Donald Trump and maga Republicans are funding ICE fascist operations without accountability! Innocent people are detained.

Frictionless fascism: Technologies being used for immigration enforcement take human agency and discernment out of the equation.

#ICEOut❗ (Maine Writer- this was a painful opinion for me to include in my blog. Reading this brought me to tears. Yet, I thank Mr. Coleman for having the courage to write this opinion based on his own experiences. Warning⚠️❗ Fascism has no limits to how much cruelty is dispensed for the purpose of seizing and maintaining power.)

Flynn Coleman is a human rights attorney and author of “A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are.” Echo opinion published in the Boston Glob by Flynn Coleman.

One weekend in January, two boys stood quivering at Mercado Central, a Minneapolis market. Their mother had dropped them off for haircuts and walked across the street to cash a check, but she didn’t return. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took her. The boys tried to find her in the detention database but couldn’t because they didn’t know her birthdate. The agents who took her didn’t need it.

This is how ICE now operates: Mobile Fortify — a facial recognition app it deploys — can verify her identity nearly instantly. The technology makes detention possible with nothing more than what a camera captures. The system already had what it wanted. And she was gone.

In my time documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity at the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, I learned that dehumanization requires infrastructure. 

In Rwanda, it took months of radio broadcasts to incite neighbors to kill neighbors. At roadblocks across the country, Hutu militias checked identity cards — Tutsi or Hutu — and made decisions about who would live or die. This took weeks. Even then, some refused to take part. Some hid Tutsis in their homes, risking their own lives. Human beings, even trained for atrocity, sometimes hesitated. 

Violence and dehumanization have always been limited by human friction — the pause before pulling a trigger, the moment when someone looks into another person’s eyes and cannot do the worst thing.

Mobile Fortify needs only seconds to scan a face. That’s the innovation.

This is what fascism without friction looks like. Adolf Hitler needed years of rallies, screaming himself hoarse to convince crowds, a steady drumbeat of dehumanization. 

Benito Mussolini needed propaganda campaigns. Even then, enforcement depended on human beings making decisions at every checkpoint. Mobile Fortify needs mere moments. Point your phone. The algorithm decides. The agent executes. No hesitation. No pause.

Mobile Fortify is a smartphone app that compares faces with more than 200 million photos, without individualized warrants, without meaningful consent, and — according to Department of Homeland Security documents — without any practical mechanism for refusal. Representative Bennie Thompson says ICE treats a biometric match as “definitive” — agents can ignore birth certificates if the app says otherwise. When the machine’s word contradicts yours, the machine wins.

The boys at Mercado Central could not find their mother. 😢

In fact, the government has billions of dollars in surveillance infrastructure. That power asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s the architecture. Technology determines who can challenge decisions, who can trace targeting, who can find their parents. The algorithm designed the cage. The children cannot see the bars.

On Jan. 14, in Robbinsdale, Minn., another parent stood at a bus stop with their child, waiting for the school bus. ICE detained the parent in front of the child, in front of a bus full of elementary students. The child went to school that day not knowing if their parent would come home. The children on that bus learned what power looks like now: automated, inescapable.

America didn’t invent this template for making dehumanization systematic. China pioneered algorithmic targeting of Uyghurs in 2017. Iran deployed facial recognition for hijab enforcement. Russia built digital surveillance states. But when the United States adopts these tactics at home, it legitimizes them globally. Mobile Fortify doesn’t break new ground — it normalizes the playbook. What was once the domain of acknowledged autocrats becomes standard democratic practice.

The masked agents who surged into Minnesota have begun their retreat. The algorithmic infrastructure remains. Mobile Fortify still scans faces in seconds. Surveillance drones still circle neighborhoods. Administrative subpoenas (requiring no judge, no warrant 😢) still demand digital records — Google accounts, Discord metadata, Social Security numbers — often within hours. The facial recognition databases still hold 200 million images. 

The tech industry is spending hundreds of millions to ensure no regulation follows, building a political war chest to keep violence frictionless. The agents may withdraw. The algorithms never do.

