“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
Half a century ago, my history professor showed us a photograph of Britain’s Edward VII and his wife, Queen Alexandra. They’re seated beside a broad woodland path that trails off into the distance behind them.
Their faces reflect the royal confidence you’d expect from Queen Victoria’s eldest son and heir to her empire. But along with that ease and self-assurance, the professor noted an apprehension in their eyes as the last Victorians looked beyond the frame at the looming uncertainties of the 20th century.
As a middle-aged prince and king, Edward had witnessed the aggressive imperialism and militarism that increasingly preoccupied Europe, but he can be excused if he failed to anticipate that Europe’s royal cousins would embark on a worldwide general war four years after his death, or how bloody that catastrophe would be.
Given that Europe’s last major 19th-century conflict had produced 250,000 casualties, the first World War’s 40 million casualties would have been for Edward and his contemporaries understandably unimaginable.
When Germany lost the World War, the victorious Allies imposed harsh surrender terms. The terms were so harsh that the German people welcomed politicians who promised them relief. Adolf Hitler rose to power out of that heap of radicals and fascist reactionaries.
The world remembered the horrors of the first World War, and after trying to avert another by appeasing Hitler, the Allies, including the United States, committed the full measure of their blood and treasure to obliterating fascism on the battlefield. We were acting on Winston Churchill’s warning that if Hitler were permitted to win that second World War, the world would “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
We have Churchill’s warning still.
People and pundits said fascism couldn’t happen in Germany, the enlightened land of Beethoven and Goethe. Instead, under Nazi rule, the arts and literature served politics, superstition replaced science, and big lies supplanted truth. Loyalty meant accepting those lies as reality, despite all evidence and reason.
Hitler incited antisocial, criminal behavior in his followers. He stoked long-existing racial and religious prejudices until they sprang to life as open bigotry and hate. Bigotry became persecution, persecution became assault, and assault became murder.
He railed against “international Jewish financiers” and incited public fury against German Jews for fabricated crimes against Germany. Those crimes included the “blood libel,” the old medieval lie that charged Jews with drinking the blood and eating the flesh of Christian children.
See also QAnon.
Presiding over the violence, enforcing Nazi dogma, and disrupting and attacking rival political meetings and activities was Hitler’s private army, the Stormtroopers. These armed, organized, street-brawling “shock troops” were instrumental in promoting the Nazi party’s rise and active in securing Hitler’s 1933 election victory and his appointment as chancellor of Germany.
See also Proud Boys, Oath Keepers et al.
See also Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz et al and their call for “20,000 shock troops” to “hit the beach,” “go right after” Americans “who are selling out the country,” “take over the administrative state,” “deconstruct it,” and impose “MAGA policies,” either “when President Trump wins in 2024 or before.”
The election in March 1933 was conducted under the supervision of Nazi authorities, including the Stormtroopers. Opposition party officials and candidates were attacked in their offices and homes. It was Germany’s last nominally free election until after World War II.
We have seen what Edward hadn’t.
Compared to German cities reduced to brick ruins by war, and Jewish shopkeepers’ storefront windows shattered by their customers, and Jewish families beaten and stripped naked in the streets by their neighbors, our current episodes of political violence may seem relatively mild.
But Nazi oppression wasn’t born fully grown. It ripened over time. Bear in mind, too, that here in the United States violent conspiracies, domestic terrorism, armed assaults on minorities, attacks on police, and death threats against elected officials, their families, and office staff are increasingly commonplace.
Our Capitol and Congress have been stormed by armed seditionists at the instigation of a president intent on overturning an election he lost. The attack featured pipe bombs, firearms, pikes, zip-ties, gallows for the insufficiently MAGA vice president, and demands to “bring out” Speaker Pelosi so she could be dragged down the Capitol steps.
When Speaker Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their home Oct. 28, many Republican leaders made the right noises. Mitch McConnell was “horrified and disgusted.” Republican leader Kevin McCarthy announced he’d “reached out” privately to the House Speaker and was “praying for a full recovery” for her husband. Ted Cruz tweeted he was praying for “God’s protection” for the entire Pelosi family. He declared that “violence is always wrong and unacceptable.”
Donald Trump said nothing. His elder son tweeted an image of jockey shorts and a hammer. Others, like Virginia Gov. Youngkin, seasoned their thoughts and prayers with jokes, or like GOP Chairman McDaniel used the attack to gain political advantage, or like Elon Musk gloried in their own recklessness.
Here’s a message for Republican leaders. If your prayers are sincere, remember you’re not talking to yourself. Your vaulting ambition, your calculated deceit, your cowardice, your failure to denounce Trump as a fraud and a liar have put the hammer in the assassin’s hand and brought the country you say you love nearly to its knees.
You say violence is always wrong. So are lies that provoke it — your lies. You know the truth. Speak it.
If instead you truly believe that the 2020 election was rigged, Donald Trump knows he didn’t win. Hitler explained that big lies like Trump’s work because decent, ordinary people can’t believe anyone would lie so outrageously. You’ve been deceived and used by people you trust. You must try to see clearly before it’s too late and we’ve lost our country.
Ben Franklin was an old man at the Constitutional Convention. After a summer of heated debate, the document that still defines our government was ready to be signed. An image of the sun was painted on the back of George Washington’s chair, and Ben remarked that he’d often wondered whether it was a rising or setting sun. Now, as the delegates signed their names to the Constitution, he “had the happiness to know” it was a rising sun.
Tell me as we near the edge of our Dark Age abyss: What kind of sun would Ben see today?
