Those who ignore history are doomed to fail and repeat - Trump and Neville Chamberlain

An echo essay published in The Brunswick News, in Georgia:

September 30, 1938

Hitler made inflammatory speeches demanding that Germans in Czechoslovakia be reunited with their homeland, war seemed imminent. Neither France nor Britain felt prepared to defend Czechoslovakia.

On Friday, Donald Trump and President Zelenskyy proved that diplomacy, like laws and sausages, should never be made in public. 

Similar negotiations between the leaders of the United States, Russia and Great Britain were difficult during World War II. Still, more reasoned minds conducted deliberations behind closed doors and then joined together with a unified message. As a result, they won WWII. The United States and Ukraine should do the same.

Is President Zelenskyy right to push for a just and lasting peace, one defined by security guarantees? Yes. To do otherwise, to weakly engage with Vladimir Putin, would not bode well for Western Europe, the United States or Ukraine. This is not a case of holding on to the stereotypes of the Cold War. Any serious student should realize that the Russian people are people of vast contrasts and contradictions. However, the Ukrainian conflict is not one with the Russian people. It is the product of a three-year rape of a peaceful nation by one man, Vladimir Putin, who, as a former KGB Colonel, is an artifact of the Soviet era and desires to remain so.

In his book The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill described his predecessor Neville Chamberlain as “an upright, competent, well-meaning man,” while not ignoring the fact that he was also a leader sadly deceived by overconfidence, lacking both foresight and experience in diplomacy. Churchill’s analysis was well-founded, for Chamberlain was greatly responsible for the ill-fated Munich Agreement, which allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, a betrayal of the first order. 

Chamberlain hoped this humiliating sacrifice inflicted on part of a country he did not lead would finally satisfy what Adolf Hitler referred to as his last major territorial demand, thereby avoiding a larger war. He was wrong, for Hitler quickly annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, continuing his conquest of Europe.

If President Zelenskyy or his successor is forced to sign an unfair agreement with Vladimir Putin — especially one without adequate security arrangements protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty — peace may be achieved, but at what price and for how long? 

President Zelenskyy has every right to be skeptical of Mr. Putin, who, like Adolf Hitler, has certainly demonstrated no evidence of peaceful behavior as Ukraine has previously signed several agreements with Russia that Moscow conveniently broke.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan fully understood this dynamic and openly supported those who desired freedom over oppression. Reagan believed that peace should not be bought “by committing an immorality.” He understood that “every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement” and that appeasement ultimately “gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender.” Reagan would have embraced the approximately 800,000 Ukrainian military service members who have valiantly struggled against the Russian invaders rather than a brutal totalitarian autocrat, one who, unprovoked and in violation of international law, invaded a sovereign nation, causing the largest military and refugee crisis in Europe since WWII.

Ukraine isn’t Trump’s to give away, but it is certainly his to lose. Making false statements about the Ukrainian leader, such as being a “dictator without elections” and that Ukraine “should have never started the war,” certainly does not advance the process. It is my prayer that our president will remain strong, not by appeasement but by proceeding honorably in support of Ukraine. If not, the United States can no longer claim that it is the last best hope for freedom in the world, for we will have sacrificed our global standing by taking a knee before an international criminal and one of our country’s biggest adversaries.

Alex Atwood (BS, MA, JD, L.LM.) has served in many roles, including as a Marine officer, in the judiciary, three terms in the Georgia General Assembly, and as a state commissioner in the Kemp Administration. Mr. Atwood now writes and teaches in the School of Business and Public Management at the College of Coastal Georgia. He can be reached at: jatwood@ccga.edu. Mr. Atwood’s views are his own and may not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of College of Coastal Georgia, faculty or administrators.

Warnings continue to stop antisemitism- Holocaust history must be remembered

"...historian Richard J. Evans, 'The Oppermanns was 'the first great masterpiece of anti-fascist literature'. Set in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel revolves around the Oppermann brothers: Gustav, a literary critic and the book’s central character; Edgar, a prominent surgeon; and Martin, the manager of the family’s furniture company."

Echo Editorial opinion published in the San Antonio Express-News: 

SAN ANTONIO — In his 1933, novel “The Oppermanns,” Lion Feuchtwanger did what all great writers do: He captured the specific to reveal the universal.

First published in 1934, but fully imagining the future of Germany over the ensuing years, The Oppermanns tells the compelling story of a remarkable German Jewish family confronted by Hitler's rise to power.

