Disproportionate Death and How They Could Happen

 

Disproportionate Deaths and How They Could Happen

I have a PhD in Russian history. I have known Russian history better than by far most Americans for a very long time. I have known for a very long time that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics suffered more casualties in World War II than the United States did, orders of magnitude more. I have had some personal exposure to that suffering. My personal acquaintance with the suffering of the Russian people in World War II began in the summer of 1968. I participated that summer in a Russian language program of Indiana University. I and the other students in that program spent five weeks in Bloomington, Indiana, on the beautiful campus of Indiana University, studying Russian. Then we went, in three different groups, to the Soviet Union. During the five weeks I spent in the USSR that summer I visited Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then called), Pyatigorsk (site of what was then the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, now Pyatigorsk Foreign Languages University), Tbilisi (the capital then of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia, now of the independent nation of Georgia), Kiev (the capital then of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, now of the independent nation of Ukraine), and Moscow (then the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic, now the capital of the independent nation of Russia). It was particularly in Leningrad that I began to learn of the deaths and the suffering the people of Russia sustained in what they call the Great Patriotic War (           `or the Great War of the Fatherland, the Russian term will translate either way) and we call World War II.

A few things stand out in my memory from my time in Leningrad that summer. One was a question Russian people asked me more than once: “Are both of your parents still alive?” I was born in 1946, just over one year after the end of World War II, but the Russians with whom I spoke didn’t know that about me. They may well have assumed that I was born during the war. They were all surprised when I answered their question yes. Few of them, it seems, could have answered the same question the same way.

Then there was walking down Nevskii Prospekt, the main street of downtown Leningrad. I would see war damage to the buildings on one side of the street but not the other. Our Russian guide explained that that was because the shells from the Germans came from one direction such that they passed over the buildings on one side of the street and hit the buildings on the other side. I learned that the Germans had besieged Leningrad.

Then I began to learn about the magnitude of the death and suffering the German siege caused in that great city. Our guide took us to a memorial cemetery outside the city. It is the final resting place of an enormous number of residents of Leningrad who died during that siege. It’s size was simply overwhelming.

I learned much more about the siege of Leningrad years later when I read the book Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich,  by Brian Moynahan. I learned that around one million residents of Leningrad, roughly one third of the city’s population, died during that siege. Most of the them starved to death. Parents watched their children starve to death. Children watched their parents starve to death. Shostakovich managed somehow to premier his Seventh Symphony, called the Leningrad Symphony, during the siege, but most of the musicians who performed it were starving to death. Through it all, Stalin’s NKVD, a predecessor of the KGB, kept on arresting, torturing, and killing  citizens of the city as they had been doing for years before the war began. Moynahan tells one story of a man whose daily eight hour shift consisted of shooting people in the back of the head. The suffering in Leningrad during the siege is essentially incomprehensible to those of us who have never experienced anything like it.

Then, just now, I finished reading the book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by the great Yale historian Timothy Snyder.[1] Snyder’s project in that book is to describe the intentional policies of mass killing carried out between 1933 and 1945 by both Stalin and Hitler in the lands of central and eastern Europe occupied in those years by both the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Much of that territory suffered three occupations, first by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again.

The intentional killing of millions of people in that unfortunate part of the world began in 1933 when Stalin instituted a policy of mass starvation in the USSR but mostly in Ukraine. He did it partly as an aspect of his effort to collectivize Soviet agriculture and partly as a way to blame the failure of collectivized agriculture on anti-Soviet peasants, especially Ukrainian peasants. Snyder says 3.4 million Ukrainians died in that artificial, intentionally imposed famine.

Next came what Snyder calls the Great Terror of 1937-1938. In the Great Terror Stalin intentionally killed between 600,000 and 700,000 Soviet people. A disproportionate number of them were Poles and Ukrainians. Stalin and his instruments of terror made up something they called the Polish Military Organization. No such organization ever existed, but Stalin’s NKVD sent to the Gulag or killed thousands upon thousands of people accused of being part of it. Many but by no means all of those people were either Polish or in some other way were accused of being agents of a Polish plot to overthrow the USSR. Soviet Jews also suffered disproportionately in the Great Terror though they were not specific targets of it.

In 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression treaty. Hitler promptly invaded Poland from the west. Shortly thereafter, Stalin invaded Poland from the east. The two totalitarian states had signed a secret protocol to the nonaggression pact that divided Poland, and Baltic states, and part of Romania between them. What had been the independent nation of Poland was quickly occupied by both the Germans and the Soviets. Both of those nations engaged in intentional mass killings in that region in the years 1939 to 1941, before Hitler invaded the USSR.

Snyder explains that Hitler did not yet have a policy of murdering Europe’s Jews. He had what he called the Final Solution to what he called the Jewish problem, but it did not at first involve the industrialized genocide in which the Nazis later engaged. Rather, Hitler planned at first to deport Europe’s Jews. The Nazis had four different possible deportation plans. One of them involved shipping the Jews to Madagascar, which was at the time a French possession. The British navy made that plan impossible. Another involved moving all of Europe’s Jews into a conquered USSR as far east as the Urals, then working and starving both them and a great many Slavs to death. This plan would have resulted in tens of millions of intentionally imposed deaths.

Nonetheless, as soon as the Nazis occupied any part of Poland or the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet republics, they began the intentional mass killing of Jews. They didn’t do it with gas chambers. They did it with bullets. They forced either Soviet prisoners of war or the Jews themselves to dig pits, then shot them either so that they fell into the pits or were already prone in the pits. One particularly egregious instance of this policy took place at a ravine outside of Kiev called Babi Yar. There, on September 29 and 30, 1941,  the Nazis and their local collaborators shot around 33,770 people, most of them Jews. Similar mass killings of Jews and others took place throughout the lands that had been Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union, at this stage  of Hitler’s plans mostly if not exclusively with bullets not gas chambers.

Both the Germans and the Soviets enacted similar policies of killing in the lands they occupied at the beginning of the war. They both set out to eliminate Poland’s educated and professional classes. They both feared that such people could lead resistance to their occupation of their homeland, but they had different ideological justifications for the killing. The Germans were engaged in ethnic cleansing. The Soviets were killing supposed class enemies. Both of them killed thousands upon thousands of people.

One famous incident of such killing took place in the forest called Katyn in April and May, 1940. There the NKVD, Stalin’s primary instrument of killing and terror, killed around 22,000 Polish military and police officers and other members of the Polish intelligentsia. For decades the Soviets blamed these killings of the Germans. More recently the Russians have admitted that it was the Soviets who did it.

Hitler had always intended to eliminate all Jews from Europe. At first he intended to do it through deportation and by working and starving millions of them to death. He planned to do that in what he expected to be a defeated and prostrate Soviet Union. The victory Hitler expected to win in the Soviet Union in a matter of months after he invaded in June, 1941, never came. Hitler could never implement that plan, but he never gave up his goal of eliminating all Jews from Europe. When it became clear that he was not going to win his war against the Soviets, which happened not later than 1942, he had to change his tactics for accomplishing that diabolical goal.

That’s when the gassing started. Hitler’s first gas of death was carbon monoxide. His SS and other killers would pipe exhaust from trucks or stand alone internal combustion engines into enclosed spaced into which people, mostly Jews, had been forced. Only later, and mostly if not exclusively at Auschwitz, did the Nazis use Zyklon B, the trade name of the pesticide hydrogen cyanide.

Most of us Americans, I suspect, associate Hitler’s gassing of countless numbers of Jews with the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The Nazis did construct gas chambers and crematoria there, but Auschwitz was not originally a death camp. It was a concentration camp. Snyder points out that the two types of camp are not the same thing. The concentration camps initially were sites of forced labor not of intentional murdering. The intentional murdering with gas did not begin at Auschwitz. It began in late 1941 at the Polish city of Chelmno and elsewhere. It was carried out at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec before it was done at Auschwitz. Auschwitz became the main Nazi death camp, but it did so relatively late. A relatively small percentage of all the Jews the Nazis killed were killed at Auschwitz. Most of them were Hungarians not Poles or members of other nationalities.

