On Sunday President Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made the comment that we could not defeat the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic. It was an open admission of defeat, the moral equivalent of surrender, to a virus that President knew was coming and knew would be worse than anything we have faced. He knew that it would be incredibly deadly, and knowing that ignored warnings from multiple American intelligence agencies, and withdrew the CDC’s investigators from China. He began a very porous shutdown of air travel from China to the United States, but took no other actions.
He talked about invoked invoking the Wartime Production Act to produce ventilators, and personal protective equipment He refused to do anything until the Stock Markets crashed at the end of March. Then he announced a shutdown of the country. Businesses were closed, as were schools for 30 days. The CDC announced a reasonable evidenced based plan for states to begin reopening, but as soon as the 30 days were up the President effectively ended the lockdown and pressured governors to re-open before they were ready, and far too many complied resulting in massive numbers of new infections and deaths.
In spite of that, many states enacted measures to mandate the wearing of masks, social distancing and hand washing, and some despite the President’s pressure as well as pressure from armed White Nationalist terrorist groups who assaulted their state houses, and threatened legislators, governors, public health, and law enforcement officials.
One relief bill passed by Congress and signed by the President in April. In May, realizing the crisis to the health and safety of Americans, and the economy, the House of Representatives passed another, but the Senate refused to pass it, and the President did nothing to twist the arms of his own defiant party members in the Senate to get anything done. Instead he bragged of his success during a second spike during the summer, and despite his Treasury Secretary’s negotiation with the House to pass another relief bill to help Americans, help the states, and bolster the economy. Instead he did nothing brag about his fake successes; massive unemployment, Nearly nine million infections, over 230,000 deaths, and even more economic disaster and weakening of our national security. With the infections spiking to record levels the President claimed that we were turning the corner, unfortunately that corner is a nation aside pandemic with no reserves to fight it.
Sarah Palin was the first nutcase liar and conspiracy theorist to say that The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare had Death Panels which wold choose who would live or die. Of course that was a bold faced lie because there was nothing in the legislation to allow it, or was simply the spiteful rantings of a deranged theocratic Christian who believed so called prophecies that she would lead the nation.
But her ranting were believed by the increasingly Christian Nationalist ans White Supremacist GOP. When Mitt Romney, whose Heritage Foundation healthcare plan for Massachusetts was adopted by Obama to ensure that everyone paid something for their medical care, including those with President-existing medical conditions got care was attempting to defend it at a campaign rally he was shouted down by attendees who cried out “Let them die!”
That my friends was the death of the Center-Right Republican Party that only existed before 1964 when Barry Goldwater followed by Richard Nixon in 1968 who gave the most radical White Racist and Neo-Confederates of the Democratic Party, Senator Strom Thurmond’s “Dixiecrats” a home in the GOP after passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 bi-partisan majorities led by a Southern Democrat President, Lyndon Baines Johnson in the House and Senate, became the party of White Supremacy, though few realized it at the time. But ever since Richard Nixon swept the South in 1968, with the powerful assistance of the Dixiecrats, have become increasingly radicalized over the issues of race and religion. Now the GOP is for all practical reasons the embodiment of all the Dixiecrats could have ever hoped for, as it is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln but that of Jefferson Davis.
And now in a time of crisis it falls back on a theories expounded on by the Southern Slave Owners, the Confederate States, the Jim Crow South and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, that some races are subhuman, and other individuals because of age, pre-existing medical conditions, birth defects, or physical and mental disabilities are “Life Unworthy of Life.”
Now with an uncontrolled virus raging infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the President and the GOP Senate majority do nothing to help Americans infected with or who have lost their jobs, and now are losing their homes because of their indifference for life.
President Trump and his Senate majority have become the party of death, and the ultimate Death Panel, ignoring ignoring the advice of well respected and world renowned virologists, contagious disease specialists, and public health experts at home and abroad.
Pardon the interruption, but I started a new article last night but was too tired to complete. I guess I will mull it over more and get around to posting it when I am ready. So instead of that I am going to repost an article from a few years back.
