Fascism is an ongoing danger to democracy: Learn hos to identify Fascism and fight it

This essay brings to mind the now cliché but nonetheless truism:

“Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.” This sentence is often attributed to the philosopher George Santayana.

The Army Warned Troops in 1945, about the danger of Fascism. That warning rings true today- echo essay published in History News Network by Alan J. Singer*. 

On March 25, 1945, the United States Army issued “Fact Sheet #64: Fascism!” to promote discussions amongst American troops about fascism as the war in Europe wound down to a close. 

Discussion leaders were alerted “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. As many of us as possible must understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

It is worth revisiting the Army’s warnings as (fascist!) Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans denounce legal due process and threaten civil war.

Four key points were addressed in the Army fact sheet to be included in discussions.
(1) Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis;

(2) Fascism inevitably leads to war;

(3) It can come to any country;

(4) We can best combat it by making our democracy work.

The fact sheet described findings by war correspondent Cecil Brown who toured the United States after leaving Europe. Brown discovered that most Americans he talked with were “vague about just what fascism really means. He found few Americans who were confident they would recognize a fascist if they saw one.” The War Department was concerned that ignorance about fascism could make it possible for it to emerge in the United States and issued recommendations for how to prevent it.

Fascism in Nazi Germany 1933-1945

Jack Burgess responded to this essay:

"Fascism" could also be discussed as "authoritarianism." And there's a whole field of study on that, some of which I was able to participate in at Ohio State University in the 1960's. Theodore Adorno, in California, and Eric Fromm are two leaders from that work that one might study to learn more. Fromm wrote a series of very popular books, starting with "Escape from Freedom," where he posited that since self-rule or democracy are very hard to do--take time, effort, and study, etc.--most or many of us look to a strong leader to just do it for us--as we do as children, trusting our fathers or mothers to make the decisions. He pointed out, also, that the fear of death motivates all of us to seek security and protection in the strong leader. And before the in-depth, academic studies of authoritarianism after WWII, there were, of course, others who wrote of authoritarianism before that war. Most notable was the popular author, Upton Sinclair, who famously said, "When fascism comes to America, it won't wear a swastika on its sleeve, but an American flag."

As a simple definition, the War Department described fascism as the “opposite of democracy. The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people. Fascism is government by the few and for the few.” 

Fascists remain in power through “skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security . . . At the very time that the fascists proclaimed that their party was the party of the ‘average citizen,’ they were in the pay of certain big industrialists and financiers . . . They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled against each other.”

The War Department acknowledged that the United States had
native fascists who say that they are ‘100 percent American’ . . . [A]t various times and places in our history, we have had sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which experience has shown can be properly identified as ‘fascist’.

What does fascism mean? Many experts agree that fascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.

The War Department warned:

An American fascist seeking power would not proclaim that he is a fascist. Fascism always camouflages its plans and purposes . . . Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-American- ism’.

The War Department identified three attitudes and practices that fascists share in common. Fascists pit “religious, racial, and economic groups against one another in order to break down national unity . . . In the United States, native fascists have often been anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Labor, anti- foreign-born.” 

Fascists also “deny the need for international cooperation” and that “all people — regardless of color, race, creed, or nationality have rights.” They “substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count.” Finally, for fascists, the “[i]ndiscriminate pinning of the label ‘Red’ on people and proposals which one opposes is a common political device.”

Learning to identify American fascists and detect their techniques was not going to be easy, but it is vitally important to learn to spot them, even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy . . . In its bid for power, it is ready to drive wedges that will disunite the people and weaken the nation. It supplies the scapegoat — Catholics, Jews, Negroes, labor unions, big business — any group upon which the insecure and unemployed are willing to blame.

They become frightened, angry, desperate, confused. Many, in their misery, seek to find somebody to blame . . . The resentment may be directed against minorities — especially if undemocratic organizations with power and money can direct our emotions and thinking along these lines.

The goal of the fascist doctrine is to prevent “men from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.”

Fascists may talk about freedom, but freedom . . . involves being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.

*Alan Singer is a historian and professor in the Hofstra University Department of Teaching, Learning and Technology. He is the author of New York’s Grand Emancipation Jubilee: Essays on Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, Teaching, and Historical Memory (SUNY Press, 2018).

Ukraine at one year: Russian war protestors risk threats from authorities

Essay echo published in the History News Network, by Lawrence Wittner:  Russia's Courageous War Resisters

Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer for Channel One Russia, interrupts a news broadcast with a protest sign, March 14, 2022.

Picture Translated: Stop the war, don't believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to.

Given the Russian government’s brutal repression of dissent, the level of Russian resistance to the Putin regime’s war on Ukraine is quite remarkable.

Beginning on the evening of February 24, 2022, the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many thousands of Russians, defying threats from the authorities, staged nonviolent antiwar demonstrations across their nation. On the first night alone, police made 1,820 arrests of peace demonstrators in 58 Russian cities. Over the ensuing weeks, the mass protests continued, with the intrepid demonstrators chanting or holding up signs reading “No to War.” As the authorities viewed any mention of “war” as a crime, even elementary school children were arrested when they said the forbidden slogan. Some peace demonstrators took to holding up blank signs, but they, too, were arrested. By March 13, according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group, the police had made at least 14,906 arrests of these and other Russian peace demonstrators.

Russian war resisters also engaged in numerous other activities. Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One Russia, disrupted the station's main news program by holding up a sign reading: “NO WAR. Stop the war. Do not believe the propaganda.” Prominent cultural figures and politicians spoke out publicly against the war. By March 1, an online petition protesting the invasion had drawn a million supporters. Signers of open letters that called for stopping the war included 30,000 technology workers, 6,000 medical workers, 3,400 architects, more than 4,300 teachers, more than 17,000 artists, 500 scientists, and 2,000 actors and other creative figures. Other activists posted antiwar stickers in neighborhoods, replaced supermarket labels with protest statements, and even wrote peace messages on currency. Most startlingly, Russian soldiers began refusing to fight in Ukraine.

Naturally, the authorities were infuriated by this resistance and determined to crush it. Demonstrations were brutally suppressed through arrests, huge fines, and violence against activists. To bolster the legal basis for repression, the Russian parliament passed laws that provided 10 years imprisonment for spreading “fake” news about the armed forces and 5 years imprisonment for “discrediting the army.” In mid-March, Vladimir Putin publicly denounced “the scum and the traitors” who opposed his war policy and promised that the Russian people would “spit them out” like insects who had flown into their mouths. This “necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country,” he promised.

Indeed, the intense repression―coupled with a massive government pro-war propaganda campaign and a gathering sense of futility on the part of activists―did have a damaging effect on Russian war resistance. About 300,000 Russians, many of them well educated and leading figures in the arts and sciences, fled the country rather than remain under these circumstances. Dozens of independent communications media were banned, while others announced that they would cease reporting on the war. Although daring individual and small-scale resistance continued, the movement declined in the late spring and summer of 2022.

