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Law Should not Stop with the Punishment of Petty Crimes Committed by Little People, but Reach to Men of Great Power and Use it to Commit Great Evil: Robert Jackson’s Opening Statement at Nuremberg


Putin with his Generals


Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

In light of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal campaign against Ukraine and its people, I am revisiting the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Germany between 1945 and 1948. It is my considered opinion as a historian and subject matter expert in military ethics, that Putin and the Russian leaders now conducting a genocidal war against Ukraine need to be brought to justice before an international war crimes tribunal. Such a trial could be convened at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, or a specially convened international tribunal similar to the International Military Tribunal that brought high ranking Nazi officials and military officers to justice at Nuremberg.

I also think of former President Donald Trump and his supporters that made a concerted attempt to overthrow the newly elected President by an planned assault on the Capitol that the President urged on and failed to stop, and his supporters who still support such actions today.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court was appointed by President Harry S. Truman as the Chief American Counsel. Jackson helped draft the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal which created the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. During the trial Jackson served as the lead American prosecutor.

Before those Trials Jackson noted something incredibly profound, which too many Americans, regardless of their political party or ideology fail to comprehend.

“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” Justice Robert Jackson International Conference on Military Trials, London, 1945, Dept. of State Pub.No. 3080 (1949), p.330.

On November 20th, 1945 twenty Nazi leaders took their seats in the dock in Saal 6oo (Courtroom 600) at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. The men were among the top leaders of the Third Reich, though there were a number of conspicuous absences. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler had committed suicide as the Reich collapsed. Martin Bormann was missing and was believed to have escaped. Reinhard Heydrich died of wounds caused by Czech partisans in 1942.

Now, the men who ruled over most of Europe just three years before presented a sad sight. Deprived of their opulent uniforms and power they looked terrifyingly ordinary.

At 10 A.M., Presiding Judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence banged his gavel on his desk looking across the courtroom at the defendants and made his opening statement, saying:

“Before the defendants in this case are called upon to make their pleas to the indictment which has been lodged against them, and in which they are charged with Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity, and with a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit those Crimes… The trial which is now about to begin is unique in the history of the jurisprudence of the World and it is of supreme importance to millions of people all over the globe…” 


Five years ago during I stood next to that same defendant’s dock where Hermann Goering and nineteen other men sat. Goering had been Hitler’s number two man and designated successor until the last days of the war. The others in the dock with Goering were Governor General of Poland, Dr. Hans Frank; Minister of the Interior and Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia, Dr.Wilhelm Frick; General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando Der Wehrmacht; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Gauleiter of Thuringia, and head of Slave Labor programs, Fritz Sauckel; Dr. Arthur Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Easter Territories, Dr. Arthur Seyess-Inquart, Reichskommissar of occupied Netherlands; Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia and publisher of the Nazi propaganda paper, Der Sturmer; Commander of the German Navy and Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz; Minister of Economics, Dr. Walter Funk; Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess;;Foreign Minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath; the First Commander of the German Navy under Hitler, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder; Head of the Hitler Youth, and Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach; Armaments Minister, Albert Speer; Hans Fritzsche of the Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Hjalmar Schlacht pre-war head of the Reichsbank, and Economics Minister, Franz von Papen, who also had served as Vice Chancellor, Ambassador to Austria and later Turkey.

Also indicted but not in the dock, were SS Obergrüppenfuhrer and Chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was recovering from a mild stroke; Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Head of the Armaments and heavy industry conglomerate Friedrich Krupp AG, and Chief of The Nazi Party Chancellery Martin Bormann. Robert Ley, leader of The German Labor Front committed suicide in his cell before the trial began. Krupp was too sick and senile to go to trial.

On the second day of trial Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Robert Jackson who was serving as Chief Prosecutor for the United States gave one of the most powerful opening statements in any trial. He said:

May it please Your Honour, the privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hands of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgement of the law, is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason. 

This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of seventeen more, to utilise International Law to meet the greatest menace of our times -aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honour. 

In the prisoners’ dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led, almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these miserable men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world. 

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalism and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which embroiled Europe, generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived, and with the forces they have directed, that tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which attached to their names. Civilisation can afford no compromise with the forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive. 

What these men stand for we will patiently and temperately disclose. We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events. The catalogue of crimes will omit nothing that could be conceived by a pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for power. These men created in Germany, under the “Fuehrerprinzip,” a National Socialist despotism equalled only by the dynasties of the ancient East. They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being, The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards those who were marked as “scapegoats.” Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics, and free labour the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages. They excited the German ambition to be a “master race,” which of course implies serfdom others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They overran their neighbours. To sustain the “master race” in its war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as “displaced persons.” At length, bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperilled Civilisation. Its united efforts have ground the German war machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralised society struggles to survive. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.

In justice to the nations and the men associated in this prosecution, I must remind you of certain difficulties which may leave their mark on this case. Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade covering a whole continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events. Despite the magnitude of the task, the world has demanded immediate action. This demand has had to be met, though perhaps at the cost of finished craftsmanship. In my country, established courts, following familiar procedures, applying well-thumbed precedents, and dealing with the legal consequences of local and limited events, seldom commence a trial within a year of the event in litigation. Yet less than eight months ago to-day the courtroom in which you sit was an enemy fortress in the hands of German S.S. troops. Less than eight months ago nearly all our witnesses and documents were in enemy hands. The law had not been codified, no procedures had been established, no tribunal was in existence, no usable courthouse stood here, none of the hundreds of tons of official German documents had been examined, no prosecuting staff had been assembled, nearly all of the present defendants were at large, and the four prosecuting powers had not yet joined in common cause to try them. I should be the last to deny that the case may well suffer from incomplete researches, and quite likely will not be the example of professional work which any of the prosecuting nations would normally wish to sponsor. It is, however, a completely adequate case to the judgement we shall ask you to render, and its full development we shall be obliged to leave to historians.

Before I discuss particulars of evidence, some general considerations which may affect the credit of this trial in the eyes of the world should be candidly faced. There is a dramatic disparity between the circumstances of the accusers and of the accused that might discredit our work if we should falter, in even minor matters, in being fair and temperate.

Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both prosecution and judgement must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The world-wide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the First World War we learned the futility of the latter course. The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as is humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.

At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to put these men to trial is to do them an injustice entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used. Let us see what alternative they would have to being tried.

More than a majority of these prisoners surrendered to or were tracked down by the forces of the United States. Could they expect us to make American custody a shelter for our enemies against the just wrath of our Allies? Did we spend American lives to capture them only to save them from punishment? Under the principles of the Moscow Declaration, those suspected war criminals who are not to be tried internationally must be turned over to individual governments for trial at the scene of their outrages. Many less responsible and less culpable American-held prisoners have been and will continue to be turned over to other United Nations for local trial. If these defendants should succeed, for any reason, in escaping the condemnation of this Tribunal, or if they obstruct or abort this trial, those who are American-held prisoners will be delivered up to our continental Allies. For these defendants, however, we have set up an International Tribunal, and have undertaken the burden of participating in a complicated effort to give them fair and dispassionate hearings. That is the best known protection to any man with a defence worthy of being heard. If these men are the first war leaders of a defeated nation to be prosecuted in the name of the law, they are also the first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of the law. Realistically, the Charter of this Tribunal, which gives them a hearing, is also the source of their only hope. It may be that these men of troubled conscience, whose only wish is that the world forget them, do not regard a trial as a favour. But they do have a fair opportunity to defend themselves -a favour which, when in power, they rarely extended even to their fellow countrymen. Despite the fact that public opinion already condemns their acts, we agree that here they must be given a presumption of innocence, and we accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.

When I say that we do not ask for convictions unless we prove crime, I do not mean mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many of us might well have committed had we been in the defendants’ positions. It is not because they yielded to the normal frailties of human beings that we accuse them. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.

We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers, and these defendants had their share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.

We would also make clear that we have no purpose to incriminate the whole German people. We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance We would also make clear that we have no purpose to incriminate the whole German people. We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists. If the German populace had willingly accepted the Nazi programme, no Storm-troopers would have been needed in the early days of the Party, and there would have been no need for concentration camps or the Gestapo, both of which institutions were inaugurated as soon as the Nazis gained control of the German state. Only after these lawless innovations proved successful at home were they taken abroad.

The German people should know by now that the people of the United States hold them in no fear, and in no hate. It is true that the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern warfare, but the ruin that lies from the Rhine to the Danube shows that we, like our Allies, have not been dull pupils. If we are not awed German fortitude and proficiency in war, and if we are not persuaded of their political maturity, we do respect their skill in the arts of peace, their technical competence, and the sober, industrious and self-disciplined character of the masses of the German people. In 1933, we saw the German people recovering prestige in the commercial, industrial and artistic world after the set-back of the last war. We beheld their progress neither with envy nor malice. The Nazi regime interrupted this advance. The recoil of the Nazi aggression has left Germany in ruins. The Nazi readiness to pledge the German word without hesitation and to break it without shame has fastened upon German diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Nazi arrogance has made the boast of the “master race” a taunt that will be thrown at Germans the world over for generations. The Nazi nightmare has given the German name a new and sinister significance throughout the world, which will retard Germany a century. The German, no less than the non-German world, has accounts to settle with these defendants.

The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From September 1st, 1939, when the German armies crossed the Polish frontier, until September, 1942, when they met epic resistance at Stalingrad, German arms seemed invincible. Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands and France, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Balkans and Africa, Poland and the Baltic States, and parts of Russia, all had, been overrun and conquered by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. That attack on the peace of the world is the crime against international society which brings into international cognizance crimes in its aid and preparation which otherwise might be only internal concerns. It was aggressive war, which the nations of the world had renounced. It was war in violation of treaties, by which the peace of the world was sought to be safeguarded. 

This war did not just happen -it was planned and prepared for over a long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The world has perhaps never seen such a concentration and stimulation of the energies of any people as that which enabled Germany, twenty years after it was defeated, disarmed and dismembered, to come so near carrying out its plan to dominate Europe. Whatever else we may say of those who were the authors of this war, they did achieve a stupendous work in organisation, and our first task is to examine the means by which these defendants and their fellow conspirators prepared and incited Germany to go to war. 

In general, our case will disclose these defendants all uniting at some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which they well knew could be accomplished only by an outbreak of war in Europe. Their seizure of the German State, their subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and extermination of dissident elements, their planning and waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples -all these are ends for which they acted in concert; and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one. We shall also trace for you the intricate web of organisations which these men formed and utilised to accomplish these ends. We will show how the entire structure of offices and officials was dedicated to the criminal purposes and committed to the use of the criminal methods planned by these defendants and their co-conspirators, many of whom war and suicide have put beyond reach.

It is my purpose to open the case, particularly under Count One of the Indictment, and to deal with the Common plan or Conspiracy to achieve ends possible only by resort to Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity. My emphasis will not be on individual perversions which may have occurred independently of any central plan. One of the dangers ever present in this trial is that it may be protracted by details of particular wrongs and that we will become lost in a “wilderness of single instances.” Nor will I now dwell on the activity of individual defendants except as it may contribute to exposition of the Common Plan. 

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority behind all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture, the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and racked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority behind all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture, the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and racked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war. 

I shall first take up the lawless road by which these men came to possess the power which they have so used. The chief instrumentality of cohesion in plan and action was the National Socialist German Workers Party, known as the Nazi Party. Some of the defendants were with it from the beginning. Others joined only after success seemed to have validated its lawlessness or power had invested it with immunity from the processes of the law. Adolf Hitler became its supreme leader or “Fuehrer” in 1921. 

On the 24th February, 1920, at Munich, it publicly had proclaimed its programme (1708-PS). Some of its purposes would commend themselves to many good citizens, such as the demands for “profit-sharing in the great industries,” “generous development of provision for old age,” “a land reform suitable to our national requirements,” and “raising the standard of health.” It also made a strong appeal to that sort of nationalism which in ourselves we call patriotism and in our rivals chauvinism. It demanded “equality of rights for the German people in its dealing with other nations and the evolution of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.” It demanded the “union of all Germans on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples to form a Great Germany.” It demanded “land and territory (colonies) for the enrichment of our people and the settlement of our surplus population.” All of these, of course, were legitimate objectives if they were to be attained without resort to aggressive warfare.

The Nazi Party from its inception, however, contemplated war. It demanded the “abolition of mercenary troops and the formation of a national army.” It proclaimed that “in view of the enormous sacrifice of life and property demanded of a nation by every war, personal enrichment through war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand, therefore, ruthless confiscation of all war profits.” I do not criticise this policy. Indeed, I wish it were universal. I merely wish to point out that in a time of peace, war was a preoccupation of the Party, and it started the work of making war less offensive to the masses of the people. With this it combined a programme of physical training and sports for youth that became, as we shall see, the cloak for a secret programme of military training. 

The Nazi Party declaration also committed its members to an anti-Semitic programme. It declared that no Jew or any person of non-German blood could be a member of the nation. Such persons were to be disfranchised, disqualified for office, subject to the alien laws, and entitled to nourishment only after the German population had first been provided for. All who had entered Germany after 2nd August, 1914, were to be required forthwith to depart, and all non-German immigration was to be prohibited. 

The Party also avowed, even in those early days, an authoritarian and totalitarian programme for Germany. It demanded creation of a strong central power with unconditional authority, nationalisation of all businesses which had been “amalgamated,” and a “reconstruction” of the national system of education, which “must aim at teaching the pupil to understand the idea of the State (state sociology).” Its hostility to civil liberties and freedom of the Press was distinctly announced in these words: “It must be forbidden to publish newspapers which do not conduce to the national welfare. We demand the legal prosecution of all tendencies in art or literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation, and the suppression of institutions which might militate against the above requirements.”

The forecast of religious persecution was clothed in the language of religious liberty, for the Nazi programme stated “We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State.” But it continued with the limitation, “so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race.” 

The Party programme foreshadowed the campaign of terrorism. It announced, “we demand ruthless war upon those whose activities are injurious to the common interests,” and it demanded that such offences be punished with death. 

It is significant that the leaders of this Party interpreted this programme as a belligerent one, certain to precipitate conflict. The Party platform concluded: 

“The leaders of the Party swear to proceed regardless of consequences -if necessary, at the sacrifice of their lives -toward the fulfilment of the foregoing points.” 

