Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The Banal Belligerence of Donald Trump

NY Times by Roger Cohen

The soldiers, millions of them, came home from the war. They dispersed across the country, in big towns and small. It was not easy to recount what had happened to them, and for the dead it was impossible.

Something in the nature of their sacrifice was unsayable. The country was not especially interested. War had not brought the nation together but had divided it. The sudden flash, the boom, the acrid stench and utter randomness of death were as haunting as they were incommunicable.

This was war without victory, the kind that invites silence. For the soldiers, who fought in the belief that their cause was right and their nation just, the silence was humiliating. They bore their injuries, visible and invisible, with stoicism.

Resentments accumulated. The years went by, bringing only mediocrity. Glory and victory were forgotten words. Perhaps someone might mutter, “Thank you for your service.” That was it. There was no national memorial, for what would be memorialized?

Savings evaporated overnight in an economic meltdown engineered by financiers and facilitated by the abolishers of risk.

Democracy, the great diluter, slow and compromised, was inadequate for the expression of the soldiers’ emotions. Reasonable leaders with rational arguments could not assuage the loss. They seemed to belittle it with their parsing of every question and their half-decisions.

No, what was needed was a leader with answers, somebody to marshal a popular movement and cut through hesitations, a strongman who would put the nation first and mythologize its greatness, a figure ready to scapegoat without mercy, a unifier giving voice to the trampled masses, a man who could use democracy without being its slave.

Over 15 years national embitterment festered and yearning intensified. But which 15 years? Anyone these days may be forgiven for moments of disorientation. The 15 years from the devastating German defeat of 1918 to the electoral victory (with 43.9 percent of the vote) of Adolf Hitler in 1933? Or the 15 years from the devastating 9/11 attack on the United States to the electoral victory (with 46.1 percent of the vote) of Donald Trump in 2016?

National humiliation is long in gestation and violent in resolution.

German soldiers, two million of them killed in the Great War, came home to fractious and uneasy democratic politics, the ignominy of reparations, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, the crash of 1929, and the paralysis of a political system held hostage by the extremes of left and right.

Some 2.7 million American soldiers came home to a country that had been shopping while they served in the Afghan and Iraqi wars, with 6,893 killed and more than 52,000 injured. They returned to an increasingly dysfunctional and polarized polity; to the financial disaster of 2008; to the mystery of what the spending of trillions of dollars in those wars had achieved; to stagnant incomes; to the steady diminishment of American uniqueness and the apparent erosion of its power.[...]

I have tried to tread carefully with analogies between the Fascist ideologies of 1930s Europe and Trump. American democracy is resilient. But the first days of the Trump presidency — whose roots of course lie in far more than the American military debacles since 9/11 — pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire.

To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses. To speak of “American carnage” is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of “a historic movement, the likes of the which the world has never seen before” is to demonstrate consuming megalomania. To declaim “America first” and again, “America first,” is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman, is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.

Trump’s outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought. When Primo Levi arrived at Auschwitz he reached, in his thirst, for an icicle outside his window but a guard snatched it away. “Warum?” Levi asked (why?). To which the guard responded, “Hier ist kein warum” (here there is no why).

As the great historian Fritz Stern observed, “This denial of ‘why’ was the authentic expression of all totalitarianism, revealing its deepest meaning, a negation of Western civilization.”

Americans are going to have to fight for their civilization and the right to ask why against the banal belligerence of Trump.

29 comments :

  1. "To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism."

    EG-zactly. Democracy has failed this nation. My vote for Mr. Trump is my foray into totalitarianism. I'm liking it so far.

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  2. "Trump’s outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought."
    "Americans are going to have to fight for their civilization and the right to ask why against the banal belligerence of Trump."

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  3. What happens when you discover you don't like it?

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  4. Some think that Trump is not of sound mind?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/keith-olbermann-donald-trump-is-not-of-sound-mind-and-must-resign_us_58884d96e4b0441a8f71db51

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  5. Now you're talking "Klartext": Trump supporters, like Trump himself, are anti-democracy and anti-western civilisation, cynically using the democratic system to undermine democracy (just like the Nazi supporters and Hamas did in the past).

