Tag: authoritarianism

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History Warns Us — But what do we hear?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson
September 30th, 2023
www.zeppscommentaries.online

In 2017 there was a pitch-black dark comedy called The Death of Stalin. A scalpel-sharp political satire, it pasquinaded the utter madness and viciousness that accompanies the decline of all authoritarian governments. It was the age of Stalin at its ultimate. The metronome in the background was the sound of people who were guilty of being accused of anything or nothing being dragged into interrogation cells and shot. At the higher levels of power, the arena of government management, both legal and extralegal, played out like a kindergarten recess where all the children are armed with AR-15s and grenades. With people like Steve Buscemi and Michael Palin it’s side-splittingly funny from the comfort of your living room and if you don’t think too hard about the reality of what you are watching. You can stream a free and legal version of the film at Tubi.
Anyone with even an ordinary understanding of history is going to feel a bit of disquiet while watching the movie. You see, while it’s clearly a parody, it isn’t an exaggeration. While the end of the Stalin era was marked by spasmodic and insane viciousness, the entire era of Stalin was one of persecution, genocide, blind obedience to mad authority, wholesale wasting of lives, and willful blindness by the millions who witnessed all this and said nothing.
But it’s not unique to Stalinism. Quite the opposite. It is a set-in-stone feature of all authoritarian regimes. All of them. No exceptions. All authoritarian structures have the cruelty and insanity that was so evident during the reign of Stalin. It doesn’t matter if they are theocracies, absolute monarchies, fascist or dictatorship, or political or social movements that keep leadership unaccountable to the followers and citizenry. They all become corrupt, brutal, insensate, and intolerant of any dissent of any kind. No exceptions.
The reason is that the coin of such realms is money and power. Nothing else. And those drawn to serve in such regimes are the very worst people for such positions. They are people who value money and power and nothing else. The power struggles are inevitable, and rapidly become no-holds-barred destructive frenzies on incurring court favor and amassing an ever-greater unassailable authority.
Quite often such regimes are “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” as Winston Churchill famously described the machinations of the Kremlin during the Stalin era. The only times we get a look at their inner workings are during their ascendancy, and when they collapse. Hitler ran for office in the 1920s and wrote a book in prison that made no effort to hide his plans for genocide and war. That Nazism devolved into utter lunacy in short order came as no real surprise to historians, who have an endless parade of tyrants and movements and churches they could compare the Nazi regime to. A good correlation to Death of Stalin would be Downfall (Der Untergang) 2004 film by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Source of thousands of “Hitler Finds Out” memes, the movie detailed the final days of the Nazi regime. Again, available to watch for free on Tubi. Not intended as a comedy, but eerily similar, because the pathology of the social phenomenon is essentially identical.
Stalin, while in his role of “Lenin’s left foot” wrote in Marxism and the National Question this summation: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” You don’t have to squint very hard to see the bones of “Ein Volk. Ein Reich. Ein Fuhrer” behind that thought. The {collective, state, church} above all, accountable only to itself.
Authoritarians usually make no real secret of what they are or what their plans are for you. But they wrap the malice in conspiracy theories and claims that you are the victim of enemies, real and imagined, inside or outside your nation. Most Americans are familiar with the hatred Republicans spit at single moms for daring to ask for help raising their kids, and blandly ignore the trillions stolen by the plutocratic class.
Accountability is the key element. It always has been. Freedom and social progress began only when leaders and prelates and governments had to become accountable for their actions. In the west, it began in 1215, when the King was forced to adopt the Magna Carta, making him responsive to the nobility. It culminated in 1789 with the Constitution, which set out to make the government the design of the people, and very deliberately worked to keep religious entities and the aristocracy out of power. It had mixed results, but it enabled Americans to largely avoid the madness and brutality of autocracy for 200 years. It was an ongoing process, of course. In the beginning, less than 10% of the population actually had rights.
It leaves Americans unprepared for the rise of an authoritarian movement, and even with a half-century of warning signs, most don’t recognize the GOP, hagridden with fascists, plutocrats, dominionists and libertarians, for the extreme danger that it is. Many believe that they lie for you, cheat for you, steal for you, kill for you, to protect your freedoms. It isn’t even intentional dishonesty on their part, usually. It’s willful blindness, denialism carried to an extreme. There are people who earnestly believe Donald Trump is being crucified for us. Most supporters blandly ignore the embrace of racism, deliberate cruelty, and outright Nazism, and parrot the propaganda about how the GOP is conservative, patriotic, and beholden to God.
When you watch the destructive nihilism of Republicans trashing the economy deliberately in a vain effort to pass cruel and draconian laws, or seeking to imprison women for the crime of not wanting to be pregnant, or staging the farcical and inane kangaroo court like the “Biden Impeachment hearings” remember Hitler and Stalin and many others, who made it crystal clear what they were, and what they would become if they seized power. The GOP want to be the Fourth Reich, the new Soviet State.
Denialism stretches to insane lengths. I began by discussing Russia in the throes of the death of Stalin. I’ll return there, only not as seen through the lens of a satire, but from a very grim reality, one described by a master eyewitness of that era, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The acclaimed novelist was, like millions of other Soviet citizenry, incarcerated in Stalin’s vast Gulag prison system (the book itself is part one of “The Gulag Archipelago”). He was there doing a ten-year stretch for “Anti-Soviet Agitation.” The so-called ASA laws allowed the state to imprison anyone for pretty much anything, or nothing at all. One of his cellmates was a peasant, learning to write. He had been taught to sign his name, and, proud of this new accomplishment, signed it wherever he could put pen to paper. One of the papers he used was the daily Pravda, and he signed his name across a picture of Stalin that happened to be there. His party block captain noticed. Ten years, ASA.
Solzhenitsyn was in prison with thousands of others that day in 1953 when news of Stalin’s death was broadcast. These were people whose lives had been destroyed, usually unfairly and often capriciously, and all knew people who had been ground to death under the wheels of the Soviet state. Many had seen the unbelievable carnage that ensued when Stalin attempted to stop the German army behind walls of bloody splintered bones that had been the pride of the Soviet Union. Millions more perished because of the mad agricultural polices of Lysenkoism.
You might think the prisoners all erupted in joy over the death of the man who had ruined their lives and murdered so many of their family and friends. But no! They wept! They wailed! They mourned the loss of this despot as if their own fathers had died (and in many cases, Stalin had caused the deaths of their own fathers!). There was an orgy of unfeigned and unstaged grief, totally genuine. Stalin was the state. He was the father figure. He was the kindly ruler who sometimes had to do hard things for the sake of his people. His victims wept, not for themselves and their loved ones, but for their loss of Stalin.
In the GOP, we find history has repeated itself. These people are showing us what they are, and anyone with any knowledge of history knows what they will do. Without restraint, and without limits, seeing cruelty as strength and freedom as a threat to their authority. Their coin is the frightfulness of madness, the inexorability of blind authority. They want to crush you. They will crush you, and they will work hard to persuade you to praise them as they do so.
Watch the Republicans, and see them for the horrible danger they are.