It is this Leadership Corps of the Party, not its entire membership, that stands accused before you as a criminal Organisation. 

We have not sought to include every person who may, at some time, have supported the Nazi Party, but only the leadership core which pledged itself to achieve its ends at the risk of their lives. 

Let us now see how the leaders of the Party fulfilled their pledge to proceed regardless of consequences. Obviously, their foreign objectives, which were nothing less than to undo international treaties and to wrest territory from foreign control, as well as most of their internal programme, could be accomplished only by possession of the machinery of the German State. The first effort, accordingly, was to subvert the Weimar Republic by violent revolution. An abortive “putsch” at Munich in 1921 landed many of them in jail. A period of meditation which followed produced “Mein Kampf,” henceforth the source of law for the Party workers and a source of considerable revenue to its supreme leader. The Nazi plans for the violent overthrow of the feeble Republic then turned to plans for its capture.

No greater mistake could be made than to think of the Nazi Party in terms of the loose organisations which we of the Western world call “political parties.” In discipline, structure, and method the Nazi Party was not adapted to the democratic process of persuasion. It was an instrument of conspiracy and of coercion. The Party was not organised to take over power in the German State by winning the support of a majority of the German people; it was organised to seize power in defiance of the will of the people. 

The Nazi Party, under the “Fuehrerprinzip,” was bound by an iron discipline into a pyramid, with the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, at the top and broadening into a numerous Leadership Corps, composed of overlords of a very extensive Party membership at the base. By no means all of those who may have supported the movement in one way or another were actual Party members. The membership took the Party oath which in effect amounted to an abdication of personal intelligence and moral responsibility. This was the oath: “I vow inviolable fidelity to Adolf Hitler; I vow absolute obedience to him and to the leaders he designates for me.” The membership in daily practise followed its leaders with an idolatry and self-surrender more Oriental than Western. We will not be obliged to guess as to the motives or goal of the Nazi Party. The immediate aim was to undermine the Weimar Republic. The order to all Party members to work to that end was given in a letter from Hitler of 24th August, 1931, to Rosenberg, of which we will produce the original. 

Hitler wrote:-“I am just reading in the Volkischer Beobachter, edition 235/ 236 page 1, an article entitled ‘Does Wirth intend to come over?’ The tendency of the article is to prevent on our part a crumbling away from the present form of government. I myself am travelling all over Germany to achieve exactly the opposite. May I therefore ask that my own paper will not stab me in the back with tactically unwise articles …” (047-PS)

Captured film enables us to present the defendant, Alfred Rosenberg, who from the screen will himself tell you the story. The S.A. practised violent interference with the elections. We have here the reports of the S.D., describing in detail how its members later violated the secrecy of elections in order to identify those who opposed them. One of the reports makes this explanation:

“The control was effected in the following way: some members of the election-committee marked all the ballot-papers with numbers. During the ballot itself, a voters list was made up. The ballot-papers were handed out in numerical order, therefore it was possible afterwards with the aid of this list to find out the persons who cast no-votes or invalid votes. One sample of these marked ballot-papers is enclosed. The marking was done on the back of the ballot-papers with skimmed-milk.” (R-142) 

The Party activity, in addition to all the familiar forms of political contest, took on the aspect of a rehearsal for warfare. It utilised a Party formation, “Die Sturmabteilungen,” commonly known as the S.A. This was a voluntary organisation of youthful and fanatical Nazis trained for the use of violence under semi-military discipline. Its members began by acting as bodyguards for the Nazi leaders and rapidly expanded from defensive to offensive tactics. They became disciplined ruffians for breaking up opposition meetings and the terrorisation of adversaries. They boasted that their task was to make the Nazi Party “master of the streets.” The S.A. was the parent organisation of a number of others. Its offspring included “Die Schutzstaffeln” commonly known as the S.S., formed in 1925, and distinguished for the fanaticism and cruelty of its members; “Der Sicherheitsdienst,” known as the S.D.; and “Die Geheime Staatspolizei,” the Secret State Police, the infamous Gestapo formed in 1934 immediately after Nazi accession to power.

A glance at a chart of the Party Organisation is enough to show how completely it differed from the political parties we know. It had its own source of law in the Fuehrer and it had its own courts and its own police. The conspirators set up a government within the Party to exercise outside the law every sanction that any legitimate State could exercise and many that it could not. Its chain of command was military, and its formations were martial in name as well as in function. They were composed of battalions set up to bear arms under military discipline, motorised corps, flying corps, and the infamous “Death Head Corps,” which was not misnamed. The Party had its own secret police, its security units, its intelligence and espionage division, its raiding forces, and its youth forces. It established elaborate administrative mechanisms to identify and liquidate spies and informers, to manage concentration camps, to operate death vans, and to finance the whole movement. Through concentric circles of authority, the Nazi Party, as its leadership later boasted, eventually organised and dominated every phase of German life -but not until they had waged a bitter internal struggle characterised by brutal criminality. In preparation for this phase of their struggle they created a party police system. This became the pattern and the instrument of the police State, which was the first goal in their plan. 

The Party formation, including the Leadership Corps of the Party, the S.D., the S.S. the S.A. and the infamous Secret State Police, or Gestapo -all these stand accused before you as criminal organisations; organisations which, as we will prove from their own documents, were recruited only from the recklessly devoted Nazis, ready in conviction and temperament to do the most violent of deeds to advance the common programme. They terrorised and silenced democratic opposition and were able at length to combine with political opportunists, militarists, industrialists, monarchists and political reactionaries. 

A glance at a chart of the Party Organisation is enough to show how completely it differed from the political parties we know. It had its own source of law in the Fuehrer and it had its own courts and its own police. The conspirators set up a government within the Party to exercise outside the law every sanction that any legitimate State could exercise and many that it could not. Its chain of command was military, and its formations were martial in name as well as in function. They were composed of battalions set up to bear arms under military discipline, motorised corps, flying corps, and the infamous “Death Head Corps,” which was not misnamed. The Party had its own secret police, its security units, its intelligence and espionage division, its raiding forces, and its youth forces. It established elaborate administrative mechanisms to identify and liquidate spies and informers, to manage concentration camps, to operate death vans, and to finance the whole movement. Through concentric circles of authority, the Nazi Party, as its leadership later boasted, eventually organised and dominated every phase of German life -but not until they had waged a bitter internal struggle characterised by brutal criminality. In preparation for this phase of their struggle they created a party police system. This became the pattern and the instrument of the police State, which was the first goal in their plan. The Party formation, including the Leadership Corps of the Party, the S.D., the S.S. the S.A. and the infamous Secret State Police, or Gestapo -all these stand accused before you as criminal organisations; organisations which, as we will prove from their own documents, were recruited only from the recklessly devoted Nazis, ready in conviction and temperament to do the most violent of deeds to advance the common programme. They terrorised and silenced democratic opposition and were able at length to combine with political opportunists, militarists, industrialists, monarchists, and political reactionaries.

On January 30,1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the German Republic. An evil combination, represented in the prisoner’s dock by its most eminent survivors, had succeeded in possessing itself of the machinery of the German Government, a facade behind which they thenceforth would operate to make reality of the war of conquest they so long had plotted. The conspiracy had passed into its second phase. 

We shall now consider the steps, which embraced the most hideous of crimes against humanity, to which the conspirators resorted In perfecting control of the German State and in preparing Germany for the aggressive war indispensable to their ends. 

The Germans of the 1920′ s were a frustrated and baffled people as a result of defeat and the disintegration of their traditional government. The democratic elements, which were trying to govern Germany through the new and feeble machinery of the Weimar Republic, got inadequate support from the democratic forces of the rest of the world. It is not to be denied that Germany, when world-wide depression added to her other problems, was faced with urgent intricate pressures in her economic and political life, which necessitated bold measures. 

The internal measures by which a nation attempts to solve its problems are ordinarily of no concern to other nations. But the Nazi programme from the first was recognised as a desperate programme for a people still suffering the effects of an unsuccessful war. The Nazi policy ends recognised as attainable only by a renewal and more successful outcome of war. The conspirators’ answer to Germany’s problems was nothing less than to plot the the regaining of territories in the First World War and the acquisition of other fertile lands of Eastern Europe by dispossessing or exterminating those who inhabited them. They also contemplated destroying or permanently weakening all other neighbouring peoples so as to win virtual domination over Europe and probably over the world. The precise limits of their ambition we need not define, for it was and is as illegal to wage aggressive war for small stakes as for large ones. 

We find at this period two governments in Germany-the real and the ostensible. The form of the German Republic was maintained for a time, and it was the outward and visible government. But the real authority in the State was outside of and above the law and rested in the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party.

On February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, the Reichstag building was set on fire. The burning of this symbol of free parliamentary government was so providential for the Nazis that it was believed they staged the fire themselves. Certainly when we contemplate their known crimes, we cannot believe they would shrink from mere arson. It is not necessary, however, to resolve the controversy as to who set the fire. The significant point is in the use that was made of the fire and of the state of public mind it produced. The Nazis immediately accused the Communist Party of instigating and committing the crime, and turned every effort to portray this single act of arson as the beginning of a Communist revolution. Then, taking advantage of the hysteria, the Nazis met this phantom revolution with a real one. In the following December, the German Supreme Court, with commendable courage and independence, acquitted the accused Communists, but it was too late to influence the tragic course of events which the Nazi conspirators had set rushing forward. 

Hitler, on the morning after the fire, obtained from the aged and ailing President von Hindenburg a Presidential decree suspending the extensive guarantees of individual liberty contained in the constitution of the Weimar Republic. The decree provided that “Sections 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153 of the constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. Thus, restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the Press, on the right of assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscation as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” (1390-PS) 

The extent of the restriction on personal liberty under the decree of 28th February, 1933, may be understood by reference to the rights under the Weimar Constitution which were suspended:

Article 114. The freedom of the person is inviolable. Curtailment or deprivation of personal freedom by a public authority is only permissible on a legal basis. Persons who have been deprived of their personal freedom must be informed at the latest on the following day by whose authority and for what reasons the deprivation of freedom was ordered. Opportunity shall be afforded them without delay of submitting objection to their deprivation of freedom. 

Article 115. Every German’s home is his sanctuary and is inviolable. Exceptions may only be made as provided by law. 

Article 117. The secrecy of letters and all postal, telegraphic and telephone communications is inviolable. Exceptions are inadmissible except by Reich law. 

Article 118. Every German has the right, within the limits of the general laws, to express his opinions freely in speech, in writing, in print, in picture form or in any other way. No condition of work or employment may detract from this right and no disadvantage may accrue to him from any person making use of this right.

Article 123. All Germans have the right to assemble peacefully and unarmed without giving notice and without special permission. A Reich law may make previous notification obligatory for assemblies in the open air, and may prohibit them in the case of immediate danger to the public safety. 

Article 124. All Germans have the right to form associations or societies for purposes not contrary to criminal law. This right may not be curtailed by preventive measures. The same provisions apply to religious associations and societies. Every association may become incorporated (Erwerb der Rechtsfaehigkeit) according to the provisions of the civil law. The right may not be refused to any association on the grounds that its aims are political, social-political or religious. 

Article 153. Property is guaranteed by the Constitution. Its content and limits are defined by the laws. Expropriation can only take place for the public benefitand on a legal basis. Adequate compensation shall be granted, unless a Reich law orders otherwise. In the case of dispute concerning the matter to the ordinary civil courts, unless Reich laws determine otherwise. Compensation must be paid if the Reich expropriates property belonging to the Lands, Communes, or public utility associations. Property carries obligations. Its use shall also serve the common good.” (2050-PS) 

It must be said, in fairness to von Hindenburg, that the Constitution itself authorised him temporarily to suspend these fundamental rights “if the public safety and order in the German Reich are considerably disturbed or endangered.” It must also be acknowledged that President Ebert previously had invoked this power. 

But the National Socialist coup was made possible because the terms of the Hitler-Hindenburg decree departed from all previous ones in which the power of suspension had been invoked. Whenever President Ebert had suspended constitutional guarantees of individual rights, his decree had expressly revived the Protective Custody Act adopted by the Reichstag in 1916 during the previous war. This Act guaranteed a judicial hearing within twenty-four hours of arrest, gave a right to have counsel and to inspect all relevant records, provided for appeal, and authorised compensation from Treasury funds for erroneous arrests.

The Hitler-Hindenburg decree of 28th February, 1933, contained no such safeguards. The omission may not have been noted by von Hindenburg. Certainly he did not appreciate its effect. It left the Nazi police and party formations, already existing and functioning under Hitler, completely unrestrained and irresponsible. Secret arrest and indefinite detention without charges, without evidence, without hearing, without counsel, became the method of inflicting inhuman punishment on any whom the Nazi police suspected or disliked. No court could issue an injunction, or writ of habeas corpus, or certiorari. The German people were in the hands of the police, the police were in the hands of the Nazi Party, and the Party was in the hands of a ring of evil men, of whom the defendants here before you are surviving and representative leaders.

ADN-ZB: Im faschistischen Deutschland 1933-45 Unmittelbar nach der faschistischen Machtergreifung werden im Frühjahr 1933 überall im Land Konzentrationslager errichtet. SA-Männer als Lagerwache des KZ’s Oranienburg bei Berlin.

The Nazi conspiracy, as we shall show, always contemplated not merely overcoming current opposition, but exterminating elements which could not be reconciled with its philosophy of the State. It not only sought to establish the Nazi “new order” but to secure its way, as Hitler predicted, “for a thousand years.” Nazis were never in doubt or disagreement as to what those dissident elements were. They were concisely described by one of them, Col. General von Fritzsche, on 11th December, 1938, in these words:

“Shortly after the first war I came to the conclusion that we should have to be victorious in three battles if Germany were to become powerful again: (1) The battle against the working class -Hitler has won this; (2) Against the Catholic Church, perhaps better expressed against Ultramontanism (3) Against the Jews.” (1947-PS)

The warfare against these elements was continuous. The battle in Germany was but a practice skirmish for the world-wide drive against them. We have here in point of geography and of time two groups of crimes against humanity -one within Germany before and during the war, the other in occupied territory during the war. But the two are not separated in Nazi planning. They are a continuous unfolding of the Nazi plan to exterminate peoples and institutions which might serve as a focus or instrument for overturning their “new world order” at any time. We consider these Crimes against Humanity in this address as manifestations of the one Nazi Plan and discuss them according to General von Fritsche’s classification… 

Jackson would continue his statement and address the battle against the Working Class, the battle against the churches, the crimes committed against the Jews, crimes in the conduct of war. I will deal with each of these In later articles.