Hundreds of children remain in detention facilities across the country. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago, detained in Dilley, Texas, wrote: “I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

Frictionless fascism removes the last human barrier to atrocity: the pause — the moment one’s conscience might emerge from the depths. Even soldiers trained for systematic violence sometimes refuse orders. Even forces prepared for ethnic cleansing sometimes let people through. The algorithm never refuses. Never hesitates. Never witnesses. It doesn’t need years of propaganda or to convince anyone to hate. Doesn’t need belief, consent, or even your attention. It just needs a face to scan.

Donald Trump must be removed from office because he is beyond being scary as executive orders are driven by his obsession with fascism

A Show of Force by Fintan O’Toole*

Published in the New York Review of Books

Maine Writer prologue:  "Scary" has become normalized by Trumpian autocratic behavior. Thankfully, journalists like Fintan O'Toole is not letting Trump get away with fascist behavior without calling it what it is- "dangerous".  ⚠️

A man protesting against raids conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement while National Guard troops stand outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles, June 8, 2025

What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.

Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.

In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”

Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the BLM protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.

On June 6 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted what US district judge Charles Breyer cited as “several locations in downtown LA and its immediate surroundings” that were “known to have significant migrant populations and labor-intensive industries.” They arrested forty-four working people, including some day laborers gathered outside two Home Depot stores, and employees of an Ambiance Apparel warehouse in the Fashion District.

On June 7, by which time only around a dozen arrests had been made at protests against these roundups, Trump issued a memorandum to the secretary of defense, attorney general, and secretary of homeland security declaring that these demonstrations “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He authorized his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, to take federal control of the California National Guard and to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” By June 9, around 1,700 National Guard soldiers and seven hundred US Marines had been deployed to Los Angeles, even though both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had made clear that they did not require additional resources to manage the protests or suppress the outbreaks of looting and vandalism that occurred on their margins. As Breyer emphasized in his ruling that Trump’s federalization of the National Guard was “dangerous” and illegal, “There can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully.”

Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles thus had no military purpose. It can best be thought of as a counterdemonstration. For Trump, those who protest against him are “paid troublemakers, agitators, and insurrectionists.” He cannot imagine large-scale dissent as anything other than a professionally organized conspiracy. The US Army, by this logic, is his own professionally organized crowd. It must be seen on the streets to demonstrate his personal power. That military presence in turn redefines peaceful protesters as enemies of the United States. They cease to be citizens exercising constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly and become outlaws and aliens.

Moreover, Trump’s lawyers pleaded in court that protesters need not engage in rebellion to be rebels. Breyer noted in his ruling (which was overturned on appeal) that “in a short paragraph, Defendants suggest that even if there was no rebellion that would justify federalizing the National Guard, there was still a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” The intent could hardly be clearer. So long as Trump has political opponents, their dissent alone makes the danger of rebellion timeless and ubiquitous. What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time. This is a form of wish fulfillment that has deep roots in his psyche.

Everything in Trumpworld happens twice—the first time as performance and the second as reality. In The Art of the Deal (1987), the best seller that formed his personal creation myth, Trump, who dodged the draft for the Vietnam War because of “bone spurs,” included three photographs of himself in military uniform. The attire is that of a dashing officer in some Ruritanian operetta rather than of a soldier in the US Army. In the first two pictures, taken in 1964, to mark his high school graduation from the New York Military Academy, he is the Student Prince. We see him gloriously arrayed in a tall parade hat with a feather plume and a chin strap, a waist-length jacket with rows of brass buttons crossed by a white shoulder belt and adorned with elaborate epaulets and decals, white gloves, and a ceremonial saber. He is a toy soldier in a make-believe army.

But in the third photo he is leading a detachment of armed and uniformed young men on the streets of an American city. Trump is at the head of his prep school’s contingent, marching up Fifth Avenue in New York’s Columbus Day Parade of 1963, a year in which there were already over 16,000 US troops in Vietnam. (Remarkably, his bone spurs do not seem to have inhibited his ability to march in step.) His own caption for the photo is bizarre: “This was my first real glimpse of prime Fifth Avenue property.” He seems at once to be occupying New York and eyeing opportunities in the conquered territory.

Yet Trump came to believe that this playacting made him a real soldier. Michael D’Antonio, in his biography Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015), reported that Trump
insisted that he had actually known military life.

