Category Archives: ethics

September 2, 2020 · 01:54

Our Heart of Darkness and Failure to Understand rather than Just Condemn Evil

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Joseph Conrad wrote in his book Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

Likewise, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”

As I struggle to understand President Trump and his criminal administration and cult followers in regard to the epic disaster of Coronavirus 19 in the United States, his unabashed authoritarian actions in destroying the guardrails of the Constitution and our Institutions, his open and flagrant disregard for law and the unwritten norms that have helped preserve and protect our resilient yet fragile system of government which depends on the constitutional separation of powers and the need for compromise in order to keep us from falling in into an authoritarian and yes, Fascist dictatorship. He has so corrupted the institutions charged with preserving the rights and liberties of our people, regardless of their political party, race, ethnicity, religion or lack thereof, and turned the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security into instruments of domestic terror that it boggles the mind. Despite all Trump has done to corrupt and poison the American political system, he has done little to take his terror abroad, although he seldom speaks up when other authoritarian rulers use their power to kill and imprison their opposition.

The fact is that the current American President is a serial liar, adulterer, business failure, deceiver, swindler and grifter who has no respect for our ideals as written in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the laws enacted by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. But those are just the surface issues, for honestly he is an evil man who could care less about the life of any American, even his followers. The fact is that President Trump is a malignant narcissistic sociopath and open racist who only cares about himself, his power, and his wealth that the lives of people don’t matter to him. Property and businesses yes, but victims of racism and violence committed by Police officers, or right wing racist and fascist individuals or groups don’t matter to him, because they are sub-human criminals who don’t deserve to live as equals in this country. That was never more on display than several times this year after Numerous Black men including George Floyd of Minneapolis who had a police officer who happened to work with him as a club bouncer, kneeled with his knee across Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, despite Floyd’s plea that he couldn’t breathe before he died. Before that there was Brianna Taylor, a paramedic and EMT in Louisville who had her home invaded by Louisville Police and was dunned down. Last week it was the turn of another Black Man, this time Jacob Blake who was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer who was holding on to his shirt as Blake attempted to get in his car with his three young children. Blake survived but will most likely be crippled for life. There are hundreds of other incidents of police brutality and killings of Blacks and other minorities over the past several decades. Then there are the killings committed by White Supremacists at Black churches, Jewish Synagogues, Islamic Mosques, Sikh Temples, people protesting Confederate monuments and other locations which do not seem to even register in President Trump’s perverted soul. It seems to me that many, if not most Americans do not want to believe that any American President is capable of the commission of gross and unspeakable crimes or approve of them. Trump may not be the first of such men, as we can go back much father, but as President he is the worst, even topping Andrew Johnson in that category of racist criminals, and yes both were impeached, but not removed from office.

So how did we as Americans get to such a place where such a criminal, scofflaw, and unrepentant racist could not only be elected to office, but could based on inflaming the fears of white people could be re-elected. I find that interesting because of something that Gustave Gilbert, an American Army Psychologist assigned to watch over the Major Nazi War Crimes Defendant’s at Nuremberg came to see. He wrote about a truth that we cannot see in President Trump and his cohort of racist cult followers. Gilbert wrote:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

That absence of empathy is common to Trump and the vast majority of his White Christian supporters. The evidence is show in almost every poll, 80-90% of them see nothing wrong in what he is doing and has done. Personally, after having been a Republican for more than half of my life I cannot imagine just how low the GOP has sunk under Trump’s authoritarian leadership. When I left the GOP in 2008 after returning from Iraq, I refused to belief that the party could abandon all principle and support a man with no moral center, no integrity, and no loyalty to family, wives, children, his employees, his investors, or the country.

I honestly believe that one of our greatest problems in the United States is to believe the myths of our nation being a light to the world, our manifest destiny, as well as the twin myths that have shaped us since Reconstruction, the myth of the Noble South, and the myth of the Lost Cause. Likewise the racist crimes committed against committed against almost every immigrant group going back to the Irish and Germans, Then the southern and Eastern Europeans, the Jews, the Japanese, the Chinese, Filipinos, those of Mexican or Latin American Descent, and yes Arabs regardless of their religious beliefs, and last but not least the genocide committed by our English ancestors and our own genocide and confinement to reservations of the descendants of America’s First Nation, more commonly called Native Americans, tend to be minimized by almost all of White America, as well as by other minorities who simply don’t know about the crimes committed by our nation against every Original Nation since the English landed at Jamestown in 1607. We tend to show little empathy for others, especially those darker than us.

Malcom X said something very appropriate, and which if you have not experienced poverty, and discrimination, you may find it hard to empathize with the plight of American Blacks. The often misunderstood Civil Rights leader said: “The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities – he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.” What we tend to forget is that such treatment in Europe brought many English, Scots, Irish, Germans, and others to the United States, where their descendants emulated the behaviors of their ancestor’s oppressors, especially towards Blacks who many believed were sub-human, the same term used by the Nazis to describe the Jews. Think about if you or I were the products of such longstanding, pervasive, and institutionalized discrimination, how would you feel or what would you do? If you cannot answer the same as Malcom X, then you will never understand.

One of our chief problems is that we want to believe that evil is simply done be evil people, especially the leaders of enemy nations, because we cannot abide the reflection that we see when we look in the mirror and see our own crimes committed at home and abroad, once again proving that for much of our national existence we have had little empathy for the victims of slavery, the wars against our First Nations, which included biological warfare, and the forced marches of them from their ancestral homelands to desolate lands, which once we found contained gold, silver, or oil, we took back from them, despite our treaty obligations. I could go on to our conquests and geographical expansion against weaker opponents like Mexico, Spain, and the relatively newly independent nations of Central American and the Caribbean. It was no wonder that Ulysses Grant in his memoirs wrote of the conquest of Mexico:

“Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”

That is why when we see a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or the monsters of the so-called Islamic State, we are often strangely comforted, because we cannot see ourselves in them. This is often because we We look abroad we can point to a single person with a wicked ideology and proclaim that “they are evil!” all the while forgetting that they are, or were, like us, also human. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reminds us of the folly of that type of thinking:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

A few years ago I took a break from my Gettysburg studies and writing and dusted off an old academic paper dealing with the one of the more uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. I did that because I felt that I needed to reexamine the nature of evil in the modern world. Since that time I have gone back, done more study, more writing, and made more visits to locations of Nazi evil. I was not able to do so this year because of Europe’s well reasoned travel ban on Americans due to the incomprehensible

When I ponder the evil committed by supposedly civilized men and women of Germany, I realize that they are little different than others who incompetence and insipid evil of the Trump Regime regarding COVID19 share the immoral culture of the West. These people were the products of a culture of learning, and of science. They were part of a culture formed by the Christian tradition, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the age of Reason. As I pondered this I came to remember something said by the late Iris Chang, “civilization is tissue thin.”

Lynching in the American South

That series of articles about the Einsatzgruppen dealt with the ordinary men, and the bureaucratic systems that implemented an ideology so twisted and evil that it is unimaginable to most people. In fact even in the Nazi system the majority of the genocide was not committed in the death camps, but up close and personal by men standing over pits with pistols, rifles, and machine guns.

While most people in the United States know a little about the Holocaust, most do not fully comprehend how devilish and insidious the crimes of the Nazis were. More frightening is the fact that in a 2015 survey 46% of people worldwide have never heard of the Holocaust, and of the 54% who are aware of it some 32% think it is a myth or has been greatly exaggerated. The numbers will only get worse as we become farther removed from these events and the survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators die off. The same is true for other genocidal acts.

We typically know about the extermination camps like Auschwitz, but the lesser known dark side of the Holocaust, perhaps the scariest part, is the story of the men of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen and affiliated units, including those of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS, the mobilized battalions of the Order Police, and locally recruited units, rounded up massive numbers of people and killed them up close and personal. In all these units murdered over two million people, about 1.3 million of whom were Jews.

My study of the Holocaust began in college as an undergraduate. My primary professor at California State University at Northridge, Dr. Helmut Haeussler had been an interpreter and interrogator at the Nuremberg trials. I was able to take a number of lecture classes from him a large amount of research and independent study courses in a year of graduate work while finishing my Army ROTC program at UCLA. It was an immersion in the history, sociology, and the psychology of evil, during which I was able to meet and talk with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Einsatzgruppen and Ordungspolizei in Russia

Since then I have continued to read and study. I lived in Germany for over four years, and made many other visits, during which I went to a number of Concentration Camp sites. I visited the rebuilt synagogue in Worms which had been destroyed during the infamous Kristallnacht, and other museums and Holocaust memorial sites in Germany. I visited the Zeppelin field, the site of Hitler’s massive Nazi Party rallies in Nuremburg, as well as the graveyards which contain the victims of other Nazi crimes, including the Nacht und Nebel or night and fog actions, where people simply disappeared and were murdered by the Gestapo.

For me, those visits were sobering, maybe even more so because I understood exactly what happened in those sites. These are uncomfortable places to visit, and I can understand why many people would not want to visit them, or even study them.

The darkness that they remind us of is a part of our human condition. Traces of the evil on display in those places is present in every human being. Frankly, most people cannot bear looking into that abyss, for fear that they might be swallowed by it.

Nanking

I can understand that and I have to admit that it is hard to do so. I am a historian as well as a clinician with much experience dealing with death and trauma. With my training I do a pretty good job of keeping my emotional distance to maintain objectivity when confronted with evil. However, it is hard for me not to have some emotional reaction when visiting these places, or reading about the events and people, and in writing about them.

Likewise, I am very troubled by the growing lack or awareness or denial of the Holocaust. It is very hard for me not to have a virulent reaction when I see books and websites dedicated to Holocaust denial, or that minimize other well documented genocides, and crimes against humanity.

Soviet Mass Killings in Ukraine

My sensitivity to human suffering and the terrible indifference of people in this country to it was greatly increased by my experience of war, and my post-war struggles with PTSD, depression, anxiety, which at points left me very close to committing suicide. A non-chaplain friend, a now retired Navy Command Master Chief Petty Officer that I served with at my last duty station recently remarked that I am a tremendously empathic person, and that I have a large capacity to feel the pain and suffering of others. This capacity for empathy and the ability to feel the suffering of others is part of who I am. It is a good thing, but it makes my work studying and writing about the Holocaust, other genocides, crimes against humanity, and subjects like American slavery, racism, and Jim Crow a sometimes difficult and often very emotionally consuming task. This sometimes leaves me even more sleepless and anxious than normal; especially when I see the indifference of so many people to the suffering of others today.

The Killing Fields

It is that indifference which motivates me to write; because if these events are not recalled and retold, they, like any part of history will be ignored and then forgotten. The statistics bear this out. There are people today, who say that we should stop talking about these events, that they are old news, and they cannot happen again; but history tells us different, and not just the Holocaust, but indeed every genocide. Then there are those who shamelessly use the Holocaust imagery to spread fear among their followers even as they openly demonize minority groups and religions as the Nazis did to the Jews.

I have to agree with the late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who said, “Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.”

The late Iris Chang, who wrote The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II wrote something that is pertinent to almost every modern episode of genocide, or other crime against humanity. It is the ability of leaders, be they political, military, or religious to convince people to rationalize actions that they normally would find repulsive.

“After reading several file cabinets’ worth of documents on Japanese war crimes as well as accounts of ancient atrocities from the pantheon of world history, I would have to conclude that Japan’s behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise.”

There are many other such events that we could note; the American decimation and genocide committed against native American tribes that spanned close to two centuries, the 1915 Turkish genocide of Armenians, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Chinese Communist “Great Leap Forward,” the actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the more recent but seldom discussed action of the Myanmar government and military against its Rohingya Muslim minority.

Rwandan Genocide

What we call civilization, to use the words of Iris Chang, is tissue thin. That is why we must never forget these terrible events of history, and that part of human nature, and in a sense part of every one of us, that makes them so easy to repeat. That is why we must periodically take the time to remember and reflect on the Holocaust, other genocides and crimes against humanity.

It is even more important now with the rise of fascist, nationalist, and racist regimes around the world. Even in the United States these demons of the past, racism, nationalism, and fascism have come out into the open as those who believe in them have become emboldened by the words of President Trump and members of his administration.

In fact in trying to clean up his inaction after the violence committed by neo-Nazis and KKK sympathizers in Charlottesville the President first equated the Nazis and Klansmen with the people that they attacked and under pressure made a speech condemning the Nazis and Klansmen. According to Bob Woodward, when a Fox News correspondent said that was an admission that he was “almost an admission that he was wrong.” The President exploded at Rob Porter, the aide who convinced him to make the speech: “That was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made,” the President told Porter. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?” A few days later the President returned to the subject and again made the argument of moral equivalence.