Snyder puts the number of people intentionally killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945 at 14 million. He says this number is probably conservative. He puts the number of Jews killed at 5.4 million, a number he also says is conservative. In his 14 million he includes only those who were killed in areas occupied by both the Germans and the Soviets at different times and only those killed as a result of an intentional policy of killing by the occupying forces. It does not include battlefield deaths or other deaths that happened but were not specifically part of an intentional policy.

The number 14 million deaths is essentially impossible to comprehend. It exceeds by 13 million the number of British and American casualties in World War II taken together. It also exceeds the number of battlefield losses in all of America’s foreign wars by 13 million.[2] I do not mean to minimize the tragedy of American and British war deaths. They are truly tragic, and the survivors of those killed did truly mourn their dead loved ones. But they are a tiny fraction of the number of people the Nazis and the Soviets intentionally killed in what Snyder calls the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945.

Snyder’s 14 million is far from the total number of people killed in the USSR, lands occupied by the USSR, and lands occupied by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. Many Americans think World War II began on December 7, 1941. It didn’t. It began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west. The Soviets invaded Poland from the east shortly thereafter. The Nazis and especially the Soviets had already intentionally killed millions of people by the time World War II was underway in Europe.

Then it got worse. World War II was horrific the whole world over, but what was its most horrific times of killing began on June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded his former ally the Soviet Union. Accounts diverge, but it appears that the Germans lost between 4 and 5 million killed on the eastern front of the European war. Common figures for the number of Soviet citizens killed in World War II range from around 20 million to around 24 million out of a population of around 194 million. Most but by no means all of those deaths were of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians. When we add Snyder’s 14 million intentional deaths to those numbers we find that between 1933 and 1945, something like 34 to 38 million people died. American deaths in all of World War II, both military and civilian, totaled around  420,000. That is a horrific number, but it is about 1.5% of the number of people killed in the bloodlands in Snyder’s relevant years.

That’s why I have titled this piece “Disproportionate Deaths and How They Could Happen.” The impact of World War II on Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and other parts of Snyder’s bloodlands is orders of magnitude greater than the impact of World War II on the United States. I don’t mean to suggest that the impact of World War II on the United States was minimal. It wasn’t. It brought the US out of the Great Depression and made the country the major world power. But America’s enemies in World War II invaded the Aleutian Islands and dropped one bomb on Oregon. Otherwise, the war did not touch the 48 states that made up the union at that time. No one destroyed New York the way the Germans destroyed Warsaw. Nobody shot 33,000 people into the Grand Canyon the way the Germans shot people into Babi Yar. No one built death camps on US soil. D-Day had its significance for the outcome of the war in Europe, but by then the Soviets had already lost millions of people and had the Germans on the run; and their sustaining casualties was far from over.

There can be no doubt that World War II inflicted massive economic damage on the USSR. It would inevitably take the country years to recover from that damage. Yes, for decades after the war the Soviet leaders used the destruction from the war as an excuse for the inadequacy of their economy, especially for the production of consumer goods. But the cynicism of the Soviet leadership doesn’t change the truth about the war and the amount of suffering it inflicted on the Soviets. That suffering staggers the imagination. Those of us who have never experienced anything like it can probably never truly understand it.

I once said to my history professor father that it seems like in the first half of the twentieth century the whole world went mad. It began with World War I, which I haven’t even mentioned here. I have mentioned here some truly shocking figures on the number of deaths on the German-Soviet front in World War II, but I haven’t mentioned the millions of deaths that different nations incurred in the Asian theater of that war. China and Japan suffered as badly as Russia and Germany did. The world saw tens of millions of deaths in the short span of twelve years between 1933 and 1945. No other brief period of human history has seen the madness of those twelve years.

And I have to ask: How was it possible? How could human beings do to other human beings what so many human beings did to other human beings in those few years? I have written on that question before on this blog. I’ll repeat here what I said there, then add another two factors, namely, the human proclivity for obeying even illegal orders and the human compulsion to look out only for oneself.

The most significant thing that leads human beings to commit atrocities against other human beings is dehumanization. In virtually every war, and certainly in every modern war, each of the combatants has dehumanized their opponent. The German Nazis give us perhaps the best example of a people doing that to other people. Nazi ideology was racial ideology, though they thought of race differently than we do. To them, the Germans were the superior human race. They were superior to all other races, that is, to all other humans. In particular, the Nazis considered all Jews and all Slavs, along with a few others, to be truly subhuman. Not fully human. Less than fully human. Certainly less than the Germans.

For most of the Germans who committed mass murder against Jews and Poles, they were not committing murder at all. Murder is one human being willfully killing another human being. It is not a human being killing some being that is not fully human. To the Nazis, Jewish people were not fully human. They were some sort of subhuman species distinct from the superior Germans. Slavic people weren’t fully human to the Nazis either. Hitler meant to eliminate all Jews from Europe either by deporting them to Madagascar or elsewhere or by killing them all. He meant to do essentially the same thing to all Slavic people, especially the Poles, the Russians, and the Ukrainians. He had no trouble recruiting an enormous number of people who were more than willing to carry out his dirty work. How as that possible? Dehumanization, that’s how. For the Nazis, Jews and Slavs were subhuman and therefore did not deserve to live if their death benefited the superior humans, the Germans.

Secular ideology is another factor in the dynamics that led so many people to kill so many other people between 1933 and 1945. I’ll look just at the Germans and Soviets in this regard, though the same analysis applies to the Japanese imperialists and the Chinese Communists. Nazi ideology was thoroughly secular. Perhaps it did not deny the reality of God as explicitly as Marxism does, but it posited something other than God as the people’s primary concern, as their highest value. That something was the German people, and the concept “the German people” is purely secular.

While some may speak of the spirit of a particular people, the concept “the German people” is a abstraction, and it is a secular one. The German people consists of German people, individual human beings. There is nothing transcendent about them. There is nothing divine about them. When you make them your ultimate concern the way the Nazis did, you make an idol of them. You have something purely human function as something truly divine. You make a god of that which is not God. In other words, you create an idolatrous secular ideology.

The same is true of Marxism whether in its pure form from Karl Marx or in its Marxist-Leninist form in the Soviet Union. Marxism is aggressively atheistic in a way that Nazism didn’t need to be. Marx was a philosophical materialist. That is, he believed in the reality only of the material, the physical. He didn’t just deny the reality of God. He considered belief in God to be nothing but a tool the capitalists used to control the proletariat, the working people of a capitalist economy.

Nazism made an idol out of the German people. Marxism and Marxism-Leninism made a idol out of the proletariat, out of a country’s workers. In theory at least, the welfare of the proletariat was a Marxist’s ultimate concern. Marxism subordinated everything to that ultimate concern. Anything is permissible and indeed is good if it benefits the working class.[3] When that ultimate concern is paired with militant atheism, there is nothing to stop the Marxists and Marxist-Leninists from committing the atrocities they eventually committed.

For example, Stalin starved between 3 and 4 million Ukrainians to death. Why? because doing so, he claimed, advanced the cause of socialism. That is, it advanced the welfare of the working class. There is nothing in Marxism to give individual human lives any value. There is no God, there are only socio-economic classes determined by their particular relationship to the means of production. Wellbeing is a collective matter not an individual one. So killing one human being is perfectly acceptable. So is killing 4 million human beings as long as the killers can maintain that they do it to benefit their ideology’s idol, the working class.