Sometimes people wonder how the Republican Party devolved to the point that it became a proto-Fascist Party completely unrelated to the Party of Lincoln. Now it is true that after Ulysses Grant’s Presidency the GOP became less civil rights and more a party of the Robber Barons. Of course Teddy Roosevelt repudiated the Robber Barons, and was quite progressive except in terms of race and civil rights, and Dwight Eisenhower who took action to enforce Supreme Court Rulings after Brown v. Board of Education, and was as progressive in many ways as were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Richard Nixon took advantage of the Southern Strategy to continue the transformation of the GOP into the party of Trump, which continued, under slightly less obvious means under Ronald Reagan, and both George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. But even more pivotal was the speakership of Newt Gingrich, and the the Tea Party.
But think that the 1964 GOP National Convention was more important because it was a watershed moment in American politics, a moment that started the Republican Party down the path that has culminated today. The convention was a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Summer of 1964.
But most of all it is how the GOP rank and file treated baseball icon and civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson’s trip to the 1964 Republican National Convention. Though the events happened some fifty-six years ago, they are not ancient history, and the spirit and ideology that characterized them is all to present today, especially in the modern Republican Party.
So have a great day.
Peace
Padre Steve+
Jackie Robinson was an American hero and icon. He was an amazing athlete who served as an Army Officer in the Second World War, but whose military career was cut short by a bus driver who ordered him to the back of the bus, for which he was tried by what amounted to a drumhead Court Martial, but was acquitted. So he missed seeing action in the war. Robinson remembered his defense attorney’s closing argument.
My lawyer summed up the case beautifully by telling the board that this was not a case involving any violation of the Articles of War, or even of military tradition, but simply a situation in which a few individuals sought to vent their bigotry on a Negro they considered ‘uppity’ because he had the audacity to exercise rights that belonged to him as an American and a soldier.
Twenty years later, Robinson, a Republican because of the then racist attitudes of the Democrats was a supporter of the progressive Republican Governor or New York, Nelson Rockefeller. When he arrived as Rockefeller’s guest he was confronted with the most vile behavior by GOP delegates as could be imagined.
“A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Jackie Robinson on his observations of the 1964 Republican National Convention
Jackie Robinson was a Republican. So was I for 32 years and for much of that time I considered myself a “conservative” whatever that means, though I thought it meant freedom, limited government and opportunity for all regardless of race, color, religion or any other trait or belief. I also believed and still do in a strong defense, but I can no longer consider myself a man that blesses American intervention in other people’s wars unless there is a clear and present danger to the United States, not simply our so called “interests” which may not be those of the nation at all but of multi-national corporations which were originally American businesses but not only need our military, diplomatic and intelligence resources to increase their profits.
My parents were Kennedy type Democrats, but in the 1970s, torn by the extremism of the 1972 Democratic Convention in Chicago and feeling the hatred of people for those in the military, including a Sunday School teacher who told me that my dad, then serving in Vietnam was “baby killer” I at the age of 12 decided that I would be a Republican. I was a Republican until I returned from Iraq in 2008, fully aware of the lies that took us into that war and seeing the cost both to American servicemen and the people of Iraq.
I have been doing a lot of reading lately on a period of history that as a historian I had pretty much skipped over. That is the period of the Civil Rights movement of the early to mid-1960s. I guess I skipped over it because I was more interested in the glory of war and patriotism wrapped in historic myth than in the experiences of fellow citizens who had been killed, abused, tormented and persecuted by people like me simply because of the color of their skin. I had not yet begun to appreciate the concept of justice at home being interconnected to our deepest held principles and how we embody them in our foreign policy.
For many years I echoed the point made by some conservatives that it was the GOP that helped make the Voter’s Rights Act of 1964 and Civil Rights Act of 1965 passed into law. That is true. Most Republicans voted for them, with a notable exception, Barry Goldwater. However, what is also true is that the Republicans that voted for the 1964 act were considered “liberals” and treated shamefully at the 1964 convention, whose delegates voted down a part of the platform that would have supported that act. Of the Democrats that voted against those bills almost all came from the Deep South, a region which within a decade become a Republican stronghold and a key part of the Southern Strategy of every GOP Presidential Candidate since Richard Nixon. A Republican aide at the 1964 convention told a reporter that “the nigger issue was sure to put Goldwater in the White House.” (See Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson p.163)
However as a life long baseball fan there is one thing that I know, that if there had been no Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson we might not have gotten Rosa Parks or the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Robinson was appointed as a special delegate to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was running against Goldwater and attended the convention. He had given up his job as a spokesman for and Vice President of the Chock Full O’Nuts Coffee Company to assist Rockefeller’s campaign in 1964.