In a separate conversation he said, “I always thought I was in the military.” He said that in prep school he received more military training than most actual soldiers did, and he had been required to live under the command of men…who had been real officers and soldiers. “I felt like I was in the military in a true sense.”

Francisco Franco (1892-1975)-Francoist dictatorship

Here we may perhaps discern the origins of Trump’s extraordinary ability to eliminate the difference between performance and reality. The archetypal twentieth-century dictators—Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet—had been or remained soldiers. Trump was a soldier “in a true sense,” by which he means presumably that a simulacrum of military masculinity is purer than the dirty reality of combat—war without tears.

Until, that is, the spectacle becomes the reality. Trump’s jokes become deadly serious, his provocative rhetoric becomes violent provocation—and his Ruritanian fantasy becomes America’s nightmare. This is what happened on January 6, 2021. Trump’s speech to his supporters before the invasion of the Capitol was that of a general firing his troops up for battle: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” But Trump did not then actually lead his storm troopers anywhere, and according to his apologists, “fight like hell” was not supposed to be taken literally. Trump’s fascistic militarism retained its performative quality and remained suspended between the playacting war games of his youth and the actual violence he frequently threatens, as commander-in-chief of the world’s most potent army, to unleash. It is thus entirely apt that his big moves toward military dictatorship in recent weeks have been a compound of show business and terror.

Trump’s grand triumphal-march-cum-birthday-party in Washington on June 14 was as much a pageant as a parade: a thousand of the participating troops were dressed in costumes rented from the Motion Picture Costume Company, which describes itself as “a leading supplier of civilian, military, and police wardrobe to the motion picture industry.” The versions of history being played out by the troops depended on the availability of suitable outfits. According to USA Today, “The Army eliminated the War of 1812 and Spanish-American War from the parade after running into trouble with the costuming process.”

The Washington jamboree was thus a show of force in which the show was at least as salient as the force. But the phrase had a parallel and much darker meaning on the streets of Los Angeles. That was a very different kind of costume drama: the dressing up of peaceful protest and some vandalism as a war so that, in Trump’s words, his soldiers could “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.” This too was make-believe, and it too was a performance. 

As California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, put it, “The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles—not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.” This spectacle, though, was not meant to entertain. It was a war movie with real guns.

Trump’s militarism remains at the meta stage, which is to say it is still primarily about language and form. The word game he is playing is one in which “rebellion” and “insurrection” are stripped of all their past meanings so that they can be forced into any garb he chooses. This is a further aspect of the drive toward absolute power. As Humpty Dumpty replies when Alice objects to his claim that a word means “just what I choose it to mean,” “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.” Milley’s rebuke of May 2020—pointing out that Lincoln was the president who faced a real insurrection—was a challenge to Trump’s position as master of meanings. In the second term, there is no place for such insolence.

On June 10, just after he sent the troops into Los Angeles, Trump boasted of rehabilitating the official memory of leaders of that insurrection. Addressing what was in effect a political rally at Fort Bragg, he told uniformed soldiers not only that he had given the base back its original name (it once honored the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, then was renamed Fort Liberty, and under the new dispensation is named after the World War II paratrooper Roland Bragg) but that “we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.” It is another word game: officially the military heroes being honored with the latest renamings just happen to have the same surnames as famous Confederate insurrectionists. The refurbished titles of these bases are thus elaborate puns. In this linguistic burlesque it is not only names that mean whatever Trump wants them to mean. It is also the actual history of rebellion against the United States. He has dropped it into a never-never land where it is both remembered as heroic and forgotten as unspeakable—much, of course, like January 6.

Meanwhile, restoring these Confederate designations obliterates the names that replaced them in 2023, the names of women and people of color: Charity Adams, Mary Edwards Walker, Richard Cavazos, William Henry Johnson. This too has purpose. For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend.

Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” It follows that women and Black men who have risen up the ranks of the army are the good soldier’s nemesis: “A black or female soldier who gets promoted, primarily because of the color of their skin or the genitalia between their legs—gets people killed.”

While Hegseth pays lip service to racial equality in the army (“There is no black and white in our ranks. We are all green”), elsewhere in his book he falsely implies that Joe Biden’s appointment of the air force general Charles Q. Brown Jr. to succeed Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a diversity hire: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.” This hardly qualifies as racist dog-whistling—the pitch is too low and too brazenly loud. Trump duly fired Brown, an unmistakable overture to the much larger project.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” The military is to be reborn as its true self: the embodiment of a nation of red-blooded American men. 

