by Mark Harvey
If the ruler is upright, all will go well even though he gives no orders; but if he is not upright, even though he gives orders they will not be obeyed. —Confucious— Analects 13:6
Pluck a squirming chicken feather by feather; it won’t become obvious until it’s too late. —Attributed to Benito Mussolini
In a recent interview, when asked if she was still proud of her American citizenship with all that’s happening in the US today, the Chilean author Isabel Allende, was vehement: “I am disgusted with a lot of stuff that is happening today, and I am willing to stand and work to make this country what it should be. I want this country to be compassionate and open and generous and happy as it has always been.”
Given that Allende lived much of her life in exile from her native Chile after the military coup in 1973, I was not surprised to hear her passion for a better America and her willingness to stand up and fight for it. In the same interview, Allende describes the heartbreak of leaving everything behind to escape Chile’s dictatorship. Narrating the flight from Santiago to her new home in Venezuela in the 1970s, she said, “I do remember the moment when I crossed the Andes in the plane. I cried in the plane, because I knew somehow instinctively that this was a threshold, that everything had changed.”
But perhaps the paramount statement Allende makes in the interview given the chaos and cruelty wrought on America by this administration is this:
Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who were persecuted and affected immediately, but most of the population wasn’t. So you think: Well, I can live with this. Well, it can’t be that bad. So you are in denial for a long time, because you don’t want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally.
What I’ve noticed in recent reading is that some of the people most alarmed by the undisguised fascism of President Trump and his minions are immigrants who have witnessed the speed with which authoritarian movements can seize a nation by its throat: immigrants who fled tyrants for the promised freedom of the United States. The corollary is how lethargic and oblivious many native-born Americans are to the recent violations of our institutions, our morals, and our image in the world. Aesop is fairly shouting through the ages for us to quit being stupid lambs trusting the hungry wolves—to quit being the lazy grasshoppers with winter coming.
Another exile who is trying to wake up the American populus and stir it into action is Gary Kasparov, who was possibly the best chess player ever—and who had a frightening ability to see several moves ahead. Kasparov has repeatedly warned us that the phalanx of American tyrants in the current administration has us headed toward a fascist state. The chess prodigee, who grew up in the former USSR, tried to fight Putin’s consolidation of power, and eventually fled what is now Russia after watching his country lose the battle to become a working democracy.
In an interview printed in The Washington Post last October describing fascists, Kasparov said, “They will slowly but surely undermine the very institutions meant to limit their power. And without a concerted effort, many in business and media will bend the knee.”
Like the grandmaster he was on the board, Kasparov has been ahead of the crowd in predicting the pull of fascism in the United States. Even before Trump was elected, he noted businesses “preemptively” bending the knee to his style of authoritarianism as if sidling up would work for their companies.
“They think they can buy the dictator,” Kasparov said in the same interview. “But there’s always a higher bidder. They think they can learn to live with the dictator. But there are no patterns of behavior to study. Just arbitrary abuse.”
There are few better ways to describe our nation’s course right now than slouching toward fascism. Readers of poetry recognize the image from W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming where he wrote, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Like all good poetry, the image is evocative and corporeal. Yeats wrote the poem after WWI when the world was in chaos and from what I read, he meant the poem to signal the end of a long era of progress and a return to rough chaos and violence.
The late social critic Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, wrote,
Fascist mentality is the mentality of the little man, who is enslaved and craves authority…This little man has studied the big man’s behavior all too well, and he reproduces it in a distorted and grotesque fashion….when he is seen puffing himself up and has his chops full of slogans, let him be asked quietly and simply in public: “What are you doing in a practical way to feed the nation?
Trump’s attempts at being the big man resemble all his previous commercial efforts: showy, cheap, and cruel. And his style of despotism runs thick through the administration. One of the most obscene emblems of his government is Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the woman who shows up in a different costume every week: border guard, firefighter, coast guard member, and ICE agent. With her words and her seemingly endless supply of costumes, Noem has become Fascist Barbie. To accessorize the mean-girl doll, the package includes cowboy hats, assault rifles, flak jackets, and bigotry in pink.
There is a recent video of Noem standing in front of the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. Behind her and behind steel bars, there are dozens of shirtless and shaved prisoners packed tightly into one cell. The prison is notorious for its harsh treatment of inmates. Prisoners are allowed about seven square feet of space, not allowed to go outdoors, not allowed visitation, and not even allowed utensils.