Robinson knew what it was like to be the “point man” in the integration of baseball and in his career was threatened with physical violence and death on many occasions. Some teammates circulated petitions that they would not play for a team that had a “black” on it. Robinson, encouraged by Rickey persevered and became an icon in baseball, the Civil Rights movement and the history of the United States. However, not even 10 years after his retirement from baseball and 2 years after he was elected to the Hall of Fame he once again discovered just how deep racism still ran in this country. As he attended the convention FBI agents and other Federal authorities attempted to find the bodies of three young Voting Rights staff who were part of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi. Eventually, later in the summer the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner would be discovered buried in the base of a dam near Philadelphia Mississippi. Their killers were local law enforcement officers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Maybe I lived in my own fantasy world. My experience growing up was on the West Coast living in a military family in small towns and big cities. I am proud to be part of the first class that attended high school in my home town when the courts ordered desegregation in our schools. That experience at Edison High School of Stockton California from 1975-78 changed me, as did having a black roommate in college.
However, that being said it took me a long time to realize that things really haven’t changed that much from 1964 in many parts of the country, especially since I have lived most of my adult live in the historic States that comprised the Confederacy. I can say from practical observation and knowledge that racism and other forms of more acceptable prejudice live on in this country. There is not a day that goes by that I do not run into the vestiges of the hate that lived during the Freedom Summer of 1964. It is more subtle in some cases, but other times is so blatant that is sickening. I never expected that I would ever be called a “nigger lover” or “wigger”until I had people made those comments on this website in response to articles that had nothing to do with race relations or civil rights, nor did I expect physical threats from people who call themselves “Christian.”Those were learning experiences that I have never forgotten.
Robinson wrote of his experience at the 1964 Convention:
“I wasn’t altogether caught of guard by the victory of the reactionary forces in the Republican party, but I was appalled by the tactics they used to stifle their liberal opposition. I was a special delegate to the convention through an arrangement made by the Rockefeller office. That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude toward black people.
A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
The same high-handed methods had been there.
The same belief in the superiority of one religious or racial group over another was here. Liberals who fought so hard and so vainly were afraid not only of what would happen to the GOP but of what would happen to America. The Goldwaterites were afraid – afraid not to hew strictly to the line they had been spoon-fed, afraid to listen to logic and reason if it was not in their script.
I will never forget the fantastic scene of Governor Rockefeller’s ordeal as he endured what must have been three minutes of hysterical abuse and booing which interrupted his fighting statement which the convention managers had managed to delay until the wee hours of the morning. Since the telecast was coming from the West Coast, that meant that many people in other sections of the country, because of the time differential, would be in their beds. I don’t think he has ever stood taller than that night when he refused to be silenced until he had had his say.
It was a terrible hour for the relatively few black delegates who were present. Distinguished in their communities, identified with the cause of Republicanism, an extremely unpopular cause among blacks, they had been served notice that the party they had fought for considered them just another bunch of “niggers”. They had no real standing in the convention, no clout. They were unimportant and ignored. One bigot from one of the Deep South states actually threw acid on a black delegate’s suit jacket and burned it. Another one, from the Alabama delegation where I was standing at the time of the Rockefeller speech, turned on me menacingly while I was shouting “C’mon Rocky” as the governor stood his ground. He started up in his seat as if to come after me. His wife grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
“Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” I shouted.
I was ready for him. I wanted him badly, but luckily for him he obeyed his wife…” From Jackie Robinson “I Never Had it Made” Chapter XV On Being Black Among the Republicans
Belva Davis, then a young journalist wrote of her experiences at that convention:
While the Goldwater organization tried to keep its delegates in check on the floor, snarling Goldwater fans in the galleries around us were off the leash. The mood turned unmistakably menacing…
Suddenly Louis and I heard a voice yell, “Hey, look at those two up there!” The accuser pointed us out, and several spectators swarmed beneath us. “Hey niggers!” they yelled. “What the hell are you niggers doing in here?’”
I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck as I looked into faces turned scarlet and sweaty by heat and hostility. Louis, in suit and tie and perpetually dignified, turned to me and said with all the nonchalance he could muster, “Well, I think that’s enough for today.” Methodically we began wrapping up our equipment into suitcases.
As we began our descent down the ramps of the Cow Palace, a self-appointed posse dangled over the railings, taunting. “Niggers!” “Get out of here, boy!” “You too, nigger bitch!” “Go on, get out!” “I’m gonna kill your ass!”