Coupled with so many of the President’s words and policies directed against Blacks, Mexicans and Central Americans, Arabs, Africans, and others; as well as his attacks on the First Amendment and his praise and defense of cold blooded dictators around the world one has to take it more seriously.

This is not an issue that simply lurks in the past, it is a very real part of the present. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

Yes, these are terribly uncomfortable subjects, but we cannot allow this generation to allow them to be forgotten, lest they be repeated. That is why that I must continue to write about them and do my best to make sure that they are not forgotten as we cannot afford to let them happen again.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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Tagged as absence of empathy, alfred north whitehead, american imperialism, Brianna Taylor, christopher browning, Donald trump followers, eric hoffer, evangelical christians, evil, George Floyd murder, gustave gilbert, heart of darkness, Hurricane Dorian, Jacob Blake, joseph conrad, narcissism, On Tyranny, paranoia, police brutality, president donald trump, President Ulysses S. Grant, primo levi, richard hofstadter, sociopathic personality disorder, The nature of evil, the paranoid style in american politics, timothy snyder, tyranny, war with mexico, white nationalist militias, White racism

September 1, 2020 · 02:45

It is Happening Again, Not in Nazi Germany: The Campaign Against “Life Unworthy of Life”

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I am reflecting about the present in light of the past, and how policy wise, the Social Darwinist policies of the Trump Administration, and the words of his cult propagandists about the value of human life during the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic since it first began. Throughout the pandemic President Trump and his ruthless enablers have done all tat they can to ensure that the pandemic has killed and infected more people in the United States than any nation in the world, and for a nation that represents barely 4% of the world population with one of the most advanced medical systems in the world that is saying a lot. The only answer for such a disaster is that Trump and his Cult want this to happen. Why else would he first deny the infection, then minimize it, then issue a series of contradictory guidance, leave the states to determine their own way through, and then sign a one time bill that provided some relief, but has not been followed up on. The answer to Republicans is that the people helped by it really are not worthy, while the hundreds of billions sucked up by Wall Street and major corporations is worth it. The program is so much like the Nazi economic plan that it defies the imagination.

Then there is the President’s continued resistance to testing, tracing, passive preventive measures such as cloth face masks, social distancing, and closing down the places where the infection spreads most effectively, bars, churches, discos, and sadly Schools too. He has sacked or marginalized many of the best immunologists, virologists, and public health officials in the country and has in the past few weeks appointed political hacks to key positions in his Coronavirus Task Force, who now argue for the Discredited and inhuman concept of Herd Immunity, which if it was employed in the United States would result in at least TWO MILLION MORE DEATHS, and countless more infections. That any President or Administration would even consider such measures places them in the realm of a criminal regime bent on the mass murder or American citizens without even having to fire a bullet or resort to poison gas. All they have to do is let the virus run rampant, which seems to be their plan. As of yesterday the United States reported 187,736 deaths, and 6,211, 796 total cases, 24% of the world’s infections and 22% of the world’s deaths. The American totals are no doubt serious undercounts due to the Trump Administration’s orders to minimize testing and reporting of Coronavirus 19 infections and deaths to minimize the political fallout of the catastrophe that Trump and his Cult Followers not only seek to minimize but pretend that it didn’t happen at all. Instead of reporting the truth the report the false narrative that Trump has saved the country, and the Coronavirus Pandemic was defeated by him even as it rages.

But regardless, the actions of Trump and his followers direct me to the Eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, Weimar Germany, and other European nations, as well as Japan. But the eugenics movement was nowhere more malevolent, evident and active than it was in Hitler’s Germany. Likewise it is hard to believe that members of the administration as well as its supporters seem to believe, if you take them at their word that the elderly, disabled, mentally ill, and poor, especially those who are not white or Christian are a burden on the State, and are as the Eugenicists of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Hitler’s Nazi Party believed, were ”Life unworthy of life .”

It seems hard to believe for anyone born after the mid 1960s, that government through its laws, decrees, and policies could deem certain people to be “life unworthy of life.” The most malevolent of such governments was the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, but individuals and institutions in the United States promoted the same ideology in the 1920s and 1930s but, in spite of actions like the the Tuskegee Experiments, could not carry it to its logical conclusion because most Americans of the time couldn’t go along with it. But the moral, social, religious and ideological barriers to its implementation then no longer exist today.

In Nazi Germany life that was unworthy of life included the physically and mentally handicapped or disabled, those with Downs Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Polio, and people with other neurological conditions. Likewise the mentally ill, those suffering clinical depression, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses were considered to be life unworthy of life. Even the deaf were included, as well as veterans suffering from what we would now call PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury. Also included were people labeled as “asocial” a very loose definition that could include almost any metal disorder or criminal act, including being a homosexual. Sadly, the President himself has made statements that show that he has no regard for the lives of such people, his policies, especially his executive orders, and the men and women he nominates to the Federal Judiciary have similar views to him.

I have been to Hadamar, I have walked it’s grounds, toured its wards, and stood in its gas chambers and crematoria. Tens of thousands people deemed “Life unworthy of Life” were liquidated at the T-4 Euthanasia centers, most located in former hospitals, psychiatric institutions, or sanitariums.

Once the Nazis decided to eliminate them the same day as they invaded Poland in 1939, most of these people gassed with carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust of trucks or Diesel engines, and their remains were cremated. Others, especially children were either starved to death or given a lethal injection while they slept. In every case the next of kin of each victim was sent a standard form letter telling them that their relative had died of influenza, typhus, or some other disease while being given the best of care. The next of kin were then given the option of paying for an urn that may or may not have contained the ashes of their loved ones for inurnment near their home town. If they could not afford an urn the ashes were disposed of in the cemetery nearest to where they were killed. At Hadamar, it was on the grounds of the institution.

But the Euthanasia program, despite Nazi lies to senior clerics and officials of neutral countries didn’t stop, it simply moved eastward as the SS Einsatzgruppen killed the patients at every mental hospital, sanitarium, old folks home, or orphanage they came across. Inside Germany at the four T4 centers over 80,000 were gassed. At Hartheim in Austria a Party was held on the gassing of the 10,000th victim. Richard Evans wrote:

“At Hartheim the staff held a party to celebrate their ten-thousandth cremation, assembling in the crematorium around the naked body of a recently gassed victim, which was laid out on a stretcher and covered with flowers. One staff member dressed as a clergyman and performed a short ceremony, then beer was distributed to all present. Eventually no fewer than 20,000 were gassed at Hartheim, the same at Sonnenstein, 20,000 at Brandenburg and Bernburg, and another 20,000 at Grafeneck and Hadamar, making a total of 80,000 altogether.”

The tolls in Poland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union were much higher, but were conducted outside the auspices of the T4 program which “officially” ended in 1941, but continued in a more clandestine manner throughout the war.

Now in Trump’s United States of 2020 the laws guaranteeing health care to people are being challenged, the Secretary of Education has removed funding from the Department’s funding request for the Special Olympics, programs for the physically and mentally disabled under the SSI are being cut to the bone, and even care for disabled veterans is being threatened as not being economical because none of them are economically valuable to an administration for which profit is the bottom line of the insurance industry. Likewise, most supposedly pro-life Christians have no problems in cutting such programs because many have bought into the materialistic, Prosperity Gospel, whose fawning preachers have anointed President Trump if he were King Cyrus.

To Trump’s Cult of Evangelicals no criticism of the President can be tolerated, no matter how factual it may be, even if it involves the lives of the least, and most most vulnerable members of our society. Thus, for these supposedly “pro-life Christians” the sick, the weak, the infirm, or mentally ill, who are not productive have no place in society. Inside the womb they are a remarkably powerful political issue; but once outside the womb they might as well be dead if you listen to Trump’s clique of Reichsbishofs, according to who cannot produce for the economy should not eat, get medical care, or live. They are life unworthy of life. This is even worse than the Nazis, for there is not even the Darwinistic idea of producing superior human beings, but rather to kill and let die for profit. The Nazis did that too, with the life of every human being that the considered sub-human, but the overriding the goal of the Nazi true believers, the idea of a perfect Aryan Germanic Master Race was always the ideal to be pursued.

Thus the propaganda directed at German citizens as to how much these men women and children cost the German taxpayer in order to get them to acquiesce to something they would never consider. Now today’s Republican leaders use the same arguments to justify cutting taxes and let the social contract we have with our fellow human beings collapse, because the to poor, the sick, the infirm, the disabled, prisoners, the mentally ill and the elderly simply cost more than they are worth, that also applies to infants and young children suffering any expensive chronic but treatable conditions.

You see, in the authoritarian world in which we live; a world where an uninhibited and unhinged executive backed by cult followers, profit minded billionaires, and greedy preachers, such lives; the old and infirm, the disabled, the mentally ill, the young but physically disabled, those with neurological issues, and birth defects stand in the way of profit, stand in the way of a “perfect” society. They have no value to them because they cost too much, and burden real Americans.

If you directly challenged such people may not advocate euthanasia per say, they would not advocate for gas chambers, or firing squads. Instead they would turn a blind eye to depriving their victims of citizenship, starving them, depriving them of medical care, and turning them out of care facilities knowing that their families lack the capability of caring for them. and if they have any capacity for work, work them until they die, so long as they Confess Christ before they die.

How do we know that life does not matter to them? One way is to note the many times that pharmaceutical corporations have increased the costs of previously inexpensive yet vital life saving medicines by thousands of dollars a dose all for profit with little to no pushback from the White House, or the FDA, much less the Senate GOP majority, or the Evangelical supporters of Trump.

Please understand, this dystopian future need not happen if people of any faith, or no faith at all make a stand against a twisted idea of dictatorship backed up by billionaires and corporate entities that suck billions of dollars from the taxpayer and pay almost nothing themselves. Of course they couldn’t do it on their own in not supported by a de facto State Media, and a cult like legion of followers who would follow Trump even if he shot someone on 5th Avenue. His words, not mine.

I am now 60 years old, and I have served in the military over 39 years, and this does bother me enough to speak out. As a senior military officer facing the end of my career and retirement amid multiple physical and emotional issues, it does matter. I keep two things in mind today. First is that of my own responsibility to my Oath, and to fellow citizens. In that I am reminded of the words of German General Ludwig Beck who wrote:

“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”

And like Beck’s compatriot, Major General Henning Von Tresckow stated: “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.” Or in my case, Trump’s America.

Historian Timothy Snyder reminds of a certain truth, which should we forget, as I imagine a large number of Trump supporters have:

Those are all hard truths to comprehend. As Americans we always presume that we are the good guys, when in fact many times we have acted in means contrary to the ideals of the Declaration as well as the Constitution, and other laws enacted by Congress. But our republic has survived, but its institutions are both resilient and fragile. History has proven this, we have even survived a civil war, but we may not survive an increasingly vindictive and unstable President, his compliant majority in the Senate, and the 35-40% of voters who are in effect no longer Republicans, but a Trump Cult which is largely buttressed by Conservative Evangelical Churches, and inspired by a President who uses force, legal, and extralegal alike to secure his rule. That my friends is what a Fascist Authoritarian does.

We live in extraordinary times which call for extraordinary strength if our Republic is to continue in any form that resembles the intentions of the founders and their liberal enlightenment beliefs. The German Pastor, Theologian, and Martyr to the Hitler regime wrote:

“The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.”

If we do not want to see the return of a full fledged government and industrial sponsored campaign to eradicate life unworthy of life, we have to fight. It is a fight that we did not chose, but if the Republic is to survive without becoming a criminal dictatorship we must speak up, and we must do so now. If we do not we have no one to blame but ourselves.

As Yehuda Bauer said: “Thou shall not be a perpetrator, thou shall not be a victim, and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.”

The choice is ours, and the time is now. As Bonhoeffer noted: “The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” and also“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Likewise he wrote: We in the resistance have learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the excluded, the ill treated, the powerless, the oppressed and despised… so that personal suffering has become a more useful key for understanding the world than personal happiness.”

If I as a Christian and an American officer sworn to uphold our Constitution cannot do that, I am worse than Trump and his cult. Over the past few years I have come to understand what Bonhoeffer wrote in prison:

“During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not ahomo religiosus, but simply a man, as Jesus was a man…I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.”

“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.”

In the midst of all the lies of Trump and his cult. In the midst of their attempt to kill as many people as possible, and to bring about a dictatorship I can only say as did Marin Luther at the Diet of Worms:

“Since your most serene majesty and your high mightinesses require of me a simple, clear and direct answer, I will give one, and it is this: I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is as clear as noonday that they have fallen into error and even into glaring inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture, or by cogent reasons, if I am not satisfied by the very text I have cited, and if my judgment is not in this way brought into subjection to God’s word, I neither can nor will retract anything; for it cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me! Amen.”

