To get the public to go along with the kind of radical social change that strips people of rights and privileges — and, eventually, their wealth — requires a shock to the political system which can then be exploited by a cynical political leader, his party, and their media allies.
In the second month of his reign, for example, Hitler had his Reichstag Fire, which pushed the German Parliament to pass “emergency” laws expanding his executive power and limiting the reach of parliament and the rights of average people. It ended the rights of assembly, freedom of speech and the press, protections against unlawful search and seizure, and gave him the power to designate persons and organizations as terrorists by decree.
Somewhat similarly, George W. Bush had 9/11 during his first year, which enabled him to push through the PATRIOT Act and other laws that expanded our government’s ability to surveil Americans, engage in warrantless wiretaps, access personal records, and monitor financial transactions. Bush also established Guantánamo Bay as a center to illegally detain, torture, and even murder people without due process, did the same with multiple “black sites” around the world, and used 9/11 to falsely justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now it looks like Trump and his rightwing buddies are trying to do the same with the MAGA terror attack in Las Vegas and the American citizen and military veteran who drove his truck into a crowd in New Orleans. Republicans were all over the Sunday shows this past weekend arguing that these events mean “the southern border is wide open” and thus the Senate should quickly confirm Trump’s most radical nominees for his cabinet.
History proves it’s vital that Senators push back against the rush to judgement now being demanded by Trump and his enablers. This is exactly the sort of environment — mass violence being exploited with lies — which can turn otherwise normal people into monsters who then seize control and ultimately destroy nations from within.
Speaking specifically to Trump’s habit of spinning lies that fall on average people like an evil spell, historian and Nazi expert Richard Evans has just published a new book, Hitler’s People.
In it, he dispels the myth that the senior leadership of the Third Reich were “a group of psychopaths, a gang of criminals, a collection of outsiders, even a modern version of the most deranged and destructive Emperors of Ancient Rome and their courts.”
Instead, Evans — the acclaimed author of a famous trilogy about the Nazi era and Hitler’s rise to power — notes that for most of the senior leaders of the Third Reich the Nazi Party restored to them personal status and privilege they’d lost during the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s.
“As individuals, the perpetrators whose lives are recounted in this book were not psychopaths; nor were they deranged, or perverted, or insane, despite the portrayal of many of them as such in the media and the historical literature. …
“In most of their life, they were completely normal by the standards of the day. They came overwhelmingly from a middle-class background; there was not a single manual labourer among them. Many of them shared the conventional cultural attributes of the German bourgeoisie, were well-read, or played a musical instrument with some proficiency, or painted, or wrote fiction or poetry.”
Monsters rarely start out as monsters, and almost never proclaim themselves as such. They are made, to a large extent, by circumstance and opportunity, and — most critically — a charismatic leader who draws them into what is essentially a political cult with heavy religious and reactionary cultural tinges.
Once deeply indoctrinated into the cult, these “normal Germans” gave vent to the brutality we appear to have inherited from a common ancestor with our chimp cousins, who also routinely engage — when properly provoked and led by an alpha male — in sadistic violence.
“The Nazi regime created a framework that encouraged its followers, especially during the war, to commit acts that would have been unimaginable in other circumstances. The regime first dehumanized whole categories of people, including the mentally ill and handicapped, Slavs, Gypsies, petty criminals, the ‘asocial’ and the ‘work-shy’, and above all, of course, Jews, then ‘placed at the disposal of its followers means of violence normally beyond the reach of most people’.
“Upending the moral restraints common to all human societies in normal times, the regime made murder, cruelty, even sadism and torture legitimate, even desirable, attributes of those who worked for it.”
Expressing concern for America when truth becomes disposable in the service of a charismatic and vengeful leader, Evans notes in his book’s introduction:
“The emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians who do not care whether what they are saying is true, and the massive growth of the internet and social media, have fostered a much more widespread uncertainty about truth, coupled with a disdain for evidence-based statements and the work of scholars and experts.”
This is what, he confesses, caused him to go back and re-examine his famous and widely-read previous works about the Nazis, saying bluntly that today’s American “unscrupulous populist politicians” have “prompted reflections on my earlier work” and “provided the opportunity to revisit and in some cases reconsider the conclusions I reached in it.”
And here we stand on the verge of something similar in America.
Trump and many of his followers are engaging in both direct and inferential lies to convince Americans that the terror incidents in Las Vegas and New Orleans were connected to brown people crossing our southern border, thus justifying a massive emergency response that ignores the Bill of Rights.
Even after Fox News corrected the record, noting that the terrorist in New Orleans was an American citizen and ten-year military veteran, Trump doubled down on his lie, writing on Truth Social:
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. … What he [Biden] and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA.”
This is the rhetoric of hate and radicalization that leads to atrocities, and the most dangerous aspect of it all is that the American media and most politicians, by and large, refuse to identify it as such. Instead, they treat it as “Trump being Trump” or some other such nonsense. To make matters even worse, Republicans are largely silent in the face of Trump’s promise to pardon the people who sent over 170 police officers to the hospital, killing four of them.
In fact, history repeatedly tells us that unscrupulous politicians using the language of victimhood and depersonalization of “the other” have the ability to turn democratic nations and civilized people into monsters. And, most critically, people who’ve been indoctrinated this way by a psychopathic, lying leader often don’t, at the time, even realize the horror of the crimes they’ve either sanctioned or committed.
It’s like a form of temporary insanity.
We saw this in the echoes of Abu Ghraib, when thousands of American soldiers and civilian contractors — under the spell of Bush’s and Cheney’s lies — routinely committed torture and murder, then returned to slip back into polite society. Were it not for worldwide exposure and condemnation that put the Bush administration back on its heels, America might still be behaving like a rogue state.
Similarly, under the spell of a violent rightwing political cult and charismatic leader, Evans writes, even educated, middle-class men and women fail to realize how deeply they’ve fallen into the role of monster.
“It is none the less striking how Nazis and other perpetrators, in the army or the professions or the world of business, failed after the war to realize that they had committed gross violations of human decency and morality or, if they were put on trial, understand why they were in the dock.
“Many if not most of them knew, like Himmler in his Posen speech of 1942, that they were breaking the legal and moral norms accepted by most societies across the globe, but like him, they felt deeply that they were doing this in the service of a higher necessity – the future of the human race and its protection from the evil machinations of the Jews.”
The lies of the Bush administration caused Americans to commit obscene war crimes. The lies of Trump and his Republican enablers, accusing immigrants and queer people of committing horrific crimes against “innocent civilians and children,” threaten to provoke something even worse.
Trump‘s whitewashing of the murderous crimes committed on January 6th in his name — particularly if he follows through with his pardons — is normalizing in advance violent criminal behavior in the service of raw and unaccountable power for one man.
There are a few voices proclaiming the dangers of the path Trump has laid before us: Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Heather Cox Richardson, Jim Stewartson, Heidi Siegmund Cuda, Teddy Wilson, Sabrina Haake, Anne Applebaum, etc. And a few voices in the media — Ali Velshi, Rachel Maddow, and Joy Reid in particular — have tried to awaken their viewers.
This must now become the work of the mainstream media more generally, and the Democratic Party specifically.
Once the mass deportations, retributive arrests, lawsuits, and states of emergency are established it may well be too late to stop a larger national MAGA onslaught driven by fear, rage, and hate and enabled by the awesome police power of the federal and Red-state governments.
The time for politicians, reporters, and people of good faith and conscience to stand up and speak out, to take a stand against Trump’s lies and normalizing political violence, is now.
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