I stared straight ahead, putting one foot in front of the other like a soldier who would not be deterred from a mission. The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hot dogs, half-eaten Snickers bars. My goal was to appear deceptively serene, mastering the mask of dispassion I had perfected since childhood to steel myself against any insults the outside world hurled my way.
Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull. I heard it whack against the concrete and shatter. I didn’t look back, but I glanced sideways at Louis and felt my lower lip began to quiver. He was determined we would give our tormentors no satisfaction.
“If you start to cry,” he muttered, “I’ll break your leg.” ( Belva Davis “Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism)
The sad thing is that in many states the new GOP has taken a page out of the past and has been either passing legislation or attempting to pass legislation that makes it harder for Blacks and other minorities to vote. Groups have shown up armed at heavily black polling sites in recent elections and efforts have been made to ensure that minorities cannot vote. They have also challenged the 1964 Voter’s Rights Act in Court and have a friend in Justice Antonine Scalia who called it a “racial entitlement” and violation of State sovereignty.
The tactics are quite similar to those used in the Deep South prior to 1964 which made it virtually impossible for a Black man or woman to cast a vote, and if they tried even to register to vote did so at the peril of their lives or families. The opponents of integration, voter’s rights and equal rights used some of the same lines used today against those that support these rights. “Communists sympathizers, Socialists, Atheists, Anti-Christian, Anti-American, Anti-Constitution,” you name it the same labels are being applied to those that simply want to be at the table. The sad thing that many of the most vicious users of such untruths are my fellow Christians.
These are hard things to look at and it is far easier to believe myth than it is to actually seek truth. A few years back I cannot every in a million years having written this article. However the threats to minorities be they racial, religious or even gender have become part an parcel of the new GOP, the GOP that I could not remain a part of when I returned from Iraq.
I guess that I am becoming a Civil Rights advocate, or then, maybe it’s that I’m actually becoming more of a Christian. Branch Rickey said “I may not be able to do something about racism in every field, but I can sure do something about it in baseball.” Oh well, I amy not be able to do something about racism and other prejudice everywhere but I can do it here and wherever I work or preach.
Oh well whatever, it really doesn’t matter so long as I can live with myself. Besides, I’ll get labeled anyway so what does it matter? I would rather be in the same camp as someone like Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey than Antonine Scalia or those that seek to keep people down simply because they are different anyway.
Martin Niemoller once said:
First they came for the , communist and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Friends, it is all too important that we not forget this, even as Donald Trump and many of his supporters who include most of the White Supremacists, Klansmen, and Neo-Nazis in this country offer the same threats against blacks, other minorities, and political moderates and liberals. Make no mistake, what is happening now is nothing more than a resurgence of the hatred and violence that was unleashed against those who fought for civil rights fifty-six years ago.
I have no doubt that Jackie Robinson is rejoicing in heaven with the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential Running mate, and I know how he would respond to a draft dodging, war criminal pardoning, racist President like Donald Trump.
As President Trump continues to take revenge on his opponents and threaten others following his acquittal, making threats toward others, including at the Justice Department, State Department, and the Department of Defense, we cannot dismiss these actions as politics as usual. This has never happened in America, at least not until now.
In fact, no American President, has behaved in such a manner. One, Andrew Jackson successfully defied the Supreme Court, in order to remove the Cherokee Nation and put them on the Trail of Tears, James K. Polk who launched an illegal and immoral war against Mexico, an act that the future President Ulysses Grant, then a young Army Lieutenant decried: “I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Then there was James Buchanan who unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the law and Constitution during the Lecompton Constitution crisis, only to be stopped by the actions of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, John Tyler, at that point a former President joined the Confederacy, Andrew Johnson who pardoned hundreds of Confederate traitors, including war criminals, and worked against the the 14th Amendment, defied Congress, was impeached and acquitted by one bought vote. Likewise, Woodrow Wilson who led the great racist purge of the military and civil service in 1915, Richard Nixon whose crimes are too many too mention, and such that even a majority of his party led by Barry Goldwater told him to resign or be convicted in his impeachment trial, approached the authoritarianism, of Trump, and the treats of violence he and his supports make to opponents. I could mention more, but you get the idea. We live in dangerous times and need to heed the words of British Historian and military theorist B. H. Liddell-Hart wrote about in his book Why Don’t we Learn From History:
They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers, “discovering” that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become traitors to it.
