America Is Losing Its Soul

This photo sums up the horrors of Trump?pence. 

America has much ugliness and many horrors in its history, ranging from genocide committed against Native Americans, to over two centuries of slavery as a legal institution, to concentration camps for Japanese Americans during WWII.  Most of us like to think that at least since WWII America has by and large embraced its better angels and cast aside the hate and bigotry of the past.  Yet, as the ongoing human rights crisis at America's border with Mexico reveals, a portion of Americans, including Donald Trump and Mike Pence, exhibit a moral bankruptcy not that far removed from that of Germans who either participated in or conveniently looked the other way as Hitler and his Nazi regime committed atrocities and millions were murdered. Among those seemingly condoning the horrors at the border are evangelical Christians who continue to support Trump and his nightmarish policies.  Indeed, as I have noted before, in the era of Trump, one cannot be a decent and moral person and be a Republican or Trump supporter.  The two are mutually exclusive.  For the rest of us, if we do not do all in our power to remove Trump and his acolytes from power, we become as soulless as his followers.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at America's steady loss of its soul.  Here are excerpts:

The photograph conforms to all the necessary standards for a media image depicting tragedy. It shows a father and his daughter, face down, at the edge of a river, their bodies floating in the muddy water. They can’t be identified and their faces are not visible, which would violate standards of “taste” at many media outlets. But the story of the two people in the photo by Julia Le Duc has been documented.

Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his toddler daughter, Valeria, died Sunday after being swept away by a strong current while the family was trying to cross the Rio Grande into the United States. Unknown to most of the world until this week, they are now briefly famous, a toddler in red shorts and tiny shoes, tucked inside her father’s dark T-shirt, seemingly at rest as if napping with her dad on a hot afternoon.

[I]t recalls the vulnerability of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey in 2015. Nilüfer Demir’s picture of the boy, who seemed to be resting after play, became one of the most searing images of the European refugee and emigration crisis. Both images share elements with other photographs in which the innocence of childhood highlights the cruelty of human or natural forces . . . .

[T]hese images have already broken through our own resistance to seeing pain and tragedy in the world, we imagine that they must break through the collective conscience as powerful political icons. They enter our consciousness almost by stealth and then explode, and that is how we assume they’ll work in the public square, too.

As it circulates, we believe it will acquire enough force and familiarity that our political leaders will have to do something different — change policies, reverse course, revise their own understanding of the severity of a problem. For more than a century, this metaphor has been in operation behind the scenes whenever journalists, or activists, hold up photographs to the world, and say: This is a truth you must acknowledge.

The metaphor of “breaking through,” however, relies on an understanding of the human conscience that is being sorely tested at the moment, not just in the United States, but in every country where nationalism and nativist populism are creating divisions between us and them, between the rightful “folk” and the supposedly illegal outsider.  . . . The thing that needs to be broken through is a basic sluggishness in the moral apparatus, a resistance to doing the hard work of humanizing the other.

But when nationalism has successfully dehumanized the other, there is no breaking through, and people who imagine that a photographic message must assuredly be so powerful that it will touch all hearts are forced to grapple with a more confounding truth: Not all consciences operate alike, not everyone is susceptible to what seems a basic, even rudimentary level of empathy. And so, there is a paradox: We resist the idea of living in an us-vs.-them world only to find that our basic sense of “us” is already fractured. We look out at our fellow humans and can’t honestly understand how their minds work. At some level, we think, “Can’t you see what is happening in this image?” As if seeing and understanding are identical.

This one photograph tells us very little about Ramírez and his daughter, and perhaps with all the attention it has received, we will learn more about the reality of who they were. But just as important is the imaginative reality of the viewer’s effort to sense them as humans, absolutely identical in value and dignity to any person in our most intimate circle of acquaintance.

Of course, one doesn’t have to do this work. Images of tragedy that arrive in a divisive political context often have an off-ramp. You may look at this photo and think that its deep message is “We are all hoping for a better life and will take extraordinary risks on behalf of those we love.” But someone else will probably say, “People shouldn’t cross borders without permission.” The drowning becomes a kind of punishment, a river stands in for ideas of human authority, and the photograph doesn’t break through anything. It merely reiterates an old and cherished belief: Bad things happen to those who break the rules.

There is a fundamental difference between these two interpretations: One requires time and effort, an act of engaged empathy, while the other is a quick judgment that reaffirms an existing sense of the world.