But Putin’s announcement, on September 21, of a draft call-up of 300,000 young men for the Ukraine war provided the movement with new momentum. Despite the banning of unsanctioned rallies, protest demonstrations erupted in dozens of cities across the nation, with more than a thousand demonstrators arrested in the first few days. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, protest was especially strong, organized by Feminist Anti-War Resistance and Spring, an antiwar group popular among students. Dispatched to suppress the activism, Russian police responded with great brutality and, also, arrested over 700 demonstrators.

More spontaneous protests, led by people new to political activism, also broke out far from the main centers of Russian life, especially in the North Caucasus. Opposed to the war and determined to stop the conscription of their men, angry local residents resorted to beating up Russian officials delivering draft notices. In Dagestan, one of Russia’s poorest republics, crowds of local people tried to demonstrate against Putin’s mobilization but, as elsewhere, their protests were smashed by the police and the military. Similar protests erupted in Siberia, including Yakutsk, where hundreds of women engaged in an impressive demonstration against the war and conscription.

The most dramatic response to Putin’s military mobilization was the sudden, massive exodus of young men, sometimes accompanied by family members, from Russia. Leaving their homeland behind, hundreds of thousands of these war resisters surged toward the safety of neighboring nations like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. At the border of Georgia, the line of Russian cars awaiting entry stretched 18 miles. An observer explained: “People don’t want to go to war.” According to one detailed analysis, nearly 700,000 Russians fled their country between late September and early November 2022.

In some ways, of course, this mass exodus, like the one immediately after the beginning of the 2022 invasion, did not endanger Putin’s grip on power. Like the departure of dissidents during Russia’s authoritarian regimes of the past, it significantly reduced opposition on the home front. Coupled with nearly 20,000 arrests of antiwar activists, it also left Russia’s remaining war resisters feeling isolated and dispirited.

Even so, the struggle continues. Ilya Yashin, a prominent politician and opposition figure refused to back off from his criticism of Russian war crimes in Bucha and, as a result, in December, received an 8-1/2-year prison sentence. In his final remarks, he stated: “It’s better to sit behind bars . . . and remain an honest person, than to silently feel shame for the blood spilled by your government.” 

Mikhail Lobanov, a leader of the University Solidarity labor union and democratic socialist politician, was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, and sometimes badly beaten during 2022 for such crimes as displaying a “No to War” banner on his balcony and “discrediting the army.” But he, too, remained defiant.

The example of these and other courageous war resisters should remind us that, despite the violence of the Putin regime, a better Russia is possible.

January 6th insurrection and the history of White Supremacy

January 6th seditionists riot in the US Capitol.

Echo essay by Elizabeth R. Varon, published in the History News Network:

In an interview ahead of the House January 6th Select Committee hearings, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), stressed the “extraordinary and unprecedented” nature of the 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Congressman Jamie Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“You really have to go back to the Civil War to understand anything like it, but of course, there, you know, the Confederates never denied that Abraham Lincoln had actually won the election. 

The Campaign and Election of 1864

Instead, they just wanted to secede from the Union.” 

Congressman Raskin is partially right — Southern secessionists emphasized the sway Lincoln’s antislavery Republican Party had over the Northern electorate as proof that the North was irredeemably radical and that disunion was a necessity.

But, the story of Southern secession provides illuminating evidence that the January 6 insurgency was, indeed, precedented, rooted in long-standing efforts to preempt, delegitimize and suppress Black voting.

Aware that roughly 90 percent of Black voters supported Joe Biden in 2020, former president Donald Trump tried, through his “Stop the Steal” movement, to invalidate and suppress votes in African American population centers; he maintained, in effect, that “Black people had no right to vote him out of office,” as columnist Eugene Robinson succinctly put it. More than 150 years ago, Southern secessionists laid the groundwork for such arguments by maintaining that Blacks had no right to vote Lincoln into office.

Secessionists rallied White Southerners to their banner by warning that Republican rule would bring about a dystopia of racial equality, race war, race mixing, race competition — and Black voting. After the Republicans imposed emancipation, Southern Whites would be “degraded to a position of equality with free negroes,” forced to “stand side by side with them at the polls,” as Alabama secessionist Stephen F. Hale put it, in a frequently sounded alarm.

Moreover, secessionists argued that Lincoln’s election was constitutionally invalid because some Northern Black people had been permitted to exercise their franchise, voting for the Republican ticket in defiance of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens.

The most influential expression of this view was a speech by Georgia secessionist Thomas R.R. Cobb on Nov. 12, 1860, delivered just a few days after Lincoln won the electoral college on the strength of Northern votes. Cobb claimed that Lincoln’s election violated the “spirit of the Constitution.” “This Union was formed by white men,” he noted, “for the protection and happiness of their race.” The Founders did give each state the power to declare who should vote, but they assumed that only citizens — Whites — would exercise that power. “Yet to elect Abraham Lincoln, the right of suffrage was extended to free negroes in Vermont, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York and other Northern States, although the Supreme Court has declared them not to be citizens of this nation,” Cobb frothed. Alluding to the resistance and flight by enslaved people, Cobb intoned, “Our slaves are first stolen from our midst on underground Railroads, and then voted at Northern ballot-boxes to select rulers for you and me.”

The Underground Railroad – Escape To Freedom

This argument resonated widely across the South during the tumultuous secession winter and spring of 1860-1861, during which Deep South and then Upper South states left the Union and formed the Confederacy. Secessionists repeatedly claimed that there was massive voter fraud in Ohio where “fourteen thousand negroes” supposedly cast illicit ballots for Lincoln, augmented by additional “half breeds, mulattoes and all other branches of the negro race.” A Georgia paper put it even more succinctly a few weeks after the presidential contest: “It is stated upon good authority that negro votes in the State of Ohio carried the State for Lincoln.” The author demanded in the same breath that no one should be allowed to take a seat in Congress who was “elected by free negroes.”

The argument that Black votes had swung the presidential electoral results was false. African Americans made up less than 2 percent of the population in the free states in 1860 and their voting was sharply limited. Only in five states — Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont — could Black men vote without significant restrictions.

The hostility to Black suffrage was widespread. 

Northern Whites were the source of the rumor that 14,000 African American ballots were cast illegally for the Republicans. Absent any actual evidence, the rumor spread, appearing in articles by Northern and Southern Democrats alike that claimed that Ohio had fallen “under Negro rule.”