Jackson concluded his opening statement with this words, and they are important, not only to the Nuremberg Process, but in our day today:

While the defendants and the prosecutors stand before you as individuals, it is not the triumph of either group alone that is committed to your judgement. Above all personalities there are anonymous and impersonal forces whose conflict makes up much of human history. It is yours to throw the strength of the law behind either the one or the other of these forces for at least another generation. What are the forces that are contending before you? 

No charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants represent, the forces that would advantage and delight in their acquittal, are the darkest and most sinister forces in society-dictatorship and oppression, malevolence and passion, militarism and lawlessness. By their fruits we best know them. Their acts have bathed the world in blood and set civilisation back a century. They have subjected their European neighbours to every outrage and torture, every spoliation and deprivation that insolence, cruelty, and greed could inflict. They have brought the German people to the lowest pitch of wretchedness, from which they can entertain no hope of early deliverance. They have stirred hatreds and incited domestic violence on every continent. There are the things that stand in the dock shoulder to shoulder with these prisoners.

The real complaining party at your bar is Civilisation. In all our countries it is still a struggling and imperfect thing. It does not plead that the United States, or any other country, has been blameless of the conditions which made the German people easy victims to the blandishments and intimidations of the Nazi conspirators.

But it points to the dreadful sequence of aggression and crimes I have recited, it points to the weariness of flesh, the exhaustion of resources, and the destruction of all that was beautiful or useful in so much of the world, and to greater potentialities for destruction in the days to come. It is not necessary among the ruins of this ancient and beautiful city with untold members of its civilian inhabitants still buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage an aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes. The refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that International Law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law. 

Civilisation asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of International Law, its prospects, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”


Following the trials of the major war criminals, eleven more trials were held, including the Doctor’s Trial, a General’s Trial, also known as the Hostage Trial, and the Einsatzgruppen Trial, as well as others.

To stand in the courtroom where such evidence was presented and powerful testimony given was humbling. To see where learned men, powerful, and even respected men, who had so willingly sacrificed any trace of personal honor and morality, men who aided and abetted a regime which committed the most heinous crimes committed by a civilized “Christian” nation in history left me silent. I have studied these trials since I was in college over 35 years ago. My primary professor, Dr. Helmut Haeussler was an interpreter at the trials.

Since that time I have continued to study them and today as I see the rise of Right Wing movements in Europe, as well as the United States, movements which have at their core many of the same beliefs and principles held by Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the men who stood trial at Nuremberg I find myself frightened.

This is especially so in the United States where former President Donald Trump during and after office made repeated policy statements similar to Hitler and the Nazis. They included: limiting civil rights and freedom of speech, the role of the courts, curtailing freedom of the press, favoring one religion above others, curtailing the legal and civil rights of whole groups of people, expelling millions of people, banning whole groups of other people entry into the country, promising to rid the government of his opponents, to fire military leaders who disagreed with him in mass, and to commit the military to use methods that are condemned as war crimes, war crimes such as were prosecuted by the United States and her Allies at Nuremberg. Many of his radical supporters, and rivals in the Republican Party are legislating such policies at state level, while members of the House of Representatives are using the same tactics as Nazi members of the Reichstag before and during the Nazi seizure of power.

To make matters more frightening, many of Trump’s supporters see no problem with this and are often shown on video threatening opponents, advocating even more extreme and violent measures than Trump himself. They justify their proposed polices by saying that these measures are to “protect the country,” and to Make America Great Again.” 

But at what price?

In Judgement at Nuremberg, the film version of the Judges’ Trial, Spencer Tracy played Judge Dan Heywood. In the scene at which the verdicts were read, he gave this speech, some of which echoed the words of Justice Robert Jackson’s closing argument in the Major War Criminal Trial.

“Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning’s record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe.

But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary – even able and extraordinary – men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen. There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country” – of ‘survival’. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient – to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is ‘survival as what’? A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.”

A nation is what it stands for. Russia in all of its guises has never been a beacon of liberty. It has from the times of the Czars, to the Soviet State, to Putin has always been an autocratic state built on terrorizing its own people and conquering its neighbors. The Russian genocide against Ukraine is simply another chapter in a long history of brutality.

The ideals that have marked the American experiment have never been perfectly practiced by the United States, but they are still the hallmark of the last and greatest hope of civilization. They are the ideals which lead people around the world to want to become Americans, they are the ideals which sustain us. But what Trump, his followers, and many Republicans in Congress is that they are not important, and in fact should be limited or abrogated entirely. But this is the way of expediency, and the end of the American experiment.

Standing beside the dock at Nuremberg I was humbled by the fact that I was where such history had been made, and at the same time I was frightened for my country and the world. This is important because the United States is not immune from going down the path of the Third Reich. 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.”

The Nuremberg trials help us to understand why. We cannot forget them.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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In Trump and Christian Nationalism the Racism, and the Ghosts of the Confederacy Return


Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I just finished reading my hard cover copy of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory and it was a far different experience than reading it on a computer or iPad screen while making edit after edit. The editing process was clinical and nothing like reading it in the flesh, it was to maybe misuse a term “sensual.” As I read it I found it hard to believe that when I started writing it, that it was just an introductory chapter to my Gettysburg Staff ride text regarding the role of religion and ideology to the men that fought the American Civil War.

Never in my wildest imagination did I expect that wildly aggrieved White Americans, following the lead of Donald Trump would have denied the results of a completely legitimate election, and assaulted Congress when it was in session to formally certify the results of the Electoral College. Nor did I then imagine that a former President and his followers would continue to deny election results long after he was out of office and the results were certified. Nor could I imagine at any former President would abscond with highly classified documents, not comply with subpoenas to return them and that the Justice Department and have to get a warrant to search his residence and retrieve them. Nor did I expect members of a political party supposedly committed to the “Rule of Law” to target FBI agents, other Federal Law Enforcement agencies and Judges for death because of a legal search.

Now my book is out and available for purchase at Amazon and will be available in bookstores on October 1st. But as I was thinking about what I had written and current events I began to ruminate on it I came up with this little essay.

Though the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14th overturned the “Dred Scott” decision to give Blacks citizenship, and the 15th granted Black men suffrage, the ghosts of racism and twin myths of the Noble South and Lost Cause still haunt our Nation and contribute to our current divide. Sadly, the curse of White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism, which were prominent in causing the Civil War, defeated Reconstruction, and restored White rule remain a clear and present danger today.

Unlike 1860, ours is not a sectional divide, but a nationwide racial, religious and political chasm. The changing racial and religious demographics of the country, the passage of laws that gave Blacks, other minorities, Women, and LGBTQ+ people civil and voting rights echoing Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of ever increasing liberty found in the Declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” provide grist for grievance. 

The growing tensions exploded after Barack Obama shattered the Color barrier of the presidency, provoking massive growth in violent, militarized White Supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, and the dramatic reemergence of the “Great Replacement“ conspiracy theory. Conservative Christians found more grievance when LGBTQ+ citizens gained equal rights including marriage. In Donald Trump, these aggravated groups found a man who catered to their grievances and perceived victimhood. Trump’s ideas redound today in the pronouncements of many Republican elected officials who subordinate themselves to Trump, including all of the 2016 presidential candidates, who he mocked, insulted, and belittled at every turn.

Trump and his propagandists play upon the same fears of “White Replacement” evoked by Southern leaders and Secession Commissioners. Historian Charles Dew portrayed Georgia Supreme Court Justice and Secession Commissioner Henry Benning’s apocalyptic vision of the outcome of a Northern invasion of the South; he told his audience, “We will be overpowered and our men compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and for our women, the horrors of their state cannot contemplate in imagination.” This then, was “the fate that Abolition will bring upon the white race. . . . We will be exterminated”. 

Trump encourages violence. The politicians, pundits, and preachers who serve as his propagandists whip his followers into a frenzy of hatred reminiscent of the worst moments in our history. This is evidenced by mass murders at Black churches, supermarkets, Jewish synagogues and community centers, and what amount to be lynchings of Black men by Whites. 

On June 1st 2020, Trump used a violent attack by Secret Service, Park Police, Washington Metropolitan Police, and Bureau of Prisons officers against peaceful citizens in Lafayette Park gathered to protest the murder of George Floyd, as cover for a photo-op with a Bible outside St. John’s Church. The next day he tweeted with pride about the “Overwhelming Force and Domination” used by police. The violence echoed police attacks on Civil Rights marchers in the 1960s. 

Trump’s “Big Lie” of the “stolen” election and the assault on the Capitol echoed the violence of the Confederate response to Lincoln’s election. In 1861 Southern Slave States seceded from the Union, seized Federal facilities, mints, armories, and military bases, and opened fire on Fort Sumter, beginning the bloodiest war in American history.

Some of Trump’s followers call for violence and civil war following the FBI’s legal search of Trump’s Mar a Lago home. Instead of trying to calm them, Trump and acolytes like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Republican office holders or candidates continue to incite violence against law enforcement. 

Lincoln mistakenly believed that Southerners would come to their senses and calls for secession and civil war would lessen after the 1860 election. Only fools would believe that Trump and his followers will back down now, in light of the January 6th insurrection and the mounting number of criminal and civil investigations against Trump. Like Southerners in 1860 they feel cornered, and are lashing out against their best interests.

Religious intolerance fuels race hatred. Authoritarian leaders like Trump fuse religious and the politics of race in a ruthless drive for political power. History, including ours shows that the result of such fusion results in war, and crimes against humanity. The damage to the victims, perpetrators, and society is felt for generations. 

Like the antebellum period, faith has emerged as a political weapon. “But,” wrote British historian and military theorist B. H. Liddell- Hart, “one should still be able to appreciate the point of view of those who fear the consequences. Faith matters so much in times of crisis. One must have gone deep into history before reaching the conviction that truth matters more.” The Confederacy’s ghosts still haunt us through White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism, and Donald Trump. We must learn the lessons, or see our democracy torn asunder from within, with blood flowing in our streets.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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“Then say they were not slain. But dead they are ….” The High Cost of Those Who Voted to Acquit

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I have watched every minute of the second impeachment trial. As one of the Deans of the Joint Forces Staff College once noted “Steve, you a a historian masquerading as a Chaplain.” Back in seminary I was asked by many classmates “why are you in seminary and not in law school?” As a historian I have spent a lot of time studying and writing about various criminal trials involving American politicians and International War Crimes Tribunals. If it would result in divorce I might at my late age go to law school, but I have put Judy through enough over our marriage. That being said I might take up a Legal Studies Masters degree on a part time basis. I think that would complement my History and Theology Masters Degrees. Since there are no History PhD. programs close to me that I would be interested in pursuing this might be the best.

I watch high profile legal cases with great interest, especially the lawyering and I have seen and read about some amazing lawyering resulting in convictions or acquittals of of the accused. These lawyers for former President put on an amazing display of ignorance coupled with incompetence, but then they are the only people willing to represent Trump and none of them have exactly great legal reputations to begin with.

The men representing the twice impeached and disgraced former President who besides impeachment is under investigation for multiple criminal charges including rape, attempting to pressure officials to change the results of the election and even more civil charges regarding gross financial and fraud charges.

These lawyers have embarrassed their profession. I know too many excellent attorneys military and civilian to count these jokers among them. David Schoen is best known for representing mob bosses, Trump’s ally Roger Stone during the Muller Investigation and most recently the late Jeffery Epstein. Interestingly Schoen began his career rathe nobly in civil rights cases, something he seems to have little interest in today. Schoen is the sharpest of the three but during the trial he has only spoken for about 45 minutes and will not be available for the closing. He is also said to have threatened to quit the defense Thursday night but Trump talked him out of it. If the impeachment trial ends tomorrow it won’t matter because he will be out of a job because he announced that he will not work on the Jewish Sabbath which ends at sundown Saturday.

This meant that the bulk of the defense was shouldered by Bruce Castor, a former prosecutor in Pennsylvania who most notably refused to charge O.J. Simpson while serving as District of Attorney for Montgomery County. He also promised Simpson that he would never would be convicted. He was wrong. Simpson was eventually convicted. In his initial statements on Tuesday regarding the constitutionality of the impeachment trial his representation was so bad that Trump Wanted to fire him and  Senator John Cronyn said “”The president’s lawyer just rambled on and on.” “I’ve seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments, and that was not one of the finest I’ve seen.”

Castor did nothing to help his defense of Trump or his lawyering reputation on Friday. The other member of Trump’s defense team is personal injury lawyer Michael Van Der Veen who has made a career of litigating car crashes, motorcycle and bicycle crashes and dog bites. Van Der Veen managed not only to be ineffective but insulted and potentially alienated Senators who might vote in favor of acquittal and was cautioned on his profane language by Senate President Pro-Tem Patrick Leahy.

The defense team used just two and a half hours of their sixteen allotted hours in which they repeatedly played the same out of context videos of Democrat politicians and entertainers using the word “fight”  while saying that Trump’s “free speech rights under the First Amendment were being denied” and using the dog whistle of videos showing mostly Black, Brown, Jewish, and Women opponents of Trump using the word fight in civil rights cases, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and debates on policy questions that never resulted in violence or assaults on the Congress of the United States. The videos were spiced together without any context, not in any chronological order, and enhanced with chilling ominous music. Almost everyone shown in the video now called the #FightClub video are Black and Brown Women of Color, Jews, and other Democratic politicians and entertainers.

Say what you want about the House Managers video presentations on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday they stuck to the facts at hand to document the insurrection minute by minute. They did not add music, and they put each video, statement and tweet in context. The counsels for the defense did not. They pieced together a vile and racist video worthy of Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher. The abject racism of Trump’s Counsel and Trump’s GOP in the Impeachment Trial are undeniable and irredeemable.

All arguments used by Trump’s Counsel were false equivalence arguments that would play well on the Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson propaganda shows, and possibly give GOP Senators an off ramp to acquit Trump. But none would stand in a real criminal trial which this is not, despite the facts that all of these attorneys have attempted to compare it to in order to deflect blame from Trump were nothing more than smoke and mirrors and not even very good ones, but good enough for 43 Republican Senators to vote to acquit.

