There is an old joke that goes something like this: A guy attends several fundamentalist sermons and begins to believe that the end of the world is near. He eventually becomes so fully convinced that he decides to tell his friends and neighbors. One neighbor is very skeptical and offers to bet on the matter. The novitiate fundamentalist takes the bet: they each wager ten thousand dollars.
The joke needs no punch line, of course. One of the two gamblers will have exceeding difficulty collecting if he should “win”.
We are all at great risk of having others turn away in incredulity if we were to claim something portentous was about to happen or likely to happen. When people disbelieve, they tend to not ask the claimant questions. It needs no pointing out that nobody is inclined to welcome the unwanted, unpleasant answers. No questions, no answers. Ergo, no deliverance avails in direst circumstances. This too is the world we live in.
What if you determined, after evaluating hundreds of historical, recent and contemporary developments in the world, and especially because of several recent trends, that humankind was extremely imperiled? (No, this writing isn’t about global warming.) And what if the matter seemed to possess such direness and urgency that you came hastily to the conclusion that your concerns ought to be unreservedly communicated, and to as many ears as you could find? You’d speak out, wouldn’t you?
However, we are not a bunch of alley cats in post-twilight, sniffing and chomping at anything half-approximating nutriment. Human affairs are not so simple.
Read Elie Wiesel’s nonfiction Night. Therein, acquaint yourself with a stultified man of the Jewish ghettoes of 1944, Moishe Beadle. Moishe “miraculously” escaped from the devilish monsters of the Holocaust to warn others in Wiesel’s hometown of Sighet, in Transylvania. Moishe was crazy, they thought. No one listened. His cries of warning were treated as histrionics.
The Holocaust is history.
After the initial shock and disgust of the first few chapters of Night, I began to think that these unspeakable crimes against humanity surely did not, indeed could not, crop up in just an hour or a day; it took many, many years to sink to such sickening perversity.
Excepted rom the nonfiction book “Night”:
“Everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches…. They shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns.”
“Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire!”
“Do you see the chimney over there? Do you see it? And the flames, do you see them? …Over there, that’s where they will take you…. You will be burned!”
There were, as historians of modern Germany will attest, many tens of thousands of Germans who were sufficiently perceptive to see disaster ahead, and many spoke out, expressing humane and civilized values in the years 1930 to 1933. But beginning in early 1933, free and forthright political expression became exceedingly risk-fraught. And eventually conscientious Germans had to select from a narrow set of unappealing options: one could continue to speak out and run almost certain risk of prison (or worse!); one could leave the country for another, like Denmark; one could shut up and continue to lay low; or, one could raise opportunism and raw, craven practicality to the apogee, and join and don the swastika.
Do I need to remind any of my readers about the values and the methods of Nazism? They were, history candidly vouches, barbaric in the ultimate. The Nazis were, delicately and euphemistically put, “supporters” of all manner of premeditated torture and killing, and on a very wide scale.
We study history to familiarize ourselves with the markers of tyranny and oppression. And our object is to avoid such awfulness. These (tyranny and oppression) do not merely exist, they produce something. Their odious progeny, their ‘babies’, are, in very fewest words, misery and destruction.
In the early months of 2016, a major Republican candidate expresses his wholehearted support for a policy of torturing terror suspects. (He stated years ago that he supports premeditated vengeance killing more ardently than anyone.) And, as late as March 3rd, 2016, the major candidate held steadfastly to his pro-torture policy. But between January and March many high-ranking American officials in intelligence and defense, who were obviously not speaking as political partisans but as experts in their fields, and extremely familiar with precedents and with international law, unambiguously and publicly demurred. Ever since the Nuremberg trials of the mid-1940s, it has been a given in international law and custom that official agents of any government, and military officers and enlisted personnel are obligated not to comply with orders they know to be in violation of international law. The Nazi claim that they were “just following orders” was wholly rejected by the judges at Nuremberg, and the precedent has now established something deep and deeply venerable in world civilization and international law. And experts also pointed out that it was a violation of international law even for the president of the United States to give a torture order.
Apparently the Republican political aspirant did not know all this. I am a nothing puke sitting at his computer in his bedroom, and I know all these things perfectly well! I’ve known about them for many years!
About March 4th, 2016, realizing that his stance was entirely untenable, the Republican did an about face and totally reversed his position, declaring that he would abide by the existing laws.
But what about other laws? What about the laws of cause and effect that we got from the lessons of the Holocaust? What about the causation law that tyranny and oppression do not mysteriously and in teleological style expire or evaporate into nothingness, but produce something? What about tyranny’s baby? Is the fact that law and precedent do not presently allow for certain amoral policies to officially take hold to afford us a confidence that tyranny and oppression no longer have their earmarks – that they no longer yield consequences?
In 2016, this Republican candidate also stated that he supported the idea of Japan and South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons, these peculiarly destructive technological capacities, and joining the nuclear-armed nations of the world. Unlike all Republican and Democratic nominees for president in all history, the radical supports nuclear proliferation.