Northern Democrats used the story to discredit Republican candidates and warn against further enfranchisement of Black people. Southern secessionists went further still and argued that Black voting delegitimized the Union itself. To them, the prospect of Black participation, should the Republicans free and enfranchise the majorities of enslaved people in many Southern plantation districts, was an existential threat. “We are often asked if it is really true that 15,000 negroes voted for Lincoln in Ohio,” secessionist editors in South Carolina asked rhetorically, rounding the number of voters up for effect. “We have the plainest evidence in the world that they did,” they insisted, citing Northern Democratic press accounts. And so, they concluded: “It is time that the latent spark of manliness and pride in the Anglo-Saxon blood of the South should be kindled, so that it may wrap the Union in ruins.”

Of course, secessionists did not feel obliged to provide proof of the alleged illegality or corrupting effects of Black votes. It was enough to assert, as a meeting of voters in Jasper County, Georgia, did in December 1860, that Lincoln’s ascendance had been “procured in part by a violation of the Elective franchise, in permitting negro suffrage.” This “contravention of the constitutional rights of Georgia and the South,” they resolved, was “just and sufficient” grounds for secession. A correspondent to the Charleston Courier, in the seedbed of disunion, pushed a similar argument. If Lincoln had been “elected by fraud, corruption and free negro votes,” the writer suggested, “no power on earth ought to be able to secure his inauguration, and the people have a right to say he is not their President.”

Broadly condemning the North for “progressive fanaticism,” secessionists in Washington County, Georgia., insisted that Lincoln’s election was tantamount to to "Negro Rule", because they could see “no difference between the submission to a negro ruler and one elected by negro suffrage.”

The election deniers of 2020, need not be aware of this rather obscure history to be shaped by it. It is no coincidence that Confederate flags were conspicuous in the January 6th insurrectionist mob or that the rioters were 95 percent White. Trump’s message to his followers on January 6th — that “you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation” — echoes Thomas R.R. Cobb’s message that the Union was “formed by white men … for the protection and happiness of their race.”

Moreover, the shared premise of these noxious claims is that White people’s citizenship, and their votes, count for more than Black people’s. Unless this centuries-old “big lie” is rebutted, January 6th will serve as the precedent for future attacks on legitimate elections.

Written by Elizabeth R. Varon, who is a Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history at the University of Virginia and author of "Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War."

Putin and the War on Food

 Putin's Ukraine War and Ecocide by Walter G. Moss
Published in the History News Network HHN:

(Maine Writer- In my humble opinion, I cannot understand how the Russian military continues to wage the Putin War on Food.  Evidence indicates that Russian military are hungry, stealing food wherever they can find it.)

Right now the two greatest evils threatening our planet are Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the continuing despoiling of our environment. 

Regarding the latter, climate change consequences come immediately to mind, but the ecocide (“destruction of the natural environment by deliberate or negligent human action”) presently being perpetrated by the Russian military in Ukraine is also important. Videos coming out of Ukraine clearly indicate that the amount of destruction--not only of people, but also of lands and structures--wrought by Russian planes, missiles, and artillery has been overwhelming. 

A Rolling Stone article of May 10, declared, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is poisoning the country’s land, air, water, and climate in a way that will have longstanding repercussions.”

Kenneth Boulding once wrote “Peace is ploughing and sowing and reaping and making things.” And the farmer, writer, environmentalist, and pacifist Wendell Berry stated, “To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”

Much earlier the Dutch humanist Erasmus (d. 1536) had written:

Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man; war, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. 

Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, and the gains of the poor are more plentiful.

But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flocks are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husbandman butchered, villas and villages burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war.

In his study of British writers and World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has a chapter, “Arcadian Resources” which contrasts that war with the peaceful pre-war rural British environment and pursuits.

This monument is to memorialize the Holodomor endured by the Ukrainian people in 1932-33. The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR and adjacent Cossack territories between 1932 and 1933. During the famine millions of Ukrainians and Cossacks died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.

Ecocide perpetrated by Russia is nothing new. In the late nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Chekhov bemoaned the “diminishing animals, drying up rivers, and deforestation” he saw his country furthering. 

In 1992, Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., in their Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Human Nature Under Siege, updated our knowledge of the saga of Russian ecocide.


By the time Putin came to power, at the very end of the twentieth century, he displayed little concern about environmental questions. In late 2021, The New York Times noted that “Mr. Putin long dismissed the scientific consensus that human activity was to blame for the warming of the planet. Rather, he said in 2018, climate change could be caused by “cosmic changes, shifts of some kind in the galaxy that are invisible to us.” But then the continued devastating effects of climate change, especially in Russia, finally convinced Putin to at least acknowledge it might be important to Russia’s future. Not important enough, however, to prevent him from ordering (in late February 2022) the invasion of Ukraine, which is bringing in its wake devastating environmental damage.

As early as 4 March, more than two months ago, “over 1,000 organizations and individuals from more than 75 countries released an open letter . . . voicing concern over the war’s environmental and human toll.” A month later a piece on the Global Citizen website indicated three major ways the Russian invasion was harming the environment: 1) It was worsening global warming; 2) It was polluting water, soil, and air; and 3) It was harming wildlife and biodiversity.

Let’s examine each of these points in more detail. First, as the U.S. agency NASA indicates, “Human activities (primarily the burning of fossil fuels) have fundamentally increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet.” The Ukrainian Donbas area, presently the region where most of the fighting is occurring, accounts for almost half of Ukraine’s greenhouse gas emissions. And as the Global Citizen article indicates, “Militaries consume enormous amounts of fossil fuels, which contributes directly to global warming.” Russian jets, which have bombed numerous Ukrainian cities, “can burn through 4.28 gallons of gasoline per mile, with each detonation releasing additional greenhouse gas emissions, and destroying natural carbon sinks like soil, vegetation, and trees.”

In addition, various other Russian wartime activities--including all the movement of vehicles, including tanks, and artillery--were increasing global warming. In early April, to cite just one other type of increase, Russian forces blew up at least a few nitric acid container tanks in Ukraine’s Luhansk Province. Not only did the explosions create air-pollution warnings, but such acid is used in manufacturing fertilizer and some explosives, and reproducing the lost acid would involve a process that releases nitrous oxide into the air. This oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that has contributed to global warming.

In regard to our second category, pollution, one of the nitric acid explosions mentioned above led a government official to urge the local population to stay inside, close their doors and windows, and wear masks because of the polluted air. Even before the 2022, Russian invasion, the World Health Organization had ranked “Ukraine as the country with the highest health impact from air pollution in Europe.” This was mainly because of Ukraine’s high dependence on fossil fuels (like coal) for producing energy.

As a result of the Russian invasion, toxic-material emissions into water, soil, and the air from fires, destroyed buildings and damaged pipelines, sanitation systems, and industrial facilities like chemical and fuel storage sites have increased. For a while Russian forces occupied the Chernobyl nuclear site and caused a fire at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest. So far, the invasion has caused no major nuclear tragedy, but fighting around nuclear sites certainly increases the dangers of a future one.