After the traveling Trump clown attorneys finished on Friday the Senate went to the question and answer session where the Impeachment Managers and the former twice impeached President’s legal team answered written questions from the Senators. Once again the twice impeached, under criminal investigation former President’s bumbled their defense refusing to answer any factual questions from Republican or Democratic Senators. They never once actually answered a question but attempted to deflect and deny everything even questioning the actual evidence, saying that they were not permitted to see it though they had it on 9 February as a condition of the bipartisan agreement on the rules of the impeachment trial. They lied. They continued to lie in their closing statement repeating the same distortions, deflections and twisted arguments they made the previous day and went on to make unsupported and scandalous statements about Democrats who had supported the Black Lives Matter movement, and spoke out about the racist, unconstitutional, and criminal actions of Trump and his administration. Their defense on Friday and Closing arguments were difficult to watch, especially those of Counsel Van Der Veen who accused the Democrats of “trying to cancel culture, cancel the Constitution, and cancel the votes of 74 million Trump voters.”


This was despite the fact that for the past four years Trump and his administration have displayed contempt for the Constitution, and bulldozed the institutional guardrails designed to protect Americans from tyranny until the final day of his administration, issuing orders and appointing political hacks into sensitive jobs in the civil service, including the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and intelligence services. Nothing like this has every been attempted by any administration in American history. Likewise they attempted to cancel the votes and in some states are still attempting to cancel the votes of the 81 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden by trampling our laws and Constitution. If there is a Cancel Culture movement it is by Trump and his GOP cult who try to narrowly decline culture in its pre-Civil War White Protestant and White Supremacy context. Nothing else matters to them.

But overnight other evidence testified to by a Republican Senator and Representative came into play.

First there were the words of Senator Tommy Tuberville who testified that he told Trump about the break in at the Capitol and the threats to Vice President Pence wo was then fleeing for his life with his Secret Service detail, family, and his military aide who held his nuclear football. Minutes after being told by Tuberville that Pence was in danger and he had to flee, Trump tweeted a threatening message to his enraged and homicidal followers about how Pence had failed. Tuberville confirmed his comments Friday night, but voted to acquit today.

Republican House Member Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State who was with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy who gave a statement undisputed by anyone, including McCarthy. Just before the gavel fell to open the Saturday session Lead Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin decided that the Managers wanted to call Herrera Beutler as a witness and depose her via Zoom since she was in Washington. In an incredibly angry tirade the defense led by Van Der Veen. threatened to call “hundreds of witness” in response. The Senate the voted on the motion to call witness and agreed by a 55-45 vote to do so. Then it recessed to discuss the matter. After about an hour of negotiations the Senators, especially the Democratic leadership bowed to the pressure that a call for witnesses, depositions and testimony pressured the Managers to accept a compromise regarding Herrera Beutler’s statement. It was read into the record and admitted in written form. It  read:

“In my January 12 statement in support of the article of impeachment, I referenced a conversation House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy relayed to me that he’d had with President Trump while the January 6 attack was ongoing. Here are the details:

“When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol. McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’

“Since I publicly announced my decision to vote for impeachment, I have shared these details in countless conversations with constituents and colleagues, and multiple times through the media and other public forums.

“I told it to the Daily News of Longview on January 17. I’ve shared it with local county Republican executive board members, as well as other constituents who ask me to explain my vote. I shared it with thousands of residents on my telephone town hall on February 8.

“To the patriots who were standing next to the former president as these conversations were happening, or even to the former vice president: if you have something to add here, now would be the time.”

I am glad the statement became part of the record but wish she had testified in person, as well as the many insurgents who said that they “acted on the invitation and orders of President Trump.” The Managers said that they reached out to other Republican targets of the insurrection but none would come forward, and that to subpoena them would be an attempt to force potentially hostile witnesses into the dock. Thus they decided to compromise remembering that a witness subpoenaed during Trump’s first impeachment trial had not yet testified. I appreciate that reasoning but wish it had been different.

I think that the Senate should vote to suspend the proceedings as depositions of witnesses are taken was right but the pressure put on the Managers to compromise was ill-considered. But Raskin and other Managers were realistic and admitted that no amount of witnesses would have persuaded that they were already going to vote to acquit based on the technicality rejected by the Senate on Tuesday that a former office holder could be impeached and tried by the Senate.

Unfortunately all of the Democrats seemed to forget something that British Chief Prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe told the American Chief Prosecutor Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as he wore out the trial judges reading documentary evidence into the record. Maxwell-Fyfe told Jackson: 

“As legal strategy  your documentary approach has been unassailable. But as drama, it is, I regret to say, absolutely stultifying. A trial is a show, Robert. Like it or not, it’s a show… And it’s ours to lose. A trial is a show, Robert. Like it or not, it’s a show. And those four learnt men sitting on the bench are as impressionable as any audience….

Witnesses will give this trial a human face. One compelling witness can outweigh a tonne of documentary evidence.” 

Unfortunately I do not think any number of witnesses would have persuaded any number of the Republican Senators who voted to acquit.

A guilty verdict would have been true justice, despite the fact that as a private citizen Trump can be tried in multiple jurisdictions for criminal and civil actions.  But the complaining party at the bar are not simply election officials Trump threatened, Republican and Democratic politicians who admitted that the results of the election were legitimate, but the 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden who Trump tried to cancel their votes and rights as citizens whose votes had been held as valid by every state and every one of over 60 courts from State Courts, up to the Supreme Court of the United States and multiple recounts in every contested state. In spite of that Trump persisted in proclaiming the Big Lie that he “won in a massive landslide, but that his victory was stolen.” Something he repeated on 6 January as some of his insurgents were breaching the Capitol as he encouraged those at the Ellipse to go to the Capitol. He promised to go with them but never did, instead laughing and reveling as the attack was broadcast on television, as was captured in a video taken by his son Donald Junior.

Not only this but the complaining party are free and Democratic societies around the world who look to the United States for leadership for what we were once considered, the best example of a successful pluralistic and multi-ethnic democracy. They have been disappointed and since Trump took office authoritarian governments back by groups like the Nazi Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Fascist paramilitaries have taken power in now former democracies in Eastern Europe, and are growing in influence around the world. This is in large part due to the distain for our Constitution, Republic and democracy.

This failed attempted insurrection or coup against the American Capitol to kill Vice President Pence, Senators and Representatives regardless of their political party in order to stop the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College Ballots, something that Pence had told Trump multiple times that he could not do under the Constitution and would not do.

Trump didn’t tell his private Army that Pence had promised to do his  but instead let them hang on the hopes that Pence would stop the proceedings. When Pence opened the count and promised to do his Constitutional duty, Trump  further inflamed his insurgents by telling them how Pence had failed them, this as they were racing through the Capitol building hunting for him and chanting “hang Mike Pence.” 

I could go on but I am going to stop for the night. The House Managers put on an amazing case that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump was guilty as charged.Though they failed to convict they convinced the largest number of Senators from the accused party to vote against him. The votes of Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, and Pat Toomey were courageous. Regardless of if they were coming up for re-election in 2022 or 2024, or if the were retiring every one of them put a target on their backs. It won’t be Antifa or anyone on the Left who tries to kill them, but Trump’s violent armed Cult goons.

But to finish I will close with a Robert Jackson’s quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear in his closing at the Major War Crimes Trial at Nuremberg to finish this article adapting it to Trump. Trump stands before the record of this trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain King. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: “Say I slew them not.” And the Queen replied, “Then say they were not slain. But dead they are ….” If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.

That is true of every Republican who voted to acquit Trump Saturday, and every one who voted in the House or Senate not to recognize the results of the Electoral College vote. But the lives of those lost on 6 January 2021, especially Capitol Hill Police Officers cries out “Say they are not slain. but dead they are.” Their blood forever stains the hands of Trump and his insurgents who attempted to overthrow the United States Government by force and violence but who were acquitted by 43 members of the Senate, both true believers and followers of Trump, or cowards desperate to remain in office through the votes of those of Trump’s Cult who fully approve of violence and murder in the pursuit of power.

For the moment Trump and his Cult appear to have escaped justice, but even now over 200 of the insurgents have been arrested and charged, and many others being investigated and sought out. Hopefully thousands will be rounded up and their terrorist organizations exposed and broken up so they cannot commit such violence again. Likewise, as previously noted, Trump himself and many of his close associates are under criminal investigation by Federal and State authorities for a multitude of crimes. Likewise Trump faces criminal action for sexual assault and rape accusations, and financial crimes which threaten the ruin of his personal financial, real estate and entertainment empire. There are also a host of civil lawsuits that he can no longer use his office to escape prosecution.

Even so Trump broke his silence of over a month since the attack claiming that he was innocent and this was only the beginning of his movement. This means that he has tacitly given the authorization to his murderous followers to begin a protracted insurgency against the United States Government, State Governments and political opponents.

If you have not served in a country undergoing an insurgency you have no idea of the brutality. One of my major areas of study before and after I went to Iraq to serve with our advisors was Counter Insurgency Operations.Trust me, from history, theory, and practice I do know what I am talking about, and no local or state, and very few federal police agencies, or emergency services agencies are trained or equipped to deal with what we are about to face and regardless of the outcome our democracy will never be the same, provide that our foreign enemies don’t inflict terrible damage on our country first.

On that happy note I say goodnight.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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The Impeachment Prosecutors Open: The defendants denounce the law under which their accounting is asked. Their dislike for the law which condemns them is not original. It has been remarked before that: “No thief e’er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law.”

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I watched the second day of Donald Trump’s second Impeachment trial transfixed by the masterful way in which the House Impeachment Managers presented the documentary evidence and connecting the dots from the election night until 6 January. I struggled to think of a title for the article because the evidence was so overwhelming and massive it was hard to find just one thing.

The evidence is so overwhelming that if this were a normal criminal trial the defense attorneys would be doing all they could to make a plea bargain deal. But this is not a normal criminal trial and a large part of the Republican Senators serving as jury has sworn their undying fealty to Trump and will not honor either their oaths to the Constitution or the one they took as impeachment jurors. There is no crime evil enough for many of them to hold him accountable for his actions.

I was reminded of the closing arguments of Justice Robert Jackson at the major War Crimes Trial of senior Nazi leaders by the International Military Tribunal. In his closing Jackson said:

The defendants denounce the law under which their accounting is asked. Their dislike for the law which condemns them is not original. It has been remarked before that:

“No thief e’er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law.”

Many of those involved in the insurrection before during and after said that they were acting on the orders or invitation of Donald Trump. They called the police defending the Capitol “fucking traitors” as they violently assaulted them, even using the Thin Blue Line Flags, symbols of support for police to assault individual police officers.




The images of the attacks by the terrorists were connected with his tweets in real time on that day, including threats against his own Vice President were starting. Watching former Vice President Pence, Senator Mitt Romney, dozens of Senators barely avoiding potential death from the angry mob which was calling for the deaths of Pence, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others which repeating his tweets by megaphone in real time to further enrage the mob. During the assault at least five people died or were killed, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, mortally wounded the attackers who slammed a fire extinguisher into his head. Two officers committed suicide in the following days, 140 more police officers were wounded. How any American could not hold the twice impeached former President responsible for his role over many months beginning before the election to radicalize his base into following his command to come to Washington on 6 January for a “wild time” which he further incited to attack the Capitol that day, something based on his previous orders they came to fulfill.

Trump wanted Pence, Pelosi, Romney, Liz Cheney, Chuck Schumer and others dead. It was a deliberate attempt to seize the Capitol and assassinate them and others. Had it not been for the courage of the outnumbered Capitol and DC Metropolitan Police, the former Vice President, many Senators and Representatives would have been killed, the Capitol taken, the Electoral College certification stopped, and Trump proclaiming himself as President.

But the House Managers were very smart to trace the insurrection back to Trump’s actions before the election and after. In the sixty days after the election, beginning at 2 AM on election night. It was then that the former President spent spinning lies and conspiracy theories about how the election was being stolen from him, and inciting violent revolts and threats against the attorneys general of several states, and elections commissioners at state and county level who were then still engaged in counting votes and in which some states would involve multiple recounts none of which changed the results.

Despite that Trump’s legal teams fired off a volley of over 60 factually and legally unsupported lawsuits which were shot down by Republican majority State Supreme Courts, US District, Appeals, and even the United States Supreme Court. Undeterred, Trump continued trying to overturn the votes, including trying to force the Attorney General Georgia, on 2 January to find the exact amount of votes to make him the winner or the race. On Wednesday Georgia announced that Trump is now being investigated on criminal charges for trying to influence the results of the election.

In spite of all those facts Trump continued to incite his followers. He told them to “walk to the Capitol” and fight like hell”. In a fiery speech lasting over twenty minutes he urged them to fight more than 20 times, while only once telling them to be peaceful. He described how the election had been stolen and that in such a case “normal rules do not apply.” 

Within an hour Trump knew his private army was already inside the Capitol because even Republican Senators and Members of the House were doing all they could to get him to stop the attack. In fact 14 minutes after the terrorists breached the Capitol and Mike Pence and his family was being evacuated by his Secret Service detail Trump tweeted:

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

It was hours before a joyful Trump who thought the insurgents had stopped the . When he finally released a prerecorded statement he told the  insurgents “we love you” called them “patriots” and told them to “go home in peace.”

I will not go into the full timeline and events. I could but the presentation of the Impeachment Managers, Congressman Jamie Raskin, Delegate Stacy Plaskett, Congressman Eric Swalwell, Congressman Joaquin Castro, Congressman Ted Lieu, Congresswoman Madeline Dean, Congressman David Cecilline, and Congressman Joe Naguse is so damning, so overwhelming that I cannot top them.

Instead I simply put one 39 minute segment of the evidence presented by the impeachment managers at the top of this post. However, these is so much more.

Watching the events took me back to Iraq in 2007-2008 and one of the boarding missions I was on during the UN Oil Embargo on Iraq in 2002. I never believed that in my lifetime that I would see an American President attempt to overthrow an election defeat and urge his supporters to commit violence when all legal means had failed.


But besides his direct attack on our Constitution, Republic and democracy before the election until 6 January is just one of many crimes that he and his administration could be prosecuted. I am thinking of the deaths of over 400,000 Americans from COVID-19 a deadly virus that Trump knew as early as a year ago was deadlier than many people thought, but then undermined every effort to contain it or help its victims.


