Why Russian-American Hostility?

 

Why Russian-American Hostility?

At the end of World War II, or shortly thereafter, there began what came to be called the Cold War between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America. Both sides had allies either willing or unwilling, but the Cold War was primarily a conflict between the USSR and the USA. It came about because the Soviets sought to expand their dominance over western Europe and the Americans set out to stop them through a policy called containment. There were hot wars during the Cold War, particularly in Korea and Vietnam, but there was no direct military action between the USSR and the USA. That’s why it was a “cold” war not a hot one.

The Cold War ended on December 25, 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist. The USSR was no more. There was, of course, still Russia, but as of that date, Russia was no longer communist. I think nearly everyone thought that there was no longer any reason for the Americans and the Russians to be at each others’ throats with threats of nuclear annihilation.

Russia and the United States have a fairly long history of at least intermittent contact and interaction. Some of the land that would eventually become part of the United States was once occupied by Russia. As the Russian state and nation spread out of Moscow in the sixteenth century CE or earlier, Russians first occupied all of Siberia. Then some Russians crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska. They occupied much of Alaska, then moved south down the west coast of North America. Eventually, they established settlements in what became northern California.

Russia was overextended, and it retracted out of North America. The most significant part of that retraction was Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. The United States and Russia were then separated by the Bering Strait. Yet far eastern Siberia was a remote and sparsely populated part of the Russian Empire. Alaska was a remote and sparsely occupied possession of the United States. After Alaska became a US state in 1959, Russia was America’s closest noncontinuous neighbor. That truth, however, didn’t mean much. There was little or no contact between the two countries across the Bering Strait.

There were a few contacts between Russia and the US in the years following Russia’s sale of Alaska to the US. US President Theodore Roosevelt mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The US sent troops into Siberia during the Russian Civil War after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 in support of the forces fighting against the Bolsheviks. The US extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1933. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, some Americans flirted with Marxism, the source of the official ideology of the Soviet Union, but most Americans who knew anything at all about the Stalinist Soviet Union wanted nothing to do with communism. When the USSR and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty in 1939, nearly all American communists abandoned the USSR and no longer saw it as the primary opponent of fascism.

During World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States were allies. They both waged war against Nazi Germany. The Soviet war with Germany began when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The US didn’t enter the war until months later. The US supplied war materials to the Soviet Union. At least until June, 1944, the Soviets bore the brunt of the allied battle with the Germans. The Soviet defeat of the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad (July 1941-February 1942) and at the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 turned the tide of World War II against the Germans. US war materials could have played some role in the battle of Kursk, but the battle of Stalingrad took place too early in the war for the US to have any significant part in it. The US, the United Kingdom, and the other allies provided some military relief to the Soviets when they invaded North Africa in 1942, Italy in 1943, and France in 1944, but by then the Soviets already had the Germans on the run. The attack of the allies in the west only hastened the German’s run, it didn’t cause it. The Soviet Red Army brought about the end of World War II in Europe when it took Berlin in 1945.

In the couple of years after the war, at least the western allies thought the Soviets would cooperate in a joint administration of conquered Berlin. Almost from the start, however, the Soviets became intransigent. They showed no interest in jointly administering the German capital city, and they opposed the western allies’ plan to create a new state in west Germany. Then, in June 1948, they closed all ground and water access from the American, French, and British sectors of occupied western Germany to Berlin. The western allies conducted a massive airlift of supplies into the city. The Soviets didn’t invade west Berlin nor did they attack the transport planes that were flying supplies into the city. Still, the more than a year of the Berlin Airlift was a time of great tension between the Soviet Union and its former allies. The Cold War had begun.

One of the most significant developments of the Cold War was the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO originally consisted of the United States, Canada, and a few countries of northwest Europe. Over the decades, it expanded. It came to include Turkey, which bordered on the Soviet Union though not on Russia. The purpose of NATO was quite explicitly to stop the Soviets from taking over western Europe as they had taken over central and eastern Europe.

Still, during the Cold War years there were peaceful contacts between the USA and the USSR. There was some commercial trade between them. There was a cultural exchange treaty between. Under that treaty, the west saw and heard the USSR’s world class musicians. They heard the magnificent Red Army Chorus. American scholars and would-be scholars, including this author, were able to conduct research in the USSR. Soviet scholars could do the same in the US, though they had to do it under strict Soviet surveillance and control. The direct, peaceful connections between the USA and the USSR were sparse during the Cold War, but they did exist.