They suppress criticism on one pretext or another and punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are unfavourable to their policy.
They enlist religion on their side, if possible, or, if its leaders are not compliant, foster a new kind of religion subservient to their ends.
They spend public money lavishly on material works of a striking kind, in compensation for the freedom of spirit and thought of which they have robbed the public.
They manipulate the currency to make the economic position of the state appear better than it is in reality.
They ultimately make war on some other state as a means of diverting attention from internal conditions and allowing discontent to explode outward.
They use the rallying cry of patriotism as a means of riveting the chains of their personal authority more firmly on the people.
They expand the superstructure of the state while undermining its foundations by breeding sycophants at the expense of self-respecting collaborators, by appealing to the popular taste for the grandiose and sensational instead of true values, and by fostering a romantic instead of a realistic view, thus ensuring the ultimate collapse, under their successors if not themselves, of what they have created.
This political confidence trick, itself a familiar string of tricks, has been repeated all down the ages. Yet it rarely fails to take in a fresh generation.
But I digress, that was simply an introduction.
Seventy-seven years ago a young German woman was under the interrogation of the Munich Gestapo, before being tried and convicted of treason for distributing a series of anti-Nazi leaflets by the Nazi Volksgericht or “People’s Court” under the direction of the notorious Judge Roland Freisler who gained further infamy in his show trials of those suspected of participating in or supporting the July 20th Bomb Plot against Hitler.
The woman was Sophie Scholl, a student at the University of Munich she was just 22 years old. Her story and the story of the resistance group that she was at the center of is remarkable for the moral clarity that she and her friends displayed in an era where most people were willing to look the other way, if not unreservedly served Hitler’s Third Reich.
She and those who like her resisited Hitler’s Third Reich at the height of its power are worthwhile examples for those who resisit President Trump here. Russia’s Putin, and so many other authoritarian leaders in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The precious truth is that Freedom must be defended from those who use patriotism as a prop, and racism as the raison d’etre of their political, social, and foreign policy of their regimes.
The story of Sophie and the White Rose is a remarkable story because stories like this are often buried by the propaganda machines of totalitarian regimes; but the shock of what these young people did was so great that the Nazi propaganda machine had to publicly confront it with the goal of instilling such fear that no one else’s would dare repeat it. What politicians, generals, and others could not do to shake the Nazi regime a handful of university students accomplished.
There are a number of monuments scattered around Munich to the White Rose movement, but the most remarkable is the monument in front of the university where they studied and where they distributed their leaflets. Facsimiles of their publications and letters are part of the pavement, looking as if they have been dropped on the ground for someone to pick up.
Scholl, as well as her friends were students, some who in the course of their time of study who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht as medics, serving on the Russian front before returning to the University. There were five of them, Sophie, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorrel, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst, plus one of their professors, Professor Dr. Kurt Huber who began a resistance cell that focused on telling the truth about the crimes of the Nazi regime, and the lies of Hitler.
Telling the truth in a dictatorship is dangerous and although Sophie and her companions could have remained silent they had consciences that were guided by reason and human rights, as well as by their Christian faith, a faith which remained despite their aversion to the institutional church for its complicity with the Nazis. As she stood before Freisler and the Volksgericht she was recorded as saying:
“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”
Too many people lacked the courage to speak as Sophie did in her day as all too many do today. It is far easier to take the path of least resistance. Laurence Rees in his history of Auschwitz wrote:
“…human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice.”
Sophie and her circle of friends in the White Rose chose how courageous people behave in such abominable conditions. They published a series of six leaflets which they printed themselves and distributed around the university, the city, and to like minded people in a number of other cities. They asked those who got them to make as many copies as they could and distribute them. They were in the process of drafting a seventh when Scholl was spotted distributing them at the university by a maintenance man who was a member of the Nazi Party. She and her friends were arrested on February 21st 1943 by the notorious Nazi People’s Court under the direction of Roland Freisler on the 22nd, and executed by beheading at Munich’s Stadelheim Prison on the 23rd.
The members of the White Rose were bold and defiant in the face of evil, of course those that have that kind of courage usually have short life expectancies in a totalitarian state, but they did not back down. Their pamphlets and graffiti criticizing Hitler garnered the attention of the Gestapo and when they were caught they were brutally tortured, but none backed down.
