Issue #11
July 2002
 |
 |
 |
It Could Happen (is happening) Here A sermon Delivered to The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Chautauqua, NY by The Rev. Dave Weissbard 7/28/02
Reading from They Thought They Were Free Milton Mayer
Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by flood or fire advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks. Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every private act - a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician - becomes a public act. Every private right - to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing press - becomes a public right. Every private institution - the hospital, the church, the club - becomes a public institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.
The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought - and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial communities, the tribe, reemerges; its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an "authoritarian personality." A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens - 95 per cent or so of the population - duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly, but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.
The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul, consuming its members for its own purposes. For the duration of the emergency, the city does not exist for the citizen, but the citizen for the city. . . .
The Sermon
[9/11]
In my first sermon following the events of 9/11, I took an approach that fits a category which has been condemned in the conservative media as "liberal self-hate." I suggested that our nation's policies and actions contributed to what happened that day. Having been raped, as it were, we were no longer virgins and our view of the world could no longer be so naive. While in no way justifying what the terrorists did, I suggested that we needed to look at what we were doing that might have made us the targets. I concluded that sermon:
My friends, we are not just talking idealistic morality here - as important as that is. I am talking pragmatism. The bellicose approach our leaders are taking will have a predictable outcome - violence will simply reinforce the distorted vision of America which bin Laden has been preaching to his followers. And others around the world, having seen the giant brought to its knees, may try to up the stakes. A call to 911 has been placed. This is a call to awaken. The answer to it does not lie in granting unjust demands from anyone, but in seeking greater justice for all the world's peoples. Only thus can we "hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope" and attain "peace for lands afar and [ours]."
I consider that a hopeful sermon - but perhaps a naively hopeful one. People do not always learn the same things from experience.
Most American politicians have taken the approach that on 9/11 we were totally innocent victims of people who have the destruction of America as their goal. That is the consistent message from the White House. In an article in "Foreign Affairs," Michael Doran, a Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, suggested that the real significance of 9/11 was that it was done precisely to manipulate us into the response we took, in the belief that such a response would further the destruction of Western leaning governments in the Middle East. We were not the point. Doran said, "War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself, but rather an instrument designed to help [bin Laden's] brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers." I see this not as in conflict with the view I expressed, but as a sophisticated additional dimension.
[the greatest danger]
I say all of this as a preface to focusing our attention on what I fear could be the greatest, even if unintended, impact of 9/11: the destruction of American democracy as we have known it. I believe we are in danger of destroying our nation from within - a victory which would exceed the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden. I do not say this lightly. I have agonized over this for months as I have watched the developments, but there is a pattern here which we ignore at our own peril.
There are two books which I have found helpful in placing what is happening in our nation today in context.
[They Thought They Were Free]
I have always been troubled by the easy explanations we are offered about how Germany turned to the Nazis. Germany was, perhaps, the best educated, the most civilized, the most liberal nation in the world. Some people want to use the explanation of an insane demagogue seizing power, but that is too simplistic.
Ten years after the Second World War, Milton Mayer went to Germany as a visiting professor. He wanted to try to understand better what national socialism had meant to the German people. The result was his book, They Thought They Were Free, which was published in 1954.
Mayer established relationships with ten men. Nine of them:
decent, hardworking, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew or knows Nazism as we knew it and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.
The border adjustments of the Versailles treaty and the continuing hostility of its neighbors made Germany experience a high level of insecurity. The Germans perceived themselves as the kind of besieged city that Mayer described in the section Karen read earlier. They were under a great deal of pressure and they were ripe for someone who would relieve that pressure.
From 1933 on, the Germans were told that they were fighting for their lives, and it didn't take much to convince them. A philologist at the university told Mayer:
What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. . . . . What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap, and reassured those who would otherwise have been worried about it.
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure, or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social problems. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
[It Can't Happen Here?]
For the second book we step back 19 years before Mayer to It Can't Happen Here, a novel written in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis during the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain. Lewis suggested fictionally a possible scenario for America in which, in spite of, or possibly because of, our naive assumption that "It Can't Happen Here," perhaps it could.