Then there was the treatment of refugees and would be immigrants on the United States – Mexican border including the separation of families, locking children in cages without adequate sanitary or living conditions, and the alleged forced sterilization of women in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization service and Border Patrol in private prisons on the border, his support for far right racist and White Nationalist extremist groups including Neo-Nazis in actions all over the country which have included attacks on Synagogues, Mosques, and Black Churches.

Likewise the use of heavy handed and brutal police assaults on mostly peaceful Black Lives Matters Protesters, while ignoring looters taking advance of those demonstrations to commit crimes. The most egregious of these was led by the former President himself in broad daylight in Lafayette Park where massive numbers of Metropolitan Police, US Marshals, and numerous other Federal law enforcement agencies backed by the National Guard with active duty Army units in reserve attacked unarmed people doing nothing more than singing or chanting near St John’s Church. The attack on the protesters was notable for its lack of restraint and the President, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff being involved. The SECDEF and Chairman of the JCS quickly distanced themselves from the attack and condemned it, but few others in the Administration or GOP Senators or Congressmen raised a single protest.

On Friday the former President’s defense team is planing on showing videos of BLM protestors, but more focused on the criminal looters in order to draw a moral equivalency argument. They will also show videos of House and Senate members calling for justice after the race based murders of Black Americans by police and ordinary citizens. But none ever called for an attack on the Congress, the White House or the deaths of their opponents. They insisted that the justice system from local police, sheriffs and prosecutors to the Department of Justice obey the laws against unreasonable force and violence. That will be their argument beginning Friday. They will show rioters and burning buildings but not put them in context. It will be like how the Nazis used the Reichstag Fire to seize complete political and police control and shut down opposition political parties and publications.

Sadly, that tactic may work because it plays to the inherent and often violent racism of the GOP base, and many Senators lack the moral, physical, and political courage to confront that base. Of course there are some in the Senate many in the House, and even more in the State and local GOP that are completely on board with all of this, and even now are censuring, banishing, and challenging any GOP office holder that is that 100% in for Trump. This is not the Party of Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan or either Bush. Instead it has become a fascist, racist, theocratic, authoritarian party committed to destroying the Constitution, our Republic, Democracy, and institutions. Despite their election loss they will continue to overthrow the Republic through legal and violent means, just like Hitler’s Nazis.

As a scholar of Weimar, the Nazi Era, the Holocaust and all of the Nuremberg Trials I do not make such comments flippantly, but only in the gravest situations. Trump and his political supporters have sown the wind and our national and people are now reaping the whirlwind that President Trump is most responsible. If he is not found guilty it will green light future Presidents and elected officials to do the same or worse. Police were murdered, 140 wounded, lives threatened, our Capitol building, a symbol of liberty around the world was desecrated.

This impeachment trial is not over, but the great trial facing our country has just begun. The violence is not over.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

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The Damning Opening of Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial: Will those Who Walked With Him Make “his life…excrement.”

 

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson who served as the Chief American Prosecutor at the Major War Crimes Trials of Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg said:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Those words were not just applicable to the war crimes of the Nazis but the unconstitutional and violent acts of former President Trump and his Cult to overthrow the Constitution, system of democratic government, and laws of the United States. The crimes, especially the attempt to assault the Capitol and the Congress as it was in the process of exorcising their sacred oath to certify the votes of the Electoral College, normally a largely ceremonial event.

Today the House Impeachment Managers led by Congressman Jamie Raskin introduced their case against Donald Trump, the now twice impeached former President. Their presentation on the question if it was constitutional to impeach a former President was decided by a vote of 56-44 in favor of the constitutionality of the impeachment trial. The managers used massive amounts of legal and historical precedents to lay out the case that the trial was indeed constitutional. The video was the most damning since the Allied prosecutors at the trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg.

Trump’s hastily gathered and woefully unprepared defense team was painful to watch, something attested to by numerous GOP Senators, most of whom stilled voted against impeachment. They behaved like mob lawyers who knew that the fix was in. Their defenses conjured the specter of American mobsters who were acquitted of murder, racketeering, extortion, kidnapping, torture, grand theft, bribery of public officials, police and judges. But then Trump has always acted more as a mob boss than President.

The remarkable thing was that six Republican Senators, including one, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana who voted with Senator Rand Paul in a similar vote a week ago changed his mind based on the evidence presented and repeating that he was doing what an impartial juror was supposed to do. This is more members of the defendant’s party than in any impeachment trial in our history. Senator Cassidy’s words will hang over the heads of every Republican Senator.

The fact that the House Managers brought these charges and prepared such a remarkable opening in spite of knowing that the very real possibility if not probability that the fix was in regarding most GOP Senators voting for Trump’s acquittal was a profile in moral and political courage. It was courageous because it defied the wishes of many Americans, especially ones committed to violence and murder.

Mind you, unlike the President and members of the Cabinet, outside of the Capitol complex none of these men and women have any security protection from the government. No Secret Service, no Federal Marshals, nothing. This means that all of them are potential targets of the people who assaulted the Capitol on 6 January.

But before Congressman Raskin began the arguments based on legal, constitutional, and historical evidence he introduced a video that I can only say was second to the video presented by the Allied Prosecutors at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The timeline of the House Managers video was damning, it was unprecedented and it put anyone who watched it in the building, for almost every Senator and Representative regardless of party was a witness and a potential victim of Trump’s mob. .

I cannot imagine how anyone with any personal or moral integrity cannot cringe when they view that footage. even the Nazis a Nuremberg were shattered by the video shown by the prosecution. I wonder if just 17 Republican Senators can find  enough moral courage and decency to convict Trump at the end of this trial. Mind you the only potential penalty the former President can face is not being able to hold public office again. There is no prison time, no financial penalty, no restrictions on any other freedoms he has. He can vote, he still receives his pension and Secret Service protection, and has no restrictions on his personal or business interests. Of course none of that will interfere with prosecution by various states where he is alleged to have committed crimes related and unrelated to the charge of the impeachment.

I have been in too many situations where people either armed and in person, or online threatened my life. I have been in combat situations where I was the only person unarmed in situations where even the good guys didn’t know who the bad guys were. At no time, even in combat situations was I unarmed, not that I didn’t insert myself into mobs of potentially murderous people to calm the situations.

I will continue to write about this throughout the impeachment trial but let no one misinterpret me; what happened on 6 January was an act that had it been successful would have upended the Constitution, overthrow the result of an election that the elections commissions of every state said was valid, and proclaimed the dictatorship of Donald Trump. There is no doubt about that.

We as Americans cannot allow a man who has done all that he could to overthrow our Constitution, Democracy, a legal election, and incite his cult to attack and kill at the Capitol which killed 6 people in the attack including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, was probably part of the reason two other Capitol Policemen committing suicide shortly after the attack. 140 more Capitol and Metropolitan Police were wounded including several critically injured losing limbs and eyesight. The insurgents called the police  “traitors” , this from people who claimed they supported police. The assailants used flagpoles bearing Trump ans American flags as weapons, used a fire extinguisher to kill Officer Sicknick, erected a gallows of front of the Capitol as attackers shouted “Hang Mike Pence.”  How anyone serving in the Senate can ignore these facts and instead bow down to Trump and the fear of his base shows they have no moral courage.

Since none of them have that it is imperative that regardless of its outcome, when this trial is over that any of the standing for re-election be hammered with this video and all of the documentation every day. There is no defense against the truth and every one of them need to be confronted on this with the assumption that most Americans, even those who at one time or another voted for Trump have not completely forgotten what they were taught in school, by parents and grandparents, political icons, pastors and Sunday School teachers.  Thus during the trial and after Democrats presented  these facts, this video documentary, and so much more at every one of them who vote to acquit the former President, a New York Sewer Rat, now Florida Swamp Rat.

But this was just day one. There will be more and it will be even more devastating to Trump and his Cult’s cause if only a few Republicans could vote their conscience and not the fear of what Trump’s cult might do to oppose their reelection. But then courage is a rare commodity in American politics, especially among Christians and alleged conservatives.

Jackson said in his opening at Nuremberg: “”The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Jackson’s words about the Nazi criminals are not morally different that the charge in the impeachment indictment of Donald Trump. If Republicans cannot see that then they are lost beyond redemption. In the Book of Genesis the Lord told Abraham if 100, then 50, then 10, then five people in Sodom who were righteous could be found the city would be spared. Today, the number for the GOP is 17 Senators. Will just 17 of 50 uphold their oath to the Constitution and the oath they swore to be impartial jurors in the impeachment trial? The question remains to be answered, but though I think between 6 and 15 might vote to convict, I doubt if most will follow conscience as they have none, precedent and history because they are ignorant, the evidence, because if they had the chance they would have taken part in the insurrection themselves, most have no honor and their only loyalty is to their personal power regardless of the moral, spiritual, legal, constitutional, personal and societal costs.

That is why no matter how this impeachment trial ends it will not be end of our troubles. Those of us who belief Trump guilty must apply every bit of pressure we can through letters, calls and emails to Republican Senators in the states we are registered to vote. If he survives we must use every bit of evidence against every House and Senate Member who swears their fealty to Trump and not the Constitution. We cannot quit regardless of the outcome. I will pen a letter to the one Republican Senator from my home of record until my residence is officially established in Virginia. In it I will do everything I can to shame her and throw up her heritage as the daughter of a former governor convicted of many crimes while in office and disbarred from the court. I hope if she has any sense of morality or shame that my letter will change her mind on impeachment. I hope that every opponent of Trump will write their Republican Senators to let them know that they will be help accountable by the electorate, not by violence or force for the rest of their political careers.

I only wonder if any Republican would dare to utter the  words spoken by Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster in Judgment at Nuremberg:

“I am going to tell the truth if the whole world conspires against it. I am going to tell them the truth about their Ministry of Justice. Werner Lampe — an old man who cries into his Bible now. An old man who profited from the property expropriation of every man he sent to a concentration camp. Friedrich Hofstetter — the “good German” who knew how to take orders, who sent men before him to be sterilized like so many digits. Emil Hahn — the decayed, corrupt bigot, obsessed by the evil within himself. And Ernst Janning — worse than any of them, because he knew what they were, and he went along with them. Ernst Janning — who made his life…excrement… because he walked with them.”

Will anyone in the GOP consider their lives excrement because they walked with Trump and his cult? That is a question for now and the ages.

So until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

 

 

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“ The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime — is guilty.” A Lesson from Judgment at Nuremberg Applicable to Trump and his Defenders


Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Tonight I have just a short thought in light of the growing number of elected Republicans insisting that former President Trump not be tried for the charge of Incitement to Insurrection in which a mob of tens of thousands of his followers assaulted the United States Capitol Building which resulted in the murder of a Capitol Police Officer the wounding of two score more, and the attempted assassinations of Vice President Mike Pence, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocosio-Cortez, and as many Senators or Representatives they could, with the likely inside help of members of the House, Senate and Capitol Police Officers.

Senators Marco Rubio, John Cronyn, Rand Paul, and Tom Cotton  were among at least a half a dozen GOP Senators to oppose an impeachment trial. Their opposition speaks volumes about their lack of character, honor, integrity, or respect for the Constitution and law. This is despite the fact that even Senator Mitch McConnell stated that the actions of the President were clearly impeachable offenses. So far hundreds have been arrested or charged for their part in the assault but none of the people who stoked the fires of their anger for months or incited the attack 6 January has yet to be charged despite they are all were recorded on video, spoke on the House and Senate floor, in speeches, media and Twitter, Facebook, Parlor and a host of other platforms.

Since it is late I am going to end with one of my favorites monologues from the film Judgement at Nuremberg. In it Spencer Tracy sitting in judgement of Nazi Judges made these comments, which I think are rather pertinent to the men and women who incited the insurrection but never took a physical part in it.

You see in Nazi Germany there were many men who ever killed a Jew or political opponent, participated in killing the physically and mentally disabled in the T4 Euthanasia program, or the forced sterilization of such people. But nonetheless their words, speeches, and court judgements contributed to murder and genocide on a scale never seen before or since.

But there is no moral difference between those who assaulted the Capitol with the intent of overthrowing the Constitution and Republic, killing their opponents, those who incited them including former President Trump, Congressman Mo Brooks, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., and others cheered them on, the former President even saying that he would be there with them. However, unlike Hitler how actually led his stormtroopers in the Bier Hall Putsch until they were met by a company of Munich Police who stood their ground at Odeonsplatz, Trump went to a tent with his family to watch the attack rather than lead it. 

But, Donald Trump, Cadet Bones Spurs who dodged the draft five times would never put himself in any physical danger to support the people he sent into battle to support his illegal, unconstitutional, and used seditious acts to overthrow the government and remain in power, is now being defended by Senators who are more afraid of his cult than they are courageous enough to risk Trump and the cult’s fury by being honest and forthright.

In Justice at Nuremberg, Spencer Tracy’s character Judge Dan Haygood made the following statement regarding the Judges who sentenced people to sterilization, euthanasia, or imprisonment for their political, religious or social standing. Haygood spoke words that should send chills down the spines of Trump and his defenders today:

“The trial conducted before this Tribunal began over eight months ago. The record of evidence is more than ten thousand pages long, and final arguments of counsel have been concluded.

Simple murders and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen of the charges in this indictment. Rather, the charge is that of conscious participation in a nationwide, government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations. The Tribunal has carefully studied the record and found therein abundant evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt the charges against these defendants.

Herr Rolfe, in his very skillful defense, has asserted that there are others who must share the ultimate responsibility for what happened here in Germany. There is truth in this. The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization. But the Tribunal does say that the men in the dock are responsible for their actions, men who sat in black robes in judgment on other men, men who took part in the enactment of laws and decrees, the purpose of which was the extermination of humans beings, men who in executive positions actively participated in the enforcement of these laws — illegal even under German law. The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime — is guilty.

Herr Rolfe further asserts that the defendant, Janning, was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of this country. There is truth in this also. Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning’s record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe. But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary — even able and extraordinary — men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat at through trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen.

There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country” — of “survival.” A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient — to look the other way.

Well, the answer to that is “survival as what?” A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.”

That my friends is what this boils down to, the simple matter of the law being supreme and no one, no matter how high their position is above it. The question is what do we stand for today? The Republican defenders of Trump have made their case clear. The former President and his actions are above the law and they will dishonor themselves by doing all in their power to prevent his trial or acquit him. The fact is they are co-conspirators in an attempt to overthrow our Republic, its Constitution, and who over a process of four years did all that they could to bulldoze the Constitutional guardrails that prevented the tyranny that our founders believed could happen if a man like Trump ever became President. They too through the processes of the Constitution governing the behavior or Senators and Representatives should be censured and removed from office by their respective houses.