"The Oppermanns", represents a dual tragedy, fictional and real, for the author is eerily prescient in his depiction of a Jewish family in Germany. It is a hard read because we know what will happen in the world beyond the fiction. A nation will succumb to hate, and millions of people will perish as a result.

In fact, "The Oppermanns" can be seen, in retrospect, as a warning, a siren alerting the country — and the world — to the evil in their midst. Some listened, but many more did not. The death camps emerged, and the victims multiplied: men, women and children, their bodies stacked in the fields outside Auschwitz and Belzec and Treblinka and …

America is not Nazi Germany, and a second Holocaust is not looming. But the rhetoric of 2022, bears a chilling resemblance to the rhetoric of 1934. Vile words lead to vile deeds. Antisemitic attacks are on the rise — and must be condemned at every turn.

We have heard vile words recently. When celebrities utter these comments, it adds poison to an already toxic environment. It corrodes our national spirit, legitimizing in the minds of some attitudes that have no legitimacy in a just and caring society.

Kanye West, the rapper who calls himself Ye, may be a gifted artist, but talent is no shield against the malignance that can rot a person’s soul. Ye, who sported a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a recent fashion show, tweeted he would go “death con 3” on Jewish people — an ugly comment that sparked a rally in which white supremacists hung a banner from a freeway overpass in Los Angeles: “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

The Road To Hell: Berlin, 1933:
Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.”

Unlike the response in 1933, Germany, the reaction here has been swift, just and decisive, especially among the business community. Companies associated with West — Adidas, Balenciaga, CAA and MRC — cut him loose, although we would say it took too long. West claimed he lost $2 billion in one day.

“We cannot support any content that amplifies his platform,” CAA and MRC executives wrote in a joint memo.

Before West unleashed his tirade against Jews, former President Donald Trump said American Jews “better get their act together,” a comment critics decried as condescending and antisemitic.

“No President has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump, who has a daughter who converted to Judaism and Jewish grandchildren, posted on his media platform, Truth Social. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”

In another incident, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving promoted “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake up Black America,” an antisemitic movie based on the book of the same title.

“The Brooklyn Nets strongly condemn and have no tolerance for the promotion of any form of hate speech,” the team tweeted.

Each incident has occurred against the backdrop of rising antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League reported 2,717 antisemitic incidents in 2021, three years after 11 people were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue; the figure represents a 34 percent increase over the previous year.

“You had Jews being beaten and brutalized in broad daylight, say, in the middle of Times Square or Los Angeles or the Strip in Las Vegas, where people who were simply identified as Jewish came under assault and attack,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, told PBS. “That was new.”

When antisemitic incidents arise, the entire community must respond in full force.

In a 1933 review of “The Oppermanns,” the New York Times said it was aimed at both Germany and “the world outside.”

“It is … bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!’”

Almost 90 years later, Joshua Cohen expressed a similar sentiment in the New York Times.

“His (Feuchtwanger’s) example shows that art can challenge power, as it were, ‘powerfully,’ and yet have no political effect,” he wrote.

Antisemitism does not sprout from a single seed; it is sown and nurtured across communities and across nations.

Yes, 2022, is not 1933. But the real-life tragedy of “The Oppermanns” is that it may be as relevant now as it was then.

"Shithole countries" and the false theory of eugenics

"Eugenics (during the 1920s) offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their (racial) biases against those they feared as being dangerous."

Reported on the PBS News Hour website

False, racist theory of eugenics once ruled science. Let’s never let that happen again ~ Dr. Howard Markel

When Donald Trump, who was frustrated during a bipartisan immigration meeting in the White House, reportedly asked, last month, why the U.S. was protecting immigrants from “shithole countries,” he appeared to be privileging the immigration status, if not the biology, of some people from certain lands.

This harsh stereotype harkens back to an era when race mattered a great deal in terms of one’s status, rights and opportunities — all to our nation’s social detriment.

Between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were obsessed with the future of their country’s gene pool and how different immigrants might taint it.

Supporting these fears was a theoretical framework called eugenics, first proposed in 1883 by Sir Frances Galton, the British polymath and naturalist, and a pioneer in many other fields such as meteorology, psychology and anthropometrics.

Galton, the younger, first cousin of Charles Darwin (who played an outsized role in influencing Sir Francis’s education and intellectual life), was born on this day in 1822.

We come today not to praise Francis Galton but to bury him along with his faulty and dangerous pseudoscience of eugenics.

Sir Francis’s social theories on who was eugenically worthy spread like wildfire among white intellectuals in almost every developed Western nation.