All secular ideologies operate the same way. They all remove the spiritual from human life. They remove the divine from human life. They kill God. They leave no ground for true morality. They leave no ground for common decency. They make anything that conforms to the ideology permissible even moral. In this way, Nazism and Marxism-Leninism functioned identically. They were both secular. Neither of them had any grounding for the value of human life be it individual or collective. There was nothing in either of them to stop them from committing mass murder, and commit mass murder they both did.

Secular ideologies are actually a form of dehumanization, or at least both Nazism and Marxism were. For Nazism, only true Germans were truly human. Everyone else was subhuman. For Marxism, only the working class had any value. Everyone else was, in practice if not quite in theory, subhuman. Secular ideologies make it possible for some people to dehumanize other people. All secular ideologies are idolatrous, and it makes little or no difference what a particular ideology’s idol is. It can be the Germans. It can be the proletariat. It can be one’s nation. All of those idols facilitate the dehumanization of “the other,” the ones the ideology blames for the problems a people, a class, or a nation face. Dehumanization combined with secular ideology is a deadly mix. It is always a deadly mix, or at least it has the potential of becoming one. That’s what it did in the case both of Nazism and of Soviet Marxism.

Then there are those two other factors that I mentioned above that played a role in making the atrocities of the bloodlands possible. One is the human tendency to obey whatever orders someone understood as superior gives. This human tendency gets parodied  as an actor saying, in a fake German accent of course, “I was only following orders!” We can hear it as a joke, but it is in fact what the former Nazis said in their own defense at the Nuremburg trials and elsewhere. I once asked an American military veteran if the people of the US military would obey an order to launch a massive nuclear attack on another nation. Such an attack would surely inflict at least as much death and destruction as World War II did, almost certainly more. My veteran said “Yes. They would.” Once again I want to ask: How could they? The answer is, they have committed themselves to an organization that makes obeying orders both a necessity and a high virtue, so they would obey even that order. Most of the German and Soviet people who actually carried out the atrocities of the bloodlands were just following orders.

And we must never underestimate the power of self-interest in human decisions. Most if not all of the people who committed the atrocities of the bloodlands were in an impossible position. They had been told to do something most of them surely were at least reluctant to do. I mean, who wouldn’t be reluctant to turn the valve that released the deadly gas into a space filled with other human beings? Yet a lot of people did it. A lot of people shot hundreds or even thousands of other people in the back of the head, something most of them surely weren’t enthusiastic about doing. But they had been given their orders, and they knew that things could go very badly for them if they did not obey those orders. Neither Stalin’s NKVD nor Hitler’s SS would tolerate disobedience. For at least many of the people who actually carried out the killing in the bloodlands, it was either kill or be killed. In that situation, a few people will choose to be martyrs and refuse to kill, but most people won’t. Most people will kill others if they have to in order to avoid being killed themselves. Sometimes they’ll even do it to avoid negative consequences for themselves less extreme than death.

So here’s one truth I wish more Americans understood. We were not the primary victims of the European theater of World War II. The people of the bloodlands, especially the Jews and the Poles, were. Yes, we suffered. Far too many families lost loved ones, and one family losing one loved one is one too many. But the suffering of the bloodlands and of the entire Soviet Union dwarfed American suffering by large orders of magnitude. Far too few of us recognize our debt to the Soviet Union, to the Russians in particular, for being the primary force that defeated Nazi Germany. The tide of the European war did not turn on D-Day. It turned at Stalingrad, the battle of which was long over before D-Day and was a battle fought by the Soviets.

Here's another. Far too few Americans understand the dynamics and power of dehumanization. We may be quick to condemn the Germans for dehumanizing Jews and Slavs. We may be quick to condemn the Soviet Communists for dehumanizing supposed class enemies. But we Americans dehumanize our opponents too. In both world wars Germans weren’t Germans to us, they were “krauts.” In both Korea and Vietnam, our Asian enemies weren’t Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese people, they were “gooks.” It was a whole lot easier for our military to kill krauts than it was for them to kill German human beings. It was a whole lot easier for them to kill gooks than to kill Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese human beings.

No, we Americans have done more than our share of harm in the world, but we didn’t shoot and gas six million Jews the way the Germans did. Nonetheless, we are hardly innocent when it comes to genocide. We white Americans committed genocide against the people of the First Nations of North America. We don’t like to admit it, but Hitler knew it. He used what we did to the Indians as a model for what he was going to do to the Jews. We actually killed more Indians than Hitler killed Jews.

We must always be vigilant to oppose any slide into secular ideology that we perceive taking place among us. We’ve already begun that slide. Our secular idol is commonly our nation. We expect salvation from our nation. We will do anything for our nation. We will kill for our nation. Yet our nation is a purely abstract, secular construct. We make it our god, but it isn’t God. It isn’t close to being God. In American politics today, the idolization of America is stronger than it has been for quite some time. We must do everything we can to stop it. We must never again think up unhuman names for our opponents be our conflict with them military or merely economic. We must not dehumanize anyone. We must refuse to obey illegal or immoral orders no matter who issues them. We must be willing to make personal sacrifices to avoid committing crimes against humanity.

So in the final analysis, how could something like the bloodlands happen? How could human beings intentionally kill 14 million other human beings? They, we, could because all of us are human. We aren’t gods and goddesses. We are fallible mortals. We make mistakes. We make big mistakes. We are prone to idolatry. We are quick to dehumanize. If you doubt that, look at what Donald Trump says about immigrants into our country. Nothing can ever truly justify one human being killing even one other human being. Certainly nothing can justify human beings killing millions upon millions of other human beings as happened in the first half of the twentieth century. So do we get it? I sure wish more of us did.

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[1] Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, New York, 2010).

[2] Snyder seems not to include the US Civil War casualties in this number. The Civil War was, after all, not a foreign war. If we include Civil War casualties, Snyder’s number drops from 13 million to closer to 12 million.

[3] In Marxism-Leninism, anything becomes permissible and even good if it benefits the Communist Party, but we needn’t go into that issue here.

Nonetheless

 

Nonetheless!

We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die. That, of course, is hardly news. We all know it.  We may spend most of our lives rarely if ever thinking about it, but we know it. I’m quite old now, 77 years old. And I can tell you that as you age, mortality becomes more and more of a reality in your life. Even if, like me, you don’t presently have a terminal medical diagnosis, you know that one could come every time you see a doctor. None of us ever knows when or how we will die until that terminal diagnosis comes, and even then some doubt probably remains about timing and the possible intervention of other causes of death. And of course, sometimes people die without ever having gotten a terminal diagnosis. They die from an accident. They die from sudden heart failure. They may even be murdered. All of that is true, and it all relates to the ultimate, that is, the last, fact of human life: We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die.

As I advance in years, my increasing age has changed the way I look at people in a couple of ways. I realize more immediately than I used to that every person I see is just at the particular stage of life in which I see them. They weren’t always the way they are now. They will not always be the way they are now. No one is stationary in life, everyone is passing through life. Everyone’s life had a beginning, and everyone’s life will have an end. Indeed, the earth itself will have an end, and it appears that perhaps even the universe will have an end. Nothing is permanent. Everything passes away.

And I have to fight the temptation to think that because everything passes away, nothing means anything. Whatever anyone does, whatever anyone thinks, whatever anyone says, whatever anyone writes, it will all pass away. It will all become ancient history, and will almost certainly be completely forgotten and insignificant ancient history. Then, we hope a very long time from now, humanity will cease to exist, and everything humans ever did will no longer even be ancient history because there will be no one to consider it as such. So why does anything matter? Doesn’t the mortality of all existence, especially the mortality of us human beings, render everything meaningless?

It sure is easy enough to think so, but there are also reasons not to think so. For people of faith, the main reason not to think so is God. If there is a God, and there is, nothing that God has created is insignificant. All creation is significant because it matters to the love that is the ultimate reality, the love we call God.