In addition, all the movement of tanks and heavy vehicles increases air pollution; discarded ammunition sometimes leaks ammonia into waters; and as wars disrupt normal government environmental oversights, it becomes more likely that air and water pollution will increase because of such activities as trash burning and dumping human waste into bodies of water. According to an early May report, Ukraine’s deputy minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources stated, “From the first day of the war, we stopped everything that we were doing.” Instead the ministry began concentrating on collecting the war’s environmental-damage data.

Finally, in regard to the harming wildlife and biodiversity, it is illustrative to consider Polesia, sometimes referred to as “Europe’s Amazon.” Although the area also encompasses parts of Belarus, Poland,and Russia, the Ukrainian portion of the area is larger than that of the other three countries combined. Overall, its total landmass is about the size of half of Germany, and its contains pristine forests, large wetlands, and rivers, most significantly the Pripyat. It is also inhabited by large populations of such animals as bison, lynx, wolves, and 1.5 million migratory birds. A factsheet about the area states it is

home to some of the most biodiverse and culturally rich parts of Europe. The survival of many endangered mammals and millions of birds depends on this untouched landscape. The area not only has tremendous natural intrinsic importance, but also provides immeasurable benefits to people through ecosystem services such as water retention, flood mitigation, clean air, and carbon storage. Polesia also has a strong cultural heritage. Due to their relative isolation the indigenous population of Polesia, Poleshuks, have historically had little contact with people from other regions. Deep in the heart of Polesia, the traditional way of life like the use of local herbal medicine and traditional singing has been very well preserved.

In late March, shortly before it became clear that the Russian military was regrouping in order to focus more on eastern and southern Ukraine, an article on the NewScientist website declared that “Polesia is a war zone, pummelled and churned by Russian tanks. . . . the assault on Kyiv, launched from Belarus, ploughed straight through its eastern flank. So did the attack on the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant. . . . Russian advances have also begun to edge towards strictly protected areas in central Polesia.”

In April and heretofore in May, as Russian attack priorities shifted, Polesia has been less directly threatened, but the author of the NewScientist essay was right when he wrote that “Putin cares no more about the destruction” of this biodiverse area “than he does about bombing hospitals and killing civilian populations that stand in his way.”

Lest one think that declining biodiversity just means the loss of some animals we humans don’t need anyway, the British natural historian David Attenborough sets us straight. In his Netflix’s A Life on Our Planet (2020), after ticking off the likely increase in global warming, he tells us how to slow it down: “To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity—the very thing that we’ve removed.” For more detail on the exact connection between restoring biodiversity and slowing down climate change, readers should watch Attenborough’s program, where he makes such statements as “The ocean is a critical ally in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. The more diverse it is, the better it does that job.”

One final harmful effect of Putin’s war should be added to the Global Citizen’s list of three--increasing world hunger. Ukraine has traditionally been a major exporter of wheat, sometimes referred to as the “breadbasket of Europe.” As Erasmus indicated five centuries ago, war ravages farm life.

Other effects of the war cannot yet be seen clearly, partly because the war is ongoing and we do not yet know how it will end--it is still possible for Putin to extend it beyond Ukraine or resort to heretofore unused weapons that could do even more environmental damage.

Although in order to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels, it is also possible that the war may hasten some counties transition to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. It is also conceivable that for the same reason, countries might increase their own fossil fuels production while placing less stress on climate-change containment. One point, however, is without doubt. And that is that the Ukrainian war and the terrible destruction it is causing is diverting great amounts of money and world attention away from fighting climate change as a number one priority.

Thus, all of the certainties and uncertainties of Putin’s Ukrainian war make it easy to understand why a lover of the environment like Wendell Berry can hate war so much. Consider the last stanza of one of his early twenty-first century poems, “Look Out.”

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

When did "pro-life" become "pro-death"? An extreme political variant

This echo essay resonates with me! My cynical take about the "pro-life antivaxx" political party is a spin on stupid Sarah Palin*, who made a brouhaha about "death panels" when President Obama was promoting policy to bring quality and affordable health care to people, by passing Obama Care. So, Palin falsely accused the Obama Care plan of including "death panels" because, obviously, there would be some extreme circumstances where certain expensive treatments might not necessarily be covered, due to having the outlier costs driving up the costs borne by everyone. In fact, all private health care plans have exclusions, that's why people who can afford to do so will buy supplemental insurances. So, where is Sarah Palin's propaganda now that her Growing Old Party is denying the medical science that can save hundreds of thousands of lives with free vaccines?  

This echo opinion was published in the History News Network (HNN) electronic magazine.

Steve Hochstadt is a scholar of the Holocaust, who taught European history at Bates College and Illinois College. His most recent book is Freedom of the Press in Small-Town America: My Opinions (Ocala, FL: Atlantic Publishing Inc., 2020).

The Republican Party promotes itself as the “pro-life” Party of God. But contemporary Republicans are the Party of Death.

Every year about 15,000 Americans die from gun murders. The multiplication of mass murders and school shootings in recent years has had no impact on Republican refusal to consider restrictions on guns, even though a majority of Americans support stricter gun control laws. Republican legislators are now removing the last vestiges of regulation on the public brandishing of guns: in Texas, adults can carry a handgun without a license, training or background check. The most extreme Republicans deride survivors of mass shootings as “actors” and reporting of those massacres as “false flag operations,” while the rest of the Party tolerates them.

The National Academy of Sciences estimated in 2019, that each year over 100,000 Americans die prematurely from air pollution that Republicans refuse to prevent or even mitigate. 

In fact, the (Growing Old) Party allowed the Trump administration to reduce regulation of lead in household water supplies, even though Republican politicians in Michigan were criminally charged, some for involuntary manslaughter, for refusing to deal with the lead crisis in Flint.

As deaths caused by hurricanes, heat waves, and flooding pile up across America, Republican continue their denial of climate science. Climate change causes about 1000 deaths annually from heat. Hurricane Ida killed over 40 people in the Northeast through flooding early in September, while Tennessee suffered more flooding deaths in 2021, than ever before.



Estimates of the number of Americans who died annually because of inadequate health insurance before Obamacare went into effect range from 25,000 to 45,000. Republican policy since 2010 has paired unrelenting efforts to get rid of the ACA and refusal to create anything in its place. Party policy under Paul Ryan’s leadership tried unsuccessfully for years to cut Medicare, while Republicans at the state level consistently refuse to expand Medicaid.

Death from environmental pollution, climate disasters and inadequate health insurance is concentrated among minorities and the poor, Americans whose welfare the Republican Party has disdained for decades. Their assumption that these less deserving Americans are Democratic voters is now being demonstrated again by nationwide Republican efforts to limit their votes.