The word eugenics is taken from the Greek root, “eugenes,” namely good in stock or hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. Galton coined the term in his 1883 book, “Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development.”

The idea was to propose a way to ‘give to the more suitable races … a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” In a 1904 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Galton defined eugenics more succinctly as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” Galton also coined the phrase “nature versus nurture.”

Sir Francis’s social theories on who was eugenically worthy spread like wildfire among white intellectuals in almost every developed Western nation. For example, in July of 1912, one year after Galton’s death, the threat of inferior races polluting the Western body politic was discussed at the first International Congress of Eugenics in London. 

Sitting in the audience were Britain’s Prime Minister Lord Balfour, Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, along with the ambassadors of Greece, France and (wait for it) Norway.

During the Progressive era (1900-1920), a generation of American reformers sought to fix several social problems of the day, which included urban poverty, assimilating the huge number of immigrants coming to American shores, and public health crises such as epidemics, high infant mortality rates and explosive population growth. Many of these reformers used inappropriate eugenic explanations for their management of those deemed to be socially undesirable: so-called “mental defectives” (which included those labeled with newly-created clinical terms like “imbeciles,” “idiots,” and “morons”); the blind, deaf, mentally ill and “crippled”; orphans, unwed mothers, epileptics, Native Americans, African Americans, foreigners, poor residents from the mountains and hollows of Appalachia and many other “outsider” groups.

“Inferior races,” eugenic theorists concluded, were a drain on the economic, political and moral health of American life.

Some African American intellectuals, too, supported the theory, arguing we should focus on the “talented tenth” of every race.
One of the dirtiest realities of the American eugenics movement is that, with relatively few prominent exceptions, it is difficult to find a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man (or woman) of means who did not endorse such theories.

As the “social Darwinist”, Herbert Spencer famously opined, it was a matter of the “survival of the fittest.” “Race suicide,” a term introduced in 1901 by the University of Wisconsin sociologist and best-selling author Edward A. Ross, was a concern that captured the American conversation all the way up to the White House. Behind his “bully pulpit,” President Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly wrung his hands over the issue.

Other influential eugenicists who fretted over the American protoplasm included grant makers from both the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, psychologist Henry H. Goddard, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Mass., auto magnate Henry Ford, inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell, botanist Luther Burbank, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert A. Millikan, a Nobel laureate in physics, novelists Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, economist William Z. Ripley, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, advocate for the blind Helen Keller, African-American scholar W.E.B. Dubois, and the creator of the wellness movement, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

The solution of the day was to quarantine, cordon off and prevent these “undesirables” from contaminating the “superior” mostly white, native-born citizens. Moreover, racial groups deemed “eugenically superior,” specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were encouraged to reproduce at greater rates, a concept often referred to as “positive eugenics.”

Those adjudged to have “inferior genes” were discouraged from reproducing through the establishment of “negative eugenics” programs, such as state-mandated sterilization laws for “mental defectives,” restrictions against who could marry whom, birth control policies, harsh adoption laws and loud nativist calls for laws restricting the entry of “swarthy,” “unkempt” and “unassimilable” immigrants. In essence, eugenics offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their biases against those they feared as dangerous. Indeed, few of the “social eugenics policies” had a greater impact than the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which blocked the entry of the millions of Eastern and Southern European and Asian immigrants seeking refuge on our shores for the following 40 years. How many millions of them died or lived tortured lives in their native lands because of this stringent and prejudiced policy is difficult to enumerate.

One of the biggest fans of the American eugenics movement was Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Nazi Germany. When the world discovered the role eugenics played in Hitler’s campaign to cleanse the Third Reich of its “unfit,” it drummed a final nail into the eugenics movement coffin.

Once the theory of an armchair population biologist, eugenics too quickly transmogrified into a racist and harmful evidence base for ridding nations of those the dominant society did not like or feared. Of course, the problem was that the evidence base was false and poorly constructed.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

If Francis Galton is remembered at all, it should be poorly, despite his other intellectual contributions. Some consider eugenics to be merely the weird, step-uncle of modern, scientifically-grounded genetics. Yet, this bit of history reminds us to constantly evaluate and test our theories for evidence of racism and prejudice before implementing them and harming the innocent.

A sign that reads "Stop" placed near a barb wire is seen at the concentration camp during a ceremony marking the 68th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz Birkenau.

Donald Trump has failed in his role to protect Americans from falling victim to the false theory of eugenics.  When Trump wrongly called certain countries "shitholes", he instantly created a regressive culture of racial tolerance towards people who originated from those nations that he stigmatized.