I double dog dare any Trump Cultist who calls themselves a Christian to refute that.

I am tired of the so called Evangelical Christians who damn Christ and his Gospel for their political gain and shit upon their evangelical forefathers like the great Virginia Baptist John Leland who in defense of religious liberty for all wrote:

“The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever. … Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”

I will fight for the truth, I will fight for the rights of every American. But I will not ever concede ground to a murderous group of thugs masquerading as Christians whose only goal is the continuation in power of a man who will give them anything in exchange for his unbridled power and authoritarian rule.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Filed under anti-semitism, christian life, civil rights, civil war, Coronavirus 19 Pandemic, crimes against humanity, ethics, euthanasia, faith, History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, Military, ministry, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary, racism, Religion, war crimes

Tagged as Coronavirus 19, corporate profits, dietrich bonhoeffer, donald trump supporters, einsatzgruppen, eugenics, euthanasia, evangelical christians, Hadamar, Hartheim, henning von tresckow, Herd immunity, Holocaust, life unworthy of life, ludwig beck, master race, mentally ill, neo-nazis, physically disabled people, president donald trump, republican party, T4 Euthanasia Centers, timothy snyder, tuskegee experiments, weimar germany, White nationalism, yehuda bauer

August 30, 2020 · 03:00

Fighting for Truth and Our Political System in 2020: Any Election Can be the Last, or at Least the Last in the Lifetime of the Person Casting the Vote.

Babi Yar

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I have a policy about Holocaust denial on my site. If someone denies the Holocaust or tries to minimize it I delete their post. That might sound somewhat restrictive, but I will not give them the space on my site to posit their race hatred and justification of genocide in any way shape or form. It used to be that I would spar with them, but I realized that by doing so I gave them a sense of acceptability, and when some proceeded to make physical threats against me for opposing their ideas I realized that I couldn’t go down that road anymore.

That being said, every so often I get comments from Holocaust deniers, as well as Japanese deniers of the Rape of Nanking and other Japanese atrocities in Asia during the 1930s and World War II. The Japanese Nanking deniers are almost always Right Wing revisionists and hyper-nationalists who subscribe to the racial theory that the Chinese and other non-Japanese are less than human. But I’ve never had an American take issue with Nanking. That being said almost all of my holocaust deniers are Americans who not only deny the Holocaust, but who subscribe to the most base and repulsive theories of anti-Semitism, and White Supremacy. I find that fascinating in a very clinical way.

I say that because I am inherently suspicious. If someone tells me a story or posts something attacking me for something I write here, or post on my Facebook or Twitter feeds I do my best to not take the comments personally, while recognizing their seriousness, especially if threats to my life or my family are involved. Thus I tend to ask myself “Why this? Why me? Why now?” My Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor at Parkland Memorial Hospital called this using a hermeneutic of suspicion, because everybody lies, especially to Priests, Ministers, Rabbis, and other clergy. But, when the President and his entourage lie with such ease to change what they did as they did this week at the Trump Party Convention, as it now is the Republican Party in Name Only, one cannot assume anything they say to be the truth. When a President uses the powers of his office for his profit and political gain it is an abuse of power and a violation of the Hatch Act which forbids every Federal employee from the President to the lowliest janitor, clerk, or military recruit to use Federal property, equipment, or resources for financial gain or partisan politics.

Sadly, since the day of his inauguration until this very day President Trump claims that he is not only above the law, but that his word is the law. His enablers, cabinet officials and most of his party’s senators, representatives, as well as sate and officials fall in line with Trump’s, demands, edicts, and policies in a manner completely different than if President Obama and Clinton, or candidates Kerry, Gore, or Clinton had made them. In the former case they jump to attention in defense of a would be dictator and madman, but would have fought to the death if uttered or proposed by a Democrat. But when a Presidential Candidate like Trump says that he would not lose a vote among his supporters even if he shot and killed someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue, one knew at that moment that the GOP was no longer a political party, but a personality cult of nearly religious dimensions, unless they had subscribed to the ideology of the cult.

To be sure, Trump is no Hitler, though his words sound more and more Hitlerian every day. I will not call the President a Nazi, though he has give tacit support to Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist groups and frequently engages in racist diatribes. That being said I do believe that he has strong Nazi leanings based on his comments about Jews, his disparaging words about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, as well as those who are physically disabled or chronically ill. These statements of mine are all based on public comments, tweets, or actions he has taken. While he may not be a Nazi, he certainly is acting as any authoritarian leader would, and we have to heed the warning of Russian dissident Gary Kasparov:

“dictators & would be autocrats do not ask “Why?” when it comes to using power for their advantage. They ask “why not?

Today I am writing about the Holocaust Deniers that post on this site or my Twitter or Facebook pages. A coupe of years ago I had one response to this article The Justification of Genocide: Race Hatred and the Quest for Living Space by shouting “you fear open debate.” His blog address was listed on the post, so I used some internet tools and went to town. I found plenty of racist, pro-Nazi, and Holocaust denial posts and links made by him as well as an amazingly strong support for President Trump’s racist polices on immigration, and against American Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. So whenever one of these Internet drive by cowards comes to my page I check them out and find that many, if not most of them are incredibly racist, nihilistic and sadistic Narcissistic Sociopaths emboldened by their Chief, President Trump.

But the reality is that such people fear open debate because when they engage in it they are exposed for the frauds that they are. Some like the English defender of all things Hitler and Holocaust denier, David Irving had the nerve to sue American Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel in a British court where she would have to prove her innocence as opposed to an American court where he would have had to prove that she had libeled him. Even in that setting Irving lost. If you want to see a great film, watch the movie adaptation of the trial entitled “Denial.” It is worth watching.

A while back I had another Holocaust Denier who ripped into me about the Nazi massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar, in which over 33,771 Jews were marched out of Kiev and shot on the 29^th and 30^th of September 1941. There were 29 survivors who managed to escape the death pits by feigning death and climbing out after dark. Massacres of more than 100,000 other people, mostly non-Jews continued until November. The number of Jews killed was documented by the Commander of the Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C which conducted the massacre. The Einsatzgruppe men were assisted by troops from two Police Battalions and Waffen SS troops with Logistical and security support from the Wehrmacht. Both the records of the Einsatzgruppe and the testimony of SS men who took part is damning enough, yet my denier critic had the nerve to say “There was no such massacre – it is just another example of war time atrocity propaganda.”

I since he decided to leave his comment, email address, and website exposed, I decided to do a little investigation and found that he is full of these zingers On other blogs and news sites, as well as an avid supporter of President Trump. He plays fast and loose with the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and claims that “It is currently illegal in many European nations to question the official or generally accepted account of the holocaust of European Jewry during the Second World War.” Of course that is not true, in fact in most of Europe the archives are open, the documents assessable, and the evidence undeniable.

Riot police rush protestors to clear Lafayette Park and the area around it across from the White House for President Donald Trump to be able to walk through for a photo opportunity in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church (seen at rear), during a rally against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, near the White House in Washington, U.S. June 1, 2020. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

The problem is that the evidence is so great that any to deny it or attempt to revise it deserves both public ridicule and academic scorn. So instead of actually trying to disprove the facts they turn to obvious lies, just as President Trump and his enablers have done with the COVID19 Pandemic and Trump’s both incompetent and evil handling of it, his handling the economic collapse that followed, and absolutely racist and authoritarian response to the protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, used massive force to clear peaceful protestors from Lafayette Park and the area around St. John’s Church to have a photo-op with a Bible that he could not figure how to hold. He couldn’t tell which way was up with it. It was then, that for the first time in my life, felt that an American President had threatened mine as a Priest and Navy Chaplain. But I digress, as closely as this attack is linked to what I am writing about today.

There are laws against Holocaust denial in many European countries precisely because it was such a horrific chapter in human history that it cannot be minimized or defended, but there are no such laws here, just as there are no laws against those who promote the evil, bloodthirsty, racist, and treason laden lies of the Noble South, the Virtues of Slavery, the less than human status of Blacks, and the villainous myth of the Lost Cause. All of these put newly emancipated slaves back into a condition of slavery by another name for another century and more. The repugnant racism of the rebellion for slavery still runs strong in much of the United States and it is not confined to the eleven states of the Civil War Confederacy, but throughout much of the country.

Not surprisingly most of the Holocaust Deniers, are also the proponents of Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, the Noble South, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow and Segregation, as well those that oppose the Constitutional civil and voting rights of Blacks, Women, and other minorities To include LGBTQ+ people of every race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. This is extraordinarily dangerous, because such people have no scruples against killing those that they hate.

James Morcan in his book Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories wrote something very true that I am all too aware of:

“Unfortunately, the historicity of the Holocaust has been undermined and chipped away at by the exact same sinister forces that created the genocide in the first place: racists, religious bigots and the most paranoid type of conspiracy theorists who, together, are uniting – often unwittingly – to form a new wave of anti-Semitism that will not willingly accept the obvious facts of the past. This chipping away (at the truth) began slowly and insidiously – much like the Holocaust itself – but sadly, and worryingly, it is gathering pace.”

It is interesting to read through the man who posted that I was afraid of honest debate, to go to his blog and see that his issue is not about anti-Semitism, as he is exceptionally anti-Semitic, nor is it about the killing of the Jews, just the number of Jews killed. It seems that if he, like the other deniers can somehow lessen the number of Jews killed, that it becomes more acceptable, and over time forgettable. I will not open this site up to Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers is Charles Johnson who was invited to the State of the Union Address in 2018 by Congressman Matt Gaetz. In an interview Johnson responded to the question “what are your thoughts on the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general?” (JQ is short for the Jewish Question) His response was telling.

“I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a war [sic] crime. I agree…about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”

Johnson denies being a Holocaust denier and touts his support for Israel, like many others like him do, but his words ring hollow. Moreover his words are all too indicative of what he really believes, and worse of all he is accepted by leading members of the Republican Party. Such associations do nothing but serve to legitimatize Holocaust Deniers and make their arguments more acceptable, after all, if a President and leading Congressmen espouse a position and associate with its proponents, it must have merit. Of course it doesn’t but when there is a dearth of historical knowledge and general indifference it does not take much for such men to motivate others to violence. As Lipstadt noted about David Irving, and I would extend to people like Johnson: “People like David Irving do not throw firebombs. They throw the words that can cause others to throw those firebombs.”

The sad thing for us as a nation is that quite a few Holocaust deniers, have the ear of the President, people in his administration, and Republican Congressmen. This makes this topic all too relevant. As Marc Bloch wrote “we can truly understand the past only if we read it in light of the present.”

Now, some 40 hours after the end of the Trump Show, otherwise known as the GOP National Convention, everything is on the line. If Trump wins this election and the GOP holds the Senate, the great experiment of our founders and all those who attempted to make us a more perfect Union will be for nought. Such a thing cannot next allowed to happen or the President that pardons war criminals, parsons men who collided with enemy intelligence services to get him elected in the first place, and attempts to destroy the lives and reputations of military personnel and civil servants who dare to tell the truth, will go much further to establish himself as dictator, trample the Constitution, make the Congress a rubber stamp, and remold the courts so they no longer server justice, but him.

The Constitution that I swore to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic is under attack by President Trump. According to the oath that every Federal, and many state officials swear to defend, President Trump and his supporters are ENEMIES of the Constitution, the Country, and its citizens.

In one of his speeches from March 14th of this year Trump declared:

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,”

It nearly killed me to write this article, but how can one not see what is going on and not speak up about it? I love my country, I have swore a sacred oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and now see for the first time in my life a man committed to destroying the Constitution and ruling as a dictator intent on destroying the American Experiment running for re-election on a personal platform little different than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. As the great American Naval hero of the Revolutionary War, John Paul Jones replied to his British Opponent: “Surrender? I have not yet begun to fight!” And fight I will, as General Henning Von Tresckow said in the attempt to kill Hitler: “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”

But men like Hitler and any other authoritarian leader including President Trump who has used his office for personal gain, the persecution of the most vulnerable in our society, bulldozed the Constitutional and the unwritten norms that serve as the guardrails of our political system. He has allowed almost 190,000 Americans to die of Coronavirus 19 and of six million more to be infected, hundreds of thousands of whom will suffer the physical and emotional damage of that terrible virus, while impeding scientist attempting to develop a cure, undercuts the public health officials trying to prevent its spread, while promising as if by magic that we will have a safe and effective vaccination by the fall. That is both criminal negligence and mass murder of American citizens of all walks of life including some of his most high level supporters like Herman Cain.