* * *

The Libertarian Party, and its fascist leaders, are one of the main reasons madness has taken over the Republican party and threatens to destroy all of us. Thom Hartmann, the renowned columnist, has a pair of deeply insightful pieces on the rise of this evil empire.

How Libertarianism is a poison that’s crept into America

And

As Republicans begin phony ‘impeachment hearings’ Democrats are ignoring real crimes

 

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Maus: A Survivor’s Tale — History bleeds us, too

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

History bleeds us, too

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 1st, 2022

There was a huge uproar over the past week over the removal of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale from the shelves of the McMinn County Schools in Tennessee. I doubt the action of the board, which voted 10-0 to ban the graphic novel, was antisemitic, let alone pro-Nazi, but rather reflected the urge toward authoritarian control disguised as concern for the children that is currently sweeping the right. But, coming as it did the day before Holocaust Memorial Day, it was incredibly tone-deaf and showed the basic moral and intellectual cowardice of so called “critical race theory,” or the Bowdlerizing of history to suit a narrative that erases the errors and crimes of authoritarian regimes.

It prompted me to pull out my own copy of Maus and reread it. I first read it about 15 years ago, and thought that the first reading might diminish the impact of a second reading years later. It didn’t. It’s still magnificent, angry, grim, human and utterly brilliant. Using cartoon animals, it humanizes the Holocaust experience in a way that none of the thousands of works about the Holocaust can quite manage.

As a child in London, I heard of the Holocaust, but it was in general terms. “Hitler murdered Jews, Hitler was evil, they used gas.” I don’t think I grasped how uniquely awful it was, but equated it to the other horrible things Hitler did, such as the Blitz, or Dunkirk.