There is another reason not to think so that should appeal both to people of faith and people of no faith. It is an existential reason. We exist. We have life. We have lives to live. In those lives we live with ourselves and with others who are living with themselves. When we stop thinking about our mortality and focus on our lives rather than our deaths, we find that we matter to ourselves. Most of us, if we’re lucky and loving ourselves, matter to some other people. We and they matter to ourselves and to each other in the only life we have or will ever have, on this earth at least.

We have only two existential choices in life. Each person can either end their life or live their life. Ending one’s life hastens the coming oblivion we all face unless, that is, there really is a God; and there is. To end one’s life, except perhaps as a self-induced euthanasia, is to throw away that which makes you some kind of reality. It is to throw away the only shot at reality we’ll ever have on this earth.

Our other choice is simply to live the life we have for as long as we have it, then let it go when it comes to an end. If we’re going to do it, however, we have to do it despite our mortality and the mortality of everything else in creation. That’s not easy. Mortality is a dominant fact of our lives, and it’s hard to ignore it completely. So let me suggest one way to do it.

The great Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall once wrote that faith is looking reality squarely in the eye and saying “nonetheless.” Hall spoke of faith, but I think we can expand his meaning here to good effect. The ability to look all of reality squarely in the eye and say nonetheless is a good way of understanding not just faith but all of life. Unless we seal ourselves off from the world entirely or just don’t give a damn about other people’s suffering, it is the only choice we have. It is the only way to live.

There’s no way to conform the world to our will. There is no way to make the larger world be what we want it to be, something it just flat isn’t. So we can end our lives, or we can look reality squarely in the eye and say nonetheless. We can say: World, you suck! You are full of violence, hatred, oppression, and injustice. Yet nonetheless. Nonetheless, I will live. I will make of my life what I am able to make of it. It will care about other people’s suffering as much as I am able and can tolerate, but I won’t let it overwhelm me. I won’t let it stop me from living. I won’t let it stop me from finding meaning in my life. I will live knowing that I will die. I will live knowing that everyone I love who hasn’t died already will die some day. I will know that the world lives by its own ways, which are definitely not God’s ways. I will know that suffering will not end on earth.

And I will live nonetheless. It’s the only way I know to live. I know that doing it isn’t easy, but I also know that it is my only choice. So I’ll do. I just hope I can actually do it well.

How Could It Happen?

 

How Could It Happen?

July 10, 2024

I am reading the book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by the great Yale historian Timothy Snyder. I’m not halfway through it, but I already have some thoughts I want to share. In that book Snyder goes into excruciating detail about the killing fields on the land between Germany and the USSR, and in the USSR itself, from around 1930 up to the end of World War II in 1945. Early in the book he focuses on the Holodomor, the famine Stalin imposed on Ukraine in 1933 and 1934. Millions of people starved to death. Snyder’s descriptions of the Ukrainian countryside during that famine are bone chilling. He tells stories of Communist Party members stealing whatever food a Ukrainian peasant family had managed to hold onto, doing it just to make sure the family starved to death. Stalin and his Communists knew what they were doing. They were punishing the Ukrainians for resisting the forced collectivization of agriculture. Stalin knew what was happening in Ukraine, and he just didn’t care.

Snyder then turns to Stalin’s Great Terror later in the 1930s. I have a PhD in Russian history, but Snyder presents the Great Terror in a way I’d never seen before. Western people like me usually think of Stalin’s Great Terror as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) turning on itself. We think of it as Stalin purging real and supposed opponents from the Party and solidifying his personal, dictatorial control of the Party and thus of the entire USSR. Stalin certainly did that, but there was much more to the Terror than that. Snyder focuses particularly on what he calls “the Polish campaign.”

People of Polish nationality or descent made up only a tiny percentage of the Soviet Union’s population. Yet Stalin set out to eliminate them nearly altogether. His Communists dreamed up something called “the Polish Military Organization” that was supposedly an active foe of the Soviet Union working to undermine it from within. There was no such organization, and Stalin had entered into a mutual nonaggression pact with Poland. Nonetheless, the Soviet Communists charged over 100,000 Soviet people with being that nonexistent organization’s operatives in the country. Something like three-quarters of them were shot. The others were sent to the Gulag, many of them never to be heard from again. Stalin conducted other what Synder calls “national operations” too. He targeted Lithuanians and Latvians along with other nationalities present in the country along with the Poles. Snyder says that there was never a national operation against the Jews, but they died in the “national operations” in disproportionate numbers nonetheless.

Essentially none of the people Stalin had killed in the Great Terror received any kind of due process of law. Instead, Stalin created a mechanism of terror that consisted of two or three local Communists putting together lists of people to be eliminated and deciding which of them would be shot and which would be sent to the Gulag. In the later months of the operations, Snyder says, the percentage of executions increased because there was no more room in the Gulag.

Snyder’s description of the Great Terror reminds me of a story I read in the book Leningrad, Siege and Symphony, by Brian Moynahan. This story took place later than the Great Terror. It happened during the German siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, but it is nonetheless telling. Moynahan tells a story of a man who worked daily eight hour shifts for the NKVD, a predecessor of the KGB, that was Stalin’s primary element of terror. This man’s job for eight hours a day was to shoot people in the back of the head. There’s no telling how many innocent people this man murdered on orders from his superiors. There were no doubt people in the USSR doing the same routine work during the Great Terror. We Americans are fortunate in a way. Our history in no way prepares us to comprehend what Stalin and the Soviet Communists did to the people of their country. What the Soviets did to their own people is horrific beyond understanding.

Snyder then turns to the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. When Hitler began that invasion, he had his Luftwaffe bomb a huge number of Polish villages, towns, and cities that had no military significance. Hitler’s bombing of Warsaw was the first time there ever was a massive bombing of a major European capital city. Snyder tells stories from the German invasion of Poland that establish that German soldiers simply did not see Polish people as human beings. They murdered people they had taken prisoner whether those people were military people entitled to certain rights under the articles of war or not. They forced people into barns, then set the barns on fire. The Luftwaffe strafed civilians as they fled Warsaw. German tanks crushed Polish buildings and people without regard for any military significance those buildings and people had or did not have. The Germans simply inflicted mass terror on the Polish population, and the Nazi genocide against the Jews hadn’t even really started yet. We, however, know that it is coming, and we know how horrific it was.

How was it possible? The dehumanization of human beings in World War I is part of the answer. European people became inured to human life meaning little or nothing. Every country in Europe, with the exception of a few places like Albania, had a history as a Christian nation. Yet whatever Christian faith people had did nothing to stop that dehumanization of God’s people (and all people are God’s people). In World War I, Christians dehumanized other Christians.

Into that context of dehumanization came the ideologies of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. I’ll start my discussion of those ideologies with the Soviet Union’s Marxism/Leninism. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German economic philosopher who worked mostly in England, developed a theory of history called dialectical materialism. Marx posited that the nature of everything in human culture is determined by ownership of the means of economic production. The dialectical part of dialectical materialism consists of Marx’s assertion that history progresses through stages as different economic classes come to own those means. History, Marx said, is always characterized by class conflict. In industrialized Europe in the 19^th century, the conflict was between the capitalists who owned the means of production and the workers, who Marx called the proletariat, who worked them and thus were the ones who actually produced value. Marx was simply wrong about most of that, but his dialectical historical philosophy is not what mostly interests us here.

It is far more important for our purposes that Marxism was radically, aggressively atheistic. The “materialism” of Marx’s dialectical materialism refers to the philosophical assertion that only the material is real. There is no metaphysical dimension to reality. There is no spiritual dimension to reality. Only physical objects are real. There is no God. For Marx, religion was nothing more than a tool the class which owned the means of production used to quiet and suppress everyone else. In Marx’s day, that meant, Marx contended, that religious faith functioned only to keep the capitalists as the dominant class. It acted as the “opiate of the people.”

