“IN THE LAST DAYS,’ GOD SAYS, 1 WILL POUR OUT MY SPIRIT UPON ALL PEOPLE. YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS WILL PROPHESY. YOUR YOUNG MEN WILL SEE VISIONS, AND YOUR OLD MEN WILL DREAM DREAMS. IN THOSE DAYS I WILL POUR OUT MY SPIRIT EVEN ON MY SERVANTS-MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE- AND THEY WILL PROPHESY. – ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 2:17-18 NLT
Last night, as we did our usual “What do you want to watch?” dance, we happened upon a movie called Lee, which starred Kate Winslet as the acclaimed photojournalist for Vogue, Lee Miller (a.k.a. Lady Penrose), who recorded the events of World War II on the European continent. She captured the brutality of Hitler in Paris after the liberation and the resulting brutalization of women who were believed to have consorted with the enemy. She captured the horrors of mass deportation of “undesirables” and their ultimate destination in places like Buchenwald and Dachau. And she famously had her picture taken in Hitler’s abandoned Munich home, where she took a bath in his very bathtub. it was a story of one woman and her journey from a life of frivolity as a Vogue model to the gritty fatigue-wearing life of a chronicler of the atrocities of was and specifically of the fascist ideology of superiority. We didn’t set out to watch a movie about the evils of fascism during this week when fascism is the central talking point in the U.S. presidential campaign, but it seems that the universe wanted to show us this story at this time.
As a student of modern revolutions during college, I was obliged to study fascism since the two are often connected. Some people don’t know that it was actually Benito Mussolini who “invented” fascism in the 1920’s of Italy when he became disillusioned with socialism, his chosen ideology during WWI. He was frustrated that socialism was so ineffective in implementing change quickly. His impatience led him to think that there really were two types of people, leaders and followers and that leaders could make good things happen more effectively if they simply took charge, and that the majority of the people would be happy to follow suit. He famously went into the fields with workers and showed himself to be a man of the people who could take off his shirt and reap wheat with the best of them. But he took the term for the bundling of the wheat stalks and fashioned it into the Italian ward “fascio” which means to bundle or gather, but also to force the gathering to hold things together. His view was that society was more likely to prosper if the fascisti took the lead away from the poor peasants who didn’t have the capacity to understand what was best for them. Naturally, this class structure was no more than an argument of convenience for supremacy, a rather age-old notion that man has gravitated to since time began. Someone always wants to be better, stronger, smarter, whether they are or not.
Hitler was searching for a model of domination and in 1925 the best example of a governance system that he admired was Mussolini’s fascism. He had the party structure in his National Socialist (Nazi) party, which he was rising to lead, so, like every wannabe leader, he needed a book to highlight his ideology. Thus was born his infamous Mein Kampf autobiographical manifesto. It is hard to imagine a greater coincidence than the writing of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitlerwith the help of lieutenants like Rudolf Hess and the production of the Heritage Foundations’s Project 2025 by Donald Trump’s lieutenants. The slippery slope of fascism from an ideology that seeks to organize for the benefit of the people to a distorted vehicle for supremacy of one narrowly defined group of elitists over all others (Uber Alles) is now well understood. It is so well understood because it gained such despicable status in its extreme nationalism, its xenophobia, its antisemitic and generally anti-immigrant and racist sense of supremacy that the surviving democratic world has made sure that the world should know everything and never forget. And yet, here we are a century later having forgotten the error of those ways.
The blatant talk this week of Trump’s admiration of Hitler and his strong authoritarian leanings that embody extreme nationalism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, talk of mass deportations, isolationism and xenophobia, and unabashed racism and misogyny, are rampant. It seems almost like there is a mass hysteria that is gripping the nation and pretends that these attributes are not what they seem and are not the latest incarnation of the dark side of man coming through as fascism. Why does man go through this struggle every cycle and then pretend to forget how badly it has turned out in the past? Why do men think they can pull the wool over the eyes of the masses on a sustainable basis when history shows us that sooner or later people get the joke? Philosopher George Santayana famously said that people who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it and yet when he wrote that in 1905 in his The Life of Reason, he didn’t know about Hitler, Mussolini or Donald Trump. What is amazingly true is that Trump does not know history and does not really even understand the foundations of what he espouses much less the ultimate outcome of that ideology. And I must comment that the MAGA efforts to eradicate the history of sociological missteps and mistakes made in the past that they purposefully want to readopt and repeat are truly pernicious because these are people who seemingly understand history, but reject the outcomes and want to try all over to regain supremacy by whitewashing history for the young and uninformed so that they can try again what has failed miserably and been rejected in the past.
Watching the Lee Miller story was an emotional journey, not because I learned anything new about the horrors of the 1930’s and 1940’s in Europe (and somewhat in the United States), but because it so very clearly reminded me of how we are traveling down the same path with our eyes shut. My Red friends think I am exaggerating when I caution about the perils of another Trump presidency. Even that repetition is a repeat itself of how Hitler came to power after being once jailed for treason. It is almost as though the world is tempting us to try this lunacy again. I do feel like the prophet on the sidewalk with the hand lettered sign saying that the world is ending. I do believe that if Harris does not prevail over Trump it will be the end of days as we know it. Life, of course, may well go on, but not for me, my kids or my grandkids in a manner that I find appealing.