If we do not fight this battle at the polls and Trump finds a way to win or remain in power by extra constitutional means, this will always be Trump’s America, complete with personal loyalty oaths to him, the mass arrests of political opponents, and the unleashing of his most violent followers backed by the police on political opponents and racial, religious and other “undesirables.” or those they dream to be “Life Unworthy of Life.”

The perpetrators could possibly include the military unless the Generals and Admirals decide to stop him. No one wants that, because most of us who value the Constitution believe that the military should be as apolitical as possible and remain out of politics. But this has not always been the case, as Herbert Hoover used active duty Army units under the command of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton to attack veterans of the First World War demanding their war bonuses early because the were jobless and homeless during the Great Depression. It was one of the most egregious, amoral, and unconstitutional actions of an American President against American citizens, and to make that matters worse attacking war veterans and their families with active duty Army troops, Marines, and police, even using tanks and chemical agents.

But if the President basically overturns the Constitution and seizes power, they are the last bastion to save the republic from destruction and will have to act. Hoover, was unwilling to try to overturn the constitutional guardrails between the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches of government. But Hoover, was no Trump. Many other military officers wanted no part of Hoover’s use of the military.

Today’s military leaders have to remember their oaths as all that serve in government must. They must remember the words of General Ludwig Beck who resigned as head of the German Army in 1938 and died in the attempt to kill Hitler on July 20th 1944:

“Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.”

Beck also noted:

I do believe that we are now at the precipice, standing at the edge of the abyss and that unless Trump is thwarted in his bid for re-election that the 2020 election may be the last free election held in this country. One cannot assume otherwise.

We have to remember the warnings of historian Dr. Timothy Snyder who wrote in his book On Tyranny:

“The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been.

But form me there is a certain timeless component of God’s justice on such people. The German Pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who ended up dying for his connection to the German conspirators against Hitler wrote:

Bonhoeffer’s words are timeless and should send a chill through anyone who claims the Name of Christ, and supports what Trump is doing, and those who oppose Trump for whatever reason and no-matter what their religion or ideology happens to be. We want our fight to be non-violent and follow the norms of our American Constitutional system as it was intended. We do not want to take violent action or undermine our sacred oaths and values as Americans as eschew violence, and promote intelligent and non-violent speech and protest against the crimes of President Trump and his racist and authoritarian followers, including those in Congress, the Justice Department, and too many Law Enforcement organizations and officers. Sadly, it has been demonstrated time after time that peaceful protests will be met with violence and propaganda justifying it.

Please remember that and vote as if our life depended on it and that this may be your last chance to vote in a meaningful election. If you don’t you may never have a meaningful chance to do so again.

Until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

2 Comments

Filed under civil rights, Coronavirus 19 Pandemic, ethics, healthcare, History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, LGBT issues, Military, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary, racism, Religion, us army, US Marine Corps, US Presidents, White nationalism

Tagged as anti-semitism, attack on bonus marchers, babi yar, charles johnson, Colonel Henning Von Trescow, dana rohrabacher, David Irving, Deborah Lipstadt, douglas macarthur, einsatzgruppe c, general ludwig beck, George Patton, herbert hoover, Holocaust, holocaust deniers, i have not yet begun to fight, James Morcan, john paul jones, life unworthy of life, matt gaetz, president donald trump, rape of nanking, Saint John’s church, smedley butler, Trump attack at Lafayette Park

August 26, 2020 · 02:30

They Thought They Were Free: the Germans 1933-45 and the GOP 2016-2020

they thought they were free

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

As I Continue to follow the rhetoric coming out of the Trumpublican Party at their their Virtual Nuremberg Rally, am re-posting an article about one of the most important books that was published in the years following the Second World War. That book is Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free.

It is one of the most powerful books I have ever read was Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945.” Mayer was a visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt in the 1950s and lived in a small Hessian town near the city. The book is about the relationships that he built with ten ordinary citizens in the town and how they lived under Nazism and how most saw little wrong with it in the end.

The book is well worth the read and very timely when one compares the attitudes of the men who became Mayer’s friends and many people in the United States today. The last few chapters of the book are a reflection of the author’s opinions of the future of Germany at the time of his writing and he was mistaken on how the Germans would eventually become a society that embraced democracy and rejected authoritarianism (at the time he felt that it was very possible that democracy would fail in Germany,) they do not take away anything from the heart of the book and its message about how people adjust to authoritarian rule.

One chapter in particular struck me, it was a conversion that Mayer had with a colleague at the University who also reflected what it was like to live in the Third Reich and how in doing so he compromised himself and lost the opportunity to resist when resistance might have changed the course of events as Germany proceeded down the road to dictatorship and destruction. The chapter is particularly painful to read as the man understood that he should have known better but didn’t recognize the warning signs of the gradual nature of how life was changing with each new law or dictate from the Fuhrer.

In reading the chapter I see parallels in American society today. There are the Trump loyalists, many of who openly call for restrictions of liberty and crushing opposition to the President’s policies using extra-constitutional means including violence. I have watched videos and interviews with Trump supporters over the past few years, particularly after Charlottesville, the QANON inspired “Pizzagate,” and following the murder of George Floyd the President gave a speech at the White House Rose Garden and then unleashed Federal Police of multiple agencies and the Washington DC National Guard launch an all out attack on peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park and outside Saint John’s Church, following which accompanied by the Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff marched through the chaos to get a photo op, holding a Bible every which way imaginable until he figured out which way was up. Ever since he was elected some of his followers have openly discussed resorting to violence, killing opponents, and civil war if Trump is removed from office or is defeated in the 2020 election. Sadly, these are not a stand alone video, there are others much like it, as well as blog posts, Twitter and Facebook posts, and other social media platforms. One of Tuesday’s speaker’s Abby Johnson, an anti-abortionist activist has said that Mixed Race children, particularly those that have a Black parent and a White parent are more likely to be criminals than purely White children. That is even worse than how the Nazis viewed mixed race German-Jewish people. And the woman calls herself pro-life. What have we come to?

That being said there are many Trump supporters who through traditions long established in the United States: a distrust of Government authority, the media, academics, supposed leftists and socialists, and finally racial, ethnic, or religious minorities follow him. Sadly for the last 40 years they have been subjected to the incessant drumbeat of those ideologies through right wing talk radio, internet “news” sights and Fox News well meaning and decent people have absorbed race hatred and conspiracy theories, just like regular people in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s willingly surrendered their wills to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

As I said, many Trump supporters are quite extreme And violent, while others, persuaded by years of right-wing talk radio, politically charged sermons by their pastors, and the daily dose of Fox News now believe everything said by the President even when confronted by facts.

Then there are Trump’s opponents, but many of the opponents were divided and could not get along with each other in order to thwart Trump. Some of these opponents actually helped Trump into office by circulating the Russian anti-Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories and falsehoods throughout the 2016 campaign. I think things are different now, but one cannot say what the end will be.

While both parties have true believers and fanatics, there is another segment comprised of the people who simply go with the flow because life is too busy and crisis laden to get too deeply enmeshed in the political debate, and many have become so cynical that they see no difference in either side and are much more concerned about making it paycheck to paycheck, and pray to live as the Coronavirus 19 cuts a swath of death through the American population, and the economy crashes with an over 10% unemployment rate and businesses shuttering forever as Trump and the GOP close off help to all but their richest business and banking allies.

Meanwhile Trump’s Virtual Nuremberg Rally continues with it’s complete submission and worship of Trump the Messiah, the one alone can fix everything, even as they state blatantly racist propaganda like the supposedly pro-life (read anti-abortion)

When his eventually falls, which men like always do, his followers, be they true believers or those who simply followed because it seemed to be better for them will face a reckoning, with the crimes that they either cooperated or allowed by looking the other way.

So I invite you to read this and draw your own conclusions. Have a great day.

Peace

Padre Steve+

Chapter 13: But Then It Was Too Late

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.”

“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”

“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

“Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

“You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

“What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know.”

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

“I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.”

“And the judge?”

“Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.”

I said nothing.

“Once the war began,” my colleague continued, “resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.”

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

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Tagged as 2020 trump party convention, Abbey Johnson, bystanders, conspiracy theories, donald trump supporters, ethics, gop, GOP 2020 national convention, Impeachment hearings, impeachment of Donald trump, milton mayer, mixed raced children, nazi germany, perpetrators, political division, president donald trump, principles, they thought they were free, victims

August 17, 2020 · 02:33

The President Who Poisons All He Touches: Donald Trump, the First American Dictator

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

It has been a bit over three and a half years since President Trump took the oath of office as President of the United States. Over that time his actions have been similar to other leaders of history who have gravitated towards authoritarian rule, and his Party has only emboldened him. Former GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner noted on October 26th of last year: “There is no Republican Party, only the Party of Trump.”

Today I want to share the words of British military theorist and historian B.H. Liddell-Hart and some others of note as to what happens when authoritarian, or authoritarian leaders gain control of a government. His Liddell-Hart’s words, from his short, but profound book Why Don’t We Learn from History are worth the considered read for anyone with an open mind who can, despite the proliferation of propaganda can still see clearly. Liddell-Hart wrote:

They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers, “discovering” that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become traitors to it. Now think of his early supporters who he has ditched, thrown under the bus, or fired them from his cabinet.

They suppress criticism on one pretext or another and punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are unfavourable to their policy. Whether it be Russia, COVID19, the Post Office, his deals with Kim Jun Un, and what has happened to every member of his staff, the GOP establishment, or member of Congress who has openly criticized him, including senior Justice Department, State Department, National Security Council Staff, the Military, the Judiciary, and on and on and on.

They enlist religion on their side, if possible, or, if its leaders are not compliant, foster a new kind of religion subservient to their ends. Trump would not be in power without his willful collaborators of the Christian Right who for all intents and purposes have become his Cult.

They spend public money lavishly on material works of a striking kind, in compensation for the freedom of spirit and thought of which they have robbed the public. The President has constructed nothing truly lavish, or of any cultural value, but he has built portions of a very expensive and ineffective border wall.

They manipulate the currency to make the economic position of the state appear better than it is in reality. He first did this with his tax overhaul of 2017 which improved the stock markets, and since the malfeasance of the Treasury Department has been to prop up the markets by purchasing stocks and bonds.

They ultimately make war on some other state as a means of diverting attention from internal conditions and allowing discontent to explode outward. This has not happened yet, but he continues to ratchet up tensions with China, North Korea, and Iran, and in the latter case he brokered a peace deal with two of Iran’s most strident enemies, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, effectively binding the United States to any military actions that they might take against Iran. These is also Venezuela which albeit a failed, and repressive dictatorship, which in Trump’s crosshairs for some time. He or any of the players in these geopolitical regions which resemble a full body dry heave could vomit all over the world, and Trump would us it to do what every authoritarian ruler does when he needs attention drawn away from himself.

They use the rallying cry of patriotism as a means of riveting the chains of their personal authority more firmly on the people. Since his announcement of his candidacy Trump has made the distinction that his supporters are Patriots and those who do not are traitors. He has amped this up every year he has been in office, and his supporters are now showing up armed in the streets as he has used the police power of the state to violently attack those who protest his policies and actions.

They expand the superstructure of the state while undermining its foundations by breeding sycophants at the expense of self-respecting collaborators, by appealing to the popular taste for the grandiose and sensational instead of true values, and by fostering a romantic instead of a realistic view, thus ensuring the ultimate collapse, under their successors if not themselves, of what they have created. The President has expanded and not cut the government, especially in the areas of its police powers, and appointed men and women who are dedicated to protecting him and not the Constitution, laws, or people as heads of agencies.

This political confidence trick, itself a familiar string of tricks, has been repeated all down the ages. Yet it rarely fails to take in a fresh generation. Sadly it has taken in yet another generation, but such is no surprise to anyone who seriously studies history.

But Liddell-Hart wasn’t the only one to warn us of such leaders, those who come to power legally and the work every day to destroy the democratic systems that brought them to power. In fact this was a concern of our founders who in the Declaration of Independence 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.”

Yale Historian and Holocaust expert Timothy Snyder warned after Trump was elected in 2016:

”The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.”

That is something I have understood since Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015. Two weeks before his election in 2016 I wrote this:

“As I watched and listened to Donald Trump before and after the third and thankfully final debate of the 2016 Presidential election, I was struck with just how viscous, vulgar, and venomous this man is. I cannot remember anyone in American politics at the national level, Republican or Democrat, or for that matter even Whig, who ever managed to immerse himself so deeply into the amoral, unethical, and undemocratic sewer that Trump has bathed himself, the Republican Party and this nation.

