It is hard to bring oneself to blog about new things (in historical and biblical studies) that I am learning all the time when every day the news is recallibrating my identity as a citizen of the West.
As a little child I wowed the grownups when I naively asked why everyone was so sad that my great grandfather was dying. Isn’t he going to heaven, I asked. Shouldn’t we be happy? Aww — so innocent!
As a teenager school student I felt it safer not to ask my war veteran elders why it was “us” who declared war on the Axis powers and not the Axis powers on us. And why the fire-bombing of Germany and Japan and snuffing out two cities with atomic bombs? I sometimes wondered if a future generation would look back and see WW2 as a titanic struggle for domination between great powers. Our identity as the liberators of democracy and crushers of fascism was at risk if such questions were taken too far.
Now today we see nothing has changed in the project to control the Middle East. Mass murder is brought into our phones and tv sets daily. The only thing that has changed is the removal of the pretence. It was easier to be deceived when the powers said they were looking for peace and that the ongoing military build up and daily occupation was all about security. Now that pretence is gone and we can see it in all its mind-numbing reality. So our leaders remain silent and criminalize those who attempt to speak out.
We are the bad guys. World War 2 was a contest to see who would dominate the world. We won. The world lost. Yes, there was welcome progress in some areas, and despite the gap between rich and poor increasing that was a good thing. But even Hitler before the war did good things for the German economy and youth welfare. Now I feel like I understand a little how anti-fascists felt living in Germany under Hitler. The difference is the propaganda. Nazi and Soviet propaganda was crude by comparison. In this post I linked to a discussion about the attempt to silence journalists. That was old hat. Today at home they are being hauled before the courts while in the Middle East they are being murdered at scale.
It’s a heavy time. Apologies.
…..
P.S. — added later….
A few days ago there was a great kerfuffle in media, in talk shows, in comedy sessions, among government and political representatives — about a lapse in security involving talk about bombing Yemen. I strained in vain to hear from those talk-fests a word of outrage over the murder of innocent human beings in an apartment building. I can no longer bring myself to listen to some of those programs ever again.
Neil Godfrey
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I’m sorry, WE are not the bad guys. But there are bad guys in control right now. There have been bad guys in control forever.
While we stay quiet do not we share some of the responsibility for what we collectively are doing?
I seem to recall (when growing up in the post-war years) hearing murmurs about the responsibility, the silence interpreted as acquiescence, among the “good Germans” in the 1930s. How are “we” any different?
Are we seeing our civilisation for what it really is, or what it has become?
It is a position of despair, if we cannot believe that there is anything to return to, or some ideal we can point to and say, that is our true selves.
Maybe after WWII we had some moral clarity, as we could create Holocaust museums and point to what we definitely don’t want to be. Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki we could forgive ourselves for – we wouldn’t ever need to do that again! Well, that was until Laos. Henry Kissinger could be given a Nobel Peace Prize and no one would be the wiser!
But here we are now, committing genocide and torture, and accusing those who dissent of the hate crimes.
I walked out of my orchestra rehearsal in tears. I just wanted to bring attention to the case of a Catholic School music teacher losing her job after speaking out while receiving a music award. Her words spoke of the horrible truth, and the lies of our government and media.
The response that pierced me most: “We must be neutral”
Neutrality – the most violent word in the dictionary at the moment. The word that justifies genocide!
We are silent as we watch (or turn our eyes away from) a crime equal to any of the mass murders of the twentieth century. The signs were there before we were born — with the suppression of the popular communist parties in Greece and Italy. Democratic freedoms be blowed. Kissinger’s Chile operation (“not standing by while a country follows the will of its (irresponsible) people”) was a direct continuation of suppression of popular wills since the 1940s in Europe. It’s how it’s always been …. Trump’s outrage has been to throw away the mask that made it easy for us to think it was otherwise.
Yes, “we must be neutral” — I don’t know how I could endure such a response.
Nothing to say Neil but, yes, requiem, bowed head, and silence.
Three great novels about what it is like to be inside totalitarianism in process: George Orwell, 1984. Jack London, the Iron Hand. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here. The first is almost science fiction and is the most known. The other two don’t have the futuristic setting but are historical fiction period pieces. All three, any of the three, are powerful. The last two have received less attention, almost to the point of being unknown in the US even though they are both famous American writers.
I can’t imagine any thinking teenager who would read these books–if people read any more–who could not “see” what is happening. I read “1984” when I was a teenager, on my own, and it was formative for me for life. The movie will not do it. These novels have to be read.
I did not know about the London and Sinclair books. One movie that I found all too instructive was about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement — another life I had never heard of before. What Sophie did was no different from what many of us are doing every week or month here. She faced the guillotine. For doing the same in the US others are now facing kidnapping and deportation.
The London book is called “The Iron Heel.”
“The Nazis Did Great Things… and So Might Trump”
By rg price – 4/5/2025
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/nazis_trump.htm
N.B. the following dates of National Power willing to excel/force their will and failing.
“[On January 27, 1967] at 23:31:06.2 GMT by someone (believed by most listeners, and supported by laboratory analysis, to be Chaffee) saying, “[I’ve, or We’ve] got a fire in the cockpit.”
–“Apollo 1”. Wikipedia. Retrieved December 3, 2024.
“[On March 16,1968] American soldiers herded the civilian villagers in several locations. . . . None of the groups of villagers included military-age males.”