Historians: Opinions about Donald Trump war with the FBI and intelligence

“Unprecedented”: historians on why Trump’s war with the FBI is so stunning: Penn State, Emory University and others.....

House Republicans have wrongly voted to release a memo alleging anti-Trump bias at the FBI. The classified memo reportedly details how the FBI used the Trump dossier produced by ex-British spy Christopher Steele to unlawfully surveil the president.

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp noted, there is no evidence so far that the FBI was plotting against Trump, and it’s unlikely that the memo will provide any. As it stands, the president has until Saturday to decide whether to release the memo. (The FBI has privately and publicly urged him not to do so.)

If the president decides to release the memo, the White House and the FBI will be in open war with each other.

Commentary published in Vox.com

Douglas M. Charles, professor of history, Penn State University

Regarding the current antagonism between the White House and FBI, there is no good historical precedent. Never has a president of the United States attacked the FBI so publicly. Furthermore, congressional committees with oversight responsibilities have also never openly attacked the FBI in this way.

In the J. Edgar Hoover days (1924-1972), the FBI worked in some cases to advance the political interests of the White House: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy interests, Eisenhower’s anti-communist interests, Lyndon Johnson’s and Nixon’s political intelligence interests.

When Harry Truman was president and allegedly was “soft on communism,” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secretly worked with congressional committees and Sen. Joe McCarthy to advance the anti-communist cause, but there was never a public rift between the FBI and the White House. 

The idea that a president would so publicly condemn the FBI and its work is unprecedented, and does appear to be an effort to pull the FBI back into the presidential orbit as an agency doing its bidding....

Carol Anderson, professor of history and African-American studies, Emory University

Yes, the independence of the FBI is under siege. Bringing an independent judiciary and investigative branch under the domination of the executive is one of the first moves of regimes that do not respect the rule of law. Pinochet’s Chile. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia.

The rationale is simple. Besides the military, the judiciary and law enforcement branches are the most powerful in a state. 

Control and politicization of that wing allows the ruler to criminalize his opponents, to label them enemies of the state, when in fact those so-called enemies are really defenders of a more viable, democratic nation. That is why they are a threat.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, professor of history, University of Edinburgh

There have been tensions in the past between the White House and the FBI. For example, President Johnson made it known that he was disappointed the FBI could not prove there were communists behind the domestic protest movement against the Vietnam War. The CIA concluded the same, and LBJ had to abandon any urge he may have felt to fire the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover. But that fracas was a storm in a teacup compared with today’s confrontation.

It seems to me that there has been incompetence all round. Russian President Vladimir Putin rightly thought there was a chance of an ally in the White House, [and] then, to further that goal, sanctioned interference in the presidential election. Donald Trump indeed wanted to be friends with Russia but suffers from Putin-like hubris ... and has thwarted his own aim in that he cannot now be friends with Russia without appearing to be part of Putin’s conspiracy.

What happens to the FBI may seem a side issue compared with all this, but presidential disrespect for the law is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s behavior, which led to his resignation in disgrace.

Meg Jacobs, professor of history, Princeton University

The contest of wills between Trump and the FBI is not so much a part of a long-term battle between the president and the director of intelligence as much as it is the latest episode in the GOP effort to sideline and discredit the Russia investigation.

When Christopher Wray testified during his confirmation hearings, he assured the Senate committee he was “not faint of heart.” 

If and when necessary, he would be willing to stand up to the president. And so far, it looks like he’s living up to his promise. However, the fight over the House Republican memo is less about historical precedence or weakening of the checks on the presidency than it is a reflection of the polarized politics we are living through and, more generally, the attack on the credibility of all government institutions.

The memo scandal is a move on behalf of the White House ... to tarnish the reputation of the FBI and of the Justice Department, and by extension call into doubt the motives of the Mueller investigation. In that way, it takes us further down the path of turning every development in the investigation into a partisan ploy.

That, of course, is nothing new — think of the attacks on Kenneth Star by the Clinton White House. But here, the charges are not simply that Mueller is an overzealous prosecutor, but rather that the FBI tried to help throw an entire election. The House memo seems like it will suggest that the FBI was implicated in an attempted coup. The long-term significance of the memo release is that it may confirm for some how few in government can be trusted to act in an independent and honest way, even the FBI —which has historically been seen as beyond the partisan fray.

Carol Anderson, professor of history and African-American studies, Emory University

Yes, the independence of the FBI is under siege. Bringing an independent judiciary and investigative branch under the domination of the executive is one of the first moves of regimes that do not respect the rule of law. Pinochet’s Chile. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia.