The day after these two people perished in the Rio Grande, the president of the United States dismissed an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a prominent author and columnist in the 1990s. He used a phrase similar to ones he has used in the past to deflect similar allegations: “She’s not my type.” It is a terrible thing to say, with a specifically misogynistic meaning in the context of how men practice violence against women.

But it is a perfect summation of our new and deformed American conscience. . . . . For anyone who wants an off-ramp to the moral demands made by this image, this could be the universal caption: “They weren’t our type.”

Once again, I find myself deeply ashamed to be an American.  As for the "Christians" supporting Trump, they make an outstanding case not only of their own hypocrisy, but of why one should reject their form of Christianity entirely.

We Need to Recall America's Past Failings and Remember the Pittsburgh Dead

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Trump’s (and the Right's) Dangerous Dehumanization of the "Other"

Throughout history one of the tools of autocrats and those seeking to commit genocide has been to dehumanize those disliked or inconveniently in the way o,f grandiose plans is to depict them as "other" and less than human.  America has a great deal of experience with this effort in its past, ranging from dehumanizing Native Americans as "savages" and heathens" to consistently dehumanizing blacks subjected to slavery as being "less intelligent" and "brutes" or worse, including the myth that black males sought to sexually violate white women.  More recently, American Christofascists have employed similar tactics against gays and have even gone so far as to recycle Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda and merely replace the word "Jews" with "gays" or "homosexuals."  Muslims have been similarly targeted and depicted as would be terrorists.    Donald Trump has taken this dehumanization campaign to new heights, getting pointers no doubt from some of the Christofascists to whom he has sold his soul (assuming, of course, he has one).  Kathleen Parker is on point - and off the GOP reservation - in a column condemning Trump's dehumanization efforts.  Here are highlights:

No sooner had I ordered the 2011 book “Less Than Human” for a late-summer read than President Trump called Omarosa Manigault Newman a “dog” and a “lowlife.” Those two slurs fit nicely into author David Livingstone Smith’s philosophical study of man’s capacity to inflict cruelty by first dehumanizing the “other.”

Trump’s personal template is familiar. He likes someone, then doesn’t, then reduces the object of his scorn to something less than human. The mononymously known Omarosa, whose friendship with Trump began when she appeared on “The Apprentice,” was fired last year from her job as a White House aide.

During the past few days, she has released secretly taped recordings of her firing as well as a later conversation with Trump, published a tell-all account of her time in the White House and told MSNBC’s Chris Matthewsthat she’s willing to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.

All things considered, it sounds as if Trump and Omarosa may deserve each other. . . . Whatever her motivations, Omarosa seems set on exposing Trump as a racist. (Congratulations, Omarosa, you’re the last to know. He’s also a misogynist.) Trump may not be an n-word-hurling racist, though Omarosa claims to know of a tape from his reality-show days when he used the term. (Trump denies having used the epithet. But his pattern of speaking about African Americans, among others not of his race or ethnicity, suggests that racism taints his mental processes.)

It’s fair to say that most whites who are racist usually don’t think they are. This is because they don’t use the n-word or actively seek to bring harm to nonwhites. But racism is a pernicious, passive plague. You don’t have to burn crosses in people’s yards. All you have to do is see African Americans (or Asians or Latinos) in stereotypically demeaning ways. Thus, when Trump became angry with Omarosa, he didn’t say she was a disgruntled former employee — or make some other dismissively neutral comment. 

Directing such vitriol toward any woman is repellent. But what makes the [Trump's] president’s remarks especially repugnant is that they were aimed at a minority woman and followed a spate of similar insults targeting African Americans: He recently said that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has a low IQ, “somewhere in the mid-60s.” In a twofer on Aug. 3, he attacked both CNN anchor Don Lemon and Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James, tweeting: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do.”

It’s a simple matter of fact that certain insults have greater or lesser impact when applied to particular individuals or groups of people. Comparing Mitt Romney or Stephen K. Bannon to a dog, as Trump previously did, obviously isn’t the same as calling a black woman a dog. Questioning the intelligence of African Americans is especially blistering.

[Trump] He’s the president of the United States and should be able to muzzle his schoolyard impulses. He should also know that dehumanization — or “othering,” to use current vernacular — leads to marginalization, which can lead to cruelty (say, separating young migrant children from their parents), which can lead to far worse.

As Smith explains in his book, it’s much easier to hurt, maim or kill another when you no longer see them as quite human. World history’s catalogue of atrocities confirms this. Which is why no one living today should be comfortable with the language of dehumanization, no matter how relatively minor the degree.