When the USSR ceased to exist, it seemed that there was the possibility of building friendly, constructive relations between the two countries. Russia would no longer be trying to export Soviet communism to other parts of the world. The US no longer had radical ideological disagreements with the Russians. Russia had what was, on paper at least, a democratic, constitutional government. The Russian economy, everyone thought, would develop as a market economy in place of the Soviet one controlled by the state. It was easy to be at least a little bit optimistic about the future of Russo-American relations in the years between 1991 and 2000.

However, in the years just before the Soviet collapse and during the years after that collapse and the liberations of the countries of the Warsaw Pact (the Soviets’ response to NATO) from Soviet control, NATO began to expand eastward. A reunified Germany joined NATO in 1990. NATO expanded to include other Soviet-dominated states. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004. The Russian government under President Vladimir Putin saw this eastward NATO expansion as a threat. Putin also saw it as a violation by NATO of a promise it had made when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany and German membership in NATO not to expand to include any territory formerly under Soviet control.

Then, from the Russian point of view, things got worse. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined NATO also in 2004. Those three independent nations had been Soviet Socialist Republics. They had all been part of the Russian Empire before 1917. The Russians considered them to be in Russia’s domain. They became independent nations after World War I, but the Soviet Union reoccupied and incorporated them after World War II. Thus, by 2004, nations bordering Russia (or Belorussia, which amounted to the same thing) not only had Russia enclosed on its western border, some of those nations had formerly been part of Russian states, either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.

The Russians saw NATO’s move eastward as a direct threat to Russia. The NATO countries may or may not have understood it that way, but the Russian reaction to it is not hard to understand. Why was NATO taking over nations that used either to be part of the USSR or under the thumb of the Soviets? Why was NATO expanding into areas that Russia considered to be Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence? For the Russians, there could be only one answer. NATO had its eyes on Russia itself. It is not hard to see why the Russians came to experience NATO as an existential threat to their nation.

In Russia, starting at the beginning of the year 2000, Vladimir Putin set out to consolidate his personal power over every aspect of Russian life. He took over the public media. He allied himself with corrupt Russian oligarchs who had come to control the Russian economy. He held illegitimate elections in which his victory was assured before anyone cast a vote. He arrested, imprisoned, and murdered his political opponents. Perhaps, after December 25, 1991, it was possible that Russia would develop in a more democratic direction. Putin made sure that it didn’t.

Putin created an authoritarian regime in Russia, but post-Soviet Russia didn’t have a central ideology the way the USSR had had. So Putin created one. He proclaimed, and proclaims, Russia to be the world’s guardian against the corrupt, immoral values of western liberalism. He formed a close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has always been ultraconservative. He had laws enacted against the rights of sexual minorities under the guise of protecting children. He said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. That statement, other statements Putin made, and things Putin did with regard to regions formerly part of the USSR clearly indicated that Putin would recreate the Russian Empire if he could. The United States is, obviously, the dominant power in NATO, so Putin’s rhetoric became anti-American not just anti-NATO. During the first years of the twenty-first century Russia came to see NATO as a threat to its existence, and the purpose of NATO came to be control of Russian expansion just as its original purpose had been to control Soviet expansion.

Then Putin made things worse. He occupied Crimea, which had been part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine.[1] He invaded Georgia in support of Russians who wanted to break away from Georgia. Then, in February, 2022, he sent the Russian army into Ukraine proper. His stated intent was to remove the government the Ukrainian people had elected, supposedly to stop Ukraine from joining NATO. He sought, and seeks, to drag Ukraine back under Russian control.

Putin reverted to the old imperial Russian way of seeing Ukraine and its people. The government of the Russian Empire never recognized the Ukrainians as a people distinct from the Russians or the Ukrainian language as distinct from the Russian one. Imperial Russia considered Ukrainians to be Russians and the Ukrainian language to be a dialect of Russian, not a separate language. That’s exactly how Putin sees Ukraine.

That gross misunderstanding of Ukraine, its people, and its language, together with the Russians’ belief that NATO was a threat to their existence, led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is completely unjustified. It violates international law. It is an overt act of aggression by one sovereign nation against another, something that had not happened in Europe since the end of World War II. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a crime against humanity, but the reasons for it are not hard to understand. NATO has not come to the defense of Ukraine through direct military intervention. It has, however, denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It and its member nations, most notably the United States, have sent an enormous amount of military equipment to the Ukrainians to assist Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russian aggression.

