Nearly eighty years ago my father went to a war we temporarily won. We seem to be losing it now. I’ll explain.
My father served in the U.S. Army in World War II. He was part of an intelligence team in France and Germany after the Normandy invasion. He interrogated captured German prisoners of war near the front lines to gain useful information on enemy troop strength, location, equipment, and morale. He was the interpreter at the surrender of the First German army. For his service he received the Bronze Star from our country and the Croix de Guerre from the Free French, one of France’s highest military honors.
My father fled a totalitarian regime in Germany that had, with its allies Italy and Japan, taken over much of Europe, major areas of the world outside of Europe and threatened democracies everywhere. The United States and its allies fought the Germans, Italians and Japanese to eventually prevail and thereby saved many democracies from a totalitarian future.
My father developed a fierce love for the United States, his new country. He became a naturalized citizen upon entering the U.S. Army. He loved his adopted country for its ideals: freedom, equality, opportunity, decency and justice, although he understood these to be goals, ones not fully realized for all Americans.
He prized the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution because he believed its separation of powers between three branches of government, the executive branch (presidency and administration,) legislative branch (the House of Representative and Senate), and the judicial branch (our court system) would prevent the totalitarianism he had witnessed as a child and adolescent in Germany.
My father was probably unfamiliar with the famous, often told (and possibly untrue) story of Benjamin Franklin being questioned outside of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 about what type of government the Founding Fathers had created. Reportedly he stated, “A republic, if you can keep it.” A republic, simply put, is a form of government where the people are key to the running of their own government, through their elected citizen representatives, and not ruled by a monarch, dictator, or authoritarian leader.
My father grew up with fear in a country gone insane. The people supported a leader who spoke of victimhood, who fanned the flames of hatred for others: Jews, Romany peoples, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, indeed anyone who did not support Hitler was an enemy of the people.
Their leader found willing accomplices in the military, in the business community, and had key allies such as Leni Riefenstahl and Julius Streicher, who used public relations techniques, media, and huge, choreographed rallies as propaganda to advance the leader’s agenda.
Eventually, targeted parents and children were often separated, locked in boxcars, and concentrated in death camps. Only the combined efforts of the U.S. and its allies were able to stop the madness.
My father did not live to see our times. I’m glad. How would he have felt about a strong leader speaking of our being victimized by our allies, demonizing Mexicans as rapists and criminals, making fun of a disabled person, mocking the father of a Gold Star recipient, speaking of “shit hole” countries (that are predominantly black), separating and traumatizing children and their parents at the border and housing them in camps around the country, ending asylum entry in violation of international law, calling the press and those who oppose him “enemies of the people,” lying repeatedly, cheating in elections, and giving comfort to white nationalists, referring to neo-Nazis with equivalence to those who protested their presence in Charlottesville as “very fine people on both sides”?
What would my father have thought of a president who overtly attacks judges, FBI, CIA, and State department officials, or interferes with judicial proceedings involving his friends?
My father did not live to see social media companies, like Facebook and YouTube, allowing faked, doctored media to appear regularly on its platform or Fox TV personalities spewing intolerance like the heirs of Riefenstahl and Streicher that they are. He did not live to see social media companies allowing campaigns to use targeted media to manipulate our votes. He did not live to see the conspiracy theories of QAnon further divide us.
He did not live to see the president’s rallies, not simply typical campaign rallies but rallies of intolerance, division, and manipulation where a president gives a wink to those who assault people who disagree with him and where reporters are placed in media pens while the president’s supporters taunt them with Trump’s tacit approval.
My father was familiar with Hannah Arendt, the German-American philosopher and political theorist, but may not have known of this quotation of hers:
“If everyone always lies to you the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that nobody believes anything any longer; …. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can do what you please.”
My father had it wrong. The Constitution does not prevent totalitarianism, nor does it help ensure the continuation of democratic rule by the people in their own interests: a republic.
The separation of powers among co-equal branches of government is no longer functioning as our founders intended. Only an active, engaged, informed, mobilized, and voting citizenry can ensure that we keep a democratic society by holding all three branches of our government accountable. Otherwise democracies die.
While my father went to war to help prevent the deaths of numerous democracies 80 years ago, we may be losing that last, big war now, here at home.
Richard Brunswick is a retired family physician and social worker who lives in Northampton.