Unlike the more murderous parties of death in modern history, such as the Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and the Argentine junta and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, Republicans could rely on the defense that they didn’t kill anyone. Many people may have died, but ideology is more important.

COVID changed everything, raising the stakes of both conventional daily behavior and national policy. Unified Republican adherence to lies about science, opposition to the regulation of destructive business practices, and disdain for Americans who aren’t rich continued right into the onset of pandemic. The early news focused on the disproportionate deaths of urban minorities.

But this year, Republican politicians ventured into new, possibly unprecedented territory. Every day, more than one thousand unvaccinated conservative Americans die of COVID, while the Republican Party insists ever more strongly on anti-vaccination, anti-mask, and anti-life policies which are killing off their own voters.

The blinkered view of life and death common among so-called “pro-lifers” was illustrated in the September 9 NYT op-ed by Prof. Karen Swallow Prior, which argued for the virtues of Texas’ new anti-abortion law. She wrote: “The highest purpose of human law is the protection of human life, from its beginning to its natural end.... A law preserving the life of a human being at any stage can be considered ‘extreme’ only within a distorted social context.” In the distorted politics of Republican “pro-lifers”, the beginning counts much more than the end.

Led by the most extreme death-dealers, Republican politicians, with few exceptions, have transformed themselves into a unique party of death. The vaccinated Republican elite hides behind a perverted rephrasing of Patrick Henry’s courageous motto: “In the name of liberty, we’ll give you death.”

*Footnote Commentary Echo published in The Colombian, by Danny Westnest: Remember “death panels”? Well, they’re back, and this time, they’re real. “Death panels” was a phrase coined by Sarah Palin, the folksy-talkin’ right wing former Alaska governor and failed vice presidential candidate. Palin fabricated and imagined that Obamacare would cause health bureaucrats to ration out medical care, after first sitting in judgment of who was most deserving to receive it. This stupidity was awarded the “Lie of the Year” in 2009, as it was nowhere in any legislation. It was a right-wing fever dream. But, now a version of it has come true — in Idaho. Hospitals in northern Idaho are so flooded with COVID-19 patients that the state has declared an emergency, called “crisis standards of care.” It means when you show up to the emergency room, you may get treated based preferentially on who is most likely to live.

“If your mother has a heart attack, someone will have to assign her a point score designating how likely she is to survive,” the Idaho Falls Post Register wrote, describing the scheme last winter when it was first being contemplated. “If it isn’t high enough, she might not get an ICU bed, and a COVID patient will get it instead.

“We will ask the nurses and doctors who’ve broken their backs trying to save us to make that Sophie’s choice over, and over, and over.”

This past week the 200-bed hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, had 218 patients — so many it was treating patients in hallways and running out of oxygen to help them breathe, The Associated Press reported.

Death Panels will be Sarah Palin's legacy, The Atlantic.

Tumpanistas afflicted with acute anxiety syndrome

Echo opinion by Walter G. Moss, published in the History News Network

William A. Galston’s recent essay “The Bitter Heartland” begins, “We are living in an age of resentment . . . [that] shapes today’s politics.” The more I read of it (and more about it later), the more the great resentments of Hitler’s followers came to mind. 

"

Trumpanistas suffer "acute usurpation anxiety syndrome", also known as AUAS- (pronounced "You Ass")

Hitler's cult resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919, had imposed the “unfair” postwar Versailles Treaty upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the “decadent” godless ways of Berlin, as hinted at in the play and film Cabaret.

The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and, also, their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies. This was especially true during the great inflation of 1923 – by then a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks – and the Great Depression. Historian Peter Fritzsche notes that “between 1929 and 1932, one in three Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force . . . German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped.”

Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler’s early cultist tactics like boycotts that “relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews,” and he writes that “the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments and transformed them into final judgments and the promise of direct remedial action.” 

Moreover, Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, “pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world.”

Almost a century after Hitler came to power in 1933, some of #FormerGuy Trump’s followers remind us of Hitler’s cult crowds. 

On at least one occasion, after Hitler ranted about the “November criminals” (German politicians who negotiated the war-ending armistice of 1918), the audience cried out, “Hang them up! Bust their ass!” In both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump crowds (in response to their hero’s words about Hillary Clinton) shouted “lock her up.”

Even in 2016, during the campaign, writer George Saunders observed (The New Yorker: Who are All These Trumpzi supporters?) described some of the Trumpist's resentments. Many believed “they’d been let down by their government . . . and [were] sensitive to “any infringement whatsoever on their freedom.” Many suffered from what Saunders labeled “(acute) usurpation anxiety syndrome" or AUAS- pronounced "YouAss",” which he defined as “the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions.”

In Galston’s 2021, essay “The Bitter Heartland” he cites a 2016, poll that indicated that 65 percent of whites without college degrees “believed that America’s culture and way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s.” But more than that poll, his essay dissects the continuing Trumpites’ resentments much more thoroughly.

Like some before him, he indicates or hints at where the Trump resentful are mostly found: in small towns and rural areas, and among older people, non-college graduates, groups once dependent on manufacturing and mining jobs, and “social conservatives and white Christians.” The resentful are more provincial and traditional and many of them “lack access to high-speed broadband.”

“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.” They believe that the big-city elites, the professionals, and the government—before Trump came along—all failed to help them achieve their share of the American Dream. They resent professionals and liberals telling them how to live, calling them racists, or limiting their freedoms—e.g. to buy multiple guns or go about maskless during our present pandemic. “President Trump was at his best, they say, when he ignored the experts and went his own way.”

Like Saunders earlier, Galston thinks that many of the resentful feel they are “being treated unjustly, unfairly, or disrespectfully.” 

Achtung! The appearance of Trump and discovery of like-minded people—via the Internet and the person-to-person contacts of smaller towns—help overcome feelings of powerlessness. Feeling more powerful, some “people merely want a remedy for the injustice they have experienced. But others—typically those who experience disrespect—want more than redress; they want revenge.”

Galston closes his essay with some suggestions for dealing with Trumpanista resentments, but they are less compelling than his analysis of them. Partly this is because, while some are legitimate, others—like the reluctance of many white Christians to grant equal rights to all ethnic and religious minorities—are not. As we learned from examining the supporters of Hitler, understanding the difficulties of people and even sympathizing with their plight (e.g., being jobless) does not mean condoning resentments that lead to dangerously hateful behavior like victimizing Jews.

The preceding comparison between two phenomena of group resentment, separated by almost a century, in two different countries and political cultures, omits many contrasts and nuances. In addition, we know how Hitler and German Nazism ended. The ending of the Trumpite culture of resentment is still unknown. Will it gradually decline? Will the Biden administration successfully address many of the Trumpite grievances? Will Republicans continue to stoke them? Will Trump run again in 2024? But thanks to the writings of Galston and others--he mentions Katherine Cramer and Arlie Hochschild--we better understand the resentments, and that’s a start.

