Picture it:
In the name of national security, civil liberties are being curtailed. People are confined without arrest, charge, or trial.
The leader restricts his appearances to orchestrated media events where supporters are visible by the thousands but protests are kept at a distance.
The leader, using a guise of national security, chooses which acts of the legislature he will follow, and which he will not. Those who criticize are labeled “traitors.”
Legislators, with few exceptions, abandon their constituted roles, and fail to provide any balance of power. There is often little difference between the sitting legislature and a dissolved one.
The governmental rhetoric is filled with identified villains, all labeled by ethnic or religious group. “They” are evil, while “we” are true patriots.
A march to war is created to “protect the homeland,” with pre-emptive entry into other countries justified without evidence or even later proof.
Back home, the economics of indebtedness slowly push the upper classes into greater wealth and protection from life’s realities while the lower classes fall deeper and deeper away from affluence.
Based on violent intimidations of the past, the dilution of voting protections, and proven manipulations of elections, there is a desperate distrust of the next election as being capable of having any fairness at all. Disillusion sweeps the country even as fear and despair combine to create a paradox of wanting both change and stability at the same time.
Around the world, the country’s reputation tumbles, and the leader explains this decline of status as evidence of our righteousness and the evil of the rest of the world. Even former allies now questioning tactics are recast as enemies.
And few, very few – against this backdrop of rhetoric, intimidation, manipulation, and false scarcity – raise any voices in protest.
And I ask you: which am I describing: 1931 Germany or 2006 America?
The parallels are frightening.
But even more frightening would be if we were to think that 2006 America is 1931 Germany.
The warning signals are all there. The parallels are all drawn. The events look disturbingly familiar. But the central questions are not about the events, but about reactions to them.
If we allow ourselves to be lulled into thinking that this time things are just as they were in the rise of Nazism, we will be playing right into the hands of repression and fascism.
When things vary from the historical patterns, as they certainly will, we will heave a sigh of relief and think all is well. But evil raises its ugly head with different disguises each time.
In many ways, the Germans of 1931 showed all the signs of a deep loss, a profound grief, a death unfolding. It may have been the loss of innocence in World War I; it may have been the grief of everyday life in a time of chaotic inflation, uncertain cultural values, rampant demagoguery; it may have been the death of hope for the future of the world. Like the dying patient, 1931 Germany was filled with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and an ironic measure of acceptance.
You know what I am talking about:
DENIAL - they said “Not here, not us!” They refused to think that the land of Goethe and Beethoven could be anything less than humane.
Today the equivalent is the attitude that our Constitution will protect us from anyone or anything. It is the belief that the electoral process in our nation cannot be tainted. It is the acceptance of unwarranted searches and detentions as a matter of homeland security.
As Andrew Jackson said, “eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty,” and Edmund Burke reminded us, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
In 1931 Germany they chose denial - in 2006 America we can learn from how bad a mistake that was, and choose instead a cold, hard, even cynical reality. To demand facts when the name of the game is spin may be the great definition of patriotism.
AND we also need to protect against hyperbole and paranoia, and the other attributes of conspiracy theories - it does not serve the cause of real freedom to either understate or overstate the situation. What these times call for are clear eyes, not eyes clouded by the dogmas of right or left.
Don’t excuse - don’t exaggerate - get real!
ANGER - In his Three Comrades, Erich Marie Remarque describes a political rally typical of Germany between the wars - a charismatic speaker using social misery as a foundation for offering platitudes of security and abundances. Later in the evening the competing meetings of political loyalties were interrupted by those of differing viewpoints, interrupted with shouts, and fists, and clubs, and guns. Systems of violence and repression were met with violence and repression - attitudes, words, weapons.
Today that anger repeats in the deep divisiveness which seeks to accentuate difference rather than find connection. The intense calls to party and national loyalty of 1931 are remembered in today’s angry calls to partisanship.
“If you are not with us, you are against us,” was a ruling motif of the emergent nationalism of Germany born out of their national anger over feeling of loss - loss of status, loss of image, loss of economic security.
We hear the same message in 2006 America, as many from the top down deal with anger born out of our own national feelings of loss from 9/11 and beyond.
But, as we know from the German experience, violence which is the response to violence create a culture of violence not a culture of justice, understanding, equity. As Gandhi reminds us, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” and as Dr. King reminds us, “One day we come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
1931, Germany chose the path of violence - our challenge in 2006 is to find ways to meet anger with a more redemptive response. Let me suggest a simple replacement - love - a fierce love. A love which does not focus its energy on what is wrong, but rather on what could be right. A passion which remembers the vision of a better tomorrow, and loves that vision beyond words.
Do get angry - get visionary and be loving.
BARGAINING - as the final remnants of the Weimar Republic were about to be swept under the carpet of oppression, the leaders who opposed the incipient trends made concession after concession. Pastor Niemoeller reminded us of the tragedy of that path.
On the international scene, the movement was given its own name - appeasement - a trend which found its pinnacle in Neville Chamberlain and his claim of “peace in our time” with Herr Hitler. Millions had already been rounded up and imprisoned or killed, the invasion of Poland was only days away, yet nations were willing to bargain.