If all this were not scary enough, if this did not give us something beyond mere “qualms”, there is the concerning emotional temperament of the Republican presidential candidate. If you think that, “Of course this guy is not going to bring about the end of the world, because of course he would not cause such terribleness to be inflicted on his own family,” think about whether the Nazi Fuhrer actually had the ruin of Germany there in his fore-mind as he went about his infamous “statesmanship”. We think that they must be planning what their policies and values ultimately bring about, but it just isn’t so! And likewise, terrorists scurry around the hills and caves completely unaware, idiots that they are, that their enemies can see them perfectly clearly and decide when and how to kill them even in the middle of the darkest night!
Terrorists and tyrants and their ilk do not occupy seats of wisdom and perspicuity, but of ignorance, brutality and blind ambition. Do not think that the mind of tyranny can be swayed by reason, caring discernment, legal concerns or matters of conscience. No! – Tyranny is swayed by the narrow and predictable psychology of the tyrant!
Many months ago, I told my wife and many friends that this 2016 Republican nominee was far more dangerous than any candidate of any major party in my entire lifetime. (And, mind you, I am a person who was so careful and non-extreme and so unhurried in my political assessments as to be quite late in agreeing that George W. Bush was “the worst president ever.” Though I’d always vehemently opposed his politics, I came to this unlovely conclusion in 2008, whereas many presidential historians had come to the conclusion years previous. I had determined that G.W. Bush was “the worst” long after he had been established completely mistaken in his pretext for his 2003 Iraq war; long after he had horrifically mismanaged that war, which invited a protracted, internecine insurgency; long after the pictures from abu Ghraib became so familiar in the international media; long after I had read the book Against All Enemies, which showed the administration’s disdain for all things Clinton, including Bill Clinton’s competent anti-terrorism efforts; long after he had taken a balanced federal budget and exploded it into the stratosphere, doubling the national debt; long after the Hurricane Katrina debacle. However, I confess that my opinions were arrived at before Bush and his administration presided over the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. That, as you might expect, didn’t change my mind about him.)
In mid-July, 2016, a writer named Tony Schwartz spoke live on ABC’s Good Morning America concerning his remarks in a new article about him and his fears of a [Republican radical] presidency appearing in the famous magazine The New Yorker. Schwartz, who became well-acquainted with the radical in the late 1980s, commented that he has been very frightened about the prospect of [the Republican] becoming president, and that he thinks it could mean the end of civilization. Here was somebody far more intimately familiar with this candidate than I ever have been, and he has the same fears that I have.
I honestly believed, and believe, that this Republican, in mishandling foreign policy issues and developments as Commander in Chief, could quite possibly bring about the destruction of civilization. The earmarks are satisfactorily there; I do not need to see his on-the-job performance!
Still, aside from a handful of comments I made about the Republican radical on Facebook and a couple of scant writings about him here in my blog (see “Bald Radicalism”), I have kept rather quiet.
Why?
Well, there is always the risk (or outright certainty) that one will be ridiculed as “partisan”, “obsessive”, “alarmist”, or extreme. No citizen, no pol, pundit, journalist, author or blogger carelessly invites such criticisms. There has also been within me the continuing worry that such a lasting focus of attention on so disturbing a political development may harm my thinking, making me negative, pessimistic, angry, judgmental, and cynical. But, truth be told, despite all my misgivings and supposedly excusable hesitancy, I am more than just a bit anxious about … well, my own anxiety, more than just a little worried that I may worry too much. I am a little bit chicken, I guess. There is the fear of being further socially marginalized, however decency-oriented and honorable one intends one’s words to be. When one arrives at a “run for your life,” “you will be burned,” Chicken Little alarmism, one can expect objections, detractions and the like.
There is, as a direct consequence of this 2016 political anomaly, a decided and probably irreversible cynicism and pessimism that has developed in me. And make no mistake: this development threatens the very purpose of this blog! One shocking remark made by the radical on the social media site Twitter is followed by another and another, and then another still more shocking! The radical once commented that he could “shoot somebody” in broad daylight and not lose a single vote. He surely said this to illustrate how adored he is. But the rest of us realize that, inasmuch as his remark holds any truth, Americans by the tens of millions have abandoned careful and impartial decision-making in their politics for something not just lesser, but unseemly; they want a certain sort of “personality”, a TV personality perhaps, or perhaps something still more consternating: a cult of personality. What can this “not lose a single vote” mean but that his support has lost all ability to reason?
In the last several weeks, the news media has shared the results of recent opinion surveys, and sometimes the polls reveal that the election seems very close, that it looks like it is possibly going to be “a horse race.”
Indeed, it is! The current contest does not appear to be between anything resembling humans at all!
There is the eerily apropos line the Joker character speaks in the Hollywood movie The Dark Knight. He says to Batman, “There’s no going back. You’ve changed things – forever!”
Even if the Democratic candidate should win in November, most any dispassionate adult, intelligent and circumspect of mind, must realize and cannot ignore that in 2016 Americans sped the dratted precipice of doom.
Is this really a threat to the existence of humanity? Are we talking about the end of the world? I have honestly worried for decades that any and all presidents are not up to the responsibility of keeping nukes in their silos. Anything can happen at any time, and we’re expecting flawed mortals to always make the unimpugnable decisions of God. A radical in the White House is unthinkable!
Is this the end of the world?
I have opinions in this matter, and my opinions are fears.
What do I fear? And why do I think anybody else should?
Tweet-tweet. A little birdie told me.
And, if you were paying attention, I told you!