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) added several things to Marx’s philosophy. Most importantly for our purposes, he developed a theory of the communist party, which, he said, was the party of the proletariat. For Lenin, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union consisted of the most “class conscious” of the country’s workers. It represented the economy’s working people against the capitalists. Under first Lenin and then under Stalin, the CPSU developed a structure topped by a General Secretary. In theory, discussion of political and economic issues inside the party was permissible until that structure made a decision. Then everyone in the party had to fall in line in support of the decision. In practice, especially under Stalin, the General Secretary was the one who made the decisions, and everyone else just had to follow and support them. In Marxism/Leninism, the communist party represents the interests of the workers by definition. It represents the interests of the workers because it says it does. Soviet Marxism/Leninism created the structure that Stalin used to make himself supreme dictator of the USSR with everyone else just obligated to do what he told them to do. That ideology contained nothing that would inhibit mass murder or genocide.

Then there is the ideology of Nazi Germany. Nazism was never as well thought out or sophisticated as Marxism/Leninism, wrong as Marxism/Leninism was. Nazism consisted mostly of the ravings of Adolf Hitler. Marx’s ideology was based on class. Hitler’s was based on race, with race defined in a very unscientific way by the Nazis themselves. In Nazism, the Germans were a race. They were in fact the dominant race. All other human races either were or ought to be subordinate to them. Indeed, all other races were less human than were the Germans.

Hitler directed his hateful ideology against essentially everyone who wasn’t German, but he had two “races” in particular in view when he dehumanized non-Germans. They were the Jews and all Slavic people, including the Poles and the Russians. Germany in the 1920s and the first years of the 1930s was not a happy country. In the early 1920s it had inflation so extreme that paper money literally wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. The world-wide depression that began in 1929 just made matters worse. Germany was nominally a democratic republic in these years, but the government was never very successful at addressing and solving Germany’s myriad problems.

Hitler blamed all of those problems on the Jews. There were Jews in Germany, but they were less than one half of one percent of the German population. That there were so few Jews in Germany didn’t matter to Hitler at all. They were still responsible for all of Germany’s problems. They had caused Germany to lose World War I. They were responsible for all of Germany’s economic problems. They were supposedly dominant in the communist movement and had it in for the German people. All of that was utter nonsense, but Hitler proclaimed it as salvific truth to the German people. He proclaimed that Jews were essentially subhuman.

The Slavic peoples were also subhuman for Hitler. Slavic people, in particular the Poles, Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Russians, occupied vast tracts of land to the east of Germany. Hitler insisted that the Germans needed more “Lebensraum,” space in which to live. Hitler had grandiose ideas about conquering those peoples, either exterminating them or making them essentially slaves of the Germans, and having Germans occupy those people’s homelands. The Nazis actually never won an election in Germany. In the election of 1932 they received something like one third of the vote. Nonetheless, Hitler came to power lawfully in January, 1933, when German President Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor.

Germany was a Christian nation. It had been one for well over a millennium by 1933. Some Germans were Protestants, some were Catholics, but they were virtually all Christians. Yet Christianity played no role in Hitler’s ideology. He was not as assertively atheistic as Lenin and Stalin were, but Christianity for him was not something to but was something to control. The Nazis convinced, or forced, most German Christian clergy to sign an oath of loyalty not to God or to Jesus Christ but to Hitler, who basically just ignored the moral teachings of the Christian faith. They just weren’t important to him. Neither he nor his followers were about to let Christian morality stop them from doing what they wanted to do.

Thus, in the 1930s, there were in Europe two powerful or at least rising nations governed by ideologies that were anything but Christian. In both of them, certain people became nothing more than pawns in the dominant ideologies’ quest to impose themselves on their respective nations. In the Soviet Union, anyone who opposed the CPSU was an enemy of no human value who could be killed with no pangs of conscience whatsoever. The same was true of anyone Stalin and the Communists made out to be an enemy whether a person actually was an enemy or not. The main group the dominant ideology dehumanized in Germany were the Jews, though Hitler also dehumanized the Roma (commonly but incorrectly called gypsies), people with physical and mental disabilities, and homosexuals. Hitler wanted all of these people simply eliminated.

So how was all the horror of what Snyder calls the Bloodlands possible? It was possible first of all because World War I had inured the people of Europe to the dehumanization of other human beings. That war was a horror in the life of Europe orders of magnitude greater than any horror imposed by human beings ever had been before. The ideologies of Marxism-Leninism and Nazism introduced justifications for continuing the dehumanization of certain sorts of people. If you want some people to kill some other people willingly and without regret, convince them that the other people aren’t human. People fighting wars dehumanize their enemy all the time. For Americans during World War I Germans weren’t people, they were “krauts.” During World War II for Americans the Japanese weren’t people, they were “the Japs.” In both Korea and Vietnam, American soldiers called their Asian opponents “gooks.” War propaganda in all nations typically pictures the enemy more as apes than as human beings. Dehumanization makes it easy for some people to kill other people, and the powers that so often want some people to kill other people know it.

For Stalin, the people he starved to death in Ukraine were not human beings. They were Ukrainians (not Russians) who opposed his disastrous policy of the forced collectivization of agriculture. For him, their lives had no value whatsoever, so he and the people following him went ahead and starved millions of them to death. For Stalin and his henchmen, Poles weren’t human beings either. They were subhuman enemies, or at least could be made out to be subhuman enemies. To Stalin, they weren’t worth anything, and the victory of communism (supposedly) required their death. So kill them. Why not?

For Hitler and his followers, Poles weren’t really people. They were subhuman Slavs. They stood in the way of Germany’s Lebensraum. The same was true of the eastern Slavs too, especially the Ukrainians. They had something Germany wanted, and they weren’t about to give it to the Germans peacefully. So kill them. Why not? They aren’t worth anything. They aren’t even human.

For Hitler, the Jews were even less human than the Slavs. They didn’t just stand in the way of Germany getting what it wanted the way the Poles and Ukrainians did, they caused all of Germany’s problems. Just how they did that remains a mystery, for in truth they never did. But never mind about that. Hitler said they did, so they did. So build concentration camps. Put gas chambers and crematoria in them. Round up the Jews, all of Europe’s Jews, force them into the camps, work some of them to death, gas and cremate others of them. Why not? For Hitler, the SS, and others of Hitlers thugs, Jews weren’t human, and they were a massive problem, so wipe them out without regrets.

Dehumanization and ideology produced the horrors of Soviet communism and Nazism. Dehumanization of the one identified as other combined with ideology overcame whatever Christian scruples against mass murder a great many Europeans might otherwise have had. I suppose it’s possible that the Christianity of most Europeans was shallow and relatively easy to overcome. Still, anyone who is even superficially Christian knows that killing is wrong. They know that every human life has value because every person is a child of God. In Europe, indeed in most of the world, in the first half of the twentieth century, none of that mattered. Dehumanization and non-religious ideology led to murder on a scale unparalleled in history and beyond the comprehension of most of us who didn’t live through it.

Now, knowing history is all very fine and good. I did, after all, spend seven years of my life earning a PhD in it. For most professional historians, history is important in its own right. They study it because it is history, and that’s what they study. But history becomes far more important when we can see the light that it can shed on our contemporary context. Does the learning that dehumanization combined with secular ideology leads to mass murder and genocide tell us anything about the United States today? I believe that it does. Here’s how.

All the signs indicate that the politics of the United States are about to be taken over by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. That movement is all about dehumanization and ideology. First dehumanization. Trump and his acolytes dehumanize two significant groups of people. One consists of Trump’s political opponents. Trump does not speak of them as being legitimate political opponents within a democracy. He and his minions throw around absolutely absurd claims about them, presumably hoping that most Americans won’t see how false they are. They call liberals communists and Marxists, which American liberals definitely are not. But “communism” and “Marxism” are hate words for most Americans. Communism and Marxism are indeed dangerous, but Trump is setting up a straw man here. Not even Senator Bernie Sanders, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a communist or a Marxist. By calling liberals communists, Trump makes them people not of disagreement but of outright evil. That, folks, is dehumanizing.