Sadly, the core of Trump's base, in my opinion, are just as racist as he is.  True, most don't burn crosses in the yards of blacks, but they go along - some enthusiastically - with Trump's racism and misogyny. 

How to Respond to Those Supporting Trump's Cruelty to Children

Like many I suspect, I continue to struggle to get my head around the mindset of Trump/Pence supporters who see nothing wrong with the forced family separation policy currently in effect along America's southwest border.  A policy that is based on a lie by Trump and which treats brown skinned children in some regards as little better than animals and certainly displays a sinister effort to dehumanize them and undocumented immigrants in general.  Beyond this, there is the issue of how does one try to have discourse with individuals who seemingly are incapable of seeing common humanity in others.  One of my cousins, Jess Charles, from the far north of New York State wrote a Facebook post that to me is remarkable in how it addresses these issues.  Here it is in its entirety:

I try really hard to be open-minded and tolerant of views that are different from mine, but I cannot stay silent on this immigration issue any longer. I am saddened, angered and shocked at the ignorance and lack of compassion so many of my acquaintances have recently shown. Since I don’t have endless hours to debate this topic, I’m going to try to summarize my thoughts in this post. Let me preface it by saying: if you don’t like what I have to say, you have a few options: scroll on, unfollow me or unfriend me. I don’t need comments negating or debating me.

First. For those saying that if you are a legal US resident and commit a crime, you’ll be separated from your children and immigrants are no different, I say this. In the majority of the US citizen cases, children are kept with their families, and if they aren’t, generally CPS keeps the family informed of where their children are. Most/generally, not always. And up until the current administration, immigrant families were NOT separated.

Second. Committing a crime (let’s say possession of heroin with intent to use) is mighty different than fleeing a country because you are in ABSOLUTE fear for your safety and the safety of your family. Some crimes are committed out of necessity, I understand that, and again, GENERALLY, the system will try to work with people (like petty larceny for diapers, again doing what you need to do for your family). I ask so many of you who sit in the comfort of your own home what you would do if your neighborhoods became drug dens, filled with slaughter and you were too afraid to walk out the door or even go to sleep. What would you do to escape that? I know I would do anything to protect my son.

Third. Unless you are 100% Native American, who are YOU to turn your back on someone from another country?! Almost every single person I know, with very few exceptions, is a descendant of someone who immigrated here. Imagine if your great-great grandparents had come over on a boat, their families ripped apart the moment they stepped foot on the soil, and then they were just shipped back?

Fourth. I suggest you study the origins of The Holocaust. Many of us learned of it in junior high or early high school and seem to forget the basis of how it came to be. Once you visit a Nazi concentration camp, you will be forever changed. Study that period of time, and the ignorance and indifference that people displayed. Then take a look around and ask what is so different today from that time period.

Fifth. Let’s take a look at the Declaration of Independence. Direct excerpt: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Or how about this one: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” Let that sink in for a moment.

I honestly could go on, but chances are if you are reading this, you are someone like-minded who I have already had conversations with, or someone who wholly disagrees with me and is already fuming and not willing to discuss things rationally. So again, I will say, if you don’t like what I have to say: scroll on, unfollow me or unfriend me.

Sprinkle kindness everywhere, people, and don’t limit it to only those who are US citizens. Pray for those less fortunate, fleeing from terrors we are lucky enough to never know. Donate your time, energy, patience, whatever you can to make the WORLD a better place, not just your backyard.

Undermining Same Sex Marriage Harms Children

One thing that has been on open display is the fact that harming children is perfectly fine with the Trump/Pence regime and its white evangelical Christian supporters - at least so long as the children impacted are non-white or live in same-sex couples headed house.  The border separation of children from the parents is sadly reminiscent of the slave traders and auctioneers who thought nothing of tearing apart African families forceably captured and transported to America.  It is all part and parcel of the dehumanization of those who are labeled as "other" due to skin color, religious belief, and/or sexual orientation - the true original sin of those who claim to honor the Gospel, yet forget its dictates the moment they walk out the church door.   Yesterday's Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling will only serve to accelerate attacks on same sex couples and their families by the "godly folk,"   In the context of the Christofascist efforts to undermine same sex marriage, a piece in USA Today looks at the harm this is doing to children - not that the Christofascists seem to care.  Here are article highlights: 

A Supreme Court ruling sanctioning same-sex marriage in 2015 was hailed as a milestone moment that would see discrimination crumble and equality triumph for LGBT couples — and for their children.