In the video, Noem is wearing a sixty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch and dressed in a tight white T shirt that has to be considered provocative in front of the prisoners. Her pose standing there before the inhumanely treated men is obscene—all of it. I’m not a puritan who wants to dictate how women dress, but in those circumstances, her watch and her t-shirt are flagrantly insulting to the gravity of the situation. She with her garish ways is the perfect totem for the Trump administration: the clip-on-tie version of despotism.
I’m sure there are some bad men in the El Salvador prison—but as we’ve learned there are some innocent men there too. And the illegal deportations by the Trump administration of Venezuelans to the prison, along with the “accidental” deportation of a Maryland man protected under US law highlights a few bright lights in this national nightmare—courageous judges.
In our three-branch system of government, the only branch that can check Trump’s Gadarene moves to destroy our country, is the judiciary. While Congress is meant to be a check as well, it is dominated by sycophants and cowards. Thus, Americans paying attention to trifling things like the rights protected under the First, Fifth and Fourteenth amendments have a close eye on the judiciary, from the district courts to the Supreme Court.
One courageous judge is James Boasberg, chief judge for the District Court of Columbia. Nominated by President George W Bush and promoted by President Obama, Boasberg is considered to be a moderate. When the Trump administration began to fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison without any due process—where they would likely rot without a trial to the end of their lives—The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a class action suit in Boasberg’s court.
The planes carrying the prisoners were already en route when the judge ordered that the deportations be stopped. Trump’s team ignored the judge’s orders claiming that that judges had no jurisdiction out of US airspace.
The day after Boasberg’s order, and by the time the Venezuelans were imprisoned at CECOT, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, posted a message on Twitter that said, “Oopsie…too late” along with the laughing-with-tears emoji. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, reposted the message (remember that the next time Rubio runs for anything).
In effect, a couple of hundred men were plucked off the street, put into airplanes with no hearing or anything resembling due process, and sent to a third-party prison where they will likely spend the rest of their lives. At CECOT they are not allowed communication with their families or lawyers. According to Sixty Minutes, an overwhelming number of the men deported had no connection to gangs and no criminal record—or even criminal charges.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider the parallels between the flights to El Salvador and the days of the 1930s and 1940s when Hitler began mass deportations of Jews to the death camps in Poland. The modes of transportation were different—one by railroad, the other by airplane—but otherwise, isn’t our government replicating one of the most despicable acts in history? Aren’t both just rounding up groups of people based on scant or no justification and shipping them off to camps where they’ll disappear?
Of course, “real Americans” will never be treated this way, right?
Returning to the case filed by the ACLU, and the sometimes heroics of our judiciary, Judge Boasberg didn’t relent, calling the government’s response “woefully insufficient” and stated, “I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order and who ordered this.” He gave the administration until April 23 to take custody of the deportees. Of course the administration ignored that order too.
While Boasberg should be cited for his courage and decency, certain members of Congress have introduced bills to have him impeached. Representative Bill Brandon of Texas introduced HR 229 saying the judge violated his oath by “interfering with the President’s constitutional prerogatives and enforcement of the rule of law.” Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona followed that a few days later with a resolution to remove Boasberg from the bench for violating the “Good Behavior” clause of the Constitution.
One thing I know is that history will treat Boasberg kindly while the goons truly violating the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution will earn the disgrace that they deserve.
Our nation is in crisis, certainly the biggest crisis in my lifetime and arguably the most destabilizing time since the Civil War. If we let a failed businessman and inveterate liar (who happens to be the president) take this country further down this ruinous path, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Obviously the course this nation takes over the next few months will most severely affect the young who are just entering their civic lives. While some of America’s youth is dissenting, too many are watching the drift toward authoritarianism in a lethargic haze. Let’s—all of us—take heed of the experience and wisdom of Isabel Allende and Gary Kasparov, two dissidents and exiles who suffered terribly when their own native countries fell to despots.
One thing I always admired about my father was that nearly the moment the US entered World War II, he joined the air force and dispatched to the South Pacific as a flight surgeon. Like most men of his generation, he didn’t like to talk about any heroics, but he held a visceral disgust for fascism his entire adult life. I share that with him.
Our predecessors laid down their lives to fight fascism and liberate Europe. For decades we were seen as just that: liberators. Now we need to liberate ourselves before it’s too late.
Let’s step this up, my good fellow Americans! For most of us, running to Canada or anywhere else is an impractical fantasy. Let’s meet these clownish, posturing, compensating thugs on the field. Working as one, we can win.