The central character of the novel is Doremus Jessup, the son of a Universalist minister, who is a small town newspaper editor in Vermont. With Doremus, we experience the election in 1936 of a populist demagogue, Senator Berzelius Windrip as President on the Democratic ticket. His opponent was Senator Walt Trowbridge, a very competent, but far more boring Republican. FDR, appalled by what Windrup stood for but unwilling to support a Republican, ran as a third party candidate, thus assuring the Democratic victory.
Windrip had a 15-point program which included anti-Semitic and racist planks, a promise to cap the salaries of the rich, and to give every household $5,000.
The 4th plank is of interest:
Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render all homage, do we Americans hold our own vast power, we shall guarantee to all persons absolute freedom of religious worship, provided, however, that no atheist, agnostic, believer in black magic, nor any Jew who shall fail to swear allegiance to the new Testament, or any person of any faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to hold any public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge or as a physician, except in the category of Obstetrics.
The 15th plank was the key one:
Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b) that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c) that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.
An allegedly grass-roots organization, the League of Forgotten Men, helps to carry Buzz Windrip into office and almost immediately after the election, the civil rights of Americans vanish. The Congress capitulates (those members who don't are imprisoned). With his mandate to govern, Windrip and his cronies eliminate state and local governments. Justice is administered by kangaroo courts, concentration camps are set up for those who express dissenting views.
Lewis wrote:
Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe."
For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The Chief [as the President was known] was photographed playing poker in shirt sleeves and with a derby on the back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur, and a pair of rugged steel workers . . .
All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuff hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Prussia.
Doremus . . . began to see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest - sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipes of officials, the accompanying blows. the formal beatings when the prisoner is forced to count the blows until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves -
Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had in central Europe.
In the book, the dictatorial president is replaced after two years in a coup by his Secretary of State Lee Sarason, one of his henchmen, who is a month later assassinated by his Secretary of War. The defeated Republican candidate and the elected Vice-President, who has resigned, head an underground movement which is working from Canada to restore democracy, and Doremus Jessup becomes a spy for that movement.
The book concludes with Jessup being awakened with a warning that a posse is after him:
So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom. And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die.
[too extreme?]
There is a sense in which the horrors Lewis paints in his portrait of a possible America are too extreme to imagine. It couldn't happen here as easily, as smoothly as he depicts it. Part of what he was playing against, of course, was the misery of the Depression and the widespread dissatisfaction. Having heard interviews with Pat Buchanan about his most recent book, he appears to be a modern equivalent of the fictional Buzz Windrip, playing on many of the same themes of racism and fear, and he was clearly not swept into office - at least yet. But our current Attorney General's pronouncements and actions bear a striking resemblance to many of the principles of Buzz Windrup's platform. The news today is perilously close to the novel.
[America, today]
Sinclair Lewis used racism and jealousy of privilege as his motivators for the election of a demagogue. I believe it takes more. It takes a patriotic frenzy constructed on fear and on feelings of superiority. That's why I have combined Lewis' novel with Mayer's nonfictional analysis of the emergence of dictatorship in Germany. The combination of those two with the current news causes me some terror. We are being told by the present administration that OUR nation is beleaguered, that there are people out there who are trying to destroy OUR way of life, and in order to combat them, it is necessary for us to surrender some of our civil liberties, just as the Germans did.
Look at what has happened in America since 9/11.
[Congressional Authority]
The Congress of the United States voted almost without dissent to support the 342 page USA Patriot bill (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) which those voting had not even read - they had not been given time to digest its implications. The administration demanded action within three days - the Congress took just slightly longer. It ceded to the administrative branch, decisions which the balance of powers demands be kept to the legislature. There are questions about how long the Justice Department had been preparing the bill because it is virtually impossible that so much could have been generated in one week after the attack. Was it in the works before 9/11, being held for the right crisis moment for it to be sprung upon the Congress?
[Executive Authority]
The President has been given a kind of carte blanche to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons . . ." The President has been clear that this list includes any nation which does not support us 100%. He has also been clear that the government is going to do things in this war against terrorism that he will not tell the American people about today, and possibly ever.