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  6. He is not working outside the parameters of American law. He's just making a particular statement and presentation unique to his ideas and his agenda, as does every president. So it's just a question of which ideas you prefer. This article, as all anti Trump rhetoric, is irrational and dangerous explosive demagoguery, intending to incite riot and panic, with the clever use of panic arousing language. The Hitler card is being used. That should be enough to discredit the article. When people speak this way, the only rational thing ton tell them is 'Take a deep breath and count to 10 and come back when you're ready to speak like a mentch and present your points in a constructive way with rational frame of mind.'

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  7. Reminds me of the Trump supporter I spoke to here in Israel who said that he voted for Trump because it might lead to the war of Gog and Magog.

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  8. Well, I wondered about that myself. For example, I'm against the Keystone pipeline, and even participated in a protest at the White House against it. Protesters totally surrounded the White House. Made a ring around it. It was vvery cool. And even cooler, Pres. Obama responded positively.

    So, the ok'ing now of the pipeline did not sit well with me. But I rely on the Left to organize and jumpstart the protests again, and they have done so with alacrity, and that has assuaged my disappointment.

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  9. The Nazis liked donuts, too. Will you call me a Nazi because I eat donuts?

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  10. The huff and puff post is known as an insane Leftist mouthpiece.

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  11. sometimes a cigar is a cigar. Sometimes the paranoid have a genuine basis to fear

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  12. Personally, I am just enjoying DT and all the other lefties on this blog getting their panties in a wad day after day. Aside from all the great changes that are being made daily by President Trump. It was worth going through eight years of Obama for all this.

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  13. Those are famous words of all paranoid people.

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  14. People said the same thing about Hitler ;-0

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  15. I am sorry that you feel the need to suppress benign comments that criticize your point of view.

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  16. Those are the words of paranoid people. Everyone is Hitler. Yes, there was to our tremendous misfortune a Hitler. Now it's time to move on.

    It is legitimate to disagree or criticize in a reasonable way, but when the 'Hitler' card is played on the likes of Donald Trump, you lost your credibility.

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  17. We would move on if Trump didn't keep bringing up the past. How can you say that Trump wants to move on when he keeps claiming that his election was crooked? When he claims that he didn't insult the Intelligence Agencies? When he claims that he didn't call them Nazis? What part of moving on doesn't he understand?

    Hitler card is not being used - as was carefully pointed out in the article.

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  18. The Guard in Auschwitz saying “Hier ist kein warum”, is not considered using Hitler? And look at the comment of Shmuel to which I responded. Was he not using Hitler?

    I am not telling Trump to move on. Trump will continue to function with his strengths and weaknesses. I am telling you to move on. That is to the extent of accepting the legitimacy of his presidency, and the democratic system. Calling him 'Hitler' like names and making such analogies are just there to incite irrational riot and panic. It isn't out of the realm of normality to want to deal harshly with illegal immigration, including sanctuary cities, and all the rest of his hard line policies. But I'm also not telling you to move on to negate your opinions. That is even if you disagree with those policies, as you are perfectly entitled to do.

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  19. you have a problem of not knowing the difference between expressing disagreement and being nasty. If you continue to express your disagreement in a nasty way they will be suppressed.

    I have no problem publishing comments that criticize my point of view- as anyone who follows this blog knows

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  20. Trump is not yet acting like a "legitimate" president, by questioning the integrity of the very system that gave him the presidency and telling bold-faced lies.

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  21. That's OK; it was primarily meant for you, although I think that the others would have benefited as well.

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  22. He did not have credibility in connection to those accusations. In other things he does, as do you.

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  23. The opposition questioned that integrity and they recounted the swing states. So why is it less legitimate now? Again, you can disagree and criticize, but that is the full extent of it. To call him not legitimate because of this, is unwarranted.

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  24. If you want continue with your nasty comments I will simply ban your comments

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  25. The opposition did not question the integrity of anything. Jill Stein, who got like 9 votes, requested a recount so that she could raise money and build a mailing list to use in future campaigns. No one from the Clinton camp afforded any legitimacy to the claims. Even Stein did not claim that there was fraud, just that it was close enough to recount the votes to see if there were errors in counting.

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  26. Well....
    https://youtu.be/fRfgKqsTMhM

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  27. Actually she didn't even get what she wanted, which was a hand-recount-- which, in general, is not such a bad idea for States in general. The recount that happened was just running the same ballots through the machine a second time, which doesn't check much.

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  28. Um no. you were the one to bring up the (reverse) hitler argument, not me (as in: the article must be totally wrong because it mentioned hitler). All my point was is that sometimes the paranoid people are correct, do not discount them...I never compared Trump to Hitler

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