In that bargaining, they unwittingly energized the very movement they sought to disable.
Every time a bargain is struck between the visionary, ethical, inclusive and the selfish, menacing, exclusive, some of the power of the good is ceded to the evil. A bad concept becomes an evil movement through the cooperation of the people of good will.
Today, hardly a day goes by that one of our elected national legislators does not talk about needing to compromise with the White House on some issue of moral standing. With rare exceptions, our nation has adopted a stance of bargaining and appeasement with the few elected and the many self-appointed leaders whose ideology is far from democratic, inclusive, progressive, and close to repressive, selective, and elitist. Day by day, the talk is the same: how can we, the people, reach a compromise with an Executive Branch which announces over and over again policies with no room for negotiation.
An alternative to a culture of bargaining is a culture of honesty. Bargaining is based on the use of stratagems, manipulations, and a politic of power. The goal of such bargaining and appeasement is not to achieve the visionary and ideal, but to settle for something less, a something which is defined by expediency not values.
In the alternative universe of honesty, expediency is replaced with truth, and a faith in the power of that truth. As Robert Weston reminds us, “Truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger, more secure.”
1931 Germany chose to bargain away its freedoms - our challenge in 2006 America is to find that faith which will sustain us as we speak our truth, looking more for synthesis than appeasement.
Be honest - make the simple test: “Is it the truth?” a mantra not only for ourselves but also for everything we think, say, or do. Which means as tempting as it may be to run as far away from appeasement as we can, turning to our own puffery and jingoism is no better.
The truth is sufficient when it is spoken honestly.
DEPRESSION - the signs of depression were ubiquitous: rampant unrelieved fears, pervasive apathy, a leveling of individual spirit, a withdrawal from familiar social activity, and a growth of unhealthy activities. Germany between the wars slowly declined into a community of depression. The mundane details of everyday life in a stressful time sapped almost all of the common energies of individuals and communities. When we ask why no one stood up to the growing threat, one answer was that many were just too depressed by life’s realities to have the energy to stand up for or to anything.
I ask you to think about yourself and your own community -
do you see the same signs of depression?
• people essentially disheartened by the senseless deaths in a war initiated on falsehoods;
• people essentially disheartened by the growing use of fear to control our society;
• people essentially disheartened by an Executive Branch and most of the Legislative Branch who do not represent the values and views of we, the people;
• people essentially disheartened by a growing disparity between a world of abundance and the pervasive experience of poverty, illness, poor education, and social isolation.
The result of deep depression is a climate of acquiescence - “sure, whatever.”
We need to be able and to be willing to speak courage to that depression. If, and this is the contingent “if,” we have not invested our energies in reacting and we have not bargained away our energies, then we, yes you and me, we can become voices, lives, models of courage in the face of anything. We can remind people that there can be meaning on the other side of anything, and that courage born in that recognition can make the difference.
1931 Germany choose to live within its social depression - the challenge for us in 2006 America is to find our voices of courage, not shrill shouts but strong, gentle, sustaining, supportive voices which affirm the capacity of every woman, every man, every teen, every child. Whenever we speak of things being desperate, of being beyond our control, we energize depression. Whenever we speak of human capacity and individual potential, we energize courage.
So be spokespersons for courage - and if you are discouraged yourself, seek out and be with others of courage who can encourage you.
ACCEPTANCE - almost unbelievably, the vast majority of Germans in the 1930s went about life as if nothing were happening. At no time in the rise of Nazism did anything close to a majority actually participate in the activities of the party.
Instead, the average person chose to neither act nor react. In talking with Germans who lived in that era, the stories are all the same: “I did not realize how much I accepted as normal until it became personal.”
I hear the same thing today, here in America. A great mass of Americans for whom life is challenging enough without challenging the direction we are headed. In fact, the more that people have to struggle for the elements of those basic qualities of life, the more likely they are to accept what is happening because it takes so much energy to simply to live.
But, we know the antidote to that kind of acceptance - and it is action. The kind of action which energizes one.
Real acceptance which grows out of love, honesty, and courage calls us to action - we do not accept the situation - we accept that we are agents of the future we want.
Real acceptance, in terms of personal loss as well as cultural loss, means that we can once again see ourselves as agents of meaning, agents of change, agents of empowerment.
Active, not passive.
Assertive, not angry.
Visionary, not reactive.
Complacency is not acceptance.
1931 Germany choose to accept their complacency - in America in 2006, we also have to choose: whether we will accept an imposed role of obedience to the wills of others or our natural role of actively living out our own wills.
Get active, or lose yourself!
- - - -
2006 America becomes 1931 Germany if we respond with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and complacent acceptance arising out of fear and doubt of ourselves, of others, and of the culture in which we live.
2006 America instead becomes a prelude to a promising future if we respond with realism, love, honesty, courage, and action, all inspired by a vision of a better day yet to come because we view ourselves as agents of change and fulfillment.
Which scenario will you choose?
What will you do or say to fulfill that choice?
What will you do or say “lest we forget,” so that we can truly say “never again.”
Which will you choose to live in - 1931 Germany, or an America in 2006 crafted with your vision, growing out of your values, and reaching toward your dreams.
Which will you choose?