It wasn’t until I was 12 when I learned, in Social Studies in Ottawa, about Auschwitz and Treblinka and what happened there. I remember those particular classes because of the images and the graphic descriptions of victims trying to claw their way out of the gas showers and the hopeless hunch in the shoulders of the inmates in the camps as the Germans raused them hither and yon. We learned about propaganda, and the ability of a society to make an entire segment non-human and remove from them all the protections and benefits of society. (In the same class we learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and read horrific tales of children staggering around with half their skin hanging off their bodies. The kids didn’t die of guilt.)

This was in peaceful, sedate Ottawa, where the worst torment we could imagine was having our books knocked out of our arms by a school bully. Should we have had to imagine the hiss of the gas, the screams of the dying, the despair of the not-yet-dead? Did it make me ashamed?

Well, yes. It made me ashamed to be human. But it also made me aware that I didn’t have to be that way, and should strive never to be that way.

Was it a lesson I needed to learn when I was twelve?

Absolutely.

In subsequent years I learned that what Nazi Germany did, while horrifying in its deliberate approach, wasn’t unique or even special. England has had dozens of Holocausts in the past, including a 13th century attempt to flat-out exterminate the Jews. Canada is only now coming to grips with 300 years of genocide against the First Nations, and lurking in the shadows are the “reform schools” and orphanages that systematically turned children into hamburger. Japan had monstrous war crimes prior to the atomic bombings, and Germany suffered destruction of many cities, including Dresden and Berlin. Even Israel rising from the ashes of the camps, has amassed its own catalogue of war crimes. Nobody is pure, nobody was only a victim. We are all human, and a mixture of these things. That’s why its so important to fight against the warmongers and propagandists and bigots. We may not attain purity, but we should at least try.

Spiegelman’s characters reflect this. His father Vladek (the survivor of the camps) proves to be as bigoted and dismissive of the humanity of African-Americans (Schvartzes) as the Germans and Poles were of his humanity 40 years earlier. Art Spiegelman himself is mildly contemptuous of the history of the Holocaust, equating it to his own feelings of inadequacy and guilt. If it weren’t for those pesky Germans, his older brother, who died at age 6 in the camps some 10 years before his was born, wouldn’t be the unattainable ideal with which he had to compete.

I remember when I first read this, I felt a certain amount of depression. After all he had been through, and Vladek learned nothing of what becomes of dehumanizing others? And Art trivializes the Holocaust over a petty and actually non-existent sibling rivalry?

Well, perhaps I’ve grown since that first read. I understand now that Vladek was heavily damaged by what he went through, and not all of his humanity returned. Further, he was sick and clearly suffering from early-onset dementia. And Art wanted us to see the facile and trivial approach he initially had to his father over the Holocaust as part of showing how he slowly came to grips with it. It’s not exactly something you can process in one sitting like a homily from a calendar page.

In short, the reread helped me to humanize the Spiegelmans. Failing to humanize is, after all, a first step toward dehumanization.

One side note (sort of): A common refrain among right wingers is that the gay pride flag is just like the swastica flag. It’s about like saying having the Star of David on the front of a synagogue is exactly the same as having a swastica on the front of a building. Hitler murdered six million Jews, but that was only half the people he targeted, and homosexuals were probably the second largest group to get shot, gassed, and starved. To equate gays to Hitler is every bit a big a disgrace as equating Jews to Hitler. In their ignorance, the right skip along in the footsteps of Hitler, unaware of where their ideology will lead them. If you feel that way, read Maus and ask yourself where the similarities lie.

Maus, along with about 250 other books targeted by the authoritarian right should be on the shelves of all school libraries. They teach the kids in GERMANY about the Holocaust and it doesn’t destroy them. American kids should be able to handle it. Stephen King has the right idea: kids should flock to read any book the authoritarians want to hide “to protect the kids.”

And let’s get rid of the notion kids need to be protected from the horrors and errors of the past because they might somehow take it personally. Instead, that just leaves them ignorant, and fertile ground to repeat those horrors and errors. And that’s what the authoritarians actually want.

Creator Art Spiegelman

Date 1991

Page count 296 pages

Publisher Pantheon Books

Original publication

Published in Raw

Issues Vol. 1 No. 2 – Vol. 2 No. 3

Date of publication 1980–1991

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Aborting America – “Pro Life” shows its pro-death face

May 15th 2019

Imagine if some religious cult sprang up that declared that cancer was God’s way of calling his children home, and thus it was a sin to do anything to treat cancer. Thus anyone trying to eliminate cancer, including the removal of tumors, should be punished, up to 99 years in prison.