Trump’s toxicity is unparalleled in American politics. Everything and everyone who has ever had anything to do with him is poisoned by his touch. Wives, business partners, contractors, employees, political advisors, and supporters have all been stained by the Mustard Gas that Trump emits on a minute to minute basis. Maybe the most stained are the Evangelical Christian church leaders who have not only endorsed and defended Trump, but who positively described his character as Christian and said nothing about Trump’s words and actions, which if an opponent had uttered, or had been accused, they would have excoriated with a particularly “Christian” self-righteousness. Their actions have stained the witness of the church for at least the next generation and it is no wonder that young people are fleeing the church. I specifically use the imagery of Mustard Gas, not just because of its toxicity, but because of its persistence. The battlefields of World War One France and Belgium are still contaminated by it, and the toxic residue still injures people today.

That my friends is the poisonous and corrosive effect of Donald Trump on this country. He is a toxic and persistent threat to everyone, even his most devout followers. Race baiting, misogynistic, narcissistic, vulgar, and ignorant, Trump spews his vile venom of conspiracy theories wrapped in fiction, and coated in lies, and buttressed with near pornograpic misogyny in every direction. He has given his supporters in the heavily armed Alt-Right, the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and White Supremacists the boldness to come out of hiding because he has normalized their hate, something that no Western statesman or politician has done since before the verdicts at Nuremberg.

I have long felt that Trump reminded me of Nazi leaders, but frankly most of them, while every bit as toxic as Trump were both more intelligent and were better able to cover the darkness of their amoral souls with a modicum of respectability, with the exception of one; the publisher of the infamous newspaper Der Sturmer, and Gauleiter of Nuremberg, Julius Streicher.

“Streicher, the venomous vulgarian, manufactured and distributed obscene racial libels which incited the populace to accept and assist the progressively savage operations of “race purification.”

Is that not exactly what Trump has done during his seventeen month campaign to stir up race hatred against Mexicans and Arabs, not to mention Asians and Blacks? Of course it is, which is exactly why the leaders of the Alt-Right claim him as their candidate, the man who in their perverted minds has made them respectable again and ready to assume their place in Trump’s new order. Anti-Semitism and racism runs rampant in the words of his closest collaborators such as the Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon, as well as Alt-Right Neo-Nazi and KKK leaders like David Duke, Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, and Peter Brimalow.

My friends, what you see in Trump is what you get. Unlike Hitler and Goering, but much like Streicher, Trump has no capability of maintaining any sort of respectability. He has been stoking the fires of violence by claiming that the election is rigged and pumping up his followers for violence if he loses.” The link to that article for doubters is here: https://padresteve.com/2016/10/21/the-venomous-vulgarian-donald-trump-and-the-alt-right/

Based on what he says on a daily basis, including admitting that he was deliberately sabotaging the ability of the US Postal Service to ensure that the mail in and absentee ballots are not received in time to be counted for the General Election. If he is successful is an action that will ensure no clear result, confusion, and creating a crisis that our electoral system was not designed to handle and cast doubt on our electoral system that will allow him to win and then proclaim himself President for life.

That might seem cynical but Trump has said “Trump 2024, 2028, 2032” and so on. There is no doubt that his supporters would attempt to overturn the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution which limits Presidents to two terms in office, including some who have encouraged that.

What President Trump and his appointees are doing is in direct contravention of the Declaration, the Constitution, U.S. Code, the intents of our Founders, and anyone that values liberty for all, not the few.

Judge Learned Hand spoke these words to a citizenship ceremony in which a million and a half people were present in New York’s Central Park, two weeks before D-Day and I think they are most applicable now:

“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.”

This is what is at stake today. We have a Venomous Vulgarian like Julius Streicher as our President. He is a man so open and unrepentant in his racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-American System of Government statements, tweets, and executive orders that it is glaringly obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, except to his Cult who have sworn their eternal allegiance to him. I am not one of them. I am bound by my oath to the Constitution and my vows as a Priest to oppose him at every opportunity. I will obey every legal order, but I will not sacrifice my sacred oath to the Constitution and vows as a Priest in the Holy Catholic Church, to him.

I have both witnessed and experienced what happens to those who merely speak out against his policies based on my oath to the Constitution and my sacred vows as a priest. All that matters to Trump is personal loyalty, which he has neither earned or deserved. He is a draft dodger, he is a serial adulterer, a racist, a serial bankruptcy artist who has left thousands of contractors, employees, and students in the lurch. Likewise he is a serial liar the kind of which has never been seen in history. He makes Hitler and his minions, Stalin and his successors until Gorbachev, Castro, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, Quisling, Petain and Laval, Putin, the Ayatollahs, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Jefferson Davis and the Lost Cause Cult, and all of the North Korean Kim Family look like pillars of honesty and decency. As an American, it shames me to have to admit this. He makes a mockery of the Christian faith yet his strongest supporters are supposed conservative and evangelical Christians, people who now believe more in the QAon lies than the Gospel.

How can I remain silent? I refuse to be one of his perpetrators, I will fight to ensure that I am not a victim, and most of all I cannot and will not be a bystander and turn my back on his crimes, those already committed and those that he is planning. The German Pastor, theologian, and martyr to Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 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?”

And I stand by the 22 year old German University student and martyr Sophie Scholl who in writing about Hitler might have well been writing about Trump and his Christian followers:

“Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed…. I ask you, you as a Christian wrestling for the preservation of your greatest treasure, whether you hesitate, whether you incline toward intrigue, calculation, or procrastination in the hope that someone else will raise his arm in your defence? Has God not given you the strength, the will to fight? We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.”

It is quite obvious to me that most American Christians are either completely supportive of Trump, or too afraid to say anything. Some of us do, and I will finish with the words of yet another German martyr to Hitler, Major General Henning Von Tresckow:

“I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.”

Tresckow also said:

“It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?”

We have to put an end to the Trump regime at the ballot box, and even that may not cause him give up without a physical fight. His former attorney, Michael Cohen has said exactly that. Trump is destroying the hard work of Americans and our allies to build a better would, and in almost every country, Trump is destroying the image of the United States, like Tresckow said in his time:

“We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”

I say to you, whether it is in the spoken word, the written word, the acts of non-violent protests, and at the ballot box we have to put an end to this before he destroys all of us, even his cult of supporters who he would not hesitate to abandon when he no longer needs them, or he knows his reign of terror is at an end, and blames them for his defeat.

If we are too timid or afraid to stand now, this will be forever Trump’s America. Not the America of our Founders or the reformers and resisters who successful fought for the end of slavery, the citizenship of every native born American, the right to vote for first black men, then all women, then the members of our First Nations, then Japanese and other Asians, overturned Jim Crow, fought for civil rights for all, including LGBTQ citizens who were denied the right to marry, property rights, and civil rights long after almost every other American had them.

We have to win this fight legally at the ballot box.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Tagged as 2016 elections, 2020 election, adolf hitler, alexander hamilton, american slavery, b h liddel hart, civil rights movement, Colonel Henning Von Trescow, conservative christians, declaration of independence, dictators, dietrich bonhoeffer, donald Trump cult, donald trump supporters, jefferson davis, jim crow, josef goebbels, Joseph Stalin, julius streicher, learned hand, president donald trump, QAnon, sophie scholl, us elections, us postal service

August 12, 2020 · 01:16

The Road to Trump Began Here: Jackie Robinson and the 1964 GOP Convention

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Pardon the interruption, but I started a new article last night but was too tired to complete. I guess I will mull it over more and get around to posting it when I am ready. So instead of that I am going to repost an article from a few years back.

Sometimes people wonder how the Republican Party devolved to the point that it became a proto-Fascist Party completely unrelated to the Party of Lincoln. Now it is true that after Ulysses Grant’s Presidency the GOP became less civil rights and more a party of the Robber Barons. Of course Teddy Roosevelt repudiated the Robber Barons, and was quite progressive except in terms of race and civil rights, and Dwight Eisenhower who took action to enforce Supreme Court Rulings after Brown v. Board of Education, and was as progressive in many ways as were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Richard Nixon took advantage of the Southern Strategy to continue the transformation of the GOP into the party of Trump, which continued, under slightly less obvious means under Ronald Reagan, and both George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. But even more pivotal was the speakership of Newt Gingrich, and the the Tea Party.

But think that the 1964 GOP National Convention was more important because it was a watershed moment in American politics, a moment that started the Republican Party down the path that has culminated today. The convention was a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Summer of 1964.

But most of all it is how the GOP rank and file treated baseball icon and civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson’s trip to the 1964 Republican National Convention. Though the events happened some fifty-six years ago, they are not ancient history, and the spirit and ideology that characterized them is all to present today, especially in the modern Republican Party.

So have a great day.

Peace

Padre Steve+

My lawyer summed up the case beautifully by telling the board that this was not a case involving any violation of the Articles of War, or even of military tradition, but simply a situation in which a few individuals sought to vent their bigotry on a Negro they considered ‘uppity’ because he had the audacity to exercise rights that belonged to him as an American and a soldier.

Twenty years later, Robinson, a Republican because of the then racist attitudes of the Democrats was a supporter of the progressive Republican Governor or New York, Nelson Rockefeller. When he arrived as Rockefeller’s guest he was confronted with the most vile behavior by GOP delegates as could be imagined.

“A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Jackie Robinson on his observations of the 1964 Republican National Convention

Jackie Robinson was a Republican. So was I for 32 years and for much of that time I considered myself a “conservative” whatever that means, though I thought it meant freedom, limited government and opportunity for all regardless of race, color, religion or any other trait or belief. I also believed and still do in a strong defense, but I can no longer consider myself a man that blesses American intervention in other people’s wars unless there is a clear and present danger to the United States, not simply our so called “interests” which may not be those of the nation at all but of multi-national corporations which were originally American businesses but not only need our military, diplomatic and intelligence resources to increase their profits.

My parents were Kennedy type Democrats, but in the 1970s, torn by the extremism of the 1972 Democratic Convention in Chicago and feeling the hatred of people for those in the military, including a Sunday School teacher who told me that my dad, then serving in Vietnam was “baby killer” I at the age of 12 decided that I would be a Republican. I was a Republican until I returned from Iraq in 2008, fully aware of the lies that took us into that war and seeing the cost both to American servicemen and the people of Iraq.

I have been doing a lot of reading lately on a period of history that as a historian I had pretty much skipped over. That is the period of the Civil Rights movement of the early to mid-1960s. I guess I skipped over it because I was more interested in the glory of war and patriotism wrapped in historic myth than in the experiences of fellow citizens who had been killed, abused, tormented and persecuted by people like me simply because of the color of their skin. I had not yet begun to appreciate the concept of justice at home being interconnected to our deepest held principles and how we embody them in our foreign policy.

For many years I echoed the point made by some conservatives that it was the GOP that helped make the Voter’s Rights Act of 1964 and Civil Rights Act of 1965 passed into law. That is true. Most Republicans voted for them, with a notable exception, Barry Goldwater. However, what is also true is that the Republicans that voted for the 1964 act were considered “liberals” and treated shamefully at the 1964 convention, whose delegates voted down a part of the platform that would have supported that act. Of the Democrats that voted against those bills almost all came from the Deep South, a region which within a decade become a Republican stronghold and a key part of the Southern Strategy of every GOP Presidential Candidate since Richard Nixon. A Republican aide at the 1964 convention told a reporter that “the nigger issue was sure to put Goldwater in the White House.” (See Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson p.163)

However as a life long baseball fan there is one thing that I know, that if there had been no Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson we might not have gotten Rosa Parks or the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Robinson was appointed as a special delegate to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was running against Goldwater and attended the convention. He had given up his job as a spokesman for and Vice President of the Chock Full O’Nuts Coffee Company to assist Rockefeller’s campaign in 1964.

Robinson knew what it was like to be the “point man” in the integration of baseball and in his career was threatened with physical violence and death on many occasions. Some teammates circulated petitions that they would not play for a team that had a “black” on it. Robinson, encouraged by Rickey persevered and became an icon in baseball, the Civil Rights movement and the history of the United States. However, not even 10 years after his retirement from baseball and 2 years after he was elected to the Hall of Fame he once again discovered just how deep racism still ran in this country. As he attended the convention FBI agents and other Federal authorities attempted to find the bodies of three young Voting Rights staff who were part of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi. Eventually, later in the summer the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner would be discovered buried in the base of a dam near Philadelphia Mississippi. Their killers were local law enforcement officers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Maybe I lived in my own fantasy world. My experience growing up was on the West Coast living in a military family in small towns and big cities. I am proud to be part of the first class that attended high school in my home town when the courts ordered desegregation in our schools. That experience at Edison High School of Stockton California from 1975-78 changed me, as did having a black roommate in college.

