Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Today I have just a few thoughts about President Trump’s Warsaw speech as well as some of his other comments while in Poland.
I know people have different opinions about the speech but my greatest concern was that while the President spoke of “defending Western civilization” he never once mentioned the ideals that are at the heart of the United States. He never talked about what is written in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or appealing to those documents as well as the ideals of our founders or his predecessors, not even Ronald Reagan. Instead it was similar to his dystopian Inaugural Address on a global level. Likewise during and after the speech he continued his attacks on the free press, something that his Polish host has been doing since he took office.
It reminded me of the “blood and soil” speeches of Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis and it appealed to a concept of white, European, Christian that has more in common with Nazi and other Fascist movements, as well as the “noble Confederacy,” the Lost Cause, and White nationalism than it has to do with the promise of the United States and its ideals. The thing that the President does not seem to grasp is that no enemy can conquer this nation if we live up to the ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln said it well on more than one occasion:
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”
But even more to the point Lincoln noted something that the President does not understand or appreciate:
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
The President has frequently threatened those freedoms as he attacks his opponents and disparagesAmericans, including military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials or agencies who disagree with him. At the G-20 summit he appeared to have given Vladimir Putin a pass on the well documented Russian efforts to influence and interfere with the 2016 general election. It is troubling for me to see our President give more credence to a thug like Putin than to American intelligence officials, military officers, and diplomats. The things that the President often says, especially on Twitter are more often than not directed at Americans and our closest allies are troubling because it seems that he is more willing to believe the words of a sworn enemy of the United States than to believe Americans. Likewise when he talks uses terms that make me think of Spencer Tracy in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. In that film Tracy took aim at those who surrendered freedom for security and those who would at the same time blame minority groups for the nation’s ills and those who would use the same tactics as our enemies would. In doing so he will destroy what this nation was founded upon and there will be no easy righting of the ship of state.
In the film during the scene where Spencer Tracy pronounces judgment on a German jurist played by Burt Lancaster. It is a riveting moment as Tracy says these words. They are important so I will leave you with them and wish you a good day.
“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.”
Peace
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 