Amidst the tyranny among us, let us not forget the terrible toll that SARS-COV-2 is having on the world and the United States. Click on the link for the most current data and information.
Lesson 18: Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
“Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” 2017.
Terror management. Remember that this book was written in 2017 before the most recent former president had unleashed his terror campaign on the United States and the world. In this 21st Century case, which terror event are we referring to? Take your pick. Was it taking children away from their parents at the southern border? Was it the Naval Air Station Pensacola attack that left three sailors dead? Was it the attack on the Capitol on January 6? Was it the diabolical mishandling of the Coronavirus Pandemic that has killed nearly a half million Americans to date and over 2,400,000 people worldwide? Threats of violence to his political opponents?
Up until the burning of the Reichstag, one of the homes of legislative power in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s party gained power mainly through the democratic process. But the fire changed everything. Seeing the burning building, Hitler said, “The fire is just the beginning. There will be no mercy now. Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”
On February 28, 1933, a day after the fire, Hitler implemented a decree suspending the rights of all German citizens. They could now legally be “preventively detained.” By claiming that the fire had been set by enemies to the German state, Hitler and the Nazis won big in the parliamentary elections of March 5. Opposition party members were starting to be rounded up and placed in detention centers. On March 23, an “enabling act” was passed by the parliament which gave Hitler the power to rule by decree.
The only thing that ended this period of martial law/state of emergency was the end of the Second World War which the Germans lost to the Allies. Hitler had taken an act of terror and used it to create a governmental regime that resulted in the deaths of millions of people.
In the 2000’s, Russia’s Vladimir Putin used a series of terrorist events, real, provoked, imaginary and questionable, to eliminate private television outlets and regional governorships thus consolidating his power and influence on the country. Read the minority staff report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 10, 2018 that I have linked above. The most recent former president and Mr. Putin’s first telephone call was reported as including that the two men “shared the opinion that it is necessary to join forces against the common enemy number one: international terrorism and extremism.”
I find it interesting that there was no mention of domestic terrorism in this conversation. Perhaps you can get further details by reading the Foreign Relations Committee Report referred to above as to why that area of terrorism was omitted from the conversation.
Snyder writes, “For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.”
The House of Representatives voted to impeach the former president, but the Senate refused to convict him of inciting an insurrection against the United States of America. The House acted quickly to resist the terror, the Senate failed yesterday to resist the terror. He is not longer in office, but the Senate just devoted more of my retirement to resisting tyranny. I’m tired of this resistance.
But, all I need to do to regain my commitment to resist tyranny is to look at the photo of my 21 year-old father in uniform as he prepared to serve his country, our country with the Army Air Corps in Burma during the Second World War.
The Nazi era political thinker and philosopher Hannah Arendt previously cited by Dr. Snyder in his book, wrote after the Reichstag fire, “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.”
Senators may have lacked the courage to act. But that’s not you. Take the actions that you are capable of taking and remember
January 6, 2020.