But in the past three years, those parents and kids have faced a brewing backlash that threatens everything from health benefits to a couple’s ability to adopt.

Two states — Kansas and Oklahoma — passed legislation in recent weeks that allows state-licensed child welfare agencies to cite religious beliefs for not placing children in LGBT homes, a troubling trend for LGBT advocates.

“We have to acknowledge that marriage equality was a huge victory for security and stability” for LGBT families, said Naomi Goldberg, policy director for the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), which released a report Monday documenting ways the 2015 ruling is being undercut and the consequences for kids. “But the landscape remains uncertain. Families have to think about ways they may or may not be recognized: when they travel, go to the doctor, go to a restaurant.”

[M]ore than two-thirds of Americans now back same-sex marriage — the highest level Gallup has recorded in the more than 20 years it has been surveying Americans on the issue.

In many families and communities, support for LGBT families flourishes, but “the gap is with legislators,” she said.

The report by MAP, a think tank that researches and analyzes laws with LGBT implications, and co-authored by the Family Equality Council, which has been working with LGBT-headed families for nearly 40 years, cites a refusal to recognize LGBT families by some government officials, state legislators and even courts.

The result puts children in peril on many levels, the report says: If a parent-child relationship is not legally cemented, children could be denied health insurance or a parent may not be able to make medical decisions.

Birth certificates to divorcesEfforts to undermine the 2015 ruling have played out across the nation in the past three years.• Arkansas was among several states that initially refused to place two married same-sex parents on a birth certificate until ordered to do so by the Supreme Court in 2017.• In Mississippi, a lower court refused to award parental rights in a divorce case to the non-biological mother of a 7-year-old boy conceived using an anonymous sperm donor. Eventually, the state Supreme Court affirmed the mother’s rights.• In Texas, Houston is fighting for rights for its gay workers after the state Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision favoring benefits for legal spouses of city employees, which could include same-sex spouses. The state Supreme Court action is alarming, Goldberg said, because it suggests the court didn’t think the landmark 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage also extended to employment benefits.  

Religious exemptionsSupporters of religious exemptions —  laws that let people, churches, non-profits and sometimes businesses cite religious beliefs as a reason to not comply with a law — say exemptions are an American right, dating to the Revolution. The laws "teach us how to live in a pluralistic society that recognizes we don’t all believe the same thing," said Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst at Focus on the Family, a Christian conservative [hate group] organization that opposes same-sex marriage. But exemption laws loom large over the daily lives of LGBT families, according to the MAP report. Currently, 21 states have some type of religious exemption laws on the books.  . . . . Only 19 states and the District of Columbia have protections from discrimination in public accommodations — meaning that in most places in the country, LGBT parents and kids can be refused service or booted from a business by someone who cites a religious belief. A 2018 proposed federal rule by the Health and Human Services Department that would let health care providers decide what procedures to perform and what patients to treat based on their religious beliefs adds more firepower.  “What we are seeing really privileges doctors’ religious beliefs over a patient’s best interest,” Goldberg said, noting that if an LGBT person lives in a rural area with only one or two doctors the individual could not have access to health care at all. 

Indeed, there are a number of reported cases where doctors have refused to provide care to the children of same sex couples.  The Hippocratic oath loses out to Bible thumping. As noted, in rural areas with few alternatives available, this phenomenon can become life threatening. In my view, religion remains one of the great evils in the world. 

Trump Administration Shamed Into Send USNS Comfort to Aid Puerto Rico?

The Comfort

Recently, I noted in a Facebook post that Der Trumpenführer could find the time to generate a tweet storm for more than 5 days over NFL players allegedly disrespecting the American flag, but he seemingly could not find time to direct his administration to focus the same level of aid to Puerto Rico as was focused on Texas.  I suggested the reason why: The majority of residents of Puerto Rico are brown skinned and worse yet in the mind of Trump and his supporters, a majority do not speak English.  In Trump world and the world of today's GOP that means these people in Puerto Rico are simply not fully human and, therefore, disposable trash.  Yes, I am livid, but it's similar to the mindset that I confronted when I was fired for being gay and had no legal resource under either Virginia or federal law.   I simply did not matter because I was "other." Worse yet, neither did my children.   Ironically, it may have taken tweets by Hillary Clinton to get the Trump administration to get off its ass and order the USNS Comfort - currently docked directly across Hampton Roads harbor from my home - to head to Puerto Rico with its 1000 hospital beds and 80 bed ICU and 12 operating rooms to aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria which left many hospitals without power and literally causing people to die:  

President Trump, Sec. Mattis, and DOD should send the Navy, including the USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico now. These are American citizens.