Russia and the US are, thus, again in a relationship of open antagonism. Does it have to be that way? Objective global and geopolitical realities say no, it does not have to be that way. Russia and the US are not geographical neighbors in any meaningful way. Russia has a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons that they inherited from the Soviets, but though Russia is huge geographically, its population is not all that big. The population of Russia is around 144,000,000, less than half that of the United States. Russia is no threat to America’s economic domination of the world. It’s economy is weak. Its infrastructure is mostly old and inefficient. In Ukraine the Russian army has proven itself to be nothing like the military powerhouse most in the west once believed it to be. Russia is no threat to the US at all as long as the US doesn’t provoke Russia into using its nuclear weapons against it.

So why have Russian and the United States been so antagonistic toward each other? The short term answer to that question is Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. It is inevitable that the US would oppose that invasion in every way possible short of direct military intervention. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is indefensible, but so, in this author’s opinion, is NATO’s expansion toward Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps NATO did that expansion simply without considering how the Russians would react. Or perhaps they understood how Russia would react and didn’t care. Either way, Russia’s aggressive response was perfectly foreseeable.

It seems that Russia and the United States keep getting crossways with each other simply because they have a history of considering the other an enemy. Yet there is no reason why Russia and the United States need be enemies. They see themselves as enemies because both of them have felt the need to contain what they have seen as aggression by the other. The chronic antagonism between Russia and the US is not the result of any geographic or geopolitical considerations. It is the result of human actions and thoughts. It didn’t have to happen. If Putin would get out of Ukraine, it wouldn’t have to happen now. The Russian-American conflict is a human construct. We humans could deconstruct it if we just understood each other better and stopped creating antagonisms that don’t need to exist. It is unlikely that that will happen anytime soon, and that is one of the tragedies of today’s world.

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[1] Crimea was at first part of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic. In other words, it was Russian. Most of its people spoke Russian not Ukrainian. The city of Sevastopol in Crimea was the home port of the Russian, then the Soviet, Black Sea navy. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one. No one is quite sure why.

What If Trump Wins?

 What If Trump Wins?

In November, the convicted felon Donald Trump will be on the ballot in every state as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party. All people of good will hope and pray that President Biden will defeat him. It wwould be better if Biden crushed him so that there was no doubt that the American voters had rejected Trumpism. But, tragically, there is the possibility that Trump will win. He doesn’t have to win a majority of the votes nationwide to do it. He didn’t win that majority in 2016. He became president only because of our anti-democratic electoral college system that gives disproportionate electoral weight to the citizens of small population states. We should all be terrified that he could do it again.

Maybe he won’t. I pray that he won’t. But I must also assert that it is not too early for us to start to plan for what we will do if he wins. There are various scenarios under which he wins. He could win the presidency but lost control of both houses of Congress. He could win the presidency and lose control of one house of Congress but retain control of the other. If he fails to gain control of at least one house of Congress, his ability to damage American democracy, which is something he does want to damage, actually wants to destroy, will be limited; but he will still control the entire executive branch of the federal government. He will have to have his nominees for many of the positions within that branch confirmed by the Senate, so who controls the Senate really matters. If the Democrats control the Senate, they could pledge themselves never to approve a Trump appointment to a position of responsibility in the government of a person who wants to destroy the functioning of the institution for which he or she has been nominated rather than to run that agency for the benefit of the American people. They could do the same thing with Trump’s judicial appointments. Sadly, the Senate Democrats have a lousy record of approving unqualified judicial candidates. They tend to roll over, play dead, and confirm whoever the president wants. Under a Trump presidency, that would absolutely have to change. I don’t have much confidence that it would, and Trump could get around the constitutional provision for Senate confirmation by appointing “acting” cabinet secretaries and never submit to the Senate for confirmation. Thus, even if the Democrats control the Senate after the November election, their ability to stop the damage Trump will set out to do to American democracy would still exist to some extent, but it probably would not be a major obstacle for Trump to overcome.

Here’s the nightmare situation. Trump wins the presidency. MAGA Republicans, who will do whatever Trump tells them to do, win control of both houses of Congress. There are vacancies on the Supreme Court. Trump would nominate unqualified MAGA flunkies, and the MAGA controlled Senate would confirm them, putting the Supreme Court even more under Trump’s control than it is today. Trump could then do what he says he will do. He could, and would. politicize the Department of Justice. He could stop the implementation of all environmental regulations. He could institute fascist policies at the Mexican border. He could pull the US out of NATO. He could and would do whatever Vladimir Putin told him to do. Trump would be able to go a long way toward establishing the fascist regime that he wants to head so that he can rule the country essentially single handedly.