[Judicial Authority]
The USA Patriot Act removes the involvement of the judicial branch in the process of wiretapping and searching people's homes. - an important check on executive power.
More than a thousand people have been detained in secret by the government, and the administration has refused to say who they are or where they are being held. They have been denied contact with families or with legal counsel. The Attorney General announced that even when judges demand their release, the administration will ignore them. Many have been deported without any trial and without notice to their families - mostly for minor rule violations. Not one of those detainees has been charged with any crime.
The President announced that we would use military tribunals, part of the executive branch, rather than civil courts under the judiciary, to try foreign terrorists apprehended overseas. We have always called such trials by other countries unacceptable. Spain has announced that it will not deport to American control, suspects it has apprehended. In other words, it is going to "harbor them" which means that the President is authorized by congress to "use all appropriate and necessary force" against Spain if he wishes.
In one of the most blatant violations of civil rights, the Attorney General has announced that the government will listen in on conversations between suspects and their attorneys. There were already provisions for such eavesdropping when the government could prove to a judge that there was reason to do so - but again, the administration does not want to be bothered by the balance of powers.
[The Right of the People to Know]
On October 12, the Attorney General, in a memo to federal agencies, urged that they reduce the amount of information they are providing the American people under the Freedom of Information Act. While it had been policy to release any requested information "unless it was reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful," the Attorney General turned it around and urged information not be released unless they cannot find a basis for withholding it. He also urged a great reduction in information available to the American people on the internet.
[domestic spying]
The Attorney General has announced that there will be a resumption of government spying on religious organizations - a former practice that was uncovered by Congress and forbidden as a result of the 1975 hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee -named for Frank Church, chair of the committee). Unitarian Universalist Churches, as well as many antiwar, civil rights and black nationalist groups, had been infiltrated by government paid informers, some of whom were shown to have urged illegal acts. Ashcroft asserts we must go back to those bad old days in order to combat terrorism.
Molly Ivins has suggested that Attorney General Ashcroft is becoming "unhinged." She wrote:
For those who remember COINTELPRO [which is what the spying program was called], this is glorious news. Back in the day, Fearless Fibbies [FBI agents]cleverly disguised in their wingtips and burr haircuts, used to infiltrate such dangerous groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Business Executives Against the War in Vietnam. This had the usual comedic fallout, along with killing a few innocent people, and was so berserk there was a standing rule on the left - anyone who proposes breaking any law was automatically assumed to be an FBI agent.
She concluded:
In this fight for our cherished freedoms, those cherished freedoms should definitely be the first thing to go. Sieg heil, y'all.
[dissing dissenters]
I would suggest one of the biggest threats of all has been the administration's insistence, from the White House and the Attorney General, that those who are critical of any or all of the above acts are really "aiding the enemy." Attorney General Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee that those who criticize him "aid terrorists for they erode our national unity . . . diminish our resolve . . . [and] give pause to our friends." He has recently referred to all critics as treasonous. As Hodding Carter said at the amphitheatre this week, "John Ashcroft knows about as much about treason as he knows about the Bill of Rights."
In 1950, during the McCarthy era, Senator Margaret Chase Smith said, "Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism are all too frequently those who . . . ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism - the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought."
An article on the STL:Today website cites the statement of Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President's wife, the leader of The American Council of Trustees and Alumni who listed 100 colleges in which she felt there were insufficiently patriotic responses to the 9/11 attack. Included as unpatriotic was a statement by a Washington University professor that "The United States would have done the right thing (by not going to war); responding as a responsible member of the international community rather than as a vigilante gunslinger in the old west." And a Stanford University professor was criticized for saying "If Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity." Mrs. Cheney also criticizes colleges adding courses on Islam. "To say that it is more important now (to study Islam) implies that the events of Sept. 11 were our fault." It is clear that Mrs. Cheney represents the administration's view in this.
[the refuge of scoundrels]
When I drive around and see all the American flags and the American flag decals and the "God Bless America" signs, I am frightened. I am frightened because I believe the flag is being wrapped around one interpretation, a false interpretation, of the events of 9/11 in an attempt to distract the American people from the erosion of fundamental elements of our system. Scoundrels have always hidden behind patriotism, and I believe there is abundant evidence that it is being used in that way today by people who have little or no regard for our Constitution.