What that means for abnormal Americans of impure blood, does not have to be spelled out.

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained or loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. In Trump's (staged for television) Fort Bragg speech, Trump invited the troops to see protesters in Los Angeles as invaders: “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are.” But what was happening in LA was, he claimed, even worse than an armed incursion:

Not only are these service members defending the honest citizens of California, they’re also defending our republic itself, and they are heroes, they’re in there, they’re heroes. They’re fighting for us, they’re stopping an invasion just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways, it’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform because you don’t know exactly who they are.

If the army doesn’t know exactly who “they” are, it has to be told. Trump reminded the troops that their purpose is to spread fear: “For our adversaries, there is no greater fear than the United States Army.” Its job now is to spread that fear to an ununiformed and thus unknowable mass of internal enemies. Just as Trump transforms actual rebellion into the vague but omnipresent “danger of a rebellion,” he makes the invading army invisible, amorphous, and fluid. Traditional military doctrine demands a clear understanding of the nature of the threat and the shape of the opposing forces. Contrariwise, in the Trump doctrine the threat must be as nebulous as possible, and the opposing forces must be formless. Thus only the commander-in-chief can say at any given time what they are. The enemy the army must learn to face is one that he, and he alone, can conjure.

In this Trump is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience. New lieutenants and sergeants are (for now at least) issued a document called The Army: A Primer to Our Profession of Arms. Its prohibition on any appearance of partisanship is emphatic:

The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too. Being nonpartisan means not favoring any specific political party or group. Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively. When representing the Army or wearing the uniform, you must behave in a nonpartisan way too.

At Fort Bragg, Trump incited the uniformed soldiers arrayed behind him to boo the press and laugh at his political opponents, thus disobeying those prohibitions, while a pop-up shop on the base sold MAGA-branded clothing and jewelry and faux credit cards labeled “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD: TRUMPS EVERYTHING.” This organized insubordination had an obvious point: soldiers must transfer their obedience from the army and the Constitution to Trump himself.

The manual makes clear to soldiers that they should not obey illegal orders:

When you believe you are being given an illegal order, you should take further action—do your homework, seek counsel, and approach your leaders for clarification. If this fails or you know that what you are being asked to do is unlawful, then it becomes your duty to disobey and to follow the law, no matter how resolute your superiors’ stance.

In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America.

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued last year. (July 2025)

Remembering the failed policy of appeasement and the rise of Fascism

Echo essay by Roger Peace, published in the History News Network electronic magazine at this site here.

The US response to the Holocaust was part of a longer pattern of trying and failing to appease Fascism.

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945

The six-hour documentary film on the U.S. and the Holocaust produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein has many merits. It vividly portrays and personalizes the horrors and inhumanity of the Nazi murder machine, examines the diversity of responses within the United States, and highlights State Department’s resistance to allowing more Jewish refugees into the country. Inspired by an exhibition of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the film reflects the museum’s extraordinary cache of recorded interviews and resources.

Most importantly, it teaches the right lessons. When asked what she hoped people would gain from viewing the film, Botstein, the child of Jewish refugees on her father’s side, said, “I hope they learn something and have conversations about their role in a democratic society and their responsibilities to fellow human beings. 

To be kind to your neighbor, to think about what you would do and what you should do when things get hard and complicated. How can we work together?”

Yet I also agree with critic Martin Ostrow, the director of a previous PBS film on America’s response to the Holocaust aired in 1994, that Burns and company treated President Franklin D. Roosevelt with kid gloves. “It's a shame,” wrote Ostrow, “the series brings nothing new to understanding Roosevelt’s troubling decisions and motivations.”

To understand the Roosevelt administration’s motivations and actions – or non-actions – one has to examine the U.S. and British policy of appeasement toward fascist states during the 1920s and 1930s. This larger story has been explored by a number of scholars, including Arnold Offner in American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (1969), David Schmitz in Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorship, 1921-1963 (1999), Jacques Pauwels in Big Business and Hitler (2017), and Jonathan Haslam, The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (2021).