What then would those of us who understand what a threat to our nation that Trump poses do? I wish I had a better answer to that question. I will never advocate violence, so there must be nonviolent ways of limiting what Trump could do. This country has a long history of nonviolent civil disobedience in opposition to injustice. Perhaps millions of Americans would have the courage to put their bodies in the way of the operation of Trump’s fascism. They would have to be willing to pay the price of doing so. Trump might have armed people who would beat them and even kill them. They would have to be willing to go to jail. The Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent campaign for justice eventually succeeded, at least to some extent; it had its share of martyrs, of people who died for their participation in that campaign. How many Americans would be willing to die as part of an effort to thwart Trump’s fascism? I fear not enough.

What else could we do? Refuse to pay taxes? That wouldn’t stop him, he’d just put the country farther in debt. Leave the country en masse? Many of us would like to leave, but where would we go? And how would that stop Trump? This, I think, is why I’m so scared of Trump taking control of the federal government. There really is nothing we could do. I don’t mean we shouldn’t try. I don’t mean we shouldn’t demonstrate against Trump and his regime without end. I don’t mean we should give up on supporting anti-Trump politicians. Not at all. It’s just that I fear that the MAGA movement is too strong. Too many people vote Republican out of habit, and the Republican Party is nothing like what it used to be. I’ll end by saying what I’ve said before: Heaven help us!

On Donald Trump's Racism

 

On Donald Trump’s Racism

Donald Trump, the Republican politician convicted of multiple felonies by a court in his native New York City, is a racist. About that there simply is no doubt. He, of course, denies that he is a racist. His most rabid supporters deny that he is a racist. Yet his racism is there for all to see, and it has been for a very long time. Many if not most of his supporters are themselves racist, and they support Trump mostly because they know that he is a racist too.

The evidence of Trump’s racism begins at least by the early 1970s. At time, Trump was managing his father’s real estate investments in New York City. The US Department of Justice sued, accusing Trump and his organization of systematically refusing to rent apartments to Black people. Trump and his father eventually signed a consent decree saying they wouldn’t discriminate against anyone, but words in a context like that are cheap. Donald Trump certainly didn’t stop being a racist just because he said he wouldn’t discriminate.

Next came the case of the so-called Central Park Five. In 1989, the New York City police arrested five young men aged fourteen to sixteen, four of whom were Black and one of whom was Hispanic. These youth were accused of raping and beating a white woman in Central Park. Trump immediately went on the attack. He bought a full page ad in the New York Times calling for reinstating the death penalty, which New York had abolished, presumably so it could be imposed on these five young men. The Central Park Five were eventually exonerated, though only after they had spent years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. Trump refused to apologize. Instead, he asserted that these men deserved the time they spent in prison because he said they were guilty of something else, though he never said what that was supposed to be.[1]

Next came the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Even before Obama was a serious candidate for the presidency, Trump conducted a vicious campaign against him. He said Obama was not a native born American but had been born in Kenya. He insisted that Obama show his birth certificate. When Obama did present that certificate, which showed that he had been born in Hawaii not long after Hawaii became a state, Trump kept insisting that Obama show his real birth certificate, never mind that Obama already had. There is no doubt that Obama’s race was what motivated Trump to make these baseless claims against him.

There’s more. Trump pardoned the overtly racist Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been harassing Arizona’s citizens of Hispanic origin, making them prove that they were legal residents of the United States when no one else had to prove the same thing. When a gang of white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of them struck a counter protestor with a car and killed her. All Trump, who was president at the time, would say to the racist thugs who carried out the racist demonstration was that they should “stand back and stand by.” He said there were “fine people” on both sides of that demonstration. For Trump, violent white supremacists can be “fine people.”