A piece at Daily Kos looks at the travesty.  Here are highlights:

Eight hundred and ninety-four feet long, 106 feet wide, and weighing 69,360 tons, USNS Comfort is a complete ocean-going medical facility with 1,000 patient beds including 80 for intensive care patients. Along with 12 operating rooms she boasts a complete dental clinic, optometry lab and pharmacy, X-ray machines, CT scanners, oxygen and fresh water production plants, capacity to store 5,000 units of blood, laundry operations, and a morgue.

She’s the size of a 20th century supertanker. Indeed, she was a supertanker — the SS Rose City — until purchased by the Navy in 1987 and converted to serve her current lifesaving mission. She and her sister ship in the Pacific, USNS Mercy, are among the rare few assets of the obscenely wealthy US military devoted exclusively to saving, rather than to taking, lives.

But today, as Puerto Rico and its 3.4 million American citizens slowly die with the island’s hospitals without power and in ruins, Comfort remains snugly berthed in her home port of Norfolk, Virginia.

Thomas LaCrosse, the Pentagon’s director of defense support to civil authorities, said U.S. officials discussed deploying the USNS Comfort to Puerto Rico over the weekend but decided that it should stay in Norfolk because it could not get close enough to any port to avoid using helicopter support to get patients to and from the ship.

True enough, the behemoth ship’s deep draft of 30+ feet bars it from San Juan harbor’s 32 to 35 foot channels even at the best of times (and these are far from San Juan’s best times). But, unmentioned in the WaPo article quoted above, that’s nothing new for the Comfort, which routinely anchors a mile or two offshore to serve disaster sites, as it did following Haiti’s devastating earthquake or, again, as it fearlessly did in 2007 in the teeth of a “storm of a decade” off Corinto, Nicaragua, where it anchored 1.5 miles offshore to receive patients. It is such a common fact in the life of this ship of mercy that militaryfactory.com notes as a mere aside that

Comfort has a deep draft and, in many ports, she has to stand offshore at least a mile. To receive wounded, Comfort has a large day-and-night helo pad.

Puerto Ricans, like all other American citizens, should be deeply chilled by the Trump administration’s stubborn refusal to deploy the Comfort, buttressed by such a transparently flimsy excuse. Because if they’re lying about the reason for their decision, then we must ask what the real reason is...and the answer is terrifying.

It can only be this: Trump intends to abandon Puerto Rico at the first opportunity, leaving its 3.4 million American citizens in their current Stone Age hell forever.

Trump is leaving the Comfort safe in Norfolk’s harbor because he does not intend to devote the years of effort, and the hundreds of billions of dollars, it will require to lift Puerto Rico back out of the Stone Age. And he doesn’t want to make that too obvious when the quiet pull-out soon begins. . . This is #TrumpsKatrina
 UPDATED: As of 3:30 PM Eastern, NBC is now quoting FEMA administrator Brock Long announcing, in a reversal of last night’s DOD comments, that USNS Comfort has just been ordered to sail for Puerto Rico. For those who are wondering, Comfort is normally required to be able to sail within 5 days after receiving the order, although it has occasionally done so within 3 days (there are about one thousand mostly civilian medical personnel + merchant seamen to mobilize, plus enormous stores of perishable medical supplies to load, plus all the usual ship’s stores to support a full complement of 2,000 souls). Comfort’s top speed is about 20 MPH, and it is (very roughly) about 1,200 miles from Norfolk to San Juan. So we’re looking at another 6-8 days before it arrives in Puerto Rican waters.

Trump Supporters - Today's Equivalent to 1930's/1940's Germans?

