JULY 4, 2024 – On this Independence Day, it’s especially pertinent to assess where we now find ourselves as a nation. We live in contentious times, but nearly all times past have been filled with conflict. Have we forgotten that our nation was forged in the fire of upheaval and upon the anvil of war? When we worry about a “civil war,” do we remember the Civil War—the nasty unfinished business of the Founders, who for all their brilliance and dedication failed to tackle the elephant in the room? It’s not entirely unfair to conclude that retroactively the blood of 620,000 dead Union and Confederate soldiers was on the hands of the “Fathers.”
The blood of soldiers, North and South, was mixed with more bloody stuff preceding the War Between the States and following the conflict, including slavery before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and slavery by a different name after the failure of Reconstruction.
None of which is to suggest that we take a ho-hum view of today’s events. Not at all. If we care about our country, if we are sincere about the Golden Rule, if we truly subscribe to the aspiration that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, if we honestly care about the world we leave to posterity, we should be plenty worried about the course our ship of state and body politic are on.
Our storied past is punctuated with two repetitive lessons:
- Really bad stuff has already happened—and however scarred we’ve become, we’ve survived, even thrived, in spite of ourselves; and
- If really bad stuff happened before, it can happen again—except worse, so we should always be vigilant and alert to divert bad stuff before it becomes really bad stuff.
Speaking of history and the term of art—“really bad stuff”—I recently watched in its entirety, the 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, produced and directed by Leni Riefenstahl. For its cutting-edge cinematic techniques, the film won prestigious awards, and to this day its recognized as one of the greatest propaganda films of all time. As a window onto fascism, Triumph of the Will provides a view that is spine-chilling. It documents the Nuremberg Congress and Rally staged in September 1934, a year and eight months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and almost exactly five years before the start of WW II.
I’d seen snippets of the film in various documentaries, but never before had I watched all two hours of Riefenstahl’s masterwork. I was struck by the sheer scale of the Rally. More than 700,000 people participated in the various parades and assemblies, with every detail orchestrated and coordinated with military precision. The extraordinary displays anticipated the grand-scale, highly choreographed propagandistic spectacles produced by the regime in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).
As martial music—and some Wagner—plays in Triumph of the Will, the viewer sees hordes of uniformed automatons goose-stepping their way through old Nuremberg past crowds of onlookers, arms raised in the Nazi salute, while thousands of adulating citizens wave from every window opening in the buildings lining the route. At the sight of it all I wondered how many factories had worked around the clock for how many days to produce such a vast quantity of uniforms and accessories; flags and standards; swastika banners five stories high; and how the movements of so many people were masterminded in design and execution.
Featured are speeches by the Fuhrer. To see him wind up and deliver is a wonder to behold. One gets the impression that as hysterical as he sounds by the end of his tirade, this man was no lunatic. Cunning and calculating, maybe, but not crazy from a clinical perspective. As a chronologically downstream observer, I knew where all this was headed. Yet, at the time, didn’t people witnessing the extraordinary event have some clue that “really bad stuff” was afoot in all the jackboots? Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany only a year and eight months before, but now the dark side was in total control. Yet it was a year and a half before Germany would occupy the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; five years before Hitler pulled the trigger on WW II in Europe. If Germans—and the rest of the world—should have called a Halten sie! to it all, then and there, how would they have done so? By September 5, 1934—the start of the four-day extravaganza—the fascist train had left the station. It was now barreling toward the abyss of nihilism.
Twenty-twenty-four isn’t 1934, nor is America Germany, and neither Trump nor Biden is a Hitler, especially in oratorical impact and imagery, despite the American fetish for the American flag[1]. But more than ever, we must beware of people in the shadows of autocracy who seek the limelight in our democracy. Beware of someone like Steve Bannon, who calls Trump “soft” and talks of managing a military control center; a person with connections, a following, resources, and a platform; who, in the style of Trump will leverage his four-month incarceration as the badge of resistance against dark forces, the evil state, and the deep swamp. The bottom line of his agenda is that the end justifies the means, even violent means. Though wrapped in the American flag, that approach is antithetical to the very principles that Jefferson grafted into his Declaration of Independence.
In Bannon’s arsenal of vitriol, in his express desire to burn down the town, lies some “really bad stuff.” Together, we who disagree about much, we on the left, on the right, and across the middle must agree on this: what makes for “American Exceptionalism,” is not power or might, extreme wealth (of the top 1%) or limitless opportunity (for the top 20%); what makes us “special” is our basic operating principle—however aspirational—that the end does NOT justify the means.
As we down our hot dogs, burgers, and potato salad; as we hoist the flag and light the fireworks, let us take honest stock of where we are and where we could be headed. Then let us extend our hands across the political aisle and pull back together what we have torn asunder.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] On a visit stateside a Swedish cousin once commented on this. “Why is it that you Americans are so obsessed with your flag?” he asked. He could well have added, “I thought you were first and foremost a country of ideals and principles.”