Trump is a racist, and many if not most of his supporters support him because they know that he shares their own racism. Many of them self-identify as evangelical Christians. In the book cited above, noted New Testament scholar Hendricks makes a strong argument that what ignited America’s current Christian nationalist movement, a movement Trump both explicitly and implicitly supports, wasn’t abortion, it was racism. Hendricks ends Chapter 2 of his book this way:

Right-wing evangelicals’ complicity in Trump’s debasement of American society shamefully paints the Christian Gospel of light, love, and egalitarian justice as an ugly, loveless, exclusionary ideology of domination. Jesus said that each of us will be known by the fruit of our acts and attitudes. The rot of the unholy fruit of Trump’s evangelical supporters and apologists has spread across the length and breath of our nation, portraying evil as good and good as evil. That is their vile and blasphemous harvest. In the name of God.[2]

Trump and his supporters portray white supremacy as good and equal racial justice as evil. They portray governmental programs designed to help people in need as evil and the government just letting them suffer as good. There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is a retrogressive racist.

Slightly over forty percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Donald Trump.[3] How is that possible? I can think of only one convincing explanation of that seemingly inexplicable fact. American’s support of Trump comes from an anger that arises from fear. America is changing. White Americans will probably no longer be a majority in this country by 2045. White men have been the dominant demographic in this country from its very beginning; but that is changing, and it has been changing for several decades now. Large numbers of white American men fear that they are losing the dominant position they had held in our country for centuries.

Fear gives rise to anger. Anger makes people want someone other than themselves to blame for the fear they feel deep inside. Donald Trump, both explicitly and implicitly through “dog whistles,” give these men someone to blame. He says immigrants cause their problems. He refuses to condemn people who say Black Americans cause their problems. He refuses to condemn people who say women cause their problems. Trump and his ilk make words like inclusion and nondiscrimination into bad words when in truth they point to good and necessary attitudes and actions. They make “woke” an expletive when in fact it points to an awareness of our country’s failings in the past and a desire to make amends for those failings, both of which are very good things. All of these Trumpian actions are grounded in racism and play to the anger and fear of a large number of Americans, most of them white men.

People say the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice. Maybe it does, but it does not do so in a straight line. Donald Trump and his MAGA followers represent a retrograde period in our country’s march toward equal justice for all. They seek to take our country backward not forward. They seek to reinstate the cultural and political dominance of white, mostly Christian men. That effort will fail. It has to fail because it moves against the arc of the universe bending toward justice. It has to fail because it moves against God’s will for that justice.

How long it will take it to fail depends on the outcome of the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. If Trump and his acolytes take the White House and gain majorities in both houses of Congress, they will set this country back decades at least. It will take a long time for us to recover, longer I fear than I will still be present on this mortal coil. Democrats and sensible Republicans, assuming there are any sensible Republicans left in Congress after this year’s election, can at least make it harder for the Trumpists to inflict the damage on this country that they are hellbent on inflicting on it. It will take a lot of them to stop the Trumpists altogether.

We don’t yet know what November 5, 2024, will bring us. I just pray that it is not a sweeping Trumpist victory. I don’t want this country slipping backwards into more racism, more sexism, more xenophobia, and more homophobia, but that is what we’ll get if the Trumpists ever gain full control of our federal government. Trump is a racist. Most of his followers are racists. May we make sure that they never get the chance to damage this country the way they promise they will if they can.

 

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[1] Obery, Hendricks M. Jr., Christians Against Christians, How Right-Wing Evangelicals are Destroying our Nation and Our Faith (Beacon Press, Boston, 2021) p. 32.

[2] Id., p. 34.

[3] Donald Trump : Favorability Polls | FiveThirtyEight.com.

Could We? Would We?

 

Could We? Would We?

In his book In the Garden of Beasts,[1] Erik Larson tells a horrific story, one of many such horrific stories one could tell from Germany in 1933, the time when this story took place.In this story, which Larson presents as historically accurate, three young Americans have traveled from Berlin to Nuremberg. As they check into their hotel, they notice something going on out in the street. As they watch, a band of Sturmabteilung thugs comes marching up the street. They are half supporting, half dragging what appears to be a person with them. The person turns out to be a young German woman named Anna Rath. She is not a Jew. The Americans learn that the SA mob is tormenting and torturing her because she had planned to marry her boyfriend, who was a Jew. The SA goons have hung a sign around her neck that read, “I offered myself to a Jew.” A large crowd of the ordinary people of Nuremberg get excited. They cheer on the SA brutes as they continue to drag her along the street. They sing the Horst Wessel Lied, the anthem of the Nazi party. Larson doesn’t say what became of Frӓulein Rath.