That is all for now. I have a busy day that begins early tomorrow. So until next time.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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“Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime — is guilty.” Bring Justice to Trump and all Connected with his Coup

 

 

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

It is time for justice in the matter of America’s most lawless, amoral, and savage President. For years I have warned about him. For years I was told that I was overreacting, being an alarmist or being histrionic. And for years I have been threatened even with death by his cultists, as well as White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis, not that there is that much difference between them. I have had his cultists in a Navy Chapel try to have me tried by Court Martial for preaching the Gospel, straight out of the Bible and undisputed Christian teaching.

I would like to say that my heart was big enough that I had grace enough to love and forgive them. Honestly, I did try but was met with rejection and further threats. Now I have to quote the Psalmist who wrote in Psalm 139:22 who wrote:

“I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.”

There was a time I could have not said that, or even quoted it out of fear of losing any sense of grace, mercy or humanity. I have not lost those, but Imam angry and I cry out for justice as did the prophets of the Old Testament, especially when the people committing and supporting the acts or terror are supposedly Christians. Their flags and banners were on prominent display throughout the assault. They were among the people shouting “hang Pence!” 

Many of them as well as Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and others have attacked me personally and threatened me with death for a decade.  They attack my country and the Constitution for 40 years I swore to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. They are domestic terrorists and enemies of our Republic, it’s Constitution and form of government and they have become my personal enemies.

Our system is not perfect and can be improved. Many of our elected officials use their offices for their political power and financial gain. But we have dealt with such issues since our founding. The answer is the ballot box and reforming the system. Many people have ideas of how to do that. I don’t presume to have the answer, but the answer is not mob violence committed by radical terrorist insurgents.

Yet, President Trump, Senators Mo Brooks, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, over 140 members of the House and Senate, members of the President’s family, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, at least 13 state representatives, and god knows how many more traitors attempted to overthrow our Republic and Constitution, endorsing their violent overthrow. That my friends fits the definition of sedition, and to being accessories to a terrorist attack and murder of a police officer in the performance of his duties. Do the math.

In the classic film about the Nuremberg Judges Trial, Judgement at Nuremberg, Spencer Tracy, playing Judge Dan Haygood made this comment in the declaration of guilt concerning the Nazi Judges in the trial: The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime — is guilty.”

In the context of our time this includes Trump, his son Donald Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Mo Brooks, Lin Wood, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and over 140 other members of the Republican House and Senate. They all invested themselves in this attack which resulted in multiple deaths and injuries. The people who made the actual attack included elected officials, law enforcement personnel, as well as former or active military personnel. Every single one of them swore an oath to the Constitution which they not only broke, but trampled.  One cannot forget what Trump said on March 14th of 2020:

“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,”

Trump’s words were an open declaration of war on our people and political system. He spoke the words every true tyrant believes, and last week he acted on it as part of the Götterdämmerung of his final days, and his cult like followers followed his orders to the letter and will do so again.

These terrorists aided and abetted by the President Trump and many others  successfully attacked the largest symbol of our nation’s democracy, something nobody has done since the British burned it in 1814 during the War of 1812. Even the Confederate Army during the Civil War could not seize or damage it.

These traitors attacked the Capitol building with the intent of killing Vice President Pence, Leader McConnell, Senator Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi, not to mention others. The insurgents and terrorists included elected political officials, law enforcement officers from various states, and former or retired members of the military. They not only seized the Capitol after being exhorted by Trump, his son Donald Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and Mo Brooks to name a few, but planned to arrest and kill Vice President Pence, Majority Leader McConnell, Senator Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi. They even erected a gallows outside the Capitol. this was no spontaneous demonstration, it was a coordinated attack against our democracy for which the perpetrators deserve no forgiveness or mercy.

Even now these terrorists do not care about the lives that were lost, even those of their supporters. Those deluded individuals will probably be canonized like Horst Wesel, the Nazi thug killed in a street battle with German Communists. Likewise they murdered a Capitol Police Officer, who actually was a Trump supporter. However, regardless of his political beliefs he took his duty seriously enough to die in the pursuit of his duties. He is dead because people who defiantly claim to support police killed him just as they promised they would when they issues their call to arms weeks ago, they promised to “kill cops and security guards.” 

You see, to me someone’s political beliefs do not define them when they obey their oath and die in pursuit of their duty, in his case, defending the Senators, Congressmen, staff members, and the Vice President. You see so long as men and women obey their oaths and discharge their duties in the manner prescribed I don’t care what their political beliefs happen to be. Loyalty to the Constitution and country are more important in the long run than one’s particular political beliefs. The officer died in the line of duty, while many of his attackers and their propagandist enablers are free right now, including the President, Senators, and Congressmen who urged on this violence. Those who died in the attack from whatever cause brought on their deaths. The officer did not deserve to die, but his killers and their supporters do deserve to die for their crimes.

So, let us have the courage call these people from President Trump on down to the lowest of the thugs who attacked the Capitol what they are, terrorists, criminals, and insurrectionists. They are the most reprehensible form of humanity to exist. If they had been Frenchmen in 1940, they would have cheered the Nazi conquest of France and collaborated with the Nazis. As General Weygand the last commander of the French Army before France’s defeat in 1940 hated the French Republic and its democracy stated: “I didn’t get the Boches, but I got the regime.” No military commander could ever make such a treasonous comment. But this is exactly how Trump’s most bloodthirsty supporters think, it is who they are. They have no loyalty to the United States, their only loyalty is to Trump and as such nothing they do is illegal, as many rank and file Nazis proclaimed “Der Führerbefhle, wir folgen.” Or in English, “The Leader commands, we follow.”

These people honestly believe that Trump is above the law and those no matter what they do is legal. This is why they are and will remain dangerous whether Trump is in or out of office. That is the power of a death cult.

As such all of us need to shake off the shackles the blind us into not believing that what people, even pathological liars are capable of telling the truth. Hitler did, as did Donald Trump.

Dr. Timothy Snyder wrote something in 2016 that is completely valid in our present crisis:

Even when everything comes apart around them and their leader collapses they cannot admit that he was deceiving them. At the end of the war a German soldier told Victor Klemperer that “Hitler has never lied, I believe the Fuhrer.” Snyder writes: “The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”

Snyder also warned us 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.”

Two weeks before Trump’s election in 2016 I wrote on this blog:

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. 

Robert Jackson, the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court who served as the Chief American Prosecutor at Nuremberg referred to Streicher in his summation:

“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/

That will be all for tonight because we do not presume what tomorrow will bring from Trump and his Cult. It is the time of every American who believes in our Constitution, democracy, and the founding principles of our Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” and “I have been to the Mountain” speeches.

I spent almost forty years in uniform supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, and though now retired I will not abandon that oath. As the German General Ludwig Beck, an opponent of Hitler who died in the attempt to kill that genocidal dictator 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.” 

Every man and woman who has sworn the Oath of Office of our country, especially those in positions of authority in the military, police, homeland security, or Justice Department need to remember and do over the next few weeks.

So, until tomorrow stay safe, remain vigilant and resist all who desire to overthrow our Republic and Constitution. They cannot be allowed to run free. They need to face justice and we cannot fear them, or they will win and we cannot allow that to happen. J

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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A Time to Stand against the Coming Coup of the Trump Cult

Munich Police Defeat Hitler’s Bier Hall Putsch at Odeonsplatz

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

As the evidence continues to mount that President Trump and his nefarious Cult which encompasses most of the GOP minority in the House of Representatives and many Senators, as well as thousands of violent heavily armed Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Fascists, and conspiracy theorists are plotting a Coup to keep Trump in power it is time for every American who stands for our Constitution and Republic to resist them.

Even a few weeks ago most people brushed off the words of Trump and the words and violent actions of his Cult members including the Proud Boys, the Bugaloo Boys, QAnon followers, Christian theocrats, so called self proclaimed Militia outfits, Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Anti-Semites and other authoritarians with a grain of salt.

But our Founders were always concerned about such movements. Historian Timothy Snyder noted in an interview with Sean Illing: “We think that because we’re America, everything will work itself out. This is exactly what the founders refused to believe. They thought human nature is such that you have to constrain it by institutions. They preferred rule of law and checks and balances.”

That is not the way of President Trump and his violent Cult. On  March 14th of 2020 Trump proclaimed:

“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,”

However, since Trump’s  indisputable loss in the election by over 7 million popular votes and a wide majority in the Electoral College he has become ever more desperate. His legal team filed over 60 lawsuits to challenge election results all of which were shot down in flames with prejudice because there was no evidence of voter fraud. While those lawsuits were going on and recounts were being conducted Trump supporters threatened election officials, and even Republican judges in the contested states. Even after the recounts, in the case of Georgia three of the, still showed that Joe Biden won, the results were certified, and the electors voted, the threats kept coming.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote something that is completely descriptive of Trump and his followers: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” 

Each day they got more menacing. Now the President has issued a call to his followers to gather and disrupt the ceremonial count of the electors in Congress on Wednesday. At least 12 Senators and over 100 GOP Congressmen and women have said that they would object to the count, which at best will delay the final certification by a few hours. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to overturn elections held in the various states. That is a fact. It is part of our Federalist structure of government which gives states certain powers not ascribed to the Federal Government. Congress cannot overturn certified election results in any state.

The German pastor, theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was killed on the express order of Adolf Hitler 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.”

The fact that so many GOP Senators and Representatives are willing to follow Trump into the abyss of his Götterdämmerung shows that they stand against the Constitution and are willing to violate their oaths all in the service of a criminal President. The President’s criminality was on full display last weekend as he was exposed as he attempted to browbeat, bludgeon, and threaten the Georgia Secretary of State and his Chief Counsel to change the votes cast in the election. That is a felony and the men he was threatening were Republicans who voted for him and wanted him to win, but have the integrity and honor to remain faithful to their oaths and obey the law. The same is true in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In all those states elected officials upholding the law and their oaths were and are continuing to be threatened with violence.

Arendt also wrote about the Germans of the Nazi era words that are frightening when one takes a look at the hold that Trump and his propagandists on Fox News, Newsmax Television, OAN, talk radio, and on thousands of fake news conspiracy theory websites and podcasts proclaim:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”


Over the past five years the President has made multiple threats to unleash his followers on opponents. Trump’s statements to that effect are so numerous that I have lost count of them. They began during his campaign and haven’t stopped, in fact they have only gotten worse and on June 1st 2020 he led a violent attack on peaceful protesters by officers of a number of Federal police agencies in Lafayette Park and the historical Saint John’s Church for a photo opportunity outside the Church. It was one of the most lawless acts ever committed by an American President against the American people.

Now we stand at the precipice of violence and insurrection incited by a lame duck President. If Vice President Pence whose life has been threatened by these people had a single working testicle or a couple of solid vertebrae in his back he would move to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from power, but Pence is not a man of courage or honor. Since Pence claims to be a Christian that is even more damning. Not only does he defy his duties under the Constitution, but his obligations to the truth as a Christian. Unfortunately, the Christian faith he represents is theocratic, authoritarian and undemocratic. In fact his version of Christianity is little different than the German Christian movement that wholeheartedly threw itself into supporting Hitler. Jesus Christ is not their God, just a slogan to make them feel good, their God is Trump which is the very definition of idolatry.

Yesterday, the ten living former Secretaries of Defense including former Vice President Dick Cheney all published and signed a letter about the existential threat of Trump to the Republic. That demonstrates the seriousness of what they see on the horizon.

Supporters of President Donald Trump rally outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office Friday, Nov. 6, 2020, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

A coup to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, overturn a free and fair election that Donald Trump lost, and to overthrow the Republic is gaining momentum. It is no different than 1860 when eleven Southern States seceded from the Union and brought about the most deadly war in American history. Senator Stephan A. Douglas who lost the election to Abraham Lincoln when the Democratic Party split into a pro-slavery Southern faction worked as hard as he could to prevent secession after his loss. He could not stop secession and went  back to Illinois where he proclaimed:

“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors”

Armed pro-trump militia members demonstrate in Louisville Kentucky on the day of the famous Kentucky Derby, which is held in the city.

Today the Party of traitors are not Jefferson Davis’s Southern Democrats, but the Dixiecrats and theocrats who took over the Republican Party and sold their souls to Donald Trump. Trump didn’t start this, he merely took advantage of a party that grew more unhinged by the decade beginning in the 1960s. Today the Republican Party is not the party of principled conservatism, it is a radical authoritarian party with dreams of dictatorship and most of Trump’s followers imbibe of the falsehoods proclaimed by him, his administration, supporters in Congress and media propagandists proclaim. William Shirer was one of the few American news correspondents in Hitler’s Germany following the Nazi takeover to the German declaration of war against the United States wrote of his experiences with the German Press, propagandists, and people:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

After January 20th the blood orgy of the Trump Cult will continue as they work to destroy the remaining conservatives in the GOP and probably destroy the Party in the process. It will be like the Night of the Long Knives, but they won’t have help from the military.

Make no mistake. There can be no more sitting on the fence hoping that things will blow over and return to normal as much as all of us, including me would like them to be. The next few days and the days leading to January 20th will be critical to the survival of the country our Framers painstakingly crafted together. What they created wasn’t perfect, the Union had flaws, especially in regards to slavery and our treatment of the peoples of our First Nations, but it was an experiment meant to see the continued increase of liberty for all.

If Trump and his Cult succeed in their plans the country we know is dead. In 1933 old line German Conservatives led by former Chancellor Franz Von Papen had President Hindenburg appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. In less than five months all of their political parties were dissolved and Hitler’s Nazis took sole power. A year later, Hitler turned on his former allies in the Night of the Long Knives, killing hundreds of his most loyal supporters, as well a German conservative leaders and some senior military officers.

I am now convinced that between January 6th and 20th we will see a wave of political violence and unrest we have never known in this country. I dearly want to be wrong, but when I look at Trump’s actions and statements, the violence already being committed by his followers, and the proliferation of threats by them against all opponents or those they suspect of not being loyal enough to Trump, I know worse is to come.

Yale Historian Dr. 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.”

