Are We The Baddies?

Bonhoeffer, Baldwin and Blindness

It was after our event, over gifted Oaxacan tamales (oil not lard) that Tad and I were talking about the conflation of resistance histories; as if solutions over there would work over here. In particular, the current situation in America and France during occupation by the Nazis.

The discounting point about the grossly misunderstood French resistance is right there: “occupation.” The French had plenty of their own homegrown fascists, the fascist- friendly, opportunists, etc. who made hay once the Nazis came to town. But the Vichy government was only formed because France was invaded by a foreign nation.

Not us. We are doing this to ourselves.

It is much easier to galvanize the incurious and apolitical against a foreign invader than it is against their cousin who spent too long on the QAnon boards, or against the co-worker who you’ve always meant to ask to hang out after hours, or your best friend whose husband is an ICE officer.

Our American fascists understand this implicitly. That’s why their pitch isn’t, “We know José and Claudia have been your neighbors for over 20 years, your children have grown up together, but they’re the problem so we’re going to send masked men without a warrant to put them in cuffs, then a van, then a camp somewhere, and leave their kids to figure out how to pay rent.”

No.

The pitch is “We’ve been invaded. It’s an infestation, a blight on our otherwise healthy (white) country, and anyone who pushes back is infected, broken, deformed.”

(“It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled – to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”)

Here’s a tip: if one side has to couch their argument in platitudes, euphemism and bad metaphor, then you’re probably headed towards a motte-and-bailey fallacy in which you might agree to a “soft” position: “Girls’ sports should be for girls,” only to discover you’ve actually co-signed on to something much more reactionary: “Trans-Women are predators; competitive, strenuous sports diminish women’s fertility; so we should ban those sports for girls who should only want to be demure mothers.”

You think I’m joking? From the Heritage Project :

“The current Title IX regime as applies to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman — one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented towards the goods of family and motherhood. […] Women also benefit from activities that build health […] grace, confidence, […] and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports.”

Voila.

Right, French.

The French were invaded by a foreign army, not by immigrants, or decadent monsters, or Satanists who look pretty old for sipping immortality juice from children’s brains. (Explaining the tenets of QAnon has replaced explaining “How Twilight ended,” as my favorite relaxation technique.)

So, no, our resistance efforts can’t resemble Paris in the 1940s. If anything, the more accurate historical context for our resistance to our homegrown fascism would be Germany. Which is worrying because… how that all worked out.

I can tell you a couple things that I’ve gleaned from the Nazi-era diaries I’ve read.

Many times a diarist will write something along the lines of “These clowns are so incompetent, and their leader is such a buffoon, this can’t possibly go on.” Sound familiar? How about, “Every day is so disturbing, there’s so much violence. Someone will step in soon.” Or that calm clarity that it’s about the economy, and the moment everyone starts losing money, or when oil is X dollars a barrel, they’ll knock it off. On October 28, legendary newsman William Shirer wrote in his Berlin diary,

“I hear in business circles that severe rationing of clothing will begin next month. The truth is that, having no cotton and almost no wool, the German people must get along with what clothing they have until the end of the war.”

He wrote that in 1939. Eventually the Germans would wear shoes and suits made of pulp. The war and the regime would go on.

I hear worrying echoes of the same sentiments these days, even from scholars I respect: the President has mouldy soup for brains and “the wheels are coming off the wagon.” This gives hopeful people the idea that all we have to do is wait for the President to die, and our nightmare will be over.

Let me put this in a whole separate paragraph, and in italics and in bold so I can accurately convey how much I do not agree that we’re free and clear as soon as Donald Jessica Trump dies, or after the Midterms, for that matter. While the future remains unwritten, I believe this is the beginning. Not the end.

Yet these diary entries are written by the people who, while waiting idly in the bleachers, are at least still watching the game.

What about everyone who isn’t? What about people’s diaries of the times that would be about the fish they caught the other day, what their mother-in-law did this time, questions about if the boss even noticed.

Well, now we come to my point. Those people? They were stupid.

Just like everyone who doesn’t know that California has eight concentration camps running right now, with another planned in El Centro.

I don’t mean ignorant. I don’t mean foolish. I mean stupid.

It’s not my definition, it belongs to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He was the best of what we know as the German resistance. A Lutheran pastor, he spoke out against the Nazis from the beginning. He’d been to the American South. He’d been to Harlem, gave a sermon in its Abyssinian Baptist Church. As the Nazis came to power, he took to the radio and warned of a growing idolatrous cult. He was part of a resistance that was rooted in the church, speaking out about the beginnings of the Nazi death machine.

