Thomas Mann. He warned Germany, but they didn’t listen. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
If Trump stays on his current course toward global catastrophe, then he must be stopped. If Congress, the courts, and the American people fail to stop American aggression, then who can, other than Europe?
The 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump have no understanding of how what is happening in the world today recapitulates what happened in Germany not that long ago.
With Trump’s threats against Greenland, his obvious intention of ceding Europe to Putin, and his also obvious intention of putting down the Western democracies and divvying up the world for rule by autocrats, Europeans are in a terrible bind. They have been there before, and they have not forgotten it.
Are we getting dangerously close to a situation in which the world must defeat Trump because Americans won’t?
According to ChatGPT in research-assistant mode, half a million people left Germany between 1933 and 1945 when they saw where Hitler was taking Germany. Many of those were Jews. About 30,000 were political and intellectual exiles. Thomas Mann was one of them. As early as 1933, he moved to Switzerland. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States.
From America, Mann wrote a series of radio addresses to the German people that were broadcast into Germany by the BBC. Twenty-five of those radio addresses, from 1940 to 1942, are available in the public domain. As far as I can tell, the complete set of radio addresses in an English translation are available only in book form, recently published by Camden House: Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945.
Here is an excerpt from Mann’s address to the German people in May 1941. We Americans are now in the same predicament.
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I tell you at the moment of your greatest — or perhaps not yet greatest — exuberance, that it will not be accepted, not permitted. Do not believe that you only have to establish iron facts before which humanity will bow in due time. It will not bow before them, because it cannot bow before them. However scornful, bitter, and doubtful one’s thoughts may be about humanity, there is, underneath all wretchedness, a divine spark in it, undeniable and inextinguishable, the spark of the spirit and the good. Mankind cannot accept the ultimate triumph of evil, untruth, and violence — it simply cannot live with them. The world resulting from a Hitler victory would be not only a world of universal slavery, but also a world of absolute cynicism, a world which would find it totally impossible to believe in the higher and better in man any longer, a world which would belong completely to evil and be subject to evil. There is no such thing; it will not be tolerated. The revolt of humanity against a Hitler world filled with the utmost despair of spirit and good — this revolt is the most certain of all certainties; it will be an elementary revolt before which the ‘iron facts’ will crumble like plaster.
The desperate revolt of humanity against Germany – must it come to that? German nation, how much more must you fear the victory of your leaders than their defeat!
Hopefully, maybe, this is just a phase for America. Growing pains. We’re still a relatively young country compared to Germany.
I think that many Americans on either side of the political spectrum see this version of America as the grand finale, either as a late-capitalist hellscape of bigotry with enclaves of decency working to right the ship or a futile attempt to relive a mythical past while mocking anyone who sees their hyper-capitalist bootlicking fascism for what it is. I think both sides tend to romanticize America’s history, but obviously, the Right tends to romanticize it more for the wrong reasons.
For example, the Right has a long history of failing to understand how it’s possible that a living forty year old working class black American with children of their own may have a different perspective on life here because their grandparents were the grandchildren of slaves and yet had to fight in a world war for that country. They would never ponder that their African American peers might have had conversations about what their great-great grandparents endured. They would never consider that the reason so many blacks live in poor areas in today’s America is because that’s where their employers and schools were located, which weren’t given public funds likes white schools were or paid the same wage as their white peers, and they can’t get out because they can’t sell a rundown small home in an area overrun by a defeatist criminal mentality for enough to get a down payment on a house in a better location, so working a job that pays just enough for renting an apartment is as good as they can get. Whites will romanticize the defeatist fatalism of the West Virginia coalminer but not the inner city African American factory worker.
In my opinion, most right-wingers are merely pretending to care about immigration issues, welfare fraud, and “woke” culture. It’s funny that the only people I ever hear use the word “woke” are conservatives. I have no idea what the hell they’re talking about, to tell you the truth. In reality, conservatives are living blissful lives in 3,000 square foot homes near excellent schools and employers. Television, podcasts, social media apps, and political influencers have brainwashed them to think that they’re supposed to be scared or that they should at least pretend to feel that way around their social circles.
I know this is a terrible thought, but it’s just something that I think about when it comes to how honest a person is or how closely they’ll try to seek the truth of a matter when it comes to their politics. Put a gun to their head or to the head of their child and ask them how they really feel about immigrants or “woke” culture with the consequence of lying being their immediate death or that of their child. Yes, that’s an ugly thought, but I have children, so I try to have honest feelings about my own politics so that my children will see someone who seeks out the truth and tries to live with respect for others.
I suppose that the consequence of the French Revolution was death for many nobility who were blissfully ignoring the plight of the commoners. I think that in America the ease of which to find out where the truth may lie does not protect them from potential consequences, which should be incarceration for those who abuse their positions of power.