There is, however, another group of innocent people whom Trump does even more to dehumanize. That group is the immigrants who come into this country seeking political asylum, something they have every right to do under international law. Trump works hard to give the American people the idea that these immigrants are evil people who are very dangerous for the United States. They are, of course, nothing of the kind. They are mostly ordinary people fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. Trump has his followers believing that they are all murderers, rapists, and terrorists. In fact, the crime rate among these people is lower than it is among Americans as a whole. Sure. It’s possible that some bad actors cross into this country along with legitimate asylum seekers. But we produce more than enough of our own bad actors. A few more getting in can’t possibly make any statistical difference to the safety of us Americans and our country.

Trump’s administration treated immigrants at the US-Mexico border as less than human during his first horrific administration. He tore children away from their parents. He put both the children and the parents in cages. Trump has said that these folk “poison the blood” of the American people. That is a phrase straight out of Nazism, and it dehumanizes the people at whom it is directed.

Trump has announced plans to treat these people as subhuman if he gets a second administration. He wants to build huge camps into which to herd them as he works to deport them in huge numbers. Trump hasn’t said that these camps will have gas chambers and crematoria, or at least he hasn’t said that yet. But Trump’s plan for these camps is chillingly familiar. It reeks of what the Nazis did to the Jews. Depriving people of their rights and their liberty and locking them up in concentration camps as Trump wants to do with immigrants dehumanizes immigrants.

Then there is the question of ideology. Trump’s ideology is a bit hard to nail down. He says so many contradictory things, and nearly everything he says is a lie. But his ideology, such as it is, is summed up most succinctly in his phrase “America First.” That phrase comes from the 1930s, when American Nazi sympathizers and isolationists, who were often the same people,  used it against America’s engagement with the world. It has nasty associations and connotations in this country’s history. Trump throws it around as though it were morally positive, which it is not. Trump’s policies to which the phrase points include withdrawing the US from NATO, kissing Vladimir Putin’s ring, and destroying the US economy with ridiculously and damagingly high tariffs on imported good.

“America First” is dangerous because it makes a purely secular thing the nation’s highest value. A great many of Trump’s followers try to combine the nationalism of “America First” with the Christian religion, but that they do so would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Only bastardized Christianity can be said to be consistent with xenophobic nationalism the way our Christian nationalists say it is. True Christianity is about God’s love and grace for the whole world, certainly not just for the one little corner of the world the US occupies. Christianity puts no nation first. It puts God first—always. And God is the God of all people not only of the Americans. “America First” supplants spiritual values with purely secular ones.

Which is precisely what Soviet communism and Nazism did, each in its own way. Soviet communism made obedience to the CPSU its highest value. Nazism made Germanness its highest value. Both of those displacements of spiritual values led to mass murder and genocide. Making purely secular values primary always carries with it the risk of such unspeakable horrors.

Will Donald Trump’s MAGA movement with its slogan of American First and its demonization of political opponents and immigrants lead to an American Auschwitz? Will it lead to an American NKVD? I like to believe that it will not. I like to believe that the American people would never let that happen. But none of us ever thought Donald Trump and the MAGA movement would ever happen either. Tragically, they did happen. They are still happening all across our country. They may well make Donald Trump president again later this year. That anyone would vote again for Donald Trump after the disaster that was his first presidency boggles the mind, yet millions upon millions of Americans will do it this coming November 5.

Hitler’s horror didn’t break out all at once. It emerged bit by bit. That’s how most violent, dictatorial regimes condition their people to do what the dictator ultimately wants. Trump is a master at that kind of popular manipulation. Will he manipulate the American people into mass murder against Trump’s political opponents and American immigrants? We like to think he couldn’t, but white America has committed genocide before. We committed genocide against the people of the First Nations of North America. We have killed millions of people during wars. We fire bombed Tokyo. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have been far from averse to killing when we want to or when our government tells us to do it.

I still tell myself there will never be an American Auschwitz. I know, however, that those of us who would never countenance such a thing must remain vigilant. We must be aware of the danger. We must do everything we possibly can to stop it from happening. Donald Trump and MAGA create the real possibility that it might. Only we can stop it. I pray that we will.

Should President Biden Run for Reelection?

 

Should President Biden Run for Reelection?

July 7, 2024

This country has an enormous problem. The Democrats are fracturing over whether President Biden should continue his run for reelection or should drop out in favor of some other Democrat, probably Vice President Kamala Harris. This division in the party is a problem mostly because it increases the chances that our fascist Republican Donald Trump will win the election, take over the federal government, and destroy this nation and its democracy as much as he can.

It is difficult for anyone, especially President Biden I suppose, to decide whether he should continue his campaign or withdraw. It is difficult for one primary reason, namely, it is not clear which Democrat would have the best chance of defeating Trump; and that’s all that matters. It matters not at all whether Biden serves another term or Harris or some other Democrat becomes president next January. What matters is that Donald Trump not become president next January.

At least two factors suggest Biden should withdraw. One is his standing in the polls. He trails Trump. Not by a lot, but he trails him. The polls, of course, don’t prove anything, but Biden trailing Trump in them is still not a good sign. The other and more important factor is Biden’s age. He will turn 82 a few days after the November election. He came across as not just old but as feeble in his recent TV debate with Trump. He has made a gaff or two since then as well. The polls say a large majority of Americans are concerned about his age. His mental capacity to act as president is in doubt. Trump isn’t that much younger than Biden (he’s 78), but he comes across as more vigorous. He looks younger than he is. It is a real question whether this country would reelect a president who seems as old and sometimes as age-impaired as Biden does.

There are, however, also factors that suggest that Biden should stay in the race. One is that Harris does slightly worse against Trump in the polls than Biden does. She certainly is younger than Biden (she will turn 60 in October of this year). When she ran for president in 2020, she did not come across as a particularly effective campaigner, though her election to the Senate from California shows that she is capable of receiving a large percentage of the votes at least in a liberal state like the one she represented in the Senate. Her age and mental competence at least would not be the issue that they are for Trump.

Perhaps more importantly, Biden withdrawing from the race could create a difficult situation for his successor as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. The election is only  four months away as I write in early July, 2024. That’s not much time for running a national presidential campaign. Many Democrats would resent Biden’s withdrawal and perhaps not give Harris the unified, enthusiastic support of the Democratic establishment that she would need to defeat Trump. Both President Truman and President Johnson declined to run for reelection when they were eligible to do so. Their successors as the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, both lost to Republican opponents, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon respectively. Biden withdrawing could leave Harris in a difficult position with only long odds of winning the presidency.

Then, sadly, there is the issue of whether this country would elect any woman of color president. We have had a man of color, Barack Obama, as president, but we’ve never had a woman of any ethnic description as president. Kamala Harris is of African-American and Asian-American (Indian) descent. Perhaps we like to think that gender and race don’t matter anymore, but the success of Trump’s racist and misogynist movement suggests otherwise. Would it be wise for the Democrats to run a woman of color for president, especially in today’s problematic circumstances? I fear that it might not be. And remember, the only thing that matters is: Who has the best chance of defeating Donald Trump?