However, that being said it took me a long time to realize that things really haven’t changed that much from 1964 in many parts of the country, especially since I have lived most of my adult live in the historic States that comprised the Confederacy. I can say from practical observation and knowledge that racism and other forms of more acceptable prejudice live on in this country. There is not a day that goes by that I do not run into the vestiges of the hate that lived during the Freedom Summer of 1964. It is more subtle in some cases, but other times is so blatant that is sickening. I never expected that I would ever be called a “nigger lover” or “wigger” until I had people made those comments on this website in response to articles that had nothing to do with race relations or civil rights, nor did I expect physical threats from people who call themselves “Christian.” Those were learning experiences that I have never forgotten.

Robinson wrote of his experience at the 1964 Convention:

“I wasn’t altogether caught of guard by the victory of the reactionary forces in the Republican party, but I was appalled by the tactics they used to stifle their liberal opposition. I was a special delegate to the convention through an arrangement made by the Rockefeller office. That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude toward black people.

A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

The same high-handed methods had been there.

The same belief in the superiority of one religious or racial group over another was here. Liberals who fought so hard and so vainly were afraid not only of what would happen to the GOP but of what would happen to America. The Goldwaterites were afraid – afraid not to hew strictly to the line they had been spoon-fed, afraid to listen to logic and reason if it was not in their script.

I will never forget the fantastic scene of Governor Rockefeller’s ordeal as he endured what must have been three minutes of hysterical abuse and booing which interrupted his fighting statement which the convention managers had managed to delay until the wee hours of the morning. Since the telecast was coming from the West Coast, that meant that many people in other sections of the country, because of the time differential, would be in their beds. I don’t think he has ever stood taller than that night when he refused to be silenced until he had had his say.

It was a terrible hour for the relatively few black delegates who were present. Distinguished in their communities, identified with the cause of Republicanism, an extremely unpopular cause among blacks, they had been served notice that the party they had fought for considered them just another bunch of “niggers”. They had no real standing in the convention, no clout. They were unimportant and ignored. One bigot from one of the Deep South states actually threw acid on a black delegate’s suit jacket and burned it. Another one, from the Alabama delegation where I was standing at the time of the Rockefeller speech, turned on me menacingly while I was shouting “C’mon Rocky” as the governor stood his ground. He started up in his seat as if to come after me. His wife grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

“Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” I shouted.

I was ready for him. I wanted him badly, but luckily for him he obeyed his wife…” From Jackie Robinson “I Never Had it Made” Chapter XV On Being Black Among the Republicans

Belva Davis, then a young journalist wrote of her experiences at that convention:

While the Goldwater organization tried to keep its delegates in check on the floor, snarling Goldwater fans in the galleries around us were off the leash. The mood turned unmistakably menacing…

Suddenly Louis and I heard a voice yell, “Hey, look at those two up there!” The accuser pointed us out, and several spectators swarmed beneath us. “Hey niggers!” they yelled. “What the hell are you niggers doing in here?’”

I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck as I looked into faces turned scarlet and sweaty by heat and hostility. Louis, in suit and tie and perpetually dignified, turned to me and said with all the nonchalance he could muster, “Well, I think that’s enough for today.” Methodically we began wrapping up our equipment into suitcases.

As we began our descent down the ramps of the Cow Palace, a self-appointed posse dangled over the railings, taunting. “Niggers!” “Get out of here, boy!” “You too, nigger bitch!” “Go on, get out!” “I’m gonna kill your ass!”

I stared straight ahead, putting one foot in front of the other like a soldier who would not be deterred from a mission. The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hot dogs, half-eaten Snickers bars. My goal was to appear deceptively serene, mastering the mask of dispassion I had perfected since childhood to steel myself against any insults the outside world hurled my way.

Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull. I heard it whack against the concrete and shatter. I didn’t look back, but I glanced sideways at Louis and felt my lower lip began to quiver. He was determined we would give our tormentors no satisfaction.

“If you start to cry,” he muttered, “I’ll break your leg.” ( Belva Davis “Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism)

The sad thing is that in many states the new GOP has taken a page out of the past and has been either passing legislation or attempting to pass legislation that makes it harder for Blacks and other minorities to vote. Groups have shown up armed at heavily black polling sites in recent elections and efforts have been made to ensure that minorities cannot vote. They have also challenged the 1964 Voter’s Rights Act in Court and have a friend in Justice Antonine Scalia who called it a “racial entitlement” and violation of State sovereignty.

The tactics are quite similar to those used in the Deep South prior to 1964 which made it virtually impossible for a Black man or woman to cast a vote, and if they tried even to register to vote did so at the peril of their lives or families. The opponents of integration, voter’s rights and equal rights used some of the same lines used today against those that support these rights. “Communists sympathizers, Socialists, Atheists, Anti-Christian, Anti-American, Anti-Constitution,” you name it the same labels are being applied to those that simply want to be at the table. The sad thing that many of the most vicious users of such untruths are my fellow Christians.

These are hard things to look at and it is far easier to believe myth than it is to actually seek truth. A few years back I cannot every in a million years having written this article. However the threats to minorities be they racial, religious or even gender have become part an parcel of the new GOP, the GOP that I could not remain a part of when I returned from Iraq.

I guess that I am becoming a Civil Rights advocate, or then, maybe it’s that I’m actually becoming more of a Christian. Branch Rickey said “I may not be able to do something about racism in every field, but I can sure do something about it in baseball.” Oh well, I amy not be able to do something about racism and other prejudice everywhere but I can do it here and wherever I work or preach.

Oh well whatever, it really doesn’t matter so long as I can live with myself. Besides, I’ll get labeled anyway so what does it matter? I would rather be in the same camp as someone like Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey than Antonine Scalia or those that seek to keep people down simply because they are different anyway.

Martin Niemoller once said:

First they came for the , communist
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Friends, it is all too important that we not forget this, even as Donald Trump and many of his supporters who include most of the White Supremacists, Klansmen, and Neo-Nazis in this country offer the same threats against blacks, other minorities, and political moderates and liberals. Make no mistake, what is happening now is nothing more than a resurgence of the hatred and violence that was unleashed against those who fought for civil rights fifty-six years ago.

I have no doubt that Jackie Robinson is rejoicing in heaven with the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential Running mate, and I know how he would respond to a draft dodging, war criminal pardoning, racist President like Donald Trump.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Filed under authoritarian government, Baseball, civil rights, ethics, History, laws and legislation, leadership, Military, Political Commentary, racism, us army, world war two in europe

Tagged as 1964 civil rights act, 1964 GOP convention, abraham lincoln, antonin scalia, barry goldwater, Baseball, branch rickey, civil rights, Dixiecrats, donald trump, dwight eisenhower, freedom summer, George H.W. Buch, george w bush, jackie robinson, Kamala Harris, kkk, nelson rockefeller, President Richard Nixon, president ronald reagan, racism, republican party, Strom Thurmond, vice president joe biden

August 9, 2020 · 05:05

Nagasaki at 75 Years: “In Being the First to use It, We had Adopted an Ethical Standard common to the Barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

7A_Nagasaki_Bomb_Cloud

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Viktor Frankl Wrote: “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

August 9th was the anniversary of the second and hopefully last nuclear weapon used in war, the bomb called the Fat Man which was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki by a B-29 bomber nicknamed Bockscar. Three days before the city of Hiroshima had been destroyed by the first atomic bomb used in combat, nicknamed Little Boy. In Hiroshima an estimated 66,000 people died and 69,000 injured. In Nagasaki, 39,000 dead and 25,000 injured. Postwar estimates of casualties from the attack on Hiroshima range from 66,000 to 80,000 fatalities and 69,000 to 151,000 injured. Official Japanese figures issued in the late 1990s state the total number of people killed in the Nagasaki attack exceeded 100,000. Kurt Vonnegut who survived the allied terror bombing of Dresden as a POW in 1945 wrote:

“The most racist, nastiest act by America, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.”

Both the cities were military targets, but the bombs were dropped in locations away from most military targets, or war production plants, they were dropped to kill the largest number of people possible. When we tried the Nazis at Nuremberg the targeted killing of civilians by their armed forces and the SS was labeled a Crime Against Humanity, yet we did, not just in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also in numerous other Japanese cities where hundreds of B-29s using thousands small incendiary bombs destroyed Japanese cities and incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. But while these raids were designed to destroy or industrial targets, which were often intermixed in civilian neighborhoods, they were also targeted to kill Japanese civilian workers in massive fire storms, or render them homeless and further decrease Japanese war production.

They did have a strategic purpose but any sense of proportionality had been lost. The Japanese in 1945 had no means of attacking the United States with any chance of winning the war, all they could do was to kill as many Americans, British, Australians, and Russians as possible before they were destroyed. Japan’s Defense was based on a national suicide pact driven by its leaders. However, many reasonable American military Commanders including Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Hap Arnold, and Dr. Leó Szilárd

The decision to drop these weapons, forever changed the consequences of waging total war. It was a decision that still haunts humanity and which policy makers and military strategists wrestle with in an age where at nine nations have deployable nuclear weapons and a number of other nations are developing or trying to obtain them. John Hersey, the first American reporter with free access to visit Hiroshima and write about Hiroshima would later write words that the leaders of nations possessing nuclear weapons and their military chiefs must truly ponder before deciding to go to war, especially if they plan to wage a total war:

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?“

It is also the subject that is wrestled with by students of major military staff colleges and universities. I know, I taught the ethics elective at the Joint Forces Staff College. In each of our classes at least one brave officer did a presentation detailing the ethical issues involved the decision and the implications today. For those not familiar with the military the truth is that most officers are quite circumspect and much more grown up about the subject than the average citizen, politician, especially President Trump, his current National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, and National Intelligence Advisor. But then there are probably some in the military who would be like Colonel Paul Tibbets who flew the B-29 bomber Enola Gay which dropped said these words in an interview in 1989:

“I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don’t care whether you are dropping atom bombs, or 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it.”

Tibbets, like Truman justified his position based on his view of the bestiality of the crimes committed by the Japanese during the war. It was quite a common point of view. Both views are troubling considering the power of the weapons being used. They almost sound the like excuses of German military officers and political officials on trial at Nuremberg between 1945 and 1948.

It was a decision made by President Truman one reason was purely pragmatic. For Truman, the “The buck stops here” was more than a motto, it was a way of life. He took responsibility for his action, but there is a certain banality in the way he wrote about them in his memoirs.

The atomic bomb was a wonder weapon that promised to end the war with a minimum of American casualties. Truman noted in 1952:

“I gave careful thought to what my advisors had counseled. I wanted to weigh all the possibilities and implications… General Marshall said in Potsdam that if the bomb worked we would save a quarter of a million American lives and probably save millions of Japanese… I did not like the weapon… but I had no qualms if in the long run millions of lives could be saved.”

But Truman’s decision was also based on the factor of revenge and viewing the Japanese as animals. There was a certain element of racism in his view of Asians which was little different than the Nazis views of they referred to as sub-human. This racial prejudice was common in the mid-twentieth century, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor only increased the blood lust, not that the Japanese also didn’t consider Europeans or Americans as equal to them, because they too, were a Master Race. This resulted in the war in the Pacific being much more brutal and inhuman than the one the Americans and British fought against the Nazis.

In response to a telegram from the Reverend Samuel McCrea Cavert, the General Secretary of the Federal Council of The Churches of Christ in America, the predecessor of the National Council of Churches. Reverend Cavert was a Presbyterian minister. Cavert’s telegram stated:

“Many Christians deeply disturbed over use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities because of their necessarily indiscriminate destructive efforts and because their use sets extremely dangerous precedent for future of mankind. Bishop Oxnam, President of the Council, and John Foster Dules, Chairman of its Commission on a just and durable peace are preparing statement for probable release tomorrow urging that atomic bombs be regarded as trust for humanity and that Japanese nation be given genuine opportunity and time to verify facts about new bomb and to accept surrender terms. Respectfully urge that ample opportunity be given Japan to reconsider ultimatum before any further devastation by atomic bomb is visited upon her people.”

Truman’s response to the telegram revealed the darker side of his decision to use the bomb.

My dear Mr. Cavert:

I appreciated very much your telegram of August ninth.

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.

When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.

