Maine Writer: Trump #theformerguy is parroting subversive Nazi communications techniques

Echo opinion letter published in Big Rapids News in Michigan: Reading the Trump indictment

So, yet another indictment against #theformerguy aka "the former president" is now issued. (Maine Writer- I've seriously lost count❗)

Unsurprisingly, the response from the tRump campaign claims: “The lawlessness of these persecutions about Trump and his supporters are reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.”

In his very brief remarks following the release of the indictment, Special Counsel Jack Smith strongly urged the American public to read the indictment for themselves and I have followed his advice. Despite the pushback from the former president and his allies that this indictment abridges the provisions of the First Amendment, at the very outset the indictment (paragraph 3) concedes Trump had “a right to speak publicly about the election, and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” Contested “free speech” is not what this indictment is about, instead it’s about illegal actions taken to undermine the foundations of our cherished democratic processes.

But the indictment’s acknowledgement that “falsely claiming” untrue facts falls within the realm of permissible speech (and therefore holds the former president harmless, as a point of law), irked me because doesn’t Exodus 20:16 exhort the Faithful: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?” But then, this indictment is headed for trial in an American court of law, not accountability to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.

In the late 90’s Stephen Carter published “Civility” a book sensibly grounded in day-to-day situations in which citizens of a polarized society find themselves. Discussing tolerance he pointedly notes: “Civility does not require a suspension of moral judgment and must not make us reluctant to impose moral judgments on each other.” And he adds, “A society that refuses to speak the language of morality is more fearful than free.”

The Toronto Star systematically gathered, researched and published untrue and misleading statements uttered by the former president during his term of office. One can still view them online under the banner “The first 5,276 false things Donald Trump said as U.S. president.” It is a matter of fact that for millions of Americans who supported him then and for the millions who support him now, the president’s untrue statements, repeated over and over again despite evidence to the contrary, engendered no moral outrage, even by so-called Evangelicals.

But since the former president has raised the specter of Nazi Germany of the ‘30s, I pulled William Shirer’s classic “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” off my bookshelf.

Speaking to the astoundingly successful uses to which radio and motion pictures were put by Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda, Shire admitted: “I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though I…had daily access to foreign newspapers…and listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts…a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it… Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation…I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes, one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”