–“A Look at the My Lai Incident Fifty Years Later”. The Army Historical Foundation. 4 May 2018.
No. My point about the rule of “the bad guys” was directed at the entire US-led world order, with the UN, GATT, Marshall Plan, the very reason for entering war in the first place against Germany and Japan (yes, even Japan) was for the Western capitalist class to dominate the world. Democratic movements were targeted from the get-go as surely as the Marxist communes were targeted by the Leninist state in the wake of the 1917 revolution. All Trump has done is to lift the mask and no longer hiding what US policy has been in relation to the Middle East since the end of WW2. His tariffs war is simply stepping out from the veil of pretence that the US has supported the trading order for the benefit of all. China especially has to be kept in its subordinate place vis a vis the US.
Neil,if you are interested there is a short survey about forming a monopoly of Lenin’s group: Gimpelson, “a way to the dictature of one party”/1994/
If it’s any solace, I’ve seen plenty of people commenting on the bombing happening at the apartment building of the girlfriend of the target – they even knew when he was going to enter so it seems shady that they needed to wait until he was inside, and people have discussed that.
Maybe it’s because I’m closer to Germany, and maybe because there’s only a generation between me and the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-45, and maybe it’s because school made us read books written by the children of Jewish survivors,
but I don’t view it as that bleak. Yes, a lot of it was self interest. Clearly the USA was not so interested in being the hero until they were getting affected one way or another. I’m the one who translated stuff for the Wikipedia article on Leo Major, a Canadian soldier, who was before that hailed as some weird Rambo-like hero, but I found a gentle, brave and reasonable man instead. One thing I learned from it: Americans were all too willing to blow up a city to spare their armies losses. Their heroism is extremely relative.
But Nazi-Germany was being as awful a leader as you could try to be. It wasn’t interested in just money or control, but racial purity and the disappearance of all ‘wrong’ people, like the handicapped and the queer (another ‘oops allies not so ally’ moment: they tended to release everyone from camps EXCEPT the queer people). And it allocated resources to itself to the detriment of others, and it even controlled how we did groceries. And the camps… Russia also has a lot to answer for, as I understand they happily continued the practice. At least the USA wasn’t able to use them.
Remember, it wasn’t just the big nations fighting, people never stopped resisting the regime, then as they do now.
I talked with an Australian friend about the American’s view of WWII versus Europe’s and Australia’s, and they told me that after 9/11 an update of their history books happened where the sections about WWII became way more pro-America.
I think we’re guilty in happily going along with the idea that the USA was this good force of Free who could be trusted to be the police agent of the world… a country that barely interacts with others on a societal level! A country that for decades happily conflated several groups – communists, socialists, atheists, satanists, etc. – as one big enemy. A country that barely interacts with itself at times, living in grass islands in suburbia. (And I’m not pretending here Europe is without myopic and insular, let alone naive views.)
But, it doesn’t have to be a continuum of political intentions, does it? Long, long ago, neither Europe nor North-America nor Australia had a concept of a king, and yet now we still have, after most of their power has gone. The veterans of WWII today were all naive teens when they signed up, and they’re quickly dying out too. The political powers today are still relatively close to the events of the middle of the 19th century, but they’re not following a script written then, before they were even born. They’re making their own stupid awful selfish choices.
That said, the absolute failure to get any peace back to the Middle East, the ‘West’ sliding into far-right-wing governments, the whole world being confused on where to stand in relation to free expression of sex, religion or gender, or NEWS, the erosion of any pretense of diplomacy or protocol in politics, North-Asia barely making any societal progress (and I know functionally nothing about the rest of the world has been doing!), several dictators/tyrants/whathaveyou not keeping their hands at home…
Even the fricking Sahara is still growing! It’s very bleak, I feel it too.
My contribution to the wikipedia article was ultimately not that great btw. After going through the sources, articles and interviews, and transcribing and translating, I still didn’t know how to write a new section about all of the information. (And sadly I also failed to get a package with information sent to me to update the article more.) I just know one source updated their story to something more grounded in reality after my edit, which I consider a win.
p.s.: I wish that Twitter link didn’t first talk so much about the state of vapid art in America (the West? he jumps from one to the other at times) first. There’s always been heaps of schlock, even in antiquity, but Sturgeon’s Law applies. Almost everything from any genre or piece of media is crap. I honestly can’t tell where the fair criticism of America’s tendency to consume lazily ends and his own cultural bias begins. Where is most of the media not controlled by money and power? Where and when have people not gotten together under pithy slogans and banners? In how many places does big bucks really show off the edgy and marginalised artists? When have people ever stopped copying other works of fiction? (I mean the tsunami of movie remakes is horrid, but before that we had hundreds of similar movies too.) Sure sometimes the rich sponsor a Voltaire, but usually they commission a flattering self-portrait. Maybe it’s because I tend to be in the indie spaces, but I don’t see this dearth of expression in the United States, at least not this massively, just a lack of awareness of other cultures resulting in not fully understanding themselves. And conversely people outside of the USA have to be aware they’re not shown the full picture of the USA either. (I’m also wondering why we leave out the effects of American Christianities so often? Remember when the Texas School Board of Education was flooded with fundamentalists? They didn’t just attack Biology and History, they attacked English/Literature too.)
It’s rarely a joy to see the veil lifted, but the alternative is to remain ignorant. I say this from Texas, of course, where ignorance is grown like a crop, though there are a lot of weeds, and they read books.