The President’s senior military advisors were certainly of a different point of view about the use of the weapons. Admiral William Leahy who served as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief and was the senior Naval Officer in service disagreed and told Stimson of his misgivings about using the atomic bomb at this particular point in the war. In his memoirs which were released in 1949 he wrote:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower disagreed with the use of the atomic bomb and recorded his interaction with Stimson:

“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He also wrote later words similar to Leahy:

“I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Stimson did not agree with the Eisenhower, he would later recall words that echoed those of Truman in 1952, not his words to Revered Cavert immediately after the event.

“My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.”

Admiral William Leahy wrote in his memoirs:

“Once it had been tested, President Truman faced the decision as to whether to use it. He did not like the idea, but he was persuaded that it would shorten the war against Japan and save American lives. It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

General Hap Arnold, the Commander of the Army Air Forces noted: “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

Those who questioned the decision would be vindicated by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study published in 1946. That study laid out the facts in stark terms:

“Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Later, Dr. J. Samuel Walker, the Chief Historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:

“Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why Truman administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is the that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”

Thus the moral question remains and perhaps is best answered by the words of Dr. Leó Szilárd who first proposed building atomic weapons. In 1960 he noted to U.S. News and World Reports:

Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?

But, again, don’t misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.

I think now, three quarters of a century later we need to ponder that question before it can happen again. India and Pakistan are moving closer to nuclear war, Russia, China, North Korea, and yes even the United States are modernizing weapons and delivery systems. Admiral Leahy, General Eisenhower, and Dr. Szilard turned out to be right. As did General Omar Bradley who said:

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”

Eisenhower, Leahy, Bradley, and Szilard were correct. The weapons have grown more deadly, the delivery systems, more accurate with greater range, speed, and maneuverability, and even their miniaturization, make their use more likely than not. If they are used it will be the beginning of the end.

Albert Einstein’s words which he penned after the bombing should serve as a warning to Americans for all time:

“America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws.”

Until Tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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Filed under crimes against humanity, ethics, Foreign Policy, History, imperial japan, leadership, Military, national security, News and current events, nuclear weapons, Political Commentary, us army, US Army Air Corps, US Navy, US Presidents, war crimes, world war two in the pacific

Tagged as albert einstein, atomic bombs, auschwitz, communist China, Dwight D Eisenhower, enola gay, Fat man, franklin d roosevelt, hap arnold, harry s truman, harry stimson, hiroshima, india and pakistan conflict, j samuel walker, john hersey, Kurt Vonnegut, leo szilard, nagasaki, Nuclear regulatory commission, nuclear war, omar bradley, paul tibbets, russia, Samuel McCrea Cavert, u.s. strategic bombing survey, Viktor frankl, william leahy

August 8, 2020 · 03:26

COVID19 Deniers and Enablers: Trump, His Cult and the Commission of Crimes Against Humanity

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I hate having to write this, especially because the deliberate lies and intentional malfeasance of government officials, and their enablers who have allowed as of yesterday over 164,000 of their own citizens die from a deadly virus. That virus, the Coronavirus 19, while highly contagious and dangerous could have been contained with far less loss of life, economic carnage, and social disruption than the Cult built around President Donald Trump has saddled us with.

The cost to date: over 164,000 dead, over Five Million infected, of whom some 2.3 Million are still infected, about 1-2% are in serious or critical condition. Since 6% of the closed cases, that is known cases with some manner or level of recovery and deaths resulted in death, a statistic which is consistent with the world’s death rate, we can probably expect that of the 2.3 Million currently infected, that somewhere around 138,000 will die, not including those infected after I write this.

Of course that number could be lower or higher, but that really depends on how overwhelmed hospitals, especially rural or community hospitals which have very limited and critical care or ICU capacity are hit. If one looks at the statistics at the county level in predominantly rural states, this is worse than the major medical centers in the major cities and metropolitan centers of those same states being so overwhelmed by cases and deaths that they need refrigerated cargo trailers to put the bodies of the COVID19 dead that won’t fit in their morgues

But I have to ask: How can it be that a Modern, highly technological society with some of the most advanced medical centers, physicians and research institutions be the hardest hit country in the world by the Coronavirus 19? It is a fair question because we only have about 4.25% of the world’s population but have over 25% of the total number of infections, and just under 25% of the total deaths in the world. Add to this that we have a natural defensive barrier of two oceans to keep infected people out of the country.

But let us assume that better protocols and drugs that lower the death rate to one or two percent the deaths of those infected as of today would be 23,000 to 46,000 deaths. But that does not count the people being infected at 50,000 to 70,000 a day, before we reopen schools, which in states like Georgia are being reopened without social distancing or any requirement for masks. Sadly, despite the factual inaccuracy of President Trump’s statements that children and young people don’t get the virus, they do. Some die, but they spread the virus to teachers, cafeteria workers, administrators, parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors. This is a game changer, because when we shut down schools we limited the spread of the virus. The same thing happened when we made a decision to lock everything down until certain criteria of infection rates, deaths and those hospitalized went down.

Unfortunately, when President Trump gave states the opportunity to reopen businesses, restaurants, entertainment venues they did so, many under the pressure of the administration, opened before any of their states had met the Center for Disease metrics for reopening. Since then, the virus has grown exponentially. The current and gold standard models for COVID19 related deaths, that of the University of Washington project that at current rates with no changes that by 1 December 2020, that if things remain as they are we will have almost 300,000 deaths, if restrictions are eased that number rises to almost 500,000, but if they are strengthen by law that number could fall to 230,000 if every swinging Richard and Mulva wears their face masks. Of course the latter will never happen and even if an effective vaccine is developed and fielded in the requisite numbers, the dumb-ass anti-vaxers and their political, propaganda and religious allies will do all that they can to ensure that as few people get it as they can. If the religious among them claim to be pro-life, then they are liars, because once a baby leave the womb they don’t care if it lives or dies, and that is the brutal truth.

Now I admit that the charge of Crimes Against Humanity as currently defined by the U.N., the Treaty of Rome, and the Nuremberg and Tokyo International War Crimes Tribunals never anticipated any government acting in am manner to ensure the maximum number of its citizens are infected and killed by a virus that they though their willing negligence and malfeasance of their government were killed. Maybe it is time to amend international law to include such actions as crimes against humanity, and maybe it is time for the leaders of the United States to follow in word and deed what Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson when the charges against the Nazi War Criminals were developed before Nuremberg:

Sadly, there are now many Trump supporters, who claim that yes their is a pandemic, but that the numbers of deaths and infections are inflated. When you get to the hear of their arguments they are in substance no different than Holocaust Deniers. For such people are quite willing to sacrifice the lives those of less value than themselves, the elderly, the disabled, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, and Non-white immigrants, and yes, that includes pregnant mothers just to prove their point and say that their supposed freedom matters more than the lives of others.

As such they are no different than Joseph Stalin who said: “The death of one man is tragic, but the death of thousands is statistic.”

Sadly the vast majority of Trump supporters who deny the evidence, make light of the deaths, and argue that certain lives are worth more than others prove their agreement with the Soviet Dictator. I say the hell with them and any other participant or bystander when human rights are being steamrolled, the Constitution being trampled, and the greatest commandments of the Jewish and Christian Religions are upended by their supposed defenders.

The German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer 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 rather than too much. 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. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

He also said:

“If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

Another, Major General Henning Von Tresckow said: “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”

General Ludwig Beck said: “Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.”

Sophie Scholl a twenty-two year old student at the University of Munich and a leader of the anti-Nazi White Rose Resistance movement wrote:

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”

And finally, the words of the leader of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther: “Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”It is legend that Luther said the words “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.”

That being said, Luther’s, Scholl’s, Beck’s, Von Tresckow’s and Bonhoeffer’s words are my words today, both in reference to the Constitution and my vows as a Christian, Deacon, and Priest.

So until tomorrow.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Filed under anti-semitism, authoritarian government, christian life, civil rights, Coronavirus 19 Pandemic, crimes against humanity, Diseases Epidemics and Pandemics, ethics, faith, healthcare, History, holocaust, Immigration and immigrants, laws and legislation, leadership, Military, ministry, nazi germany, Political Commentary, racism, Religion

Tagged as adolf hitler, Colonel Henning Von Trescow, Coronavirus 19, COVID19, crimes against humanity, dietrich bonhoeffer, general ludwig beck, holocaust deniers, International Criminal Court, Joseph Stalin, justice robert jackson, Martin Luther, nuremberg trials, sophie scholl, the white rose, tokyo trials, treaty of Rome, trump cult, united nations

August 7, 2020 · 01:33

The Film that Shocked the World: Nazi Concentration Camps From Nuremberg

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Instead of writing much tonight I am posting a video compiled by American and British personnel as they liberated Nazi Concentration Camps in Germany. The images even though shot in black and white are still nearly 75 years after it was shown in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice on 29 November 1945, just a week into the trial the Allied Prosecutors led by Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Robert H. Jackson introduced it into evidence.

The UPI report of the day’s testimony and the film described the scene:

NUREMBERG, Nov. 29, 1945 (UP) – A tense audience at the war crimes trial watched for 52 horror-packed minutes today a 6,000-foot American Army film baring conditions at Nazi concentration camps. The prosecution charged that the camps were an instrument of policy of German leaders, including the 20 men on trial in the courtroom, in their drive for power.

In an almost deathlike silence the defendants, silhouetted in the dark courtroom by fluorescent lamps so that their guards could watch them, stared fascinated, bowed their heads low or mopped their faces as the show proceeded.

One, Hjalmar Schacht, kept his back turned throughout. Another, Polish Overlord Hans Frank, one of the most infamous mass murderers in world history, got sick.

American Sidney S. Alderman had closed the case on the German seizure of Austria, denouncing Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, Austrian traitor Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Baron Franz von Papen and former Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath as the arch-plotters – “sly bullies wearing sanctimonious masks to cover their duplicity.”

High spots included a telephone talk in which Goering dictated to Seyss-Inquart a request which Seyss-Inquart was to make that German troops be sent into Austria; a telephone talk in which Adolf Hitler said he would “never, never forget” Benito Mussolini for co-operating and a 41-minute call by Goering to former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, then Ambassador in London, describing how “the birds are twittering here” in Berchtesgaden the day after the German invasion.

Court recessed at 3:15 so the movie screen could be made ready. At 3:35 the lights suddenly went out. At the same instant lights set around the prisoners’ dock rail flashed on to light the defendants. Reinforcements of American M.P.’s filed silently into the room to join the white-helmeted guards around the dock.

American Prosecutor Thomas Dodd rose.

“We will now show what concentration camps mean,” he said. “… the camps were not an end in themselves but an integral part of the Nazi system of government. We intend to prove that each defendant knew of the camps and that the camps were instruments by which the defendants retained power. They used the camps to prepare aggressive war.”

At 3:50 the film started grinding. The 6,000 feet shown were selected from 80,000 feet.

First came Leipzig – shots of bodies, burned to a crisp, of men and women who had tried to flee barracks the Nazis set afire and were mowed down by machine-gun fire.

Goering leaned forward in his seat, staring. Rudolf Hess snapped upright, betraying intelligent interest for the first time since the trial started, and whispered to Goering on his right and Ribbentrop on his left.

The camera eye moved slowly over the heaps of burned bodies. War correspondents had seen them before they were piled up – fingers dug into the earth in agony.

Col. Gen. Alfred Jodi put on dark glasses. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel bent stiffly forward.

The film flashed to Hamadar, which the Germans called the shudder house.

Papen lowered his head and covered his face with a handkerchief.

The film went on to Northausen, which the American 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry divisions liberated. It showed 2,500 bodies stacked beside a bombed building.

Schacht, his owl-like glasses reflecting the light in the prisoners’ dock, remained rigidly facing the audience, turned away from the screen.

German civilians, carrying bodies to mass graves under the guns of American troops, passed on the screen.

Grand-Adm. Karl Doenitz leaned heavily over the side of the dock as if he had taken all he could. Keitel took off his glasses, mopped his sweating face and lowered his head.

Next came Buchenwald, one of the worst of all. The film showed German civilians marching past a display of lamp shades, picture frames, plaques and bookmarks made of the skin of murdered men. The wife of the S.S. camp commandant had selected the victims.

Hess still watched, intensified. Julius Streicher stared with a deadpan face. Ribbentrop still had his eyes to the floor.

Then came Mauthausen, notorious Dachau, one of the earliest, greatest and most dreadful, and Belsen, where bodies were piled so high British bulldozers had to push them int o mass graves.

The film ended and the lights went on. For long moments the entire audience sat as if transfixed. Goering did not move his eyes from the screen until court adjourned one minute later. Schacht stood up and his lawyer said that he had nothing to do with the camps – in fact, would tell the court that he spent seven months at Dachau himself.