Racism and unknown risk consequences for democracy

Echo opinion published in the History News Network by Donne Levy, a retired community college history instructor. 

The term “Trumpism,” alluding to a cult of personality surrounding the #FormerGuy, has penetrated the American vernacular. 

(Maine Writer: Trumpism is the modern euphemism for Naziism)

So much about the Trump presidency has been weirdly unprecedented. 

But, the cult phenomenon is not new.  

Apparently, a cult of personality also engulfed Ronald Reagan. Although the two men are very different from one another in character, their cults of personality share similar qualities. Both were not always truthful, both made serious mistakes and both were tinged with racism.

A political cult of personality means a strong and irrational admiration and devotion to a leader. Frequently, the leader spreads fame widely through mass media. Followers become enamored to the point of idolizing the leader, while overlooking or ignoring shortcomings. This characterizes the public life of both Trump and Reagan.

Familiar to millions of Americans by appearing in movies and hosting the weekly General Electric Theater on Sunday night television, Ronald Reagan began a political career on October 27, 1964 with a nationally televised speech on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. It was a week before the election. The speech was filled with false claims about the overbearing U.S. government and unverified anecdotes. This was all to support Reagan’s view that government needed to get out of the way of the economic freedom of the American people. Reagan created #fakenews by falsely claimed that farmers could be imprisoned who did not cooperate with federal government programs, and that the Federal Reserve Board planned inflation.

Reagan also said, “We were told four years ago that seventeen million people went to be hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” (OMG!) Due to his building a cult of personality, this particularly callous and inaccurate quote was overlooked. When Reagan spoke, more than 36 million Americans were living in poverty, nearly one-fifth of the country. Following the formula of that speech, Reagan won the California governorship two years later by a landslide and would go on to win the presidency twice, by equally impressive margins. The Reagan cult of personality enabled him to remain popular with his followers even when violating his own conservative principles. Throughout his political career, Reagan railed against big government deficit spending. But when the national debt rose by 189 percent, he suffered no political consequences. When Reagan admitted to misleading Americans during the Iran-Contra scandal, his popularity went down temporarily, but bounced back by the end of his presidency.

Donald Trump, like Reagan, gained fame with the American public through show business. Trump starred in a reality television show called The Apprentice. Many Americans assumed that Trump was the “boss” starring in his own program, but in reality Trump was an actor employed by a television production company, just as Reagan was an actor employed by the General Electric Company. 

Trump's strangely favorable celebrity status leading toward a political cult of personality was supported by the appearances on The Apprentice. While Reagan launched his political career with a televised speech, Trump began his with a nationally televised (racist!) accusation that Barack Obama should not be president because he was not a natural-born U.S. citizen. With no proof other than his words, Trump claimed to have investigators in Hawaii uncovering evidence that Obama was not born there as his birth certificate indicated. “They couldn’t believe what they’re finding,” Trump asserted. Several years later, shortly before winning the presidency, Trump admitted that he believed Obama is a U.S. citizen.

When Trump announced his presidential candidacy, he declared, “Sadly the American dream is dead.” The campaign slogan became “Make America Great Again” That is not unlike Reagan’s decrying big government for destroying our freedom. The Reagan 1980 campaign slogan “Morning in America” is not very different in meaning from the Trump 2016 slogan. Like Reagan, Trump deviated from facts to support political points. Examples of this are legion, from Trump’s assertion that he saw thousands of Muslims on 9/11 cheering the collapse of the twin-towers to his claim of Obamacare imploding. One difference however is that Reagan’s factual deviations usually served to buttress his political points, while Trump’s were often to boost himself, from the false claim to have graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania at the top of his class, and the boast of being a “very stable genius.” That arrogance was not in Reagan’s character.

Trump’s personality cult protected him to some extent as it did Reagan. Trump’s popularity was never high as Reagan’s was. But his approval ratings always remained in the middle 40s, not dropping precipitously as in the case of Nixon and Carter for example. That is despite numerous scandals, including the Russia investigation, and a poorly-handled pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Unfortunately, in the end, 74 million Americans (incredulously!) voted for Trump. The cult of personality remained intact.

Another and more sinister similarity in the Reagan and Trump cults of personality is white racism. Both men saw an opportunity to advance their political careers by appealing to white voters in a racially prejudicial way. In Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor he appealed to white voters disgusted with the “beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates” as Reagan termed it. In his 1976 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Reagan frequently told the “welfare queen” story about a woman on welfare who allegedly defrauded the U.S. Government of $150,000. The story was significantly embellished, but was in keeping with Reagan’s political views. He once called welfare recipients a “faceless mass waiting for a handout.” He did not mention race, but the implication was abundantly clear that the welfare queen is black. In his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan after winning the nomination, traveled to Mississippi to give a speech at the Neshoba County Fair to a white audience glorifying states’ rights, which has long been the cry of white Southerners fighting civil rights. Neshoba County is the site where three civil rights workers were infamously killed in 1964.

Donald Trump’s appeal to white racism has been more blatant. In August 2017, the Unite the Right rally occurred with one counter-protester killed. Trump said that “you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” One side had neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and Alt-Right people. In the last presidential campaign, Trump in numerous ways appealed to racism attempting to win re-election. For example, he condemned NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag. He condemned Black Lives Matter and predicted the “beautiful suburbs” will be destroyed by low-income housing if Biden wins. He blamed big city Democrats and their black voters for stealing the election, ignoring the fact that he lost battleground states because too many whites in the suburbs deserted him.

Two recent presidents have had cults of personality, although that is antithetical to democracy. That enabled both to win their party nominations and the general election. It gave both men the luxury of deviating from truthfulness and enabled Reagan to survive a severe scandal and Trump to be incompetent, scandalous and profane while maintaining a base of popularity. This also indicates something ominous about America. If a candidate has a cult of personality, and develops a large number of devoted followers who believe he or she can do no wrong, it could potentially make white supremacy or other malignant elements of politics seem permissible, with unknown consequences for democracy.

Radio waves can carry dangerous propaganda but not germs or viruses!

What happened to American sincerity and truth!

History, Evidence and the Ethics of Belief

An essay echo:

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/179164

Guy Lancaster is author or editor of several books on racial violence in Arkansas, most recently the revised edition of Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919, co-authored with Grif Stockley and Brian K. Mitchell. His forthcoming book, American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching, is tentatively scheduled for release by the University of Arkansas Press, in the fall of 2021.