The rationale is simple. Besides the military, the judiciary and law enforcement branches are the most powerful in a state. Control and politicization of that wing allows the ruler to criminalize his opponents, to label them enemies of the state, when in fact those so-called enemies are really defenders of a more viable, democratic nation. That is why they are a threat.

Ivan Greenberg, author of Surveillance in America: Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present

This level of open combat between President Trump and the FBI is unprecedented. In the past, President Jimmy Carter took on the FBI and reformed it substantially, reducing its investigations in politics. That reform followed the death of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975-’76 on abuse of power by the FBI and other Intel agencies. But Carter did much of the reform behind the scenes. It was not open combat, as Trump is waging today.

Trump is the second president to fire an FBI director. The first [FBI director] was William Sessions in 1993 [who was dismissed by then-President Bill Clinton]. But there was little open feuding like today surrounding that decision. Greenberg says that Trump has a deep-seated suspicion of the US intel agencies, which may be due to contact with them from his days in Atlantic City, or from his father’s experience with the FBI.

The claim that the FBI’s “independence” is a thing to preserve is misguided. In the past, much of that so-called “independence” allowed the bureau to go rogue in its spying on Americans and evade congressional or Justice Department accountability.
Morton Keller, professor of history, Brandeis University

The major theme in earlier FBI-White House relations was the tension between the presidents and an all-but-autonomous J. Edgar Hoover. Strong chief executives like FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and LBJ contained him pretty well, but there was constant tension.

I have no idea whether there will be an increase or a decline in the FBI’s independence. I do know this: The tension between the Democratic presidents of the past and J. Edgar Hoover closely resembles the relationship between Trump and the current FBI leadership. It appears to be inherent in the institutional relationship of the presidency and the FBI.

Timothy Naftali, clinical associate professor of public service, New York University

Donald Trump is not the first president to have a fraught relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Trump is, however, the first to launch both a public and private war on its credibility. When Richard Nixon found that there were limits to what J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were willing to do for the White House, he ordered that a White House investigative unit (dubbed “the Plumbers”) be set up to go after his enemies.

But Nixon did not dare take on Hoover or the bureau publicly. After Hoover’s death, Nixon put his own man in the job and expected loyalty. The bureau beneath L. Patrick Gray pushed back when “loyalty” meant obstruction of justice. In the long post-Hoover period, the relationship between the bureau and presidents has seemed less fraught.

The one exception, before the Trump era, was the tense relationship between President Clinton and his FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was very supportive of the Lewinsky investigation. However, that tension remained largely hidden, and no evidence has ever surfaced that the president tried to have Freeh fired.

There’s another phenomenon of the Trump era that portends a real threat to the independence of the FBI. Not since the “season of investigations” of the CIA and the FBI in the 1970s have members of Congress been so suspicious of the bureau. The FBI’s force of dedicated public servants will not be alone in bearing the burden of this hyperpartisan moment. In the end, whether the American people fully recognize it or not, they need an independent, nonpartisan federal investigative force.

H.W. Brands, professor of history, University of Texas

I can’t think of a single time any president has done anything like this. Harry Truman privately worried that the CIA would become an American Gestapo. And several presidents muttered against J. Edgar Hoover. But no one went public the way Trump has.

Stanley Kutler, the historian who knew more about Watergate than anyone, called it the “war of the FBI succession.” The death of J. Edgar Hoover left the bureau in a state where Richard Nixon could try to employ it to cover his misdeeds. But the FBI had its own interests and secrets, and in the tangle that ensued, it was the president who was brought down. The lesson might be that if a president has secrets he wants to keep hidden, he shouldn’t mess with the FBI.
David Stebenne, professor of history, Ohio State University

There was serious antagonism between the FBI and the White House during the Kennedy administration (over Director Hoover’s attitude toward the civil rights movement in general and Dr. [Martin Luther] King in particular).

There was also serious antagonism between the FBI and the White House during the Nixon administration. Nixon believed that Hoover might have wiretapped a conversation dealing with the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese government in the fall of 1968, and feared Hoover might release it, implicating Nixon and his campaign chief in a violation of the federal statute that prohibits private citizens from interfering with the conduct of American foreign policy.

Once the Watergate break-in happened, that tension between the FBI and the White House intensified.

As for the current situation, it seems fair to say that the White House appears to be pressuring the FBI, but it’s too soon to tell whether that leads to a significant loss of the FBI’s independence from the White House.

The Nunes memo, explained with diagrams