This story is horrific in two different ways. First, the Sturmabteilung was the Nazi party’s paramilitary force that was, in 1933, Hitler’s main instrument for tormenting and damaging Germany’s Jewish people. It was far bigger than the regular German military. It’s members truly were brutes, violent thugs who delighted in attacking innocent people. A political party had come to power in Germany that not only had such an enormous instrument of torment and torture, it had let that instrument loose on the German population. Anyone who wasn’t sufficiently Nazi was a target of its violence. At least some of the Americans in Larson’s book evaluated the Nazis too favorably, but we must remember that they did not know what we know about the Nazis because most of the horror they produced hadn’t happened yet. Some Americans and other foreigners in Berlin were starting to tumble to just how horrible the Hitler regime was going to be, especially for Jews, but not all of them did.

The second way in which this story is horrific is the way the crowd of ordinary Germans reacted to the display of hatred and cruelty that was taking place before them. The crowd watching the demonic parade of the SA loved what they saw. They cheered the SA men on as they tortured a helpless young woman. Two of the young Americans who saw what happened were repelled by it. One of them made excuses for it. She said things like this was just an isolated incident, and we shouldn’t judge before we know the whole story. We know that that young American was naïve at best and was failing to see the diabolical nature of what was starting to happen in Germany.

A much more important issue is how ordinary German people could so enthusiastically accept Hitler and the Nazis when Hitler and the Nazis made no bones about the fact that they hated Jews and were hellbent on harming them in every way they could. I have a personal story that may shed some light on that issue. My family and I lived in Berlin for the 1957-58 academic year while my father did historical research. I was eleven years old. 1957 was only twelve years after the end of World War II and only twenty-four years after 1933, when Larson’s book begins. We lived with a woman named Annamarie von Goedel. She was a widow, but her late husband had been a member of the Nazi party. She still had his Nazi party uniform hanging in her closet. She had no real understanding of just how horrific the Nazi regime had been. One day she said to us, “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done.” That stunningly insensitive statement of hers reveals two things about the success of Nazi totalitarianism.

First, it reveals how ordinary German people had bought the Nazi lie that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I and all of the myriad troubles that followed that defeat. There weren’t all that many Jews in Germany at the time. Larson puts the number at significantly less than 200,000. They were a tiny percentage of the German population. Some of them had been very successful in business, the professions, and academics, especially in the scientific disciplines; but there was no way they were responsible for Germany’s troubles. Hitler told people that they were, and most Germans bought that lie.

Second, Annamarie’s “something had to be done” shows us that ordinary Germans were perfectly happy to let someone else solve “the Jewish question” by whatever means that someone else chose. Annamarie really did put her statement in the passive. It wasn’t that the Germans did anything to the Jews, something just happened to the Jews. The Nazis were, of course, anything but passive in their treatment of Europe’s Jews. But Annamarie apparently thought that she and all other ordinary Germans had been passive in it. She said, in effect, we didn’t do it, it was just done.

That is how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes come to power, maintain their hold on power, and do horrific things with their power. First they create “the Big Lie.” It can be a big lie about what’s really happening in their country. It can be a big lie about who is responsible for the bad things, real or imagined, that are going on their country. The bigger the better. The more often those seeking absolute power tell the lie the better. The big lie always includes the claim that only those telling the big lie are capable of solving their country’s problems. That’s what Hitler and the Nazis did in Germany. It’s what Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists did in Russia. It is what totalitarians have done the world over, and it has worked for them in an appalling number of places.

Today the fabric of my country is being torn apart by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.[2] MAGA isn’t a political party, but the people of that movement have taken complete control of the Republican Party, long one of America’s two major political parties. Donald Trump tells more lies than anyone can really keep track of, but he tells some big lies in particular. He says that the United States is experiencing a horrific crisis. He says our cities are crime-ridden. He says the economy is a disaster. He says our country is weak and that no one beyond our borders respects us. None of that is true, but the big lies totalitarians tell are never true.[3]

Beyond that, Trump does what Hitler did. He names who is responsible for all of the country’s supposed troubles. Hitler said it was the Jews. Trump says it is people who are not like “us.” He means people who aren’t white, who aren’t evangelical Christians (though Trump is no kind of Christian at all himself), and, most of all, who weren’t born here. Migrants coming into our country play very much the same role for Trump as Europe’s Jews played for Hitler. They are primarily responsible, Trump says, for all of America’s real and made-up problems. He tells a significant portion of the American population, namely, white Christian men, that people who are not white Christian men are stealing their jobs. Trump says immigrants are all rapists and murderers, never mind that the crime rate among such people is actually lower than it is among native born Americans. Emigres, Jews, and Muslims are, Trump says, the bad guys in American life today, and millions upon millions of Americans believe him.