This is truncated, but the death camps began as a secretive euthanasia program in which the mentally ill, elderly, physically disabled, the unhoused, addicts — all communities which faith leaders regularly interact with, especially those with strong commitments to justice and service. When people began to go missing from asylums, sanatoriums, hospitals, jails, eventually people started noticing. Especially families who got letters about their loved ones being moved for vague reasons, quickly followed by even more vague death notices. The Protestant church, already staunchly positioned against the Nazi Reich, not only spoke out but used theirs pulpits, conveying not only their horror, but an unflinching moral clarity that revealed just how sinister all that innuendo and cliche would be.

Bonhoeffer would be executed in 1945, a month before the end of the German war, after being tried with no evidence, no defense, and no witnessess, for participating in a failed assassination plot against Hitler. Early on in his incarceration however, Bonhoeffer wrote extensive letters. One of these included his idea that stupid was far more dangerous than evil.

The theory is that evil, in its chaos, and nihilism, “always contains within itself the seeds of its own subversion.” Think Hitler, “in a ditch, covered in petrol and on fire.” Think Mussolini, hanging from a pole, again covered in flammables.

Stupidity, on the other hand, can go on forever, as indeed it has. But, let’s not confuse things. Working off this excellent video by philosopher Jonny Thomson, we’re not talking about foolishness — like when you watch yourself lock your keys inside your car, or spend over a decade thinking the name of the 80s yachtpop act was one man named Holland Oates.

Neither are we talking about ignorance, as in, ‘I don’t know the name of the group who sings the song, “You Make My Dreams Come True," I should ask someone.’ Ignorance can be addressed.

The stupidity we’re talking about, Bonhoeffer’s idea of it, is comprised of three elements:

• Outsourcing critical thinking by trusting an authority figure of any quality to ascertain the validity, morality, likelihood, etc of a context. For example, trusting and believing everything your guru, priest, favorite TikToker, parent or writer says. Asking your AI assistant if you should change your business model or leave your wife.

• Conformity. If your beliefs remain unchallenged by knowledgeable and accurate sources, and if you isolate yourself from any one who disagrees with you, what you believe, what you think, quickly devolves and flattens. In groupthink, belief becomes identity, group cohesion, and any debate becomes an attack on who you are. It becomes a fight for your life.

• Willful Ignorance is a different thing than “I don’t know who sings this song.” It’s, “I don’t know who sings this song, and I don’t want to know.”

I should drop the bit. This is what I really mean:

“I don’t know what’s happening with ICE deportations, and I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t know why the US won’t provide evidence that the 200+ dead people were in fact 'narco-terrorists,’ and I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t know how the President’s finances were entangled with Jeffery Epstein, and I don’t want to know.”

Or, as I read this morning from James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,”

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

Baldwin was writing of not only his literal brother, but of the brotherhood of the Black American experience, part of which is those hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives.

Do you know how many Black deaths in the past twenty years constitute a death by lynching? Do you want to know?

Perhaps, like me, you are navigating choppy waters with friends and loved ones over who is paying attention, and who isn’t. Who is doing anything, and who is doing nothing.

Remember the difference between evil and stupid, and remember how much more dangerous the stupid are. Evil is rare, maybe extraordinary. Perhaps here is where I would complicate Arendt. What she saw in Eichmann, the brain numbing cliches, the refusal to step out of party lines, or think about what it was all for: what happens when the trains arrive? To me, this is Bonhoeffer’s stupidity.

Stupidity sits beside Evil. On the other side, Cynicism, making a profit off of the guileless and gormless, selling courses on How to Make Friends and Rape Sluts, asking for a donation to Save the Children.

There’s a bit from British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, in which two SS officers are awaiting the Russians. One notices that their uniform caps “actually have little pictures of skulls on them.” This prompts him to wonder… “Are we the baddies?”

I know that some might see the pictures of an old man being forced into the snow in his undergarments, of children packed into a cage eating mouldy bread, of masked men fist bumping while they march tax payers into a concentration camp in the middle of Los Angeles, of the blood soaked front seat of Renée Good, and see “justice.” I know that some have never and never will see any of these images, even if they looked right at them; that’s what it means to be willfully blind.

I can only look at us and wonder, “Are we the baddies?”

I want to know.

Here, at what I believe is the beginning of the end, or at best the end of the beginning, I’m begging you:

Don’t be stupid.