The film is real, and there was much more like it; in fact the Soviets would show a film from the death camps they liberated just two months later. But for now I will leave you with the film that shocked the world, and forever turned the tide against the Nazi Major War Criminals.

Please don’t believe that such events could happen in any country in the World, including Trump’s America. Please watch all of it, even if it sickens you as it should. Please don’t believe anything Trump says regarding race, ethnicity, religion, political opponents, the free press, and his deliberate falsification or anything that might embarrass him, because in each case he is telling his alternate version of the truth which acquits him and blames his victims.
As of today he has been responsible for decisions that have claimed the lives of over 160,000 American and infected over Five million Americans with the Coronavirus 19 virus and a pandemic that has made a nation with just 4.25% of the Worlds population, which supposedly had the best in medical, scientific and research programs to stop pandemics to the worst for a nation supposedly so well educated, prepared, and ready for a pandemic.

But instead of a President dedicated to telling the truth, backing the facts of science and medicine, we have a man who only speaks for himself and those who will not turn on him. 162,000 dead, and over Five Million infected Americans testify against him

Yet, unlike the President I will tell the truth because I am bound by my oath to the Constitution, and my vows as a priest.

With that I leave you for tonight. I do need get some sleep.

I report, you decide.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

1 Comment

Filed under civil rights, Coronavirus, crimes against humanity, culture, ethics, euthanasia, faith, film, germany, History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, LGBT issues, natural disasters, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary, war crimes, war crimes trials

Tagged as a, bergen-belsen, buchenwald, crimes against humanity, dachau concentration camp, Haldamar, herman goering, justice robert jackson, nazi war criminals, nuremberg trials, president donald trump, soviet union, war crimes

August 6, 2020 · 02:41

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Strong Prejudices ill Formed Minds, and Weapons of Mass Destruction Hiroshima at 75 years

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Seventy-five years ago the world changed. A remarkably destructive weapon was introduced in combat, a single bomb that annihilated the city of Hiroshima Japan. The effects were immediate, 70,000 to 100,000 people were killed, tens of thousands of others wounded, many of whom would suffer from the effects of radiation and radiation burns the rest of their lives. Within days a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki with similar results, and Japan sued for peace. The Second World War was over and a new world was born, a world under the shadow of nuclear weapons.

The anniversary of that event today is something that all of us should ponder with great trepidation as the world seems to lurch towards a day when such a weapon will be used again. The question should not be one of mere military or tactical expediency, but must consider the moral dimension of the use of these weapons as well as the whole concept of total war.

In his book Hiroshima, John Hersey wrote:

His question is worth considering. It is no wonder that Robert Oppenheimer one of the members of the team that developed the bomb quoted a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita after he witnessed the test explosion “Trinity” on July 16th 1945: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Up until April of 2017 I spend the last three and a half years teaching the ethics of war to senior military officers at a major U.S. Military Staff College. One of the things that we do in the class is to have the officers do presentations on different historical, or potential ethical problems faced by national policy makers, military commanders and planners. The goal was to have these men and women dig deep and examine the issues, and think about the implications of what they will do when they go back out to serve as commanders, staff officers, advisors to civilian leaders and planners.

Sadly, in the gutting of that institution after I departed the Ethics elective and all other electives were eliminated. They also cut back the number of seminars from 13 to five and limited the students to O-5s and O-6s, with command experience, directly contravening the intentions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act which was designed to prevent repeats of Vietnam, the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt, and the invasion of Grenada. The intent of the legislation was to better coordinate the efforts of the services and inculturation of younger officers to understand the capabilities of their sister services, as well as teach history, strategy, and ethics to rising leaders in the Defense Department, State Department, CIA, DIA, and other agencies charged with our national security.

In each class that I taught, at least one student dealt with the use of the Atomic bombs. Most were Air Force or Navy officers who have served with nuclear forces. Unlike the depiction in the classic movie Dr. Strangelove or other depictions that show officers in these forces as madmen, the fact is that I was always impressed with the thoughtfulness and introspective nature of these men and women. They sincerely wrestle with the implications of the use of these weapons, and many are critical of the use of them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is comforting to me to know that at least in the U.S. military that there are many who can reflect and do try to look at things not just from a purely military standpoint.

Of course since I know something of human nature I figure that there are others in our ranks, or in our appointed civilian cabinet officers, and members of Congress who are not so reflective or sensitive to the moral implications of the use of these weapons, among whom is our current President and some of the people he has appointed to cabinet positions.

The fact that President Trump acts on impulse and seems to have no moral compass, strategic sense, or anything apart than what benefits him causes me to shudder, especially when he has to actually confront North Korea on their ICBM and nuclear programs, not to mention the use of weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group. As Barbara Tuchman wrote: “Strong prejudices and an ill-informed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.” President Trump not only displays strong prejudices, but one of the most ill-informed minds of any American President.

I am no stranger to what these weapons, as well as chemical and biological weapons can do. Thirty-five years ago when I was a young Army Medical Service Corps lieutenant I was trained as a Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Officer. I learned the physical effects of exposure to these weapons, how many Rads of radiation a person could receive before they became sick and died. I learned what radiation exposure does to people at each stage. We trained with maps to chart fallout patterns, and the maps had the cities and towns that we lived in, this was Cold War Germany and yes both NATO and the Warsaw Pact expected that tactical nuclear weapons and chemical weapons would be used and we had to be able to operate in contaminated environments. We operated under the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD as a deterrent to war. It was chilling and made me realize that the use of these weapons today would be suicidal. When Chernobyl melted down we were in the fallout zone and were given instructions on what we could and could not do in order to minimize any possible exposure to radiation poisoning.

So when it comes to the first use of the Atomic bomb I am quite reflective. As a historian, military officer, chaplain and priest who has been trained on what these weapons can do I have a fairly unique perspective. Honestly, as a historian I can understand the reasons that President Truman ordered its use, and I can understand the objections of some of the bomb’s designers on why it should not be used. I’ve done the math and the estimates of casualties had there been an invasion of the Japanese home islands is in the millions, most of which would have been Japanese civilians. So I admit how conflicted that I am about its first use, but how after that it could continue to be used or produced is part of a moral abyss that I cannot fathom, especially after the Soviets successfully deployed their stolen version of the American bomb. The fact is that both sides built so many of these weapons to target facilities that could easily be destroyed by conventional weapons is mind numbing. Thus instead of building a few hundred, Enough by far to destroy their enemy completely, both sides built tens of thousands.

My inner lawyer can argue either point regarding the first use of the weapon when even its designers were unsure that it would work, is nit the issue. That being said the manner in which it was used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki troubles me. Hiroshima did have military targets, but a big part of the choice was its location, surrounded by hills, which created a bowl that would focus the explosion and maximized its effect. Many of the larger military and industrial targets lay outside the kill zone. The designers and officers on the committee wanted to show the Japanese, as well as the world the destructive power of the weapon. Those who opposed its use hoped that it would convince the leaders of nations that war itself needed to be prevented. These men wrestled with the issue even as they prepared the first bombs for deployment against Japan. The recommendations of the committee can be found here:

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/Interim.shtml
Of the 150 scientists who were part of the bomb’s design team only 15% recommended the military use without a demonstration to show the Japanese the destructive power of the bomb and a chance to end the war. The poll of the scientists can be found here:

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/Poll.shtml
Leo Szilard wrote a letter to Edward Teller seeking his support in sending a petition to President Truman regarding his opposition to the use of the weapon based on purely moral considerations. Szilard wrote:

“However small the chance might be that our petition may influence the course of events, I personally feel that it would be a matter of importance if a large number of scientists who have worked in this field want clearly and unmistakably on record as to their opposition on moral grounds to the use of these bombs in the present phase of the war.

Many of us are inclined to say that individual Germans share the guilt for the acts which Germany committed during this war because they did not raise their voices in protest against those acts, Their defense that their protest would have been of no avail hardly seems acceptable even though these Germans could not have protested without running risks to life and liberty. We are in a position to raise our voices without incurring any such risks even though we might incur the displeasure of some of those who are at present in charge of controlling the work on “atomic power.”

The entire text of Szilard’s letter can be found here:

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/SzilardTeller1.shtml
The two petitions of the scientists to the President are here, the second letter concludes with this recommendation:

“If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation. Its prevention is at present the solemn responsibility of the United States–singled out by virtue of her lead in the field of atomic power.

The added material strength which this lead gives to the United States brings with it the obligation of restraint and if we were to violate this obligation our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. It would then be more difficult for us to live up to our responsibility of bringing the unloosened forces of destruction under control.

In view of the foregoing, we, the undersigned, respectfully petition: first, that you exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender; second, that in such an event the question whether or not to use atomic bombs be decided by you in the light of the consideration presented in this petition as well as all the other moral responsibilities which are involved.”

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/SzilardPetition.shtml

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/Petition.shtml

Ralph Bard, Undersecretary of the Navy wrote to Secretary of War Stimson his opinion on July 17th 1945:

“Ever since I have been in touch with this program I have had a feeling that before the bomb is actually used against Japan that Japan should have some preliminary warning for say two or three days in advance of use. The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling.”

But Hersey went to Hiroshima, and interviewed the victims. In his 31,000 word article in the New Yorker which was published as his book Hiroshima he wrote words which contradicted the lies of MacArthur’s government and most of the military. He exposed the weapon as something worse than any conventional weapon, and worse than anything ever developed: “…their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.”

Hersey wrote of another survivor:

“He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever.“

Published a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the article stunned Americans, but did not alter policy.

I think that those who debate the history of this need to look at the entire picture and read the letters, the documents and take into account everything. My hope is that leaders, policy makers, legislators and we the people continue to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. It is true that the nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia are significantly smaller than when the Cold War ended, but even so what remain are more than enough to extinguish human life on the planet. Add to these the Chinese, French, British, Indian, Pakistani and the hundreds of undeclared weapons of Israel the fact is that there remains the possibility that they could be used. Likewise there are nuclear programs in other nations, especially North Korea, which has certainly produced weapons and is working on making them useful on their missiles. But the North Koreans are not alone, they could easily be joined by others including Iran and Saudi Arabia. Add to this the possibility of a terrorist group producing or acquiring a weapon the world is still a very dangerous place.

That is the world that we live in and the world in which policy makers, legislators and educated people who care about the world must attempt to make safe. If you asked me I would say outlaw them, but that will never happen. Edward Teller wrote Leon Szilard:

“First of all let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls…. Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat use might even be the best thing…. But I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it to escape…”

We are on the brink again. India and Pakistan are once again girding themselves up for nuclear war over Kashmir. Iran, after having ceased its production of enriched uranium, has resumed it following the Trump Administration voiding the nuclear nonproliferation agreement signed during the Obama administration. Despite its promises to President Trump, North Korea still seems intent on developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and it was reported yesterday that the United Nations believes that the North Koreans have successfully developed miniaturized nuclear warheads that can be mounted in their existing missiles, including ICBMs.

The Russians are developing hypersonic missiles and torpedoes which could deliver nuclear warheads against American targets, and the Chinese are increasing their nuclear capability. of course the threat of nuclear proliferation continues to grow. The United States is now embarked on a plan to modernize its nuclear arsenal and under the Trump administration loosen the restraints on the use of nuclear weapons.

The ghost is out of the bottle, and nothing can ever get it back in. We can only hope and pray that reasonable people prevent any of these weapons from ever being used and that war itself would end. But then, General Of the Army Omar Bradley said in 1948:

I think that, Bradley, the “Soldier’s General” was correct. Too many people just don’t care about life, Ethics, or peace.

So, until tomorrow, I leave you with that less than cheerful thought.

Peace

Padre Steve+

Category Archives: ethics

Our Heart of Darkness and Failure to Understand rather than Just Condemn Evil

It is Happening Again, Not in Nazi Germany: The Campaign Against “Life Unworthy of Life”

Fighting for Truth and Our Political System in 2020: Any Election Can be the Last, or at Least the Last in the Lifetime of the Person Casting the Vote.

They Thought They Were Free: the Germans 1933-45 and the GOP 2016-2020

The President Who Poisons All He Touches: Donald Trump, the First American Dictator

The Road to Trump Began Here: Jackie Robinson and the 1964 GOP Convention

Nagasaki at 75 Years: “In Being the First to use It, We had Adopted an Ethical Standard common to the Barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

COVID19 Deniers and Enablers: Trump, His Cult and the Commission of Crimes Against Humanity

The Film that Shocked the World: Nazi Concentration Camps From Nuremberg

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Strong Prejudices ill Formed Minds, and Weapons of Mass Destruction Hiroshima at 75 years

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