On a day in which there was a lot of news but also in which we became even more immediately aware of the dangers to American democracy posed by another Donald Trump presidency as Steve Bannon, his once and potentially future aide, made clear what a Trump dictatorship would look like through an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber.
"They're going to be in prison. Yes, prison." That is a sign (by Mr. Bannon) to send a message to wake people up, to scare people, to instill fear. It's all in public, right? If it were just a private plan, you might send private messages and write up private blueprints. That's a secretive approach. This is something that looks more like at least an attempt at an aspect of the Putin playbook, where the use and singling out of government power against your opponents doesn't just take them off the table -- or, as it sometimes has been in Russia, worse -- but it also sends a message to everyone else: maybe you don't want to be associated with that, maybe you don't want to be involved in that, maybe you want to go back and just try to live your life and avoid being grouped in with this group of people that Mr. Bannon says are going to be in, "Yes, prison."
How important and dangerous is this? To my mind sufficiently so that it’s worth reposting this essay last posted on March 10/11 again.
ON TYRANNY (2)
[Opinion] by Leland J. Katz
With apologies to Tim Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at
Yale University and author of the book On Tyranny, a very worthwhile read.
This essay is about the dangers of the United States becoming an autocratic Fascist dictatorship. It is not a subject Americans like to think about. But the danger is real. If Donald John Trump becomes president again, he intends to appoint people whose loyalty is to him rather than to the Constitution. If that happens, the guard rails are off and the Great American Experiment in Constitutional Democracy will be on life support. And, possibly, flat lined.
Some time between 1957 when I was 18 and 1959 when I was 20, I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Several times. First published in 1940, it tells the story of Soviet tyranny and of the need for tyrants to eat their own in order to maintain their power. The story is told through the exploits of Rubashov, an old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government he helped create. The story moves from the subversive actions of the Communist International (ComIntern) on the waterfront of prewar France to the coded tappings of political prisoners trying to maintain their sanity by talking about women they had known. It was my first real exposure to the realities of tyranny.
In 1939 I was born into a world on the cusp of war. In 1936 Mussolini had sent war planes with machine guns against Haile Selassie’s spear wielding Ethiopian tribesmen. Tojo, acting in the name of Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, was conquering China and four months after I was born, having bamboozled Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, Hitler invaded Poland splitting that country with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
During the 1930’s, Fascism almost triumphed in this country (see Rachel Maddow’s Prequel for details). But there were giants in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle created the alliance (including Joseph Stalin after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union) that defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
In 1962, I was a 23 year-old U.S. Air Force first lieutenant when, in October, the new, young American president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, faced down Nikita Kruschev over Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba just 90 miles from the United States. A miscalculation by either side during that face off could have resulted in the civilized world being destroyed by thermonuclear warfare.
By the end of that November I was reassigned from my Stateside post to a British air base in northwestern Germany where I become a nuclear weapons alert duty officer and part of the NATO nuclear strike force defending Western Europe against the Soviet Union and her Warsaw Pact allies.
Today we teeter on the brink of worldwide armed conflict again. Russia’s illegal and war-crime riddled invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s proxy war through its clients Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others against Israel and the United States and China’s threats against Taiwan are just some of the potential trigger points.
Where are today’s equivalents of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini? Look no further than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping (North Korea’s not big enough to include Kim Jong Un) plus a wannabe in this country by the name of Donald John Trump. That Trump has taken total control of what used to be a reasonable conservative political party called the GOP is an existential threat to American democracy. As the Republican Party unquestioningly follows Trump over a Fascist cliff and not only excuses the actions of Vladimir Putin in both Russia and in Ukraine but suppresses knowledge of those actions.
One day in February, 2024, I woke up to the news that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny had died in prison at 47. It was suspected that Putin had finally succeed in poisoning him. The only viable opposition to Putin in Russia, he represented Russia’s only hope for democracy. Putin’s “party” had put a straw man candidate on the ballot to create the semblance of democracy but had to take him off fearing he’d get too many votes. Putin is so “popular” with the Russian people he didn’t dare run against even a straw man candidate. This is who Tommy Tuberville called at the “top of his game” and whom Trump seeks to emulate. He "won" of course. However, since there was no contest, "won" is probably the wrong word.
Unless you want a country in which members of the opposition of a strong man president die in prison from mysterious causes you must not only vote against but vigorously oppose these efforts to replace the Great American Experiment in Constitutional Democracy with a Fascist Autocracy.
Where are the giants of this era is the “Essential Question”. Who is going to save the world from the likes of Putin and Xi. Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine, having refused safe passage from Ukraine and rallied his nation to fight off the invading Russian forces, is possibly one. Another may be Alexei Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya. This courageous woman has stepped into the breach and is taking the leadership role of his movement. But from outside Russia. The third is the present President of the United States, Joe Biden, who, despite his age — or maybe because of it — has infused new life into NATO, revived a flagging U.S. economy, maintained a rational presence in the Middle East, and kept Xi Jinping from absorbing Taiwan into the PRC. He may even go down in history as a great American president. But hopefully not the last to be democratically elected.
Voting and fighting for American democracy hasn’t been this important since 1776.
My parents’ generation fought and defeated Fascist tyranny in Europe. And in Asia at great cost. Both to the country at large and to themselves personally. The following poem and accompanying photos represent a small illustration of that cost. It is why we must never let this happen again.
MARGRATEN
On a rise, monuments.
Beneath, a sea of green.
On that sea, a fleet of white.
Like sails on the sea.
Among them families
of the fallen wander,
searching for their own.
Nederlanders pull weeds,
groom grass.
Caring for the graves of
“The boys who saved us
from the Nazis”.
On the monument above,
these words:
“In Memory of the Valor
and the Sacrifices
which Hallow this Soil.”
Remembered almost 80 years
after Operation Market Garden.
The American Military Cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands.
Oh Leland.
Wonderful writing. Powerful!
And you nailed it this moment in time.
SCARY ...NOT FAR FETCHED, QUITE POSSIBLY A TRUE PREDICTION.