Essentially, the policy of appeasement was based on the view that communism constituted a mortal threat to Western society, whereas fascism (!) was acceptable (?), if not a positive antidote to communism. 

Benito Mullolini (1883-1945) the Italian dictator, was Europe’s first 20th-century fascist dictator

Indeed, when Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, U.S. officials welcomed his National Fascist Party as a force for stability and a bulwark against Bolshevism (communism). 

“In developing American policy,” writes Schmitz, “officials in Washington were mainly influenced by Mussolini’s establishment of a stable, noncommunist government that welcomed American trade and investments.” This view, in turn, “allowed American officials to ignore Mussolini’s brutal repression of all opposition groups, destruction of Italy’s constitutional government, and rule by violence.”

Conservative British leader Winston Churchill was of a similar mind. Following a meeting with Mussolini in Rome in January 1927, Churchill praised the dictator at a press conference, saying, “If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” (OMG!)

Mussolini provided the role model for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Upon Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, the American ambassador to Germany, Frederic Sackett, wrote, “From the standpoint of stable political conditions, it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power.”

In 1937, after more than four years of Nazi dictatorial rule and anti-Jewish policies and propaganda, the U.S. State Department continued to maintain that fascist-type governments were compatible with U.S. interests, free trade, and the international order. 

A February 1937, report written by the department’s European Division defined fascism as a respectable movement of the propertied classes aimed at defending the existing order and private property against Bolshevism. Where fascism was in power, the authors judged that “it must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left.” The goal of the United States, as such, was to ensure that Germany would recover economically. Should the economy falter, they warned, “war is possible, if not probable.”

Some members of the U.S. diplomatic corps pushed in the opposite direction. Most prescient was George Messersmith. He had been in the Foreign Service since 1914 and served as the consul general in Berlin from 1930 to April 1934 before becoming minister to Austria. In March 1934, he strongly advised that the U.S. not renew the major trade agreement with Germany, the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Consular Rights, ratified in 1925, which was due to expire in 1935.

Messersmith argued that the treaty would only spur German rearmament. He pointed out that the long-range “mail planes” recently purchased by Germany were “easily convertible to bombers.” Contrary to Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s benefic view of international trade, he wrote in May 1934 that “a government with really peaceable intentions does not produce armaments, train its people in military exercises, and create such an extraordinary spirit in the schools, even among the very young.” Rather than build up the German economy, Messersmith hoped that economic instability would bring down the Hitler regime.

Disregarding Messersmith’s pleas, a special State Department committee recommended approval of the trade treaty, noting that trade warfare would mean the loss of nearly one billion dollars in American investments. The U.S. and Germany renewed the treaty in June 1935, which in turn enabled U.S. corporations to trade and invest in Germany without restriction. Messersmith lamented in 1936 that American firms were allowing their capital to be “used for the maintenance of the German industrial program and in some important directions for German rearmament, which is obviously not intended for defensive but for aggressive measures.” American business leaders, he added, “are not blind to all of this.”

U.S. business investments in Germany were substantial when Hitler took over in 1933, and continued to grow thereafter. “Perhaps the Germans could have assembled vehicles and airplanes without American assistance,” writes Pauwels. “But Germany desperately lacked strategic raw materials, such as rubber and oil, which were needed to fight a war predicated on mobility and speed. American corporations came to the rescue.”

As Nazi repression and militarization proceeded, U.S. corporate leaders faced the choice of whether to continue their operations in Germany or pull up stakes and take a financial loss. Virtually all remained. The reigning philosophy in Corporate America was expressed by Alfred Sloan, Jr., chairman of the General Motors board of directors, in a letter to a stockholder in April 1939: “According to my belief . . . an international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the country in which it is operating.”

Ambassador William Dodd in Berlin criticized this economic appeasement. He wrote to President Roosevelt on October 19, 1936: “At the present moment more than a hundred American corporations have subsidiaries here or cooperative understandings. The DuPonts have three allies in Germany that are aiding in the armaments business. Their chief ally is the I. G. Farben Company, a part of the Government which gives 200,000 marks a year to one propaganda operation on American opinion.” Dodd also noted the investments of Standard Oil, International Harvester, and General Motors in German rearmament.