The Nazis murdered six million Jews and millions of other people. They forced Jews to dig pits, then shot them so that they fell dead into the pits they had dug. They built Auschwitz and other death camps where they worked some people to death and gassed an enormous number of others. We’ve all seen the horrific pictures of what the Nazis did. Many of us have heard Holocaust survivors speak about the horror they experienced. Many of us have read written accounts of that horror. There are deranged people in our country today who deny that it happened, but there is no doubt about it. Nazi Germany committed one of the worst crimes against humanity in human history.

Let me make this clear. As of today, I don’t expect Trump and his MAGA followers to build an American Auschwitz should they come to power early next year. He has said that he wants to build concentration camps to hold the millions of people he says he is going to deport, but so far he hasn’t said that there will be any gas chambers in them. I cling to the hope that Americans could never capitulate to Trump the way the Germans capitulated to Hitler. That Americans would never do to anyone what Hitler’s SS did to Europe’s Jews and to so many others.

Nonetheless, Trump has created an atmosphere in which we have to ask: Could we do to Trump’s scapegoats what Hitler and his Germans did to his? Trump is laying a foundation not radically different from the one Hitler and the Nazis laid in Germany before they undertook the worst of their oppression of the Jews. Trump is an American fascist, and he has come closer to turning the federal government fascist than anyone else ever has. I don’t know that he would ever ask Americans to commit crimes against humanity the way Hitler’s Nazis did, but neither am I completely convinced that he never would.

So we have ask: Could we? Would we? Would let ourselves be led along a path from cheering as a group of thugs torment a young woman for wanting to marry the man she loved to turning on the gas at an American Auschwitz? Could we ever turn on that gas? We like to answer that question, No! Never! But American history says something different. We white Americans have already committed genocide once. We did it against the First Nations of North America. We stole their land. We broke every treaty we signed with them. We shot them. We starved them. We gave them diseases they could not fight off. Hitler thought America would never complain about what he was going to do to Europe’s Jews because America had already done it to the Indians. The country generally but the American South in particular has a horrendous history of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation against Black Americans enforced through the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, and other terrorist organizations. Hitler thought the South’s Jim Crow laws were a good model for how he wanted to remake Germany.

So let’s not get complacent. The last thing we need is to get ourselves into a position where we have to decide: Could we? Would we? We have many things in common with the Germans of 1933. The most significant thing we have in common with them is that both they and we are human beings. The Holocaust is something human beings did. World War II is something human beings started and fought with the result of millions of casualties. Human beings did all of that killing, and we Americans are human beings.

We’ve done more than our share of killing in both domestic and foreign wars. We’ve committed genocide. We’ve enslaved, dehumanized, and oppressed people because of the color of their skin. We like to think that we’re the world’s good guys, and in some ways we are. But our hands are hardly clean. Could we dirty them further? Would we ever dirty them further? Time will tell.

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[1] Larson, Erik, In the Garden of Beasts, Love Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (Broadway Books, New York, 2011) in Chapter 11, “Strange Beings.”

[2] MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, which was the slogan of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

[3] Actually, part of it may be true. Certainly, our allies around the world are more apprehensive about us than they used to be; but that’s only because Donald Trump was the US president from January 2017 to January 2021. Trump can destroy anyone’s trust in America better than anyone else can.

On Intimacy

 

On Intimacy

June 1, 2024

Last night I watched a PBS Great Performances program styled as the 80^th anniversary of Rodgers and Hammerstein. A great male performer, whose name I didn’t catch, sang “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific. It is one of the greatest songs ever written. It has the line in it “Now, now I’m alone.” I teared up listening to that song. Then I wondered why I did. Nominally at least, I’m not alone. I live with my wife, who I love. I have my children and their children in my life though I don’t see all of them all that often. Because my wife works and I’m retired, I have a lot of alone time, but I don’t mind it. So why was I tearing up?

It occurred to me that I was tearing up because deep in my soul I feel that being truly alone is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I thought that perhaps I fear being truly alone. At first I thought, I’ve never been truly alone. I’ve always had family in my life. But then I remembered what I and my life were like before June 2, 1972. That’s the day my first wife, Francie, moved from San Diego to Seattle to be with me. I tear up when I remember that date too. I was twenty-five years old. I had never been intimate sexually or in any other way with anyone. That ended that day so many years ago when Francie, now of blessed memory, came to share her life with me.

