“First They Came for the Communists”

Reflections on the Loss of Reason

This morning I am feeling restive. The angst that eats at me is a reflection of books, articles and memoirs read long ago, slowly percolating through me in a very disquieting way.

“Remember what ‘they’ said?, it asks.

It brings a physical chill, amplified by the sense of apartheid that makes up the world we live in today. We, and by that I mean those of us who are introspective and use reason, logic and rationality, usually in retrospect, as I wish I were capable of true clairvoyance, see the time we are now in as dark, and in some respect, soulless.

I feel as though every warning, every treatise to my psyche, each and every synapse of my brain is now alive with a barely conscious message that biology has built into me.

It says, run, or fight. Fight or flight.

The sense of there being a hand at work, unseen yet aware of its malevolent intent, exists. It is atmospheric, surrounding me like a fog.

Yet, it is still at this moment benign. I cannot put a finger on it.

All of my adult life, I was a firefighter, and later, a college instructor focused on ethics. As a firefighter, my training and my intuition sent me messages, sometimes subliminally.

Don’t open that door, or wait here for a moment.

On more than one occasion, that voice, ephemeral yet intrusive, spoke to me. And on more than one occasion, it saved my life.

Strangely, amorphously, the voice has returned to me. It was gone for a long time, or at least silent.

Last night I had a dream where men stood on a Dias, also silent, pointing at people in a crowd. Not a word was spoken while each in turn, left, as though held by and unseen hand, and walked through a door to a courtyard. In the courtyard were six men, each holding a rifle.

Those who had stepped through the door did not scream, yell or invoke pleas. They simply went to a patch of sand on the ground, drenched in blood, and waited. A sound resonated, and, — I woke up.

What is my subconscious afraid of? What is it warning me to do?

There is no means of escape, and there is no action one can take to resolve ignoring the command to walk through that door.

So I wait, and hope against hope for an answer, a means or mechanism to keep the door from opening.

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Martin Niemoller was a German Lutheran Pastor and theologian. An anti-communist, he supported Hitler’s rise to power. But when Hitler rose to power and insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemoller became disillusioned. He became the leader of a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler.

In 1937 he was arrested and eventually confined in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He was released in 1945 by the Allies.

While in Dachau he wrote the following;

“First they came for the communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.”

Today, I reread a post by Andrew Coyne, a columnist from Toronto. He said the following,

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”

Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.

Written by Andrew Coyne

That voice, distant and often muted, is now louder. It tells me, – implores me to listen, – yet, what actions can I take? What mechanism do I have to give voice to the unspoken?

We live in a moment in time, where voices from the past would, – could they, implore us to listen. To act and to not ignore.

All I can do is give voice to all of those silenced in the past. Those who, hoped against hope, for someone to act.

Be safe, be wise, be present…