Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
With every death from COVID19 and every lie, distortion, or amazing conspiracy theory about it, promoted by the President and his advisors I grow more and more frustrated and angry. I have gone from the point of simply disliking the man and those who tell whoppers of lies in his defense that I want them to die, the same kind of slow and painful deaths that he and his administration Have allowed to happen to almost 154,000 Americans. I hate them because of their violence and racism, that tries to masquerade itself under the banner of Christianity. That is an affront to me as a Christian and as a Christian I have to ask like Major General Henning Von Tresckow, a key planner of the attempt to kill Hitler on July 20th 1944 who died in that attempt: “I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.” However, I would change it to Trump’s Regime. I hate them because they dispatch the equivalents of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen to American cities, uninvited by local or state governments to conduct brutal operations against protestors who until attacked had been peaceful, even kidnapping people off of the street out of their legal area of operations in rented vehicles.
I could go on and on and on, but the actions, lies, and violence of this administration against American citizens and immigrants, those here on valid entry visas, or those fleeing violent regimes and dictatorial regimes South of our border, including exposing them to COVID19 in confinement at the border and sending them back, sick or infected to their countries of origin to die or to infect others. Such actions would have been classed as Crimes against Humanity at Nuremberg.
I am angry because I am seeing my President defying the defying his oath and subverting the Constitution, and pissing on the ideals of the declaration as he allies himself with enemies abroad like Vladimir Putin, and at home with White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and Neo-Confederates. In other words he is putting the national security of the United States in danger against foreign enemies, but also deploying the police power of the State against his domestic political opponents, often in the most unabashedly racist ways possible.
Unfortunately, few in his party leadership dare oppose him because they are afraid if his often heavily armed and dangerous cult followers, people willing to attack state capital buildings and legislators to fight against political opponents of Trump who support science and public health in terms of COVID19 and those who oppose his overtly racist policies which harken back to Jim Crow. I fully expect that in the next few months leading to the November election that Trump and his cult, including the Attorney General, and Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security will do all that they can to take complete control even if it leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The President is a malignant narcissistic sociopath and he will stop at nothing because only he matters.
I do hope and pray for the best but now I expect the worst, because our President, his closest advisors, and his loyal cult followers see him as their messiah, though he is an Anti-Christ figure if one ever existed in American politics.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered on the person order of Hitler wrote:
“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear … Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.“
He also wrote:
“We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing — for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’ — for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?”
For me this is not about politics, though politics has to be included. It is about an Oath of a Military Officer that I took to Our Constitution over 37 years ago, and my faith which does not deny the rights I have to others based on their skin color, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or anything else.
Another German Officer who died on July 20th 1944 was General Ludwig Beck, who resigned his post as the head of the German Army over Hitler’s planed invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. He remained connected to the German resistance and wrote something that I fully believe that all military officers, or government officials who swear an oath to the Constitution must fully understand and live by, or die as traitors and hypocrites.
“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees hisduty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”
Beck also said: Final Decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will not acquit these leaders with blood guilt if they do not act according to their specialist and political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience ends when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid them from carrying out an order.”
I finally finished my book Mine Eyes Have Seen They Glory! Racism, Religion, Ideology, and Politics in the Civil War Era until Today, and Why They Matter Now. In researching and writing it I have become radicalized about fighting for those words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
While the founders of the country knew that be preserving slavery that they were being hypocrites, the fact of the matter that this phrase is always to be interpreted in an ever expanding manner until it is true for every human being. In that same declaration, those writers and editors also noted: “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
I cannot think of an American President who these were more pertinent to, then Donald Trump. He is the man who Alexander Hamilton warned us in his words and in the Federalist Papers.
“Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”
These are harrowing times, and if we are to retain our freedom and liberty for all Americans, and defend their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness we cannot allow ourselves to be bystanders in the face of evil by hiding behind our theology, ideology, or some grotesque imagination of what patriotism means. Judge Learned Hand, one of the most brilliant judges in American history never to sit on the Supreme Court spoke at a swearing in of thousands of new citizens before a crowd of over a million and a half people in New York’s Central Park two weeks before D-Day. His words then are as true today as when he first spoke them:
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow.
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”
But the President does not believe any of this. As historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his little book On Tyranny wrote:
“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
So I leave you with that. This is not a joke, it is an existential matter for us as individuals and a nation.
Until Tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 