“The Reichstag Warning” is a short essay by Timothy Snyder just published in The New York Review of Books (NYRB). Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University. You might have read his widely shared post on 20 lessons from the 20th century on Facebook from November on how to resist the spread of fascism in Trump-ruled America.
In his latest essay, Snyder warns about how terrorism will be used to destroy (“deconstruct” in Trump speak) our American democracy. He wrote:
The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. […]
In 1989, two centuries after our Constitution was promulgated, the man who is now our president wrote that “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.” For much of the Western world, that was a moment when both security and liberty seemed to be expanding. 1989 was a year of liberation, as communist regimes came to an end in eastern Europe and new democracies were established. Yet that wave of democratization has since fallen under the glimmering shadow of the burning Reichstag. The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror—real or fake, provoked or accidental—can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.
Responding to terrorism is the proven justification that an “aspiring” tyrant will use to gain control and undo democracy. Hitler blamed terrorists in 1933 and seized control of Germany. Putin blamed terrorists in 1999 and seized control of Russia. Already, Trump and his cronies have weakened our national security with the point of inviting a terrorist attack.
“If we know the history of terror manipulation, we can recognize the danger signs, and be prepared to react,” Synder wrote.
Trump paid to publish those words — “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS” — in a full page ad in 1989 he took out in the Daily News and make no doubt that he still believes them.
These are the words of an “aspiring” tyrant. “Leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse,” Synder wrote.
The five teenagers, four blacks and one Hispanic, that Trump falsely accused were exonerated when their convictions were vacated, but not after they were wrongfully convicted and having served between six and thirteen years in prison.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, last year Trump told CNN the five are guilty. “They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”
In his essay, Snyder references research that indicates the Nazis, themselves, set fire to the Reichstag and then notes that Trump’s mentor and puppet master, Vladimir Putin also used terrorism to secure his place at the head of the Russian state and to boost his rock bottom approval rating. A month after Putin was first elected:
… bombs began to explode in apartment buildings in Moscow and several other Russian cities, killing hundreds of citizens and causing widespread fear. There were numerous indications that this was a campaign organized by the KGB’s heir, now known as the FSB. Some of its officers were caught red-handed (and then released) by their peers.
Putin blamed Muslim terrorists and started a war in Chechnya, a Russian republic. The response boosted Putin’s popularity and he “exploited more terrorist attacks to consolidate his rule”.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an interview with BBC News earlier this month, said:
I am optimistic in the long run. A great man once said that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle. It is the pendulum. And when the pendulum swings too far in one direction it will go back. Some terrible things have happened in the United States but one can only hope that we learn from those bad things.
But what if a tyrant’s hand catches the pendulum and doesn’t let it swing back to the left?
Jasmin Mujanović, a political scientist who fled with his family from Sarajevo in 1992, wrote yesterday in a Twitter thread, about how fragile society really is. He wrote:
Virtually any society is no more than handful of episodes away from significant strife and chaos. Brexit and Trump perfect examples. Whatever real and imagined concerns drove [people] to back these options, outcome will be infinitely worse. History accelerates in their wake.
He concludes, “societies are complex, meaning they are far more easily broken than created. And a lot can happen in a decade.”
Stephen Bannon, Trump’s resident white nationalist ideologue, promised an unending fight for “deconstruction of the administrative state.” The Trump cabinet was chosen because of the destruction they will unleash. Leaving America as we know it in ruins is their goal.
To wit, the Trump regime is already at war with truth and our civil liberties expressed in the Bill of Rights such as their attack on the First Amendment. Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought at Amherst College, wrote in The Guardian that “The White House's radical attack on the first amendment cannot go unanswered”.
These must be seen for what they are: the strong-arm tactics of an authoritarian. It is, in fact, a signature of authoritarian rulers that they turn the opposition into the enemy. The opposition is to be engaged and persuaded; the enemy is to be isolated and crushed.
“Once an authoritarian regime is established, the threat of terrorism can be used to deepen repression, or indeed to promote it abroad,” Synder wrote. Trump and his advisers have been saying for more than a year on how dangerous his regime will become and now they are putting their words into action.
Last year Omarosa Manigault, who is now Trump’s director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison, promised that “every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump… It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him — it is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”
After the outcome of the election last November became known, Masha Gessen wrote a essay, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” for the NYRB. She wrote, the first rule of survival is “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.”
Trump has said “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins”. Believe him. Trump’s “Reichstag” attack is coming. Be prepared. Resist.