That warning is now becoming a reality unless real patriots be the liberal or conservative are willing to stand up and be counted. That especially matters for police and military leaders. General Ludwig Beck the Chief of Staff of the German Army in 1938 resigned in protest over Hitler’s decision to invade Czechoslovakia. In retirement he became part of the resistance against Hitler and on the night of July 20th 1944 when the attempt to kill Hitler and take over Germany failed he was faced with immediate execution or the chance to kill himself. He attempted to kill himself but was just badly wounded and was finished off by an executioner. However before the attempt was made he sounded a warning to military and police personnel about duty to their country against a dictator. He wrote:

“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.”

I pray that over the next 15 days that true patriotism and loyalty to the Constitution prevails. If it doesn’t our country is doomed.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

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The Complicity of the Military and Police in Hitler’s Criminal Wars: Robert Jackson’s Closing Argument Part Two

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Tonight I am continuing on with my series on Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s closing arguments while serving as the Chief American Prosecutor at the Major War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg. These crimes are not without relevance today, thus it is important for us to revisit them, for as I noted yesterday, quoting Yehuda Bauer, the Holocaust did not deviate from human norms.

For me it is a difficult subject, for I served in and supported a war that by any standard of legal and moral judgement would have met the criteria that we prosecuted the Nazis for in 1945. I should have known better because I had studied the Nazi crimes and had been the student of a professor who served as an interrogator and interpreter during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. But in the moment of hysteria after the attacks of September 11th 2001 and my belief in the integrity of Secretary of State Colin Powell, I allowed my good sense to be persuaded that an act of aggressive war that resulted in war crimes, and might even include crimes against humanity was perfectly legal.

I went to Iraq in 2007 and 2008. I worked with advisors to Iraqi Army, Border Troops, Police, Port of Entry, and Provincial Reconstruction Teams In Al Anbar Province. I came back from Iraq a very different man. I saw the lies. I came to love and appreciate the Iraqis and what they had suffered under both Saddam Hussein and our invasion and occupation. I can still see the maimed bodies, the destroyed cities and hamlets, the crippled children, as well as the wounded Marines in my mind. I pray and hope that the Iraqis that I served alongside did not become victims of ISIS after I left the country.

I am haunted by it to this day, and I no longer trust the supposedly good intentions of the American government, and in the age of Donald Trump fear for our nation and the world. A year ago the American Border Patrol fired CS gas, a riot control agent that is banned for use in combat across the international border into Mexico at unarmed Central American refugees, many of whom were women and children. The reason was that they “felt endangered” because some in the sea of refugees threw rocks across the border at the border control officers, who were dressed in body armor and Kevlar helmets with face masks. Rocks were going to do nothing to them.

While this was not war, there is a principle and law of war that American law enforcement officers frequently violate, the principle of proportionality. I’m sorry, but firing CA gas at unarmed refugees on the opposite side of the border for throwing rocks is not proportional. They had not breached the border and were also facing Mexican Federal Police. I have to wonder what is next. After that President Trump says that he has authorized U. S. Military personnel to use deadly force against rock throwers, and his former Chief of Staff, retired Marine Corps General John Kelly issued a “cabinet order” something never heard of before, allowing U. S. Military personnel to engage refugees believed to be endangering Border Control agents, in what appears to be a direct violation of Posse Comitatus. Add to those issues the use of drone strikes, by the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations, both DOD and CIA, against often insignificant targets that that more often than not have many women and children in them, and finally the pardoning of convicted war criminals by President Trump, and firing the only administration who stood in his way, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer. Since I first wrote this post the actions of President Trump against American citizens, refugees, allies, and his dereliction of duty in the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic which has cost close to 275,000 American lives to date, condemn Trump as a mass murderer and being guilty of Crimes Against Humanity. Had former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Miley not stood against him he would have invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 in order to crush his opponents using military force.

But I digress. When I read these accounts my mind is taken back to the subject of war crimes, and based on my expertise and study of the crimes of the Nazis, not to mention the Japanese in the Second World War, I automatically default to those settings.

So, I will stop with my words and go back to those of Robert Jackson at Nuremberg, because they are so pertinent today.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

Robert Jackson’s Closing Argument Continued…

Immediately after the seizure of power the Nazis went to work to implement these aggressive intentions by preparing for war. They first enlisted German industrialists in a secret rearmament programme. Twenty days after the seizure of power Schacht was host to Hitler, Goering and some twenty leading industrialists. Among them were Krupp von Bohlen of the great Krupp armament works and representatives of I. G. Farben and other Ruhr heavy industries. Hitler and Goering explained their programme to the industrialists, who became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power. Two months later Krupp was working to bring a reorganised association of German industry into agreement with the political aims of the Nazi Government. Krupp later boasted of the success in keeping the German war industries secretly alive and in readiness despite the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and recalled the industrialists’ enthusiastic acceptance of “the great intentions of the Fuehrer in the rearmament period of 1933-1939”.

Some two months after Schacht had sponsored his first meeting to gain the support of the industrialists, the Nazis moved to harness industrial labour to their aggressive plans. In April, 1933, Hitler ordered Dr. Ley “to take over the trade unions”, numbering some 6 million members. By Party directive Ley seized the unions, their property and their funds. Union leaders, taken into “protective custody” by the SS and SA, were put into concentration camps. The free labour unions were then replaced by a Nazi organization known as the German Labour Front, with Dr. Ley at its head. It was expanded until it controlled over 23 million members. Collective bargaining was eliminated, the voice of labour could no longer be heard as to working conditions, and the labour contract was prescribed by “trustees of labour” appointed by Hitler. The war purpose of this labour programme was clearly acknowledged by Robert Ley five days after war broke out, when he declared in a speech that:

“We National Socialists have monopolised all resources and all our energies during the past seven years so as to be able to be equipped for the supreme effort of battle.”

The Nazis also proceeded at once to adapt the Government to the needs of war. In April, 1933, the Cabinet formed a Defence Council, the working committee of which met frequently thereafter. In the meeting of 22nd May, 1933, at which defendant Keitel presided, the members were instructed that:

“No document must be lost since otherwise the enemy propaganda would make use of it. Matters communicated orally cannot be proven; they can be denied by us in Geneva.”

In February, 1934 -and, your Honours, dates in this connection are important -with defendant Jodl present, the Council planned a mobilization calendar and mobilization order for some 240,000 industrial plants. Again it was agreed that nothing should be in writing so that “the military purpose may not be traceable”.

On 21st May, 1935, the top secret Reich Defence Law was enacted. Defendant Schacht was appointed Plenipotentiary General for War Economy with the task of secretly preparing all economic forces for war and, in the event of mobilization, of financing the war.

Schacht’s secret efforts were supplemented

in October, 1936, by the appointment of defendant Goering as Commissioner of the Four-Year Plan, with the duty of putting the entire economy in a state of readiness for war within four years.

A secret programme for the accumulation of the raw materials and foreign credits necessary for extensive rearmament was also set on foot immediately upon seizure of power. In September of 1934, the Minister of Economics was already complaining that:

“The task of stock-piling is being hampered by the lack of foreign currency; the need for secrecy and camouflage also is a retarding influence.”

Foreign currency controls were at once established. Financing was delegated to the wizard Schacht, who conjured up the MEFO bill to serve the dual objectives of tapping the short-term money market for rearmament purposes while concealing the amount of these expenditures.

The spirit of the whole Nazi administration was summed up by Goering at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, which included Schacht, on 27th May, 1936, when he said: “All measures are to be considered from the standpoint of an assured waging of war.” The General Staff, of course, also had to be enlisted in the war plan. Most of the generals, attracted by the prospect of rebuilding their armies, became willing accomplices. The Minister of War von Blomberg and the Chief of Staff General von Fritsch, however, were not cordial to the increasingly belligerent policy of the Hitler regime, and by vicious and obscene plotting they were discredited and removed in January, 1938. Thereupon, Hitler assumed for himself supreme command of the armed forces and the positions of von Blomberg and of von Fritsch were filled by others who became, as Blomberg said of Keitel, “a willing tool in Hitler’s hands for every one of his decisions”. The generals did not confine their participation to merely military matters. They participated in all major diplomatic and political manoeuvres, such as the Obersalzberg meeting where Hitler, flanked by Keitel and other top generals, issued his virtual ultimatum to Schuschnigg.

As early as 5th November, 1937, the plan to attack had begun to take definiteness as to time and victim. In a meeting which included the defendants Raeder, Goering and von Neurath, Hitler stated the cynical objective:

“The question for Germany is where the greatest possible conquest could be made at the lowest possible cost.”

He discussed various plans for the invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia, indicating clearly that he was thinking of these territories not as ends in themselves, but as means for further conquest. He pointed out that considerable military and political assistance could be afforded by possession of these lands, and discussed the possibility of constituting from them new armies up to a strength of about 12 divisions. The aim he stated boldly and baldly as the acquisition of additional living-space in Europe, and recognized that “The German question can be solved only by way of force.” Six months later, emboldened by the bloodless Austrian conquest, Hitler, in a secret directive to Keitel, stated his “unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future”.

On the same day, Jodl noted in his diary that the Fuehrer had stated his final decision to destroy Czechoslovakia soon and had initiated military preparations all along the line. By April the plan had been perfected to attack Czechoslovakia “with lightning swift action as the result of an ‘incident’”.

All along the line preparations became more definite for a war of expansion, on the assumption that it would result in a world-wide conflict. In September, 1938, Admiral Carls officially commented on a “Draft Study of Naval Warfare against England”:

“There is full agreement with the main theme of the study.

1. If, according to the Fuehrer’s decision, Germany is to acquire a position as a world power, she needs not only sufficient colonial possessions but also secure naval communications and secure access to the ocean.

2. Both requirements can only be fulfilled in opposition to Anglo-French interests and will limit their positions as world powers. It is unlikely that they can be achieved by peaceful means. The decision to make Germany a world power therefore forces upon us the necessity of making the corresponding preparations for war.

3. War against England means at the same time war against the Empire, against France, probably against Russia as well, and a large number of countries overseas; in fact, against one-third to one-half of the whole world.

It can only be justified and have a chance of success if it is prepared economically as well as politically and militarily and waged with the aim of conquering for Germany an outlet to the ocean.”

This Tribunal knows what categorical assurances were given to an alarmed world after the Anschluss, after Munich, after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, that German ambitions were realised and that Hitler had “no further territorial demands to make in Europe.” The record of this trial shows that those promises were calculated deceptions and that those high in the bloody brotherhood of Nazidom knew it.

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As early as 15th April, 1938, Goering pointed out to Mussolini and Ciano that the possession of those territories would make possible an attack on Poland. Ribbentrop’s Ministry wrote on 26th August, 1938:

“After the liquidation of the Czechoslovakian question, it will be generally assumed that Poland will be next in turn.”

Hitler, after the Polish invasion, boasted that it was the Austrian and Czechoslovakian triumphs by which “the basis for the action against Poland was laid”. Goering suited the act to the purpose and gave immediate instructions to exploit, for the further strengthening of the German war potential, first the Sudetenland, and then the whole Protectorate.

By May of 1939 the Nazi preparations had ripened to the point that Hitler confided to the defendants Goering, Raeder, Keitel, and others, his readiness “to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity”, even though he recognized that “further successes cannot be attained without the shedding of blood”. The larcenous motives behind this decision he made plain in words that echoed the covetous theme of Mein Kampf:

“Circumstances must be adapted to aims. This is impossible without invasion of foreign States or attacks upon foreign property. Living-space in proportion to the magnitude of the State is the basis of all power -further successes cannot be attained without expanding our living-space in the East ….”

While a credulous world slumbered, snugly blanketed with perfidious assurances of peaceful intentions, the Nazis prepared not as before for a war but now for the war. The defendants Goering, Keitel, Raeder, Frick and Funk, with others, met as the Reich Defence Council in June of 1939. The minutes, authenticated by Goering, are revealing evidence of the way in which each step of Nazi planning dovetailed with every other. These five key defendants, three months before the first panzer unit had knifed into Poland, were laying plans for “employment of the population in wartime”, and had gone so far as to classify industry for priority in labour supply after “five million servicemen had been called up”. They decided upon measures to avoid “confusion when mobilization takes place”, and declared a purpose “to gain and maintain the lead in the decisive initial weeks of war”. They then planned to use in production prisoners of war, criminal prisoners, and concentration camp inmates. They then decided on “compulsory work for women in war time”. They had already passed on applications from 1,172,000 specialist workmen for classification as indispensable, and had approved 727,000 of them. They boasted that orders to workers to report for duty “are ready and tied up in bundles at the labour offices”. And they resolved to increase the industrial manpower supply by bringing into Germany “hundreds of thousands of workers” from the Protectorate to be “housed together in hutments”.

It is the minutes of this significant conclave of many key defendants which disclose how the plan to start the war was coupled with the plan to wage the war through the use of illegal sources of labour to maintain production. Hitler, in announcing his plan to attack Poland, had already foreshadowed the slave labour programme as one of its corollaries when he cryptically pointed out to the defendants Goering, Raeder, Keitel, and others that the Polish population “will be available as a source of labour”. This was part of the plan made good by Frank, who as Governor-General notified Goering, that he would supply “at least one million male and female agricultural and industrial workers to the Reich”, and by Sauckel, whose impressments throughout occupied territory aggregated numbers equal to the total population of some of the smaller nations of Europe.


Here also comes to the surface the link between war labour and concentration camps, a manpower source that was increasingly used and with increasing cruelty. An agreement between Himmler and the Minister of Justice, Thierack, in 1942 provided for “the delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentence to the Reichsfuehrer SS to be worked to death”. An SS directive provided that bedridden prisoners be drafted for work to be performed in bed. The Gestapo ordered 46,000 Jews arrested to increase the “recruitment of manpower into the concentration camps”. One hundred thousand Jews were brought from Hungary to augment the camps’ manpower. On the initiative of the defendant Donitz concentration camp labour was used in the construction of submarines. Concentration camps were thus geared into war production on the one hand, and into the administration of justice and the political aims of the Nazis on the other. The use of prisoner-of-war labour, as then planned in that meeting, also grew with German needs. At a time when every German soldier was needed at the front and forces were not available at home, Russian prisoners of war were forced to man anti-aircraft guns against Allied planes. Field-Marshal Milch reflected the Nazi merriment at this flagrant violation of International Law, saying: “… This is an amusing thing, that the Russians must work the guns.”