So the decision of whether or not President Biden should continue as the Democratic presidential nominee or should withdraw in favor of his vice president is not an easy one. The more I think about it, however, the more I believe Biden should withdraw. He has been a very good president. He has a lot of accomplishments as president. He is not, however, a good candidate. Being a good president and being a good candidate are not the same thing. For example, the American voters thought George W. Bush was a good candidate, but he was a very bad president. The same is true of Richard Nixon. Perhaps no one can defeat Trump in November, but it is becoming more and more apparent that President Biden cannot. Therefore, if I had a say in the matter (which of course I do not), I would say President Biden should step aside. I doubt that he will. I also doubt that he will win in November, and Donald Trump again becoming president will be a great tragedy for this country and for the world.

Reflections On the Fourth of July, 2024

 

Reflections On the Fourth of July, 2024

July 4, 2024

Two hundred forty-eight years ago today, thirteen British colonies in North America declared their independence from Great Britain. They did so in the name of liberty. Limited liberty to be sure, for there were still many enslaved Americans of African descent in those colonies, and women had no rights, but still. This nation’s founders said, though they didn’t actually believe, that “all men are created equal.” They declared their independence from a British monarch who was essentially above the law. In the nearly two and a half centuries since then, this country has struggled mightily to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, though today most of us understand those principles more broadly than did the men who drafted that Declaration.

We have made some significant progress in that effort, but our history is hardly a straight line toward making those principles reality. We stole the land from and committed genocide against First Nations people. It took a civil war to end slavery, then we let the racist south institute Jim Crow while the racist north engaged in more subtle but nearly equally effective forms of racial discrimination. Women forced us men to give them the right to vote only in 1920. Several decades ago we refused to enact the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have given broader women’s right constitutional protection. In very recent times the United States Supreme Court took a constitutional right away from all Americans when it overturned Roe v. Wade. No. Our trek toward making the principles of the Declaration of Independence has hardly been a direct one, and it has been only partially successful.

This country adopted the United States Constitution in 1789. That constitution doesn’t establish a pure democracy, but it does create a democratic republic. It creates the office of the President of the United States. It specifies certain duties and responsibilities of that office. It does not make the president a king. Under the Constitution, a president serves for only four years, and after World War II and the four-time election of FDR as president, we amended the Constitution to provide that any person may be elected president only twice. Nowhere does the Constitution explicitly establish presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

Then, on July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump that turned the presidency into something the Constitution never created that office to be in the first place. The background of that case is that former president Donald J. Trump has been indicted multiple times for crimes he allegedly committed while he was president and shortly after he left office. He was recently convicted of having committed thirty-four felonies by a court of the state of New York. In the two federal criminal cases against him, Trump has argued that the president is immune from criminal prosecution for any crime he committed while he was president. The federal trial court in which one of those cases was filed denied the motion for dismissal in which Trump made that claim of presidential immunity. (The other court has not ruled on that motion). The United States Court of Appeals affirmed that denial unanimously. It dismissed Trump’s immunity claim outright. The United States Supreme Court granted cert.

In its decision of July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court rewrote the Constitution. The court’s majority held that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for any act he or she takes in connection with the president’s “official acts” while remaining subject to criminal responsibility for unofficial acts. The court said that “official acts” are those which relate to the “core constitutional responsibilities” of the presidency. The court gave essentially no further direction as to which presidential acts are official and which are unofficial.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s unprecedented immunity claim put the president above the law. Now any president can claim immunity from criminal prosecution for anything the president does as president. It seems a president could still be criminally prosecuted for something like business fraud the president committed in a personal capacity while president, personal business hardly being a core presidential constitutional responsibility. But Trump’s lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that the president could order the US military to kill a political opponent and not be criminally liable for murder. In its recent decision, the Supreme Court agreed that the president would be immune from criminal prosecution for such an act as long as the act was “official” in the court’s sense (vague as it is) of what an official presidential act is. In its decision, the Supreme Court’s majority denied that its decision put the president above the law, but that assertion is simply laughable. Putting the president beyond the reach of the criminal law is precisely what the Supreme Court has done.

One of this country’s foundational principles has been that we live under the rule of law not under the personal rule of any person or any political position. The United States Constitution provides for the legislative passage, presidential approval or veto, and the judicial interpretation not of the acts of any individual person but of federal law. It cannot be denied that one of the founders’ primary contentions in rebelling against Britain and in enacting the Constitution was to create a rule of law not a rule by any individual person. Until Donald Trump made his outlandishly absurd claim that he is above the law, no president, not even the presidential criminal Richard Nixon, thought that he was above any law. Nothing in the Constitution puts anyone above the law. Yet that is precisely what the Supreme Court has now done with regard to the presidency.

This decision by the highest court in the land is truly radical. It represents a revolutionary assault on the legal principles on which this country was founded and on which it has stood for nearly two and a half centuries. This decision would be unconscionable in any circumstance, but today’s political circumstances in the United States make it even more immensely dangerous than it otherwise would be.

Former president Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president in the 2024 election. He has made it perfectly clear that he rejects the democratic principles under which this country has always operated. He simply does not believe in real democracy. He does not want to be a legitimately elected servant of the American people. He wants to be an American dictator. He wants to use the power of the federal government to persecute his political opponents. He considers opposing him politically to be criminal. He openly admires authoritarian and dictatorial rulers like Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. He has said that if again elected president he intends to be a dictator, though he has claimed he’d be that only on his first day in office, a claim no reasonable person can believe he actually means. He makes no bones about the fact that he wants to turn the United States Department of Justice into his person law firm and to use it for political not legal purposes. He still insists that he won the 2020 presidential election and that his victory was somehow stolen from him though there is not one shred of factual evidence to support that claim. There is no reason to believe that he would leave the presidency willingly and peacefully at the end of another term.

Another of this country’s founding principles has been that every person in the country has certain legally guaranteed rights. The US Constitution establishes those rights, and they have been implemented by Congress and interpreted and applied by the federal courts. They are constitutionally inviolable. Trump does not believe that people who oppose him have any rights at all. Most particularly, emigrants into this country, especially those who are people of color, have no rights at all for Trump. He has said that he wants to build huge detention facilities, to put everyone who is in in this country seeking asylum (and no doubt other immigrants as well) into them, to deport hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and to do it without due process of law. Trump is both a racist and a misogynist. Another Trump presidency would put the rights of people of color and of all women at serious risk. Trump could now trample those rights without fear of criminal prosecution even if he committed crimes in his attacks on them.

A couple of important questions now arise. One is: How could the Supreme Court make such an outrageous and outrageously wrong decision? The answer to that question surely is that the Court is acting today not on the basis of the law but on the basis of political preference. Donald Trump nominated three of the six justices who made up the majority that determined the court’s decision in the case. Other Republican presidents nominated the other three. It is no secret that Trump’s defense in the criminal cases against him consists mostly of engineering as much delay in the resolution of the cases as he can. The Supreme Court took months to issue its decision in this case. We know that the Supreme Court can act quickly, at least by court standards, when it wants to. Clearly, it did not want to in this case. The only possible explanation of the delay is that the court’s majority wanted to benefit Trump as much as possible. The court’s incomprehensible decision in the case just affirms that conclusion. The Supreme Court’s decision is inexplicable legally. It is quite explicable politically.

Another important question is: What, if anything, can we do about this horrendous decision? One way to avoid the decision’s predictable, immensely harmful consequences is to make sure Donald Trump never becomes president again. Unfortunately, as of today, keeping Trump from winning the election this coming November appears to be an uphill battle. Trump has a solid, fanatical base in his MAGA movement. He leads Biden in the polls if only by a little bit.

Perhaps even more importantly, Joseph Biden has been a very good president, but he is a very bad candidate. Most of the time he is far from charismatic. A majority of Americans have been concerned about Biden’s age for a long time. He is 81 years old. He will turn 82 fifteen days after the 2024 presidential election. Then in the recent “debate” he had with Trump on CNN, Biden performed horrifically badly. He performed so badly that a great many people, including some Democratic politicians, want him to withdraw from the race. So far Biden insists he won’t do it, and he very probably won’t. Moreover, it is not clear that any Democratic candidate who replaced him on the ticket would have a better chance of beating Trump than Biden does. The most likely replacement for Biden is Vice President Kamala Harris, but she does even worse in the polls against Trump than Biden does. We must deal with the probability that on January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump will once again be president of the United States. The American electorate is unlikely to save us from the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential criminal immunity.