In his 1874, paper “The Ethics of Belief,” Cambridge philosopher and mathematician William K. Clifford tells the story of a shipowner who worried about the seaworthiness of a vessel about to carry a group of emigrants to their new lives across the ocean: “He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs.” 

Nevertheless, he was able to dismiss these concerns from his mind and “put his trust in Providence” and watched the departure of the ship “with a light heart.” In the end, “he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.” Clifford concludes that our fictional shipowner should be judged guilty of the deaths of these people: “It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.”

While devout believers of missionizing religions do typically consider the personal belief of others a matter of ethical concern (is it ethical to let people go to hell?), most of us on the more pluralistic end of the spectrum tend to be accommodating of the diversity of worldviews out there, even the intolerant ones, given the inherent rights we ascribe to individuals. But many personal beliefs today do endanger us collectively. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people exhibiting a range of beliefs have (unbelievably) resisted even the slightest public health efforts to control the spread of the disease—or have torn down 5G (radio!) towers they believe to be causing the pandemic. (JSYK- ! HELLO? Radio waves do not carry germs or viruses! On the other hand, radio waves can carry dangerous propaganda!)

Anti-vaxxers believe, without evidence, that vaccines, by their very nature, cause health problems. As a result, the nation has recently undergone several outbreaks of measles, and millions of Americans are likely to refuse any vaccine for COVID-19. 

Moreover, the cry of “religious freedom” now serves to rally those who would deny public accommodations to non-heterosexual people, just as in decades past the cry of “religious freedom” served to rally those who wanted to keep their schools segregated, and in both cases these proponents of “religious freedom” believed without evidence that the nation would experience divine calamity for extending basic rights to gays and non-whites, respectively. 

Veritable reigns of terror, personal and political, have been fashioned from deeply held beliefs unsupported by the slightest whisper of evidence, as the parents of Sandy Hook victims can well attest. And now, Donald Trump and his followers, on a basis of a belief (one not supported by any evidence) that he actually won a landslide election, are willing to tear this nation apart and murder Americans en masse.

Clifford would argue that people, like climate change denialists, and Pizzagate enthusiasts have no right to their beliefs, not simply because these beliefs do not accord with the evidence at hand, but because these beliefs can and do cause harm to other people. It is a radical notion—the idea that a belief which has an impact beyond the individual must withstand the encounter with reality in order to be considered ethical. As Andrew Chignell puts it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Clifford’s view is not merely that we must be in a certain state at the precise time at which we form a belief. Rather, the obligation always and only to believe on sufficient evidence governs our activities across time as well. With respect to most if not all of the propositions we consider as candidates for belief, says Clifford, we are obliged to go out and gather evidence, remain open to new evidence, and consider the evidence offered by others.”

We in the business of historical analysis discourse a great deal, in our own professional work but also in various popular forums, about the nature of evidence, especially when confronting those who would misconstrue the events of the past. This past year, historians have publicly marshaled the facts about, among other things, the nature of the Confederacy (against those who insist that monuments to traitors Robert E. Lee et al. have nothing to do with slavery) and the longstanding utility of public health measures (against those who claim that mask mandates are a novel form of oppression, even during a pandemic). However, despite an unprecedented level of engagement with the public, and despite it being easier now to share over digital platforms the many primary documents that inform our studies, historians are frequently frustrated by the persistence of beliefs that resist any evidence whatsoever.

But then, the founding mythos of the United States leans heavily into the idea of “freedom of religion,” and so we accord a privileged status to belief. Such belief, as we regard it, need not be grounded upon specific facts or principles—it need only be sincere. For example, after sharing with certain relatives my recent HNN article, “A Modern-Day Lynch Mob Invaded the Capitol on January 6,” an aunt of mine, who has one of John McNaughton’s hagiographical prints of Donald Trump up on her wall, texted me back thusly: “I believe everyone is entitled to their views. I would never try to belittle you for yours and I expect the same from you.” On the surface, this may seem like quite the statement of tolerance, especially from someone so long part of the “Fuck Your Feelings” crowd, but such a view does not simply discount the evidence underlying any assertion—it claims that evidence is not necessary for the formation of a belief and insulates from criticism any belief so developed. She expects—even demands—never to be belittled for any belief she may hold, no matter how ridiculous.

With our nation undergoing a series of crises—with the whole damn world in crisis right now—we must be willing to take the next step in our confrontations with a worldview that insists upon freedom from fact and make not only historical judgments but also ethical ones. Clifford, remember, concluded that his fictional shipowner “had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him.” And so must we take a stand and say the following to those whose worldviews that 1) have no basis in reality as can currently be determined, and 2) actively harm people beyond the individual adherent:

You do not have a right to your belief.

For our nation to survive, we must make this the new measure of citizenship. An engaged citizen must not merely be one who takes an active role in the public discourse. An engaged citizen must be, instead, one whose views and suggested policies are grounded in reality. Sure, we can continue to debate the significance of certain forms of evidence—historians and scientists do that all the time, and new evidence regularly emerges to challenge our previously held worldviews. But we can no longer afford to give a privileged place to beliefs just because they are beliefs. 

Our democracy, our world, will simply not survive it.

Donald Trump failed attempted self-coup

"...congressional Republicans will have to take personal responsibility for their actions in support of Trump’s coup attempt."- Fiona Hill

Yes it was a failed self-coup! Donald Trump is a corrupt failure!

Echo opinion published in the History News Network (HNN) and Politico.  By Fiona Hill*

Since the violence at the US Capitol, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, people have been arguing what to call what happened at the – was it a riot? An uprising? An insurrection? 

I’ve been public in calling it a coup, but others disagree. Some have said it’s not a coup, because the U.S. military and other armed groups weren’t involved, and some because Donald Trump didn’t invoke his presidential powers in support of the mob that broke into the Capitol. Others point out that no one has claimed or proved there was a secret plan directed by Trump. Moreover, Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election could never have succeeded in the first place.

These observations are based on the idea that a coup is a sudden, violent seizure of power involving clandestine plots and military takeovers. 

By contrast, Trump’s goal was to keep himself in power, and his actions were taken over a period of months and in slow motion.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a coup attempt. Trump disguised what he was doing by operating in plain sight, talking openly about his intent. He normalized his actions so people would accept them. I’ve been studying authoritarian regimes for three decades, and I know the signs of a coup when I see them.

Technically, what Trump attempted is what’s known as a “self-coup” and Trump isn’t the first leader to try it. Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (nephew of the first Napoleon) pulled one off in France in December 1851 to stay in power beyond his term. Then he declared himself Emperor, Napoleon III. More recently, Nicolas Maduro perpetrated a self-coup in Venezuela after losing the 2017 elections.

The storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, was the culmination of a series of actions and events taken or instigated by Trump so he could retain the presidency that, together, amounts to an attempt at a self-coup. This was not a one-off or brief episode. Trump declared “election fraud” immediately on November 4 even while the votes were still being counted. He sought to recount and rerun the November 2020 presidential election so that he, not President-elect Joe Biden, was the winner. In Turkey, in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan successfully did the same thing; he had called elections to strengthen his presidency, but his party lost its majority in the parliament. He challenged the results in the courts, marginalized the opposition, and forced what he blatantly called a “re-run election.” He tried again in the Istanbul mayoral election in 2019, but was thwarted.




There’s a standard coup “checklist” analysts use to evaluate coups. We can evaluate Trump’s moves to prevent the peaceful transfer of executive power against it. To successfully usurp or hold power, you need to control the military and paramilitary units, communications, the judiciary, government institutions, and the legislature; and mobilize popular support.

Let’s see how well this applies to what Trump has done.

The Military: During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Trump drew Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper out of a White House meeting to follow him for a provocative photo-op, in front of a historic church. Paramilitary forces under the president’s command cleared a passage for his group across Lafayette Square. Trump was testing the military and the Pentagon to see if he could turn the U.S. armed forces into his own “Pretorian Guard.” The blowback from this episode emphasized the nonpolitical position of the U.S. military, but there was sufficient lingering concern that just days before January 6, 10 former Defense secretaries—including Esper, who had been forced out of his office for insufficient loyalty—felt compelled to issue an unprecedented public letter reminding Defense Department officials of their oath to uphold the Constitution.

Communications: In the old days, coup plotters would seize the Central Telegraph or Post Office, and later, radio and TV towers. Trump put a loyalist in charge of the Post Office. He did not take TV and radio by storm, but he discredited the “mainstream media” that was critical of his actions as the “enemy of the people” and recruited or pressured Fox News, Newsmax, OAN and social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, into participants in his efforts to sway public opinion in his favor. Twitter, in essence, was Trump’s equivalent of the TV and radio tower. He directly messaged the 88 million people who “followed” his account. 

Trump used (Maine Writer- I would say tRumph "mis-used!) social media and cable news to propagate false self-serving narratives, reinforce messages to provide justification for his actions, and mobilize his supporters.

The judiciary: With the help of Republican lawmakers, Trump stacked federal courts with what he kept calling “his judges.” He successfully pushed through the appointments of three new Supreme Court justices ahead of the presidential election. He made his expectation clear that if the Supreme Court had to settle an election dispute, then “his justices” would tilt the verdict in his favor. Erdogan did the same in Turkey, purging the judiciary and installing loyalists who facilitated his rerun of the 2015, election and sentenced political opponents to long prison terms. Trump frequently called for investigations into his opponents and for courts and law enforcement to “lock them all up!”

Government institutions: As in Turkey, Trump purged Cabinet members and career officials who resisted him. He bypassed Congress and installed acting officials in crucial national security positions like the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, and, briefly, the director of National Intelligence. He made it crystal clear that personal loyalty was the primary factor for candidate selection. He removed Esper after he lost the election. Attorney General William Barr resigned in the same period amid rumors he would be sacked for failing to declare massive election fraud. Trump wanted officials in place in January 2021 who were entirely beholden to him and likely to support his efforts to stay in power.

The legislature: Finally, Trump usurped the Republican Party. He claimed the more than 74 million who voted for him last November as his personal base—his popular support. He threatened to destroy the careers of Republican members of Congress who did not favor overturning the election result. At the January 6 rally preceding the storming of the Capitol, Donald Trump Jr. even referred to the GOP as the “Trump Republican Party.” In the end, even after the Capitol was seized by Trump’s violent mob, 147 Republican members of Congress, led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, did endorse some of Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results and overturn the constitutional order. So did Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and six other politically ambitious senators who wanted to tap into Trump’s popular support. In this way, Trump’s control of the legislature and a significant popular mandate was almost within his reach.

The truth is that, for the past four years, Trump has been stress testing the U.S. democratic system to see if anyone will rein him in. Consider how many times he stated that he “deserved” two or even three terms in office because he was treated “unfairly” or “cheated” out of the first two years of his presidency by the “Russia hoax,” the Mueller investigation and last year's impeachment trial. 

Throughout 2020, when his poll ratings faltered, the president laid the groundwork for what would become the Big Lie, that he (falsely!) won the election. He said in advance that the ballot was “rigged” and that he could lose only if “they” stole the election. “They” was a domestic enemy that he manufactured in broad strokes for his grassroots base to rise up against: Democrats, liberals, globalists, radical socialists, communists, antifa leftists, the Black Lives Matter movement, the mainstream media, George Soros, various other “bogey” men and women, deep state bureaucrats, and even congressional Republicans, whom he labeled “RINOs” (“Republicans in Name Only”) and “Never Trumpers.”





After the election was declared in favor of Biden, Trump refused to concede. He never stopped lying about the outcome to his base and the rest of America. He deployed Rudy Giuliani and his legal team to contest every single postelection juncture. He harangued state election officials in phone calls and in person to intimidate them into repudiating or even changing the vote tallies. He told Vice President Mike Pence to block the formal election certification process in Congress, which was beyond his constitutional authority. When Pence refused, Trump rallied thousands of his supporters to “stop the steal” on Capitol Hill.

So, what thwarted Trump’s slow motion, in-plain-sight attempt at a self-coup? Fortunately, there was pushback from all the key institutions you need for a coup. First, the military and other parts of the government resisted Trump’s efforts to personalize their power. Second, major media outlets reported the facts truthfully. Social media outlets flagged the president’s lies about the election—albeit belatedly—and Twitter and Facebook ultimately cut off his accounts. Third, the judiciary and courts held firm. “Trump judges,” all the way up to the Supreme Court, respected their oath of office and rejected the president’s appeals to overturn legitimate election results. Fourth, state and local government officials refused to be swayed. They repeatedly called out the lie that Trump had won the election. Finally, in the legislature, the vice president performed his constitutional role, as did the Republican Senate majority leader and most of the Senate. The only two elements that rallied behind the president’s coup attempt were the handful of senators and the majority of House Republicans and his popular support, in the form of an insurgency—the mob that stormed the Capitol.

The good news for the United States is that Trump’s self-coup failed. The bad news is that his supporters still believe the false narrative, the Big Lie that he won the election. Trump has not repudiated it, nor have the House and Senate Republicans who voted against the Electoral College results. Millions of people still think the election was stolen. They still support Trump the person, not the Republican Party, and many are prepared to take further action on his behalf.

As in the case of other coup attempts, the president’s actions have put us on the brink of civil war. Trump did not overturn the election results, but, just as he intended, he disrupted the peaceful democratic transition of executive power.




*Fiona Hill is a British-American foreign affairs specialist and academic. She is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council specializing in Russian and European affairs.