The orders for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war were so ruthless that Admiral Canaris, pointing out that they would “result in arbitrary mistreatments and killing”, protested to the OKW against them as breaches of International Law. The reply of Keitel was unambiguous. He said:

“The objections arise from the military conception of chivalrous warfare! This is the destruction of an ideology! Therefore I approve and back the measures”.

The Geneva Convention would have been thrown overboard openly, except that Jodl objected because he wanted the benefits of Allied observance of it while it was not being allowed to hamper the Germans in any way.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

Other crimes in the conduct of warfare were planned with equal thoroughness as a means of ensuring victory of German arms: In October, 1938, almost a year before the start of the war, the large-scale violation of the established rules of warfare was contemplated as a policy, and the Supreme Command circulated a most secret list of devious explanations to be given by the Propaganda Minister in such cases. Even before this time commanders of the armed forces were instructed to employ any methods of warfare so long as they facilitated victory. During the progress of the war the orders increased in savagery. A typical Keitel order, demanding the use of the “most brutal means”, provided that .

“… It is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as they ensure success.”

Hitler with Grand Admiral Erich Raeder 1939


The German naval forces were no more immune from the infection than the land forces. Raeder ordered violations of the accepted rules of warfare wherever necessary to gain strategic successes. Donitz urged his submarine crews not to rescue survivors of torpedoed enemy ships, in order to cripple merchant shipping of the Allied Nations by decimating their crews.

Thus, the WAR CRIMES against Allied forces and the CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY committed in occupied territories are incontestably part of the programme for making the war because, in the German calculations, they were indispensable to its hope of success.

Similarly, the whole group of pre-war crimes, including the persecutions within Germany, fall into place around the plan for aggressive war like stones in a finely wrought mosaic. Nowhere is the whole catalogue of crimes of Nazi oppression and terrorism within Germany so well integrated with the crime of war as in that strange mixture of wind and wisdom which makes up the testimony of Hermann Goering. In describing the aims of the Nazi programme before the seizure of power, Goering stated that the first question was to achieve and establish a different political structure for Germany, which would enable Germany to object against the Dictate (of Versailles), and to make not only a protest, but an objection of such a nature that it would actually be considered.

Hermann Goering

With these purposes, Goering, admitted that the plan was made to overthrow the Weimar Republic, to seize power, and to carry out the Nazi programme by whatever means were necessary, whether legal or illegal.

From Goering’s cross-examination we learn how necessarily the whole programme of crime followed. Because they considered a strong State necessary to get rid of the Versailles Treaty, they adopted the Fuehrerprinzip. Having seized power, the Nazis thought it necessary to protect it by abolishing parliamentary government, and suppressing all organized opposition from political parties. This was reflected in the philosophy of Goering that the opera was more important than the Reichstag. Even the “opposition of each individual was not tolerated unless it was a matter of unimportance”. To insure the suppression of opposition a secret police force was necessary. In order to eliminate incorrigible opponents, it was necessary to establish concentration camps and to resort to the device of protective custody. Protective custody, Goering, testified, meant that:

“People were arrested arid taken into protective custody who had not yet committed any crime but who could be expected to do so if they remained free.”

The same war purpose was dominant in the persecution of the Jews. In the beginning, fanaticism and political opportunism played a principal part, for anti-Semitism and its allied scapegoat, mythology, were the vehicle on which the Nazis rode to power. It was for this reason that the filthy Streicher and the blasphemous Rosenberg were welcomed at Party rallies and made leaders and officials of the State or Party. But the Nazis soon regarded the Jews as foremost amongst the opposition to the police State with which they schemed to put forward their plans of military aggression. Fear of their pacifism and their opposition to strident nationalism was given as the reason that the Jews had to be driven from the political and economic life of Germany. Accordingly, they were transported like cattle to the concentration camps, where they were utilised as a source of forced labour for war purposes.

At a meeting held on 12th November, 1938, two days after the violent anti-Jewish pogroms instigated by Goebbels and carried out by the Party Leadership Corps and the SA, the programme for the elimination of Jews from the German economy was mapped out by Goering, Funk, Heydrich, Goebbels, and the other top Nazis. The measures adopted included confinement of the Jews in ghettoes, cutting off their food supply, “aryanizing” their shops, and restricting their freedom of movement. Here another purpose behind the Jewish persecutions crept in, for it was the wholesale confiscation of their property which helped to finance German rearmament. Although Schacht’s plan to use foreign money to ransom the entire race within Germany was not adopted, the Jews were stripped to the point where Goering was able to advise the Reich Defence Council that the critical situation of the Reich exchequer, due to rearmament, had been relieved “through the billion Reichsmark fine imposed on Jewry, and through profits accrued to the Reich in the aryanization of Jewish enterprises”.

A glance over the dock will show that, despite quarrels among themselves, each defendant played a part which fitted in with every other, and that all advanced the Common Plan. It contradicts experience that men of such diverse backgrounds and talents should so forward each other’s aims by coincidence. The large and varied role of Goering was half militarist and half gangster. He stuck his pudgy finger in every pie. He used his SA bullies to help bring the gang into power. In order to entrench that power he contrived to have the Reichstag burned, established the Gestapo, and created the concentration camps. He was equally adept at massacring opponents and at framing scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. He built up the Luftwaffe and hurled it at his defenceless neighbours. He was among the foremost in harrying Jews out of the land. By mobilising the total economic resources of Germany he made possible the waging of the war which he had taken a large part in planning. He was, next to Hitler, the man who tied the activities of all the defendants together in a common effort.

Einsatzgruppen Trial, SS General Otto Oldendorf 


The parts played by the other, defendants, although less comprehensive and less spectacular than that of the Reichsmarschall, were nevertheless integral and necessary contributions to the joint undertaking, without any one of which the success of the common enterprise would have been in jeopardy. There are many specific deeds of which these men have been proven guilty. No purpose would be served -nor indeed is time available -to review all the crimes which the evidence has charged against their names. Nevertheless, in viewing the conspiracy as a whole and as an operating mechanism, it may be well to recall briefly the outstanding services which each of the men in the dock rendered to the common cause.

To be continued…

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A Warning Then, Reality Now: Trump’s Radical and Violent Supporters in 2016 and 2020

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Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I wrote this on October 12th 2016. I saw what was coming and it is now here. Back then even many Democrats did not believe that fellow Americans would continue to behave this way, even if Trump somehow won the election. Many thought is was a passing moment, an anomaly that would not be repeated.

I wish I was wrong but it is being repeated day after day during the 2020 campaign. Heavily armed White Supremacists attempt to intimidate voters at polls. Today a caravan of Trump supporters tried to drive a Biden-Harris campaign bus off the road between San Antonio and Austin, threatening the lives of the people on the bus with no law enforcement intervention, while police in North Carolina attacked a column of mostly Black men and women holding a peaceful protest while marching from a church to the polls to cast their ballots, arresting more than a dozen of them after attacking them with peeper spray and truncheons. There are so many of these incidents that they are almost overwhelming, but to see the President use his rallies and twitter to praise them is unheard of in American politics.

I knew better because I had been a Republican for 32 years. I campaigned for Gerald Ford before I could vote. Forty years ago I cast my first vote in a Presidential Election for Ronald Reagan. I finally left the GOP when I heard Republican politicians and the Right Wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh who I had listened to and even defended for years repeating Birther conspiracy theories, and using racist terminology and dog whistles constantly during the 2008 campaign. I had supported John McCain up until that point, but I realized that he and men like him were no longer in control of the Republican base which had been radicalized by men like Limbaugh for decades. The base was now made up by people who supported in increasing numbers openly racist politicians, like the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Master, David Duke, and radical Evangelical Christian extremists who preached a gospel of hate, including someone I knew well from church, anti-abortion leader Randall Terry. Terry once urged his followers:

“Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…. If a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It’s that simple…. Our goal is a Christian Nation… we have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I’ve got a hot flash. God rules.”  [Randall Terry, Head of Operation Rescue, from The News Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Aug 15, 1993]

On the day I cracked I was driving between my military unit’s facilities on two different bases while listening to Limbaugh. I had to pull to the side of the road and cry. This was about three months after returning from a combat tour in Iraq and dealing with PTSD that had not yet been diagnosed. I cried because I realized how mistaken I had been about the GOP for all of those years. I felt deceived and lied to, and I began to see the race hatred in the words and on the faces of Republicans I had known for years. I saw what was underneath the veneer of respectability shown by Republican leaders and knew that if I did not leave at that moment that I would be responsible for what came after as the scales had been lifted from my eyes.

Tonight with the fate of our republic on the line, I repeat my original warning and unequivocally state that their violent revolution is happening before our eyes. Trump is no longer simply a candidate, but the President. He has destroyed the guardrails that prevented tyrants from seizing power, the kind of man envisioned by those who wrote the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. He is a tyrant and a would be dictator whose supporters are devoted to that end. He is using all the powers of government and the courts to ensure that he remains in power. Alexander Hamilton warned us of a leader like Trump in the Federalist Papers:

“the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty … that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the mask of zeal for rights of the people than under the appearance of zeal for firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying court to the people, commencing as demagogues and ending up tyrants.”

So anyway, most of last night and today I have been battling a severe toothache. I went to the Naval Medical Center only to be told that the on call dentists no longer came in for “routine” issues. I was given pain meds and antibiotics and told to go to dental sick call on Monday morning.

What follows is that post from October 12th 2016. The original post is titled:“Trump and His Supporters Real Threats of Revolution and Violence.”  It is posted in its original form and has not been edited.

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

The great American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote:

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass.” 

I have been seeing questions asked about why so many of Donald Trump’s supporters are doubling down on their support of him as he melts down and declares war on his own the Republican Party. I think that too many people simply ascribe this to frustration with the status quo but I think that there is more to it than that. Quite frankly Trump has appealed to the basest instincts of many of his supporters: he appeals to their fear, their racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Gay feelings, their feelings of powerlessness against real and imagined elites, and the fantasy world of conspiracy theories that have been promoted by right wing talkers, preachers, and media outlets for over two decades. He promises to make them important again, to make their twisted version of the Christian faith the law of the land, to bring retribution to their “enemies” to deport those not like them, and to ban others from coming into the country. He appeals to their desire for an authoritarian leader who will solve their problems without the niceties of acting in accordance with the Constitution or law.

Donald Trump supporter Birgitt Peterson of Yorkville, Ill., argues with protesters outside the UIC Pavilion after the cancelled rally for the Republican presidential candidate in Chicago on Friday, March 11, 2016. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)

His message is quite simply, to use these factors to stoke anger, hatred and rage against real and imagined devils. Hoffer noted: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.” For many Trump supporters that “devil” is Hillary Clinton, Trump actually called her that during debate on Sunday night and claimed that she had a “very dark heart.” For some of his other followers it is Barak Obama, and to a growing number of his followers, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and other GOP leaders who have denounced Trump or who have failed to endorse him. Hoffer wrote:

“It seems that, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is one. We have it from Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making “even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category.” When Hitler picked the Jew as his devil, he peopled practically the whole world outside Germany with Jews or those who worked for them. “Behind England stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States.”

In place of any detailed policy, instead of a message of hope to Trump threatens and cajoles and his supporters, of whom he said during the Iowa Caucus campaign “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Richard Evans in his book The Coming of the Third Reich discussed one of Hitler’s first speeches after coming to power.

“As so often in his career, Hitler, beginning slowly and quietly so as to secure the rapt attention of his enormous audience, went over the history of the Nazi Party and the alleged crimes of the Weimar Republic since 1919—the inflation, the impoverishment of the peasantry, the rise of unemployment, the ruin of the nation. What would his government do to change this parlous situation? His answer avoided any specific commitments at all. He said grandly that he was not going to make any ‘cheap promises’. Instead, he declared that his programme was to rebuild the German nation without foreign aid, ‘according to eternal laws valid for all time’, on the basis of the people and the soil, not according to ideas of class. Once more, he held up the intoxicating vision of a Germany united in a new society that would overcome the divisions of class and creed that had racked it over the past fourteen years. The workers, he declared, would be freed from the alien ideology of Marxism and led back to the national community of the entire German race. This was a ‘programme of national resurrection in all areas of life.’” 

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One thing you can say about Trump is that he understands his hard core supporters. Time and time again he has said and done things that would have left a normal candidate in a normal campaign sitting out the election at home, but instead his hardcore supporters, the people who now proudly call themselves “the Deplorables” respond to his threats to jail Hillary Clinton, to abandon and overthrow the GOP leadership, and his other invectives with an eagerness not seen in an electorate since Adolf Hitler’s mesmerized supporters screamed “Sieg Heil!” at Nazi Party rallies. The cult like devotion of his base is unlike anything ever seen in American politics. After two of his supporters beat a homeless man with a metal pole and urinated on him following a speech in which Trump called Mexicans “Rapists and drug dealers” Trump responded: “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”  

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When his supporters roughed up opponents at Trump rallies he said: “Knock the crap out of them, would you?” and “In the good ol’ days, they’d have knocked him out of his seat so fast,” and offered to pay their legal fees. He encourages supporters to shout down the media at his events, calls out people who might be different than his supporters as he did when he asked non-Christians to identify themselves at a rally and asked his supporters if they should be allowed to stay in the room. This week he suggested that his followers go to heavily minority and Democratic precincts to “monitor” the vote. In open carry states that could well lead to his armed supporters loitering near polling places intimidating voters just as Hitler’s Brownshirts policed polling places in the elections leading to Hitler’s accession to power and the few votes held until he abolished opposition parties. Below is an image of armed S.A. Brownshirts outside a polling station on March 5th 1933, the final election for the Reichstag.

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This monster is something that will not go away even if Trump loses. Some of his supporters call for violent revolution if Clinton wins, but they wouldn’t be the first. Trump himself used twitter to call for revolution when President Obama defeated Mitt Romney on November 7th 2012. These calls for revolution and the blessing of extrajudicial violence against political enemies and minority groups have to be taken for real, especially with the rise of heavily armed so-called militia groups, as well as neo-Nazi, KKK, and other White Nationalist groups which live in a cloud-cuckoo land of conspiracy laden paranoia, and dualism.

This my friends is not normal or rational behavior for any Presidential candidate or campaign. I don’t think that I’m overly dramatic at this point. We have not seen the worst of this campaign.

Have a good night. Until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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