They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
(en.m.wikipedia.org/......)
Universality slowly dawns. The duty to be antifascist is not always acknowledged, especially when there is a price to pay for resisting a powerful bully. For many of us, going along with the bully is easy until it is suddenly and possibly too late no longer tolerable.
Tonight I happened to watch for the first time Z, the 1969 antifascist classic (en.m.wikipedia.org/...). I highly recommend it. One roots for the honorable magistrate to keep up the good risky prosecutorial investigative work and thinks of Bill Barr's bullying corruption of justice.
But it is long past time to be shocked. Human solidarity should have been there all along. One shouldn't have to see someone who looks like himself in a movie or under a policemen's knee to wake up.
I know I am revealing myself as watching too much TV, but, before I watched Z tonight, I finished HBO's profoundly awakening The Plot Against America last night. Highly relevant to these dark days of Trumpism is this adaptation of Phillip Roth's 2004 novel, as was recently pointed out at Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com/...), referencing Roth's own keen analysis of Trump three and a half years ago.
Roth was making his observations just as Trump was coming to power.
We have now seen Trump in full extended corrupt mahem, complete with a compliant William Barr running the Department of Justice (www.newyorker.com/...), or have we?
Could it get worse, really really really really worse? When Roth's book first came out, I remember reading the New York Times review but did not read the book. It seemed to me at the time ludicrous that fascism could come to New Jersey and elsewhere in the U.S.
Trump has disproved this mistaken assumption of untenability. And yes, with Trump in charge of America, there is always still worse to come. Indeed, perhaps the most stunningly pathological and nihilistic aspect of Trump is that he makes the previously untenably unjust or incompetent seem completely viable.
As Roth wrote back in the good old early MAGA days of January 2017:
As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.
Mr. Roth is absolutely correct. And as a Jewish American he already has had to directly experience prejudice I have not as a white American of the politically dominant religion of the land. (Note that I'm a Christian and although I'm in fact half brown, I've typically blended in as a white most of my life.) He has felt ethnic hatred as a Jewish American I could too easily overlook. Watching The Plot Against America helps open my eyes to how many Jewish Americans must feel with Trump.
Looking still further outward from my own narrow perspective due to what has happened recently in terms of suddenly having greater awareness of systemic racism, I can see an element of white privilege in my own shock at how bad Trump can manage to make things. The legal dimension of Trump using the government as a grotesque tool of oppression is in some ways a mere homage to J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, who, with red-baiting, came down hard on anyone who happened to challenge the pro-American capitalist status quo.
But what about Jim Crow? And, hiding in plain sight, fascism in the U.S. was always present acting under color of law with the mass terror directed at Native Americans and Black Americans. In addition, others such as women, LGBTQs, and immigrants have long been treated under color of law to varying degrees of dehumanizing dangerous otherness by the legal guardians of the assumed norm of white male heterosexuality.
At what point does a white heterosexual Christian male like me finally begin to take notice of the fascism that has been here all along?
Suddenly hard facts may begin to be noticed. Trump has managed to threaten all of America, including white heterosexual male Christian America, with his acutely incompetent, health care-gutting, pandemic science-denying, crudely and cruelly disparaging, neo-Confederate version of fascism. You know he's messing up when a growing portion of white heterosexual male Christian America is not going along with him. It has even suddenly dawned on some who voted for him the first time that to have a purely self-centered bully run the government who could not care less about them or their families is not good.
Where the hell were they in 2017 when they were still sporting the red hats, not to mention in all the unjust decades and centuries past? Better late to the party than never.