The other way to avoid the dreadful consequences of the Supreme Court’s grant of criminal immunity to the president is to have the court overturn its decision. This Supreme Court will, of course, never do that. No Supreme Court on which the majority of justices have been nominated by Republican presidents is likely to do it. Therefore, if it is to happen at all, we’ve got a long wait ahead of us.

There is also the question of how the question would ever come up before the Supreme Court again. Because of the Constitution’s double indemnity clause, the prosecution in a criminal case can never appeal a final court decision in favor of a criminal dependent. It can file an interlocutory appeal of a decision that doesn’t resolve the question of the defendant’s guilt or innocence, but no appellate court is required to accept and hear such an appeal.

There is one way in which the ruling on presidential criminal immunity could come up before the court nonetheless. The Supreme Court’s decision creates the very real possibility that in some future case the question of whether a president’s alleged actions were official nor unofficial could come up. Both a final judgment in favor of the prosecution and an interlocutory decision in favor of either party could come before the Supreme Court. One way for a future court to resolve such a case would be to overrule the immunity decision in US v. Trump. We would have to have a Supreme Court more committed to the rule of law than the current one is, but this scenario is at least a possibility at some point in the distant future.

On the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate both national independence and the principles on which our independent nation is founded. We have never lived fully up to those principles. We never did it in the past, and we don’t do it today. Yet that we may someday live up to them is the hope of every American who truly loves their country. Donald Trump not only would not lead us in the direction of making our principles reality, he would lead an all-out assault on those principles; and the Supreme Court has now given him carte blanche to do it without fear of criminal liability.

Our Fourth of July celebration takes on especially important meaning this year. Only we American people can stop Donald Trump from creating an American fascism, from replacing foundational American legal principles with wholly un-American fascist ones. Only we American people can stop Donald Trump from making the president a dictator. We can save our country from Donald Trump and his fanatical, unthinking MAGA supporters, but we can do it only if all of us who value our American principles rise in defense of those principles. Perhaps today the Fourth of July can inspire us to do so. If it doesn’t, it may be the last true Fourth of July we ever celebrate.

On the Criminal Immunity of the President

 

On the Criminal Immunity of the President

July 1, 2024

Today the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case of The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump on the issue of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. According to news reports, the court held that the president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” committed while president. “Official acts” apparently means acts connected to the “core constitutional responsibilities” of the president. What “official acts” actually are, and what the “core constitutional responsibilities” of the president are, is difficult to determine at best. This is the kind of legal language that leads to years of motions, countermotions, and appeals in cases to which the legal language applies. The Supreme Court today doomed us to years of such legal maneuvering.

In the election interference cases against him in the federal court in Washington, DC, and in a state court in Georgia, Trump will no doubt claim that everything he did that had anything to do with the 2020 presidential election or the January 6 insurrection was official and within his core constitutional responsibilities as president. The federal and state prosecutors in those cases will no doubt claim none of those acts was official or within Trump’s core constitutional responsibilities as president. The courts in those cases will have to rule on those claims. Whichever side loses will certainly than appeal, and years of litigation will follow.

As nearly as I can tell from news reports, the key question here is: What are the core constitutional responsibilities of the president? Under today’s decision, the president is immune from criminal prosecution if the act in question legitimately relates to those core constitutional responsibilities. The obvious place to look for what those core constitutional responsibilities are is Article II of the United States Constitution. That Article creates the office of the presidency, provides for how the president and vice president are elected, and specifies what the president is authorized to do.

Article II:

·        Makes the president the Commander in Chief of the army and navy and of the state militias when they are called into the actual service of the United States.

·        Gives the president the power to make treaties with the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senators “present,” presumably meaning present when the Senate votes on the treaty.

·        Gives the president authority to nominate, and with the consent of the Senate appoint, ambassadors, other public ministers and “Counsels,” judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointment is not otherwise provided for.

·        Authorizes the president to fill vacancies in the federal government with acting officials acting for a specified term without the consent of the Senate.

·        Provides that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

·        Authorizes the president to “commission” all of the officers of the United States.

Article II, Section 2, also charges the states with choosing the “electors” who will be the ones who actually elect the president and vice president every four years. Article II says nothing more of significance about what the president’s responsibilities, powers, and duties are.

Most of these provisions of Article II are quite specific, but there is one of them that is not. The Constitution says that the president shall “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Just what that phrase means is far from clear. Perhaps it’s clear enough that “executed” means put into effect and enforced. But what does “faithfully executed” mean? That, it seems to me, is far from clear. That provision, I fear, opens an enormous can of worms in Trump’s election interference cases. Trump will no doubt claim that when he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, he was simply seeing that the election laws were faithfully executed. He can claim that he honestly believed that the election officials of various states had not faithfully executed Article II, Section 2, of the US Constitution and that, therefore, it was incumbent on him to step in and see that that section of the Constitution was faithfully executed.

There are at least two problems with that assertion. First, the Constitution only requires the states to appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Under this provision, how a state chooses its representatives in the electoral college is a matter of state law not federal law. When the Constitution charges the president with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, it can mean only federal laws. The Constitution gives the president no power over state election or any other kind of state law at all. Therefore, what Trump did with regard to the 2020 election can in no way be excused as official acts relating to the president’s core constitutional responsibilities under Article II, Section 2.

In addition, engaging in illegal acts such as a conspiracy against the US government and unleashing a violent mob on the United States Capitol as the members of the Senate and the House gathered to fulfill one of their constitutional duties in an effort to overturn election results that a state has declared to be valid is hardly seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. When a state submits its slate of electors to the federal government it certifies, in effect at least, that its election laws were faithfully executed with regard to the subject election. Any political candidate can file suit in court in an effort to establish that the election result of a particular state was somehow invalid. Trump did that something like sixty times after the 2020 election. He lost those cases because there was not one shred of evidence of the fraud he alleged had taken place and that had supposedly corrupted the election result. There are no other legal means for a defeated candidate to challenge the results of an election. It simply cannot be legitimately contended that the Constitution gives the president the authority to engage in illegal acts, such as forming a conspiracy to challenge valid election results by having a state submit false sets of electors to the federal government and as inciting a violent resurrection, the way Trump and his minions did so many times in late 2020.

Yet, again, the issue here is not what is true legally or factually. It is what Trump can claim is true in an attempt to bring his actions with regard to the 2020 presidential election under the immunity the Supreme Court today gave the president. The majority of the present United States Supreme Court has established both in how it handled Trump’s immunity claim procedurally and in today’s absurd decision that it will do everything it can to help Donald Trump be elected once again as president of the United States. This court cared a lot that the US Constitution does not specifically mention abortion when it overturned Roe v Wade. It seems to care not at all that the Constitution nowhere says the president is immune from prosecution for criminal acts undertaken as president.

The Supreme Court apparently tried to draft today’s decision on presidential immunity as to avoid the claim that it put the president above the law, but putting the president above the law is precisely what this appalling decision has done. In a country governed under law, no person can be above or beyond the reach of the law in any way. Today, the United States Supreme Court said the president is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. That outrageous ruling puts the president above the law. It creates the possibility of true presidential tyranny of the type Trump wants to implement. Our country is worse off for this decision. This decision puts our democracy at risk. Just how destructive today’s decision turns out to be in practice remains to be seen, but its effect can in no way be good. This decision has continued this Supreme Court’s actions what have destroyed public trust in and respect for the court. For today’s decision all we can say to this court is: Shame! Shame! Shame!