As I have recounted, I have little sympathy for Trump supporters who, in my view, were motivated by foul emotions that boil down to hatred towards others and irresponsible selfishness.  With the collapse of Republicans' Obamacare "repeal and replacement," effort, many Trump supporters may dodge the bullet of losing healthcare coverage.  But there is much else that may yet come home to roost for them before the Trump/Pence nightmare is over.  Trump's proposed budget cuts could hit Appalachia especially hard and poor/working class whites who voted for Trump may yet pay a high price for giving into their racism and embrace of ignorance, not to mention their open willingness to ignore the uglier aspects of  the Trump/GOP agenda.  Besides seeking to destroy the social safety net, this agenda is marked by its effort to dehumanize non-whites, LGBT citizens, and non-Christians. Personally, I cannot grasp the mind set that willingly sees others as less than human and/or undeserving of what each of us wants for ourselves and our loved ones.  Worse of all, is the participation of supposed Christians in this open hatred of those deemed "other."  The phenomenon is especially foul when directed at children who had no role in determining the race of their birth, the religion of their parents or where they were born.  Transgender youth are another disturbing target of Republicans and these self-anointed "godly folks." 

How does one buy into such malignant treatment of others?  An op-ed in the New York Times offers a possible glimpse.  The piece is authored by the granddaughter of a German member of the Nazi Party in the late 1930's and first half of the 1940's. It focuses on the deliberate refusal to admit the horrors being done and the refrain of "we did not know" despite all the evidence that shows that it was impossible not to know.  I see a similar mindset and denial in "friends" who voted for Trump - some of whom I have now severed relationships with - and who truly should have known better. Here are op-ed highlights:

My grandparents were Nazis. It took me until recently to be able to say — or write — this. I used to think of and refer to them as “ordinary Germans,” as if that was a distinct and morally neutral category. But like many “ordinary Germans,” they were members of the Nazi Party — they joined in 1937, before it was mandatory.

Understanding why and how this woman I knew and loved was swept up in a movement that became synonymous with evil has been, for me, a lifelong question.

They joined the Nazi Party to be youth leaders in an agricultural education program called the Landjahr, or “year on the land,” in which teenagers got agricultural training. My grandmother always maintained that she had joined the Nazis as an “idealist” drawn to the vision of rebuilding Germany, returning to a simpler time and, perversely, promoting equality.

In the Landjahr, sons and daughters of factory workers would live and work side by side with sons and daughters of aristocrats and wealthy industrialists. She liked the idea of returning to “traditional” German life, away from the confusing push and pull of a global economy.

Through research, I understand the Landjahr program was part of Hitler’s larger “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) vision of making Germany a racially pure, agrarian society. The “racially pure” part was not something my grandmother ever mentioned.

“We didn’t know” was a kind of mantra for her on the long walks we took when I visited her at the farm she lived on, not far from where she grew up. “But didn’t you hear what Hitler was saying?” I would ask, grappling with the moral paradox of a loving grandmother who had been a Nazi.

My grandmother would shrug and answer something like, “He said a lot of things — I didn’t listen to all of them.” . . . . And anyway, she was focused on her own problems, on making ends meet and, once the war began, protecting her children.

This insistence on her own ignorance was an excuse, and I didn’t and still don’t accept it. It is impossible that she wouldn’t have known of Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ objective of ousting Jews, whom Hitler had falsely (but successfully) linked to a Bolshevik terrorist threat. But did she follow what she knew of Hitler’s plan to its horrific, unimaginable end? In the late 1930s there was talk of sending Jews to Madagascar and to “settlements” in the east. But even if she believed this, why wasn’t she appalled at the injustice? At the dangerous stripping of rights?

In German there are two words for knowing: “wissen,” which is associated with wisdom and learning, and “kennen,” which is like being acquainted. Acquaintance is, by definition, a surface understanding, susceptible to manipulation.

When you are “acquainted with” something it’s much easier to see only part of the whole. Especially if the other half of what you hear and see is appealing. Hitler brought back jobs and opportunity, restored national pride and told seductive, simplifying lies . . . .
“But what did you think when you started hearing the rumors about concentration camps?” I would press her. “Didn’t you ever listen to the foreign news reports?”

“Allied propaganda” was my grandmother’s answer. That’s what Hitler said it was. And she, like many Germans, trusted him. Her trust, apparently, relieved her of the need to understand.

My grandmother heard what she wanted from a leader who promised simple answers to complicated questions. She chose not to hear and see the monstrous sum those answers added up to. And she lived the rest of her life with the knowledge of her indefensible complicity.

"Friends" who voted for Trump would be most upset to be likened to Nazi Party members, but in my view the parallels are on point.  They heard what they wanted to hear, made a deliberate effort not to know the truth by remaining in the Fox News/Breitbart bubble, and some sadly bought into the racism and white supremacy hook line and sinker.  They are complicit in a foul agenda and, if FBI investigations reveal Trump/Pence collusion with Russia, treason.  They deserve no sympathy, no efforts to be understood and they need to be held accountable. 