Another mark of appeasement was Roosevelt’s appointment of Hugh R. Wilson to replace Dodd. Ambassador Dodd had been a thorn in the side of the Nazi regime, avoiding Nazi celebratory events and beseeching the Roosevelt administration to protest Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, albeit to no avail. Wilson, during his first meeting with Hitler on March 3, 1938, complimented the dictator as “a man who had pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity which they now enjoyed,” according to his own account. Eight days after the meeting, German troops marched into Austria.

German troops march into Austria on March 11-13, 1938.

U.S. diplomatic and economic appeasement carried over into the muted U.S. responses to Jewish repression as well as the establishment of strict immigration quotas. On June 16, 1933, Roosevelt effectively established his administration’s policy with respect to Jewish persecution in Germany in a missive to Dodd in Berlin: “The German authorities are treating Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a government affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to have second thoughts about the policy of appeasement in 1937. In February, he questioned a State Department report which concluded that “economic appeasement should prove to be the surest route to world peace.” In May, he wrote in a letter to William Phillips, ambassador to Italy, saying that the “more I study the situation, the more I am convinced that an economic approach to peace is a pretty weak reed for Europe to lean on. It may postpone war but how can it avert war in the long run if the armament process [in Germany] continues at its present pace – or even at a slower pace?”

Britain hoped to avoid war with Germany in the 1930s- Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (b. 1869-d. 1940) failed in his attempted diplomacy.

The U.S. and Great Britain abandoned the policy of appeasement, but only after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Thereafter, the policy became anathema*. During the war, the U.S. aligned with the communist Soviet Union and fought against Germany and Italy, thus reversing its prewar orientation. The foreign policy establishment, meanwhile, blamed its abandoned appeasement policy on the antiwar movement rather than its own anti-communist vendetta – which it revived after the war.

“During the Second World War, millions of Americans fought and sacrificed to defeat fascism,” writes Lynn Novick, “but even after we began to understand the scope and scale of what was happening to the Jewish people of Europe, our response was inadequate and deeply flawed.”

Indeed, it was inadequate in a number of dimensions. The Roosevelt administration could have prevented U.S. corporations from aiding the Nazi state, particularly in rearmament. It could have united with the Soviet Union early on in opposing German expansionism. It could have spoken out strongly against Germany’s human rights abuses and opened the doors of immigration wider, even on a temporary basis, fulfilling the promise set in the bronze base of the Statue of Liberty, written by Jewish immigration activist Emma Lazarus in 1883, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

*Anathema- something or someone that one vehemently dislikes.

Steve Bannon- failed in the military, flopped in government and will surely blunder in Italy!

Echo report by Ben Munster published in the May 31, 2021, The New Yorker:

Maine Writer comment: Bannon (ugh!) irony- A man who failed as a Navy officer and made a name for himself by supporting conspiracy theories perpetrated by #FormerGuy, now wants to build a right wing Nazi style academy in Italy!?!  Obviously, Bannon does not read. There is zero, "Nein!" ie. "no", support among Italians for anything that resembles Facism, Mussoliniism, right wing revanchism* and the evils of Nazism. 

Predappio, Italy crypt Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)

 

Suggested reading list for Bannon. If he can't read, then somebody must read these to him:

• The Italian Front: Invasion of Sicily, Salerno, Monte Cassino, Anzio, Rome, Gothic Line (Campaigns of World War II), by Michael B. Haskew.
• Beneath A Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan
• The Vatican Pimpernel: The World War II Exploits of the Monsignor Who Saved Over 6,500 Lives by Brian Fleming
• The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

The Last Stand at Steve Bannon’s “Gladiator School”

The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West is trying to stave off eviction from Trisulti, an eight-hundred-year-old monastery outside Rome, where its founder hopes to offer courses like “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare.”  By Ben Munster

At a café in a mountain town east of Rome, Benjamin Harnwell was wondering which of the five thousand applicants to his right-wing “gladiator school” he could introduce to a reporter without embarrassment. He thought of four, and dialled one up. “A journalist is looking to speak to some students,” he said into the phone, “and I don’t want him to wind up talking to some skinhead.” He listened, a religious medal rattling against his chest, his slicked-back hair shining. Harnwell hung up, saying that he’d been kidding about the skinhead thing. He then sped off in a white Fiat Punto, heading to the Certosa di Trisulti, a vast, eight-hundred-year-old charterhouse that is both his home and the site of his school.

