Dictators and Autocrats don’t ask Why? They ask Why Not.

What happens when a nation yields to base instinct.

Nazi Christians campaigning in 1932

“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.” The First Leaflet of the White Rose*

I thought of those words many times during the first Trump administration, and much more during this election season, and especially now that a majority of voters elected Trump and a MAGA Senate, even as we wait for the final House races to be settled. But, first a brief post-mortem.

By deciding to run for reelection, Joe Biden seemingly lost his grip on what was really important; that winning the election was more important that his desire for a second chance to defeat Trump and cement his legacy.

Instead he lost everything, his legacy, his credibility with too many voters who voted for him four years ago, and left Vice President Harris a nearly impossible task, trying to separate herself from a tremendously unpopular president, while battling the corporate media machine that refused to hold Trump accountable for anything and let him get away with brazen lying, and they never confronted his increasing cognitive decline, something that they never ceased attacking Biden as his decline became terribly obvious.

Unfortunately, Biden’s team, including Harris pretended nothing was wrong. Of course, for her doing so in public was fraught with risk, sitting Vice Presidents no not publicly criticize the President. I do understand that numerous advisors tried to get him to acknowledge it and leave the race and it is possible that Harris was one of them, but he and his family refused to accept that criticism and continued on until weeks after his disastrous performance in the first debate, when he stepped aside for Harris, leaving her with precious little time to campaign and set herself apart from Biden, something that she didn’t do. She ran a good campaign, but she would have been a stronger candidate if she had won a primary campaign. That would have given her time to enunciate policies that might have shown that she understood just how unpopular Biden was, and address the economic concerns that millions of Biden voters who reversed course and voted for Trump.

Neither she, nor Biden addressed the fact that although the economy as a whole was doing much better by all standards, that this was not being covered well by any of the media, and that many people had not seen the results of it in their lives, and as a result believed every lie that Trump and Vance told about it. They forgot a very simple understanding of human psychology, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. People tend not to be convinced by arguments about democracy, which seems a bit esoteric to many, national security, or even the crimes Trump was convicted of, indicted for, and charged with, or the COVID 19 response by which he ensured that hundreds of thousands of people died on his watch. Neither did his connections to Putin and other dictators, or threats against our closest allies and friends. None of that seemed to matter.

But, now he is the President elect and is promising to take revenge on his opponents, deport millions of people, put a raving loon vaccine denier in charge of health, and give the wealthiest man in the world of gutting the discretionary budget of any program that benefits the same people that voted for him. Time prohibits me from going down the list of groups who voted against their own interests. But that is where we are, and what we will have to deal with over at least the next four years.

In the past several days I have received much encouragement from like minded friends, but I have been mocked for my statements by some Trump supporters, including a former colleague at the Staff College, and told that I was battling a “Straw Man” by a former Navy Chaplain friend. The former colleague barely knew me and is a long time Evangelical Christian Trump supporter. The Chaplain friend surprised me because we had shared much. He is a kind and decent man, but has opted out of being informed on politics. This he says allows him to be at peace. I tried to reason with him and told him:

“To do what you say would to disobey the basics of the Christian faith and the Gospel. We are to care for and protect the weak, the poor, and the most vulnerable people. By doing as you suggest I would be no better than the Germans who stood back and did nothing as the Nazis first ostracized, then violently persecuted, and finally sent the Jews and others to their deaths. The young, 22 year old, University of Munich student and martyr to the Nazis, Sophie Scholl wrote: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the chance to stay in England or the United States, but he refused because he felt that in doing so would abandon his country to the Nazis. I cannot do as you suggest and I pray that you rethink your position.”

Another friend, who I have known since I was 19 and is not a Trump supporter told me in that conversation, “Our first priority as Christians is to continue working to fulfill the Great Commission. We cannot legislate change, neither can we change people's minds until God first changes their hearts. We must be the Light of Christ in the midst of a dark and perverted world full of hate-mongers, racists, agents of falsehoods, "fake" Christianity. Live as Christ would have us live,... like Him, loving unconditionally.” I told him that unless we defend others, our message has no credibility. He did reply that he agreed with me when he read what I wrote.

That leads to tonight’s deeper thoughts, so pardon me for being a historian.

Sophie Scholl was a 22 year old student at the University of Munich. Her brother Hans, and a number of their friends, all medical students had returned from the Russia. Front where they served as medical assistants before returning to complete their studies and upon graduation become Doctors, to serve as such in the Army. They had seen too much. They realized that Hitler’s government had led Germany into a war that it could not win and had committed unspeakable crimes against the Jews and their Soviet enemies on the Eastern Front. They had seen the horrendous casualties inflicted on the German Army by the Red Army. All were Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox Christians, and all returned home determined to resist the Hitler regime however they could.

White Rose memorial outside the University of Munich

They formed a resistance circle known as the White Rose. They wrote and distributed seven pamphlets condemning the actions and crimes of the Nazi regime throughout Germany, primarily through the mail or delivering them to others who sent them on. Six were distributed, but while trying to distribute the seventh in the rotunda of the university, Sophie and Hans were spotted by a janitor who was a Gestapo informant. They were arrested and interrogated, and on February 22nd, 1943, they were tried