The Right/GOP's Psychology of Dehumanization

Throughout history one of the key elements of setting the stage for genocide has been the dehumanization of others.  Once the opponent becomes less than fully human, killing men, women and children becomes far easier on one's conscience - assuming you have one.  We have seen this taken to a high art in Nazi Germany where a campaign of making Jews less than fully human was pressed by the Nazi regime with horrific results.  Often religion has fostered a similar dehumanization and hatred of non-believers or those of differing faiths.  The Crusades are but one example.  The conflict in Northern Ireland where Catholics and Protestants dehumanized each other that costs so many lives is yet another.  But genocide and mass murder are not always the only example.  The Christofascists have sought to dehumanize gays for many decades and have pursued a campaign to depict gays not only as a threat to society and children, but as promiscuous, sex obsessed alcoholics/drug users.  More recently, we saw the Trump/Pence campaign use the dehumanization of others and racism to win the votes of white voters.  That dehumanization effort continues with the efforts to depict Muslims and brown skinned immigrants as a threat and "other."  The recent proposal to separate illegal immigrant mothers from their children is symptomatic.  As a commentator on radio asked, how many white Americans would approve such treatment for themselves and their children.  The answer, of course is none.  But it's just fine for those deemed other and not fully human.  A piece in Vox looks at this dangerous phenomenon that the Trump regime, much to the praise and applauding of most Republicans, is pursuing.  Here are excerpts:

You can think of human psychology as a series of overlapping mental programs. One program identifies faces as individuals we recognize. Another is working memory, which allows us to make quick calculations in our heads. These programs were coded by evolution and help us survive every day; they are the sources of our ingenuity and our compassion. They are everything we are.

These mental programs — etched in all of us — are also the sources of horror and pain.
Nour Kteily is a psychologist at Northwestern University whose research is about understanding one of the darkest, most ancient, and most disturbing mental programs encoded into our minds: dehumanization, the ability to see fellow men and women as less than human.

[T]he prevailing wisdom has been that most people are not willing to admit to having prejudice against others.

Kteily suspected otherwise. And so he and his colleagues created a new way to measure people’s levels of blatant dehumanization of other groups. It’s not subtle.

In Kteily’s studies, participants — typically groups of mostly white Americans — are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human. And then they are told to rate members of different groups — such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes — on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100.

Many people in these studies give members of other groups a perfect score, 100, fully human. But many others give others scores putting them closer to animals.

“We have this incredible capacity for cooperation; it’s what makes us human in many ways,” Kteily says. “And yet we have this capacity for othering.”

And that conclusion is opening a Pandora’s box of revelations about the new wave of intolerance toward Muslims and immigrants in America under President Donald Trump — and what it could bring about.

“Dehumanization doesn’t only occur in wartime,” says Nick Haslam, a psychologist who is the world’s current leading expert on the topic. “It’s happening right here, right now. And every day, good people who don’t see themselves as being prejudiced bigots are nevertheless falling prey to it.”

Often “people’s spontaneous, knee-jerk reactions to other people who are dramatically different from them is negative,” says Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University and a leading expert on prejudice. This is especially true when we have quick, minimal exposure to them — as we do today via the media. These thin slices activate the us-versus-them conflict encoded in our minds since the dawn of humanity.

Look back at some of the most tragic episodes in human history and you will find words and images that stripped people of their basic human traits. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches” that needed to be cleared out.

At Stanford, Albert Bandura, showed that when participants overhear an experimenter call another study subject “an animal,” they’re more likely to give that subject a painful shock. If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify them.

From these experiments, and those that followed, it became clear that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in their full humanity,” says Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies how people think about minds and collaborates with Kteily. Even children as young as 5 years old see the world in terms of us versus them.

What’s shocking about Kteily’s results from the “Ascent of Man” experiment, she says, is that “people are willing to admit that they have relative scales of humanity in their heads.” . . . . With the “Ascent of Man” tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that on average, Americans rate other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less evolved.

“We typically see scores that average 75, 76,” for Muslims, Kteily says. “Which I think is a lot on a scale that’s so extreme.” And about a quarter of study participants will rate Muslims on a score of 60 or below.