Several years ago, encouraged by his friend Steve Bannon, the strategist behind #FormerGuy Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Harnwell, a forty-five-year-old British Catholic, began leasing the monastery, for about a hundred thousand dollars a year, from the Italian Ministry of Culture. 

Bannon has long been trying to foment populist insurgencies across Europe, and he viewed Trisulti as the perfect location for the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, in which a new class of right-wing “culture warriors” would be trained. The aim, Bannon said, was “to generate the next Tom Cottons, Mike Pompeos, Nikki Haleys: that next generation that follows Trump.”

Set high in the mountains and decorated with frescoes, the monastery is a lonesome outpost on Bannon’s European frontier. With Trump’s defeat and Bannon’s 2020 arrest, on wire-fraud charges (he was pardoned), the work of setting up the school feels newly urgent. Harnwell spent the past two years battling lawsuits, and now the Italian government is trying to evict him. He has until June to appeal, before the carabinieri drag him out. Bannon blames “corrupt bureaucracy,” saying, “This is the sort of thing you expect from third world countries, not a founding nation of Western Civilization.”

If the plan goes ahead, gladiatorial training in the Catholic conservative arts will be offered to about seventy-five students, who will receive academic credits, toward a master’s degree, from an as-yet-undisclosed Catholic university in the States. Students were to have resided in old monks’ cells (no Wi-Fi), among a few lingering brothers. Applicants range in age from eighteen to eighty and include Italian academics and former U.S. marines. “We want people who have a sense that Western civilization is under threat,” Harnwell said.

So, the student he called, Alvino-Mario Fantini, is a fifty-two-year-old Ph.D. candidate in the Netherlands. “It’s wrong to accuse someone of racism and xenophobia, or Nazism, or any other ‘-ism’ without knowing their beliefs,” Fantini said by phone. He bitterly recalled being labelled a “fascist” in college for wearing a Dartmouth Indians sweatshirt. (The team has been renamed Big Green, to Fantini’s chagrin.) He applied to the academy in 2018, sending Harnwell a few clips blasting political correctness from the magazine he edits,  The European Conservative.

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The academy’s curriculum is devoted to the intellectual underpinnings of (stupid!) Bannonism, a cocktail of populist nationalism, libertarianism, and traditional (right wing!) Catholicism, angled vehemently against the European Union, China, Islam, gay rights, Pope Francis, abortion, and the left. Course titles include “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare” and “The Early Church as a Business Enterprise.” The professors—whom Harnwell is reluctant to name—will include browbeaten conservative instructors from obscure Catholic finishing schools. The academy will also offer media training, taught, ideally, by Bannon himself, and inspired by sessions held at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. (As one cpac participant put it, “They taught us how to speak about gay marriage without revealing our real thoughts.”)

When the idea for the academy was first floated, in Trump’s heyday, Harnwell had the support of a broad coalition of right-wingers, but that base is crumbling. The Italian government has moved leftward and has repeatedly taken Harnwell to court, alleging failure to pay rent and irregularities in his lease application. (Harnwell calls the charges “leftist disinformation.”)

He prevailed until last month, and the litigation has drained him, financially and emotionally. He has also lost support from revanchist elements in the Vatican, and other allies are now disillusioned with Bannon’s attempts to re-create Trumpism in Europe. “They said it would be a cultural project, that they would make Trisulti again a place of study and prayer,” Rocco Buttiglione, a conservative-leaning former Italian minister, said. “Then Steve Bannon entered into the picture.”

Protests have been erupting in the woods near the monastery, the monks have fled, and Harnwell is preoccupied with pet problems: his dog likes to eat lamb shank, and his cat drowned in a medieval well. But he remains determined to open. “This is an existential battle for me between good and evil,” he said. But months of potential gladiatorial prep time have been wasted, and it’s hard not to be glum. “Now I’m a fund-raiser for my lawyers,” he said. 

Published in the print edition of the May 31, 2021, issue, with the headline “Gladiator 101.” The New Yorker.

*Revanchism/Revanchist is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement.

Postscript - May Bannon and company should also read about what happened to the Former Guy Academy.