) have unearthed wooden clubs, bronze spearheads, and flint and bronze arrowheads. They have also found bones in extraordinary numbers: the remains of at least five horses and more than 100 men. Bones from hundreds more may remain unexcavated, and thousands of others may have fought but survived

No one knows if the men who fought at this battle were good men or bad, or why they fought and died. Archaeologists can uncover the bare facts about the battle, how many fought and with what weapons, but they cannot tell us why they were fighting or what issues they thought were important. enough to fight and die over. If any bard composed epic poems celebrating these warriors, we will never hear it. Any oral tradition has not survived. I am not sure if these warriors are any relation to the people currently living in the region. I would guess probably not. No Homer was able to preserve any epic poetry by writing it down, since these people had no knowledge of writing.

On thing is clear, however. This was no mere skirmish between villages or wandering tribes. These were small armies made up of thousands of fighters, which implies a level of political sophistication unsuspected in that place and time.

Northern Europe in the Bronze Age was long dismissed as a backwater, overshadowed by more sophisticated civilizations in the Near East and Greece. Bronze itself, created in the Near East around 3200 B.C.E., took 1000 years to arrive here. But Tollense’s scale suggests more organization—and more violence—than once thought. “We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people is very surprising,” says Svend Hansen, head of the German Archaeological Institute’s (DAI’s) Eurasia Department in Berlin. The well-preserved bones and artifacts add detail to this picture of Bronze Age sophistication, pointing to the existence of a trained warrior class and suggesting that people from across Europe joined the bloody fray.

Ancient DNA could potentially reveal much more: When compared to other Bronze Age samples from around Europe at this time, it could point to the homelands of the warriors as well as such traits as eye and hair color. Genetic analysis is just beginning, but so far it supports the notion of far-flung origins. DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. “This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”

As University of Aarhus’s Vandkilde puts it: “It’s an army like the one described in Homeric epics, made up of smaller war bands that gathered to sack Troy”—an event thought to have happened fewer than 100 years later, in 1184 B.C.E. That suggests an unexpectedly widespread social organization, Jantzen says. “To organize a battle like this over tremendous distances and gather all these people in one place was a tremendous accomplishment,” he says.

There could have been whole kingdoms and empires in the northern Europe that we know nothing about, a whole undiscovered history. I wonder how much unknown history there remains to be discovered in other parts of the world where the people had not yet learned about writing. Perhaps we will never know.

Independence Day

The Fourth of July is the day on which the American people celebrate their independence from Great Britain. It is not actually clear why Independence Day is the Fourth. Congress actually passed the Declaration of Independence on July 2, 1776. It has often been thought that the Declaration was signed on the fourth, but that doesn’t seem to be true. There wasn’t any one time when the members of Congress signed the Declaration and there were a few who didn’t get around to signing it until August. Nevertheless, the fourth is the date that stuck. As John Adams wrote to Abigail.

 

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

 

And so it has been, for the last 242 years. May God bless America and grant us many more years of freedom.

 

 

 

Happy Independence Day.

 

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