If that sounds pretty whack-a-doodle, reflect on the strange things the mainstream religions in America teach. Bible literalists have to believe such utter nonsense as the talking snake story in Genesis, the Ark story, and the sun holding still in the sky for three days. Non-literalists have to accept such oddities as virgin births, miracles, and power of prayer as being a real thing.

So having a group rising up and declaring that blastomas are an expression of God’s love and must be protected at all costs really isn’t all that far fetched.

That there is no biblical basis for such a belief is pretty irrelevant. After all, ‘God’s Will’ has been used to justify most wars, even against other Christian enemies, an unending bitter strife over mostly worthless land in the middle east, slaughter of indigenous tribes in Africa and the Americas, and even the massacre of cats in Europe (led to the plagues, that, as the rodent population exploded). Jewish and Islamic countries have (and still have) similar atrocities stemming from similar beliefs. Indeed, many of the worst elements of religious savagery in all three main faiths stem from the same source—the Mosaic Law of what Christians call the Old Testament.

But religious-based lunacy can exist independently of weird texts translated hundreds of different times that were originally written by people who didn’t know the Earth was a globe or that lobsters weren’t fish.

This leads to the abortion movement. In America, the Catholic Church always opposed abortion on grounds similar to my hypothetical pro-cancer faith; they thought all human seed was sacred, an expression of divine love, and thus it was a sin to waste seed. At various times and in various places, the church punished and even executed men for the ‘sin’ of masturbation.

When fundamentalists glommed on to the notion of stopping abortion in the wake of Roe v Wade, they brought their own brand of fundamentalist lunacy to the table. Every zygote possessed a soul and was an expression of God’s will.

Years ago, I came across a ‘public service announcement’ put out by some of the religious lunatics that featured an animation of a full-term baby being aborted, and as she (curly blonde hair and pink bow in her hair, the way most female babies are born) is dying, she’s screaming “Mommy! Mommy! Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you LOVE me?”

I laughed at the sheer absurdity of that cartoon, but here we are, 30 years later, and millions of Americans believe a truly savage blood libel spread by Republicans and Fox News that babies—real, actual babies—are being aborted after they are born because that is what Roe v Wade demands.

John Oliver had a clip of some intellectual abortion standing in the Alabama Legislature, droning on about “Baby Fetus” and even providing supposed quotes from this etymological absurdity. Two days later, Alabama passed a draconian law banning all abortion and providing life sentences to anyone performing or getting an abortion.

There’s an old saying: “People who can be persuaded to believe absurdities can be led to commit atrocities.”

It’s not even Biblical. The Bible doesn’t mention abortion, although it does condone ripping babies from the wombs of the women of vanquished foes and dashing their brains out against a rock. The New Testament has nothing to say about abortion, even though Nazareth had no shortage of midwifes who had abortifacient herbs and crude tools to physically induce abortion. Further, in many levels of society in that time and place, it wasn’t uncommon for female babies to be drowned or used to break rocks because female children were expensive and of limited use. For some reason, Jesus never did have an opinion on that.

Dressed up as a religious and moral crusade, the anti-abortion movement is neither. It doesn’t really care about “the life of a child,” as witness the fact that few if any of the people running the movement have any provisions whatsoever for the care and feeding of these involuntary children, or helping the mothers in any significant way, or otherwise assuming any responsibility.

It is, instead, a naked authoritarian power grab. It places a large segment of the female population in a precarious role where they can be effectively enslaved, either by pregnancy or the mere fear of pregnancy. If Alabama’s law is allowed to stand, the move will be on to ban birth control of all kinds. In the name of God, of course.

It’s a political movement, as well. The brownshirts of the GOP have long used the religiously insane as a handy bludgeon to enforce their more authoritarian dictates, such as enforced worship of the police and military, and to justify discrimination and segregation.

And if you take a look at the states joining the rush to knock down Roe v. Wade, with the exception of Ohio, all are in southern states with long histories of repressive authoritarians backed by the iron dictates of corrupt pastors.

It’s time to recognize the ‘pro-life’ for what it is: it’s not pro-anything. It’s anti-women, anti-choice, anti-individual, and anti-freedom. It opposes everything America stands for, including the right for every person not to have someone else’s religious dictates imposed upon them. No woman should be enslaved by some politician lying about God’s will. Nobody should have to follow the religious taboos of some church if they don’t want.

They are anti-America, and should be treated, not as voices of some god, but as enemies to American rights and freedoms.

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