Their criticisms of Hitler and his Third Reich were hard hitting. Since all of the students had spent much of their childhood teenage years in Nazi organizations which were designed to make loyal little Nazis, their resistance came as a shock to many. All were children who could have easily due to their family background taken the easy road, but chose the more honorable and dangerous road.
Their pamphlets are striking, and each focused on a different part or aspect of the Nazi regime. In their first leaflet they wrote:
“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.” They urged their readers “Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism.” And to “Offer passive resistance – resistance – wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!”
Such was their beginning, but they went on to attack the Nazi, leaders, the Nazi system, and especially the silence of their countrymen over the extermination of the Jews and Polish intellectuals. They asked in the second leaflet:
“Why do German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly anyone thinks about that. It is accepted as fact and put out of mind. The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their depredations; and of course they do so…. For through his apathetic behavior he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do; he tolerates this “government” which has taken upon itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!”
In each of the letters they asked their readers to offer some form of resistance to Hitler and the Nazi State but urged passive resistance, but in the third missive they went into more detail, including something that anyone who thinks that they are loyal to their country need to appreciate:
“The meaning and the goal of passive resistance is to topple National Socialism, and in this struggle we must not recoil from any course, any action, whatever its nature. At all points we must oppose National Socialism, wherever it is open to attack. We must soon bring this monster of a state to an end. A victory of fascist Germany in this war would have immeasurable, frightful consequences. The military victory over Bolshevism dare not become the primary concern of the Germans. The defeat of the Nazis must unconditionally be the first order of business… And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present “state” in the most effective way, how he can strike it the most telling blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt…”
Eventually their tracts became more biting, and in fourth the metaphysical linking Hitler to Satan and Anti-Christ.
They wrote:
“Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed…. I ask you, you as a Christian wrestling for the preservation of your greatest treasure, whether you hesitate, whether you incline toward intrigue, calculation, or procrastination in the hope that someone else will raise his arm in your defence? Has God not given you the strength, the will to fight? We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.”
In the fifth leaflet they spoke of where the Nazi war effort would end and the responsibility of not only Hitler but the German people for it:
“It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and closer. But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. Victory at any price! is inscribed on their banner. “I will fight to the last man,” says Hitler-but in the meantime the war has already been lost…. Do not believe that Germany’s welfare is linked to the victory of national Socialism for good or ill. A criminal regime cannot achieve a German victory. Separate yourselves in time from everything connected with National Socialism. In the aftermath a terrible but just judgment will be meted out to those who stayed in hiding, who were cowardly and hesitant.”
In the aftermath of the disaster at Stalingrad they published their sixth and last issue before being caught. In it they urged Germans to fight against the Nazi Party and regime, and confronted the way that since its inception Hitler and the Party corrupted the meaning of honor and freedom:
“Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German – it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of “freedom and honor of the German nation” throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew.”
Just over two weeks later they were caught and in Freisler’s People’s Court convicted and executed. During their trial, if it can be called that, Freisler and others expressed their shock that young Germans could commit treason. Sophie had no problem confronting her accusers:
Her last words before going to the guillotine were unapologetic: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” On the back of the order condemning her to death she wrote the word Freedom.
There are leaders in many nations today intent on destroying freedom and in many places the people and the country’d institutions fall in behind them, usually by painting pictures of threats so imminent that people willingly trade real freedom for a false security. It is a dangerous world and all of us must be alert to changes in society and question what comes out of the mouths of leaders, and even more so their true believer followers.
Sophie Scholl and her companions understood the risk, but they got their message heard at the highest level of government, and most were killed. But their example of courage and belief in freedom and human rights is still stronger that they mightiest despot, and unlike their mighty yet evil rulers, they are the ones that Germany remembers.
Last year I visited her grave in Munich’s Friedhof at Perlacher Forst, it is humble but gravesite, but it is obviously a place of remembrance and pilgrimage. When I go o Munich this year I will again make my pilgrimage to places where she and the White Rose used non-violent protest to speak truth about the Hitler regime when most of the population, knowing the truth did nothing to resist.
I think that there is a lesson for us as well, and I think that it is a lesson that many of our young people will understand that better than their elders, especially in the age of President Trump. That my friends gives me hope for the future, young people like Sophie Scholl might be all that stands in the way of the destruction of our Republic.
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