[it is happening]
In January when I delivered the original version of this sermon, I modified Lewis' ironic "It Can't Happen Here" to "It Could Happen Here" to "It Can Happen Here." In recent weeks I have felt compelled to revise it further to "It IS Happening Here."
In recent weeks:
- The administration has called for a network of a million domestic spies to be called Operation TIPS [Terrorist and Prevention System] which will enroll utility technicians and cable installers to report "anything suspicious" in American homes. [The Post Office has formally declined to participate.]
- The administration is urging the issuance of national drivers licences which would serve as national identity cards.
- The proposals for the Homeland Security Department contain many provisions which violate the separation of powers and would create a Department almost unanswerable to the people.
- Last week the Administration began testing the waters for removing the historic prohibition of the use of the Armed Forces as domestic police - an enforcement tool always central to dictatorships.
- The President has announced that he will not nominate any judges who do not believe in God as the creator of our nation -- a direct and blatant violation of Article VI of the Constitution which says "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
I am more terrified then ever by my second rereading of "It Can't Happen Here" because it reads almost like an outline that the present administration is following, lacking only, so far, the open brutality.
[the people]
The problem, of course, is not in Washington in the hands of two or three - nor even just in the Congress. The problem is across America where there are people who are frightened and who have a loose commitment to our freedoms. A poll of Illinois voters showed that 70% of the people would be willing to give up some of their liberties in order to fight terrorism. It is not clear which liberties or to what extent, but the disposition is there. And this is replicated throughout the United States, just as it was in Germany. It was replicated in the Chautauqua Amphitheatre this week in the warm response to Bill Kristol's suggestion that we need to give up liberties for security.
Knowledgeable critics have been clear that the intelligence failures of 9/11 were not statutory or structural - they were due to incompetence and insufficient Congressional oversight of the administration(s). The means were available. The absence, to date, of subsequent terrorist acts cannot be legitimately attributed to the trampling on civil liberties. That's like saying that our bombing of Cambodia kept Ho Chi Minh out of SanFrancisco.
A loose attachment to our Bill of Rights is not an entirely new phenomenon. From time to time, college classes have gone out with petitions calling for the elements of the Bill of Rights and have found that people considered them too radical to sign. Our fantasies of the Revolution aside, there is ample evidence that 1/3 of the people supported remaining a colony, 1/3 did not care, and only 1/3 supported creating a new nation.
[vigilence]
I consider myself a patriot. I love this country and would not prefer any other, but what I love most is the dream of what this country stands for, more than what it has become -- and what I fear it is increasingly becoming. I have given more than passing consideration to the possibility of having eventually to move to Canada. I can envision the time when I could be arrested for delivering this sermon, just as Doremus Jessup was for his newspaper editorials. In the meantime, I have not surrendered, nor do I suggest any of us should. I will not give up without a fight.
What Doremus Jessup came to realize was:
The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.
We need to have the courage not to turn our backs, but to stand and say what may not be popular, just like the boy in the Emperor's New Clothes. We need to risk standing up for the freedoms we cherish. John Fillpot Currant asserted:
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man [sic] is eternal vigilance which condition, if we break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
We must be vigilant.
[a practical step]
Let me suggest one practical response. Our media are not all helpful in keeping track of what is happening. The American Civil Liberties Union, an organization which several Unitarians and Universalists served as founding members, is perhaps the premier source of information on threats to our democracy. The ACLU has a very helpful section on its homepage called SafeandFree. I commend it to you as a way to be informed. Then we must speak out - to our elected representatives, to our newspapers, to our friends: we must not fall into the trap of the comfortable belief that we are safe because "it can't happen here." It can, and it may have begun. That's the bad news. The good news is that we are not alone. We have one another. We have a religious faith which celebrates the spirit Doremus Jessup affirmed "the free, inquiring, critical spirit." We can support one another in the struggle to nurture that spirit. That struggle has not been lost - yet.
Click on underlined by-lines for the author’s home page.
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.c om
All content copyright 2002 by nystringer.com