Before then, I truly was a loner. I’d never had a girlfriend. All of my friends were paired up. So was my twin brother. I wasn’t. I remember wandering the University of Oregon campus, where I was a student at the time, feeling horribly alone. Grieving the fact that I was alone. Praying that somehow I could no longer be alone, but having no idea how to end my loneliness. I’ve never been very good at establishing even friendships with other people. I am a strong introvert. I’ve never been handsome. I had acne. I’ve never been good at small talk. I don’t dance. I’ve never been athletic. I was a very good student but wasn’t really good at anything else. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why I was alone. I didn’t like it at all, but it seemed just to be part of who I am. I thank God that my loneliness ended that day in June so many years ago when Francie moved in with me. We were married just a few months later.

All of that reminiscing about an earlier time in my life got me thinking about the nature of intimacy. What is intimacy? For me it is being close with another person more than you are with anyone else. It is being truly, deeply close to another human being. There is often a sexual component of intimacy, but there needn’t be. Intimacy is much more than sex. True intimacy is more spiritual than physical. Intimacy is knowing another person deeply and being know by that person deeply. It is sharing every aspect of your life with another person and having that person share their life with you. It is having another person in your life who is more important to you than you are to yourself and having that other person feel the same way about you. Intimacy is a relationship between two equals, a relationship between two people in which there is no dominant partner. There is instead a union of two people, neither of whom places themselves above the other in any way.

What, if anything, does sex have to do with intimacy? I just said that intimacy often includes sex but needn’t have a sexual component to it. It needn’t, but a person feels more intimate with another when they are making love together than he or she does at any other time. Yes, sex is physically pleasurable; and there is great pleasure in sharing the physical pleasure of sex with another person. But the physical aspect of sex isn’t really what makes it important for intimacy. It is perfectly possible to feel the physical pleasure of sex without being truly intimate with anyone. Sex has to do with intimacy when two people come together with their whole being not just with their bodies. When two people truly are making love and not just having sex, there is a feeling of intimacy between them like no other. They feel truly, deeply together. They feel joined not just physically but emotionally, spiritually. And that is the best feeling a human being can ever have.

True intimacy is a joining of one’s soul with the soul of another, but how does that joining make the relationship spiritual? Spirituality is about relationship. We usually think of spirituality has something that has to do with religious faith, and spirituality indeed can and should be part of the religious experience. In faith one seeks union with a Spirit that pervades everything there is and also transcends everything there is. Spirituality is about connection. At its deepest level it is about connection with God. But other connections can be spiritual too. A connection that feeds one’s soul and rests in one’s heart is a spiritual connection. Intimacy between two human beings, then, can indeed be a spiritual connection. It is more spiritual than any other connection between people. If two people think of their relationship as only physical, that relationship contains only a shallow spirituality at best. It most likely contains none at all.

I am not alone. I haven’t been really alone, or at least not alone for long, since June 2, 1972. Yet the loneliness that I felt for so many years before that date stays in my psyche. It lurks there in my unconscious mind as a dread of something awful. Sometimes something causes it to come into or at least to affect my conscious mind. That’s what happened last night when I heard that beautiful rendition of “This Nearly Was Mine.” For many years that lyric “Now, now I’m alone” could have been talking about me, and I felt that truth powerfully last night.

My loneliness ended back in 1972 when Francie joined her life with mine. She died of breast cancer on July 31, 2002. We had been together for thirty years. In the year following her death I was alone, though what I felt during that year was more grief than loneliness. My wife Jane and I came together shortly after the end of that first year following Francie’s death; so my loneliness didn’t last for long though the grief I felt over Francie’s death has never fully gone away, nor do I want it to. Grief is the form love takes when a loved one is lost, and true love never dies. I have been blessed with two great loves in my life, the two women to whom I have been married. They have been the greatest blessings I have ever received.

I don’t know why Francie loved me and Jane does love me. I don’t always love myself all that much. But with both of them I have known true intimacy. I have known a union that is so much more than physical. It is indeed spiritual. My life of love with both of them has fed me spiritually in a way nothing else ever has. That is true intimacy. Physical intimacy yes, but so much more than that. A connection so much deeper than that. A deep, deep connection that is a human version of the intimacy between God and every single person. That’s what true intimacy is, and it is a blessing beyond compare. I wish that every person could have it. It makes life richer than life could ever be without it.