Memory to the Rescue
Margaret Randall
La autora es poeta, académica y activista.
Foto de la autora: © Kory Suzuki
The most frightening aspect of our current situation isn’t the assault by a sociopathic president but the fact that roughly half the population supports him. Republican lawmakers, with few exceptions, fall in line behind his every crime. And the citizens who support him continue to do so even when his actions may hurt them personally.
Situations tend to look and feel different from inside than from far away. Time as well as geographical distance adds to this dual perspective. We look back at Germany during the rise of Nazi fascism in the 1930s, and we may delude ourselves into thinking that we can locate the tipping point, the moment when it was too late for the resistance to gain the upper hand, when vulnerable citizens should have left the country if they hoped to survive, and more. At the time, those moments were complicated by the emotions accompanying each person’s situation and ability to make choices. The answers were not so obvious and differed depending on who you were. To say nothing of the fact that many people who wanted to staunch the power of racist hatred felt the avalanche of power launched against them was overwhelming.
In the United States today we are experiencing a similar political situation. And most of us are reacting with a similar lack of clarity, a similar indecision. In a remarkably short time, Donald Trump has taken our nation from a liberal democracy to the threshold of neo-fascism. In responding to his multi-pronged attacks on citizen agency, most of us continue to think of our country as fundamentally democratic, incapable of being destroyed by a narcissistic criminal and his cronies.
As the administration has gained in power it has perpetrated far-ranging crimes. It denies climate change and has withdrawn from every hopeful international pact for cooperation. It makes the rejection of common sense precautions to keep us safe from the current pandemic an issue of false «patriotism,» claiming that by disregarding them we can show that we are strong. It sends refugees to concentration camps, separates children from their parents, and sterilizes immigrant women without their knowledge or consent. It fills our judiciary with rightwing judges, including a Supreme Court justice who resembles someone out of Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It has gutted our departments of Justice and State, rendering them inoperable for their intended purposes. It has stripped citizens of access to healthcare. It constantly denigrates women and minorities. It has intensified decades of weakening public education.
We have fewer and fewer tools with which to fight back. With a presidential election looming and four more years of this presidency hanging in the balance, Trump speaks ever more frequently about simply staying in office. I would venture to say that most citizens don’t take him seriously. All our efforts against him are defensive.
As was true in Hitler’s Germany, Trump has convinced middle- and upper-class Americans that they will benefit economically from his policies. Those policies have indeed been good for corporations and the very rich. They continue to hurt working people and create larger and larger numbers of unemployed and poor. Germany’s master race concept favored Aryan genes; millions of Jews, Romanis, homosexuals, and those with physical or mental disabilities were forced into concentration camps, starved, tortured and exterminated.
Mid-twentieth century fascism originated with Mussolini in Italy, spread to Germany and Japan, and as German troops advanced across Europe took root in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries. Today’s neofascism is not limited to the US. It has taken hold in Brazil, Hungary, Myanmar and elsewhere. We are not struggling against its stronghold in a single country but a movement with global pretensions. And we are doing so in an era in which the Internet and social media make the transmission of information instantaneous. A lie becomes «truth» in a millisecond, just as truth is easily made to lack credibility in the same length of time.
From within a country with an autocratic administration that spawns this swirl of lies and vicious acts, can we tell where the point of no return may be? What must we do, how do we do it, and when?
Leaving the country is not an option for most people. And why would we want to leave our homeland to galloping devastation? Most of us want to stay and protect it, keep it from harm and from harming others. The real question, and it is an urgent one, is: can we reimagine the country we want and need? Can we do this in time? And if so, how?
The most frightening aspect of our current situation isn’t the assault by a sociopathic president but the fact that roughly half the population supports him. Republican lawmakers, with few exceptions, fall in line behind his every crime. And the citizens who support him continue to do so even when his actions may hurt them personally.
In 1940 Germany, membership in the Nazi Party only amounted to 9% of the population. This figure didn’t include young people, who were being roused to blind patriotism through the Nazi youth movement. But in Germany’s last free election, generally considered to be that of 1932, the Nazi party won with 33% of the vote. In today’s United States, a May 2020 Gallup poll found that 31% of Americans identify as Democrats, 25% as Republicans, and 40% as Independents. These figures give a slight edge to Democrats although, when it comes to their vote, Independents may go either way. Joe Biden has an edge in most polls, but it is a small one. And in many of the states that matter most in our electoral college system, Trump has a lead. At the very least, these figures bode well for a Trump reelection. And when we factor in his repeated declarations that he will not leave office no matter what, the threat becomes more real.
I am 84, old enough to remember the horrors of World War II, the mass torture and death of millions, and the ideology that spawned such atrocities. Most US citizens are much younger. They cannot draw on these memories. And memory itself is intentionally being erased, through tendentious education, a tendency to look at America and Americans through rose-colored glasses, and a continuous stream of lies that are repeated so often they become a new and unquestioned «truth.»
In 2017, a Körber Foundation survey found that forty percent of fourteen-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was. A similar culture of forgetfulness exists in the United States; our textbooks and news reports emphasize the glorious aspects of our participation in World War II, distorting, passing over or ignoring events and periods of which we should feel ashamed. We have a similar memory loss when it comes to all aspects of history.
Global warming that has resulted in natural disasters such as the devastating wildfires engulfing the western part of our country, a pandemic that won’t let go and which the Trump administration has woefully mismanaged, racially-motivated violence intensifying throughout the land, a woman’s right to choose imperiled by a Trump appointee to the Supreme Court, increased violence against LGBTQ people, impending economic doom and more and more people losing their homes, jobs, healthcare and other necessities, combine to show those of us paying attention that we must act now.
Today we are witnessing a number of powerful movements for change in the United States. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Parkland youth and other sectorial movements bring hundreds of thousands into the streets. Young people are central to these efforts. This is no time for sectarianism. We must pull these responses together to motivate a serious in-depth public conversation and create a nationwide multi-issue movement capable of pushing the political needle. And we must do this quickly. We have no time to lose.
But beyond this obvious wish list, I have no ready advice. I am horrified by the fact that those of us fighting for positive social change are on the defensive, in some cases on the ropes. We are reacting rather than acting. And, although I mostly blame Republicans who clearly feel it is more important for them to follow their leader than to think for themselves, I also blame an entrenched Democratic party machine with its history of arrogance and, yes, also lies. We must vote Democratic in November; that goes without saying. But we must also begin to hold our political leaders to more transparent standards. Until we have a government that really does reflect and respond to our values and needs, we will always be in danger of a fascist future.