In the months since Donald Trump was elected president, it’s become shockingly commonplace for Americans to blatantly dehumanize Muslims and Mexican immigrants — and then use violence against them. Hate crimes against Muslims in the US are at their highest levels since 2001. In the 1970s, Bandura predicted that dehumanization leads to increased aggression. Today, Kteily and colleagues find something similar: Willingness to dehumanize on the “Ascent of Man” scale predicts aggressive attitudes toward the Muslim world.

[B]latant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican immigrants was strongly correlated with Trump support — even when compared with support for other Republican candidates. The data is “consistent with the idea that support for some of the Republican candidates (and Trump in particular) comes not despite their dehumanizing rhetoric but in part because of it,” Kteily and Bruneau conclude in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“What we have in this era that’s unique is the legitimizing of those perspectives with laws, with people in [positions] of authority,” she says. “It’s given license and legitimacy to these perspective. they’re not perspectives that people have to hide or sugar coat, or qualify in any way.”

It’s hard to draw a direct line from Trump to these incidents. But it’s plausible that he is emboldening people with these feelings, and helping to change norms around talking about members of other racial and ethnic groups.

Something very ugly and dangerous is happening that must be opposed and stopped.  For now, Muslims and Mexicans are the targets, but Der Trumpenführer will find other targets down the road.  If the First Amendment Defense Act passes, LGBT citizens will be legally lesser under the law and subject to unrestricted discrimination, a first big step in the dehumanization process.  Be very afraid of what Trump and the GOP are unleashing. , 

The Woman in Gold: Reflections

Adele Boch-Bauer - the woman in gold

This evening after going to the family visitation for the deceased partner of a friend, the husband and I went to see "The Woman in Gold" which recounts the story of Maria Altmann, a Vienna born elderly Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who successfully sued the Austrian government to win the return of artwork stolen by the Nazis regime in the wake of the Anschluss when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany.  Besides the compelling personal story of what happened to Altmann's family and Austria's refusal to admit the illegal manner in which the artwork came to be in the Austrian State Gallery - the case went to the U. S. Supreme Court in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) - the movie contains a needed retelling of what was done during the Holocaust under the Nazis.   But the movie, in my view has an even wider message: the dangers of what can happen when ideology, religious belief and/or the desire to target classes of people for political gain combine.  

Some will say - as does one character in the movie  - that the past needs to be forgotten.  I believe that the exact opposite is the case.  If we do not know and remember the ugliness of the past we are likely doomed to repeat it in some form or another.   Likewise, we cannot allow individuals or institutions that have committed horrible deeds in the past to try to cloak themselves in respectability and in some case demand deference.  Hitler may have been a madman as some like to argue, but his techniques are still being used today, most often in this country by conservative Christians and politicians eager to win the votes of bigots and racists (as noted in other posts, Vladimir Putin is using Hitler's techniques in Russia).

For political purposes, Hitler needed to blame someone for Germany's defeat in World War I. The Jews became the scapegoats for Germany’s economic catastrophe following the war.   Hitler had good religious backing for his antisemitism: Martin Luther founder of the Lutheran Church, was a raging anti-Semite.  The Roman Catholic Church too for centuries had call Jews "Christ killers."  In short, Hitler had a ready made template from which to launch his mistreatment of Jews and ultimately their murder in the "Final Solution." Yes, some religious leaders in Germany and Austria opposed Hitler and his policies, by far more went willingly along with the program.  Political expediency combined with a religious based bigotry lead to horrors and millions and millions of lost lives.

One would think that the world would have learned from the Holocaust and World War II.  But, too often seemingly not.  Here in America we have the Bible used to justify everything from unequal treatment of blacks and gays - downright discrimination and persecution at times and in some locales - to savaging the social safety net.  Likewise, we have "family values" organizations spewing hate and lies about gays which, if one changes the word "gay" or "homosexual" to "Jew," the statements are near carbon copies of anti-Jewish propaganda used by the Nazis.  And lest we forget, these very same people who are doing the victimizing claim that it is they, not their victims who are being persecuted - just as Hitler claimed the Jews were harming good Germans.  Worse yet, we have politicians only too happy to play upon the hate and bigotry and effort to dehumanize others in order to court the votes of bigots, racists and the ignorant. 

If you haven't seen the movie, go see it.  And after you see it, look around you in today's political and fundamentalist religious circles and reflect on it and think of the wider application of what you witness being done to Vienna's Jews in the movie.   Hate, division, and the dehumanization of others is alive and well in our midst. 

P.S. I was perhaps especially moved by the movie because my paternal grandparents were from Austria - they left just before World War I.