Was there ever any doubt?

On Tyranny

Answering The Kennedys Call

Amazon.com

Whether or not President Donald Trump ever owned a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, stories abound of its existence with followers such as Steve Bannon, who was reported to have gifted him a signed copy when part of Trump’s campaign.

What is most disturbing to Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a scholar of the Holocaust, is that so many of Donald Trump’s supporters espouse Hitler’s program of white (instead of Aryan) nationalism, which could lead to a similar outcome if such a demagogue ever rose to power in the United States of America.

You say that’s not possible with our 229-year old democratic institutions enshrined in the U.S. Constitution?

Professor Snyder writes in his Prologue: “History does not repeat, but it instructs…Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

And he has listed 20 signs that help us to learn how to remain free from past tyrannies:

1. 1. Do not obey in advance.
2. 2. Defend institutions.
3. 3. Beware the one-party state.
4. 4. Take responsibility for thr face of the world.
5. 5. Remember professional ethics.
6. 6. Be wary of paramilitaries.
7. 7. Be reflective if you must be armed.
8. 8. Stand out.
9. 9. Be kind to your language.
10. 10. Believe in truth.
11. 11. Investigate.
12. 12. Make eye contact and small talk
13. 13. Practice corporeal politics.
14. 14. Establish a private life.
15. 15. Contribute to good causes.
16. 16. Learn from peers in other countries.
17. 17. Listen for dangerous words.
18. 18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
19. 19. Be a patriot.
20. 20. Be as courageous as you can.

Many of these maxims may seem self-evident, but are necessary for a participatory democracy to exist. “Believe in truth” may seem to be self-evident, but only works if one is willing to “Investigate” untruths, or truthiness, or alternative facts; terms coined by Trump administration officials to deny reality—whether it be the reality of damage done by Republican tax cuts, trade wars, and immigrant caravans that are made up mostly of women and children fleeing terror in their own countries, rather than criminals.

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” says Professor Snyder. “If nothing is true then no one can criticize power.”

“Be kind to your language” is a corollary maxim, which means think for yourself and not be bound up in mass media language and thoughts. Read books, rather than be mesmerized by the Internet. Radio was the medium Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels used to hypnotize the German people with Hitler’s speeches.

“Listen for dangerous words” is another corollary. Words have meanings. How many times have we heard President Trump use the words ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’ to mischaracterize Muslims and Hispanic immigrants?

They give license to President Trump to invoke emergency declarations, which justified his use of emergency powers to slap aluminum and steel tariffs on our allies, while withdrawing from existing trade agreements that in fact protected us from unfair competition, and call up U.S. Troops to supposedly defend our southern border from the approaching immigrant caravans.

“Modern tyranny is terror management,” says Professor Snyder. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives…The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution opposition parties, the suspension of expression.”

Nothing is more dangerous to Democracy than an immoral and lawless leader who cares only to enhance his own power and wealth, or an adult citizen that doesn’t vote.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Shutdown vs. “S***hole” Countries

Popular Economics Weekly

The just ended government shutdown has little to do with 9 million children’s health insurance under the CHIP plan, or extending the Dreamers protection under DACA. It really has to do with President Trump’s insistence on shutting down immigration from non-white countries, as was evident from Trump’s “S***hole” comments that he wanted to limit immigration from African and other non-white countries.

What is so shocking about Trump’s comments is they repeat those of one who he claims not to admire. Adolf Hitler in 1928 openly admired America’s racist policies of that time that excluded non-whites and Jews from immigrating to the U.S.:

“The American Union feels itself to be a Nordic-German state and by no means an international porridge of peoples. This is revealed by its immigration quotas ... Scandinavians … then Englishmen and finally Germans have been accorded the largest contingent,” said Hitler even before the Nazi’s took power.

Specifically, Hitler admired the US Immigration Act of 1924 – also known as the Johnson-Reed Act – “which had erected openly racist barriers to immigration on the basis of a “national quota” system,” according to Yale Law Professor James Whitman.

“It was not until the 1965 US Immigration and Nationality Act that the US began to separate itself from the worst aspects of its racist past. And, as Trump’s presidency makes clear, that past has yet to be permanently overcome,” said Professor Whitman in a Project Syndicate article.

There is a reason why US immigration laws became more open. The US has always suffered from a labor shortage, so that it has been newly arrived immigrants that have filled the labor deficiency.

PEW Research states that More than 41 million immigrants lived in the U.S. as of 2013, more than four times as many as was the case in 1960 and 1970. By comparison, the U.S.-born population is only about 1.6 times the size it was in 1960. Immigrant population growth alone has accounted for 29 percent of U.S. population growth since 2000.

That is the most glaring sign that new workers are needed to maintain economic growth. US population growth cannot keep up with our demand for new workers. There is no other way to fill the 6 million job openings reported each month in the Labor Department’s JOLTS report.

Debate on the current House bill that doesn’t include an extension of the Dreamers’ protections was continued for 3 weeks, in the hopes that a bi-partisan bill keeping open the door for immigrants from what President Trump considers to be “S***hole”, non-white countries will be passed.

So this is important for economic reasons; as well as recognizing that America has always been a land of immigrants; that we keep a flow of qualified immigrants and their families coming from countries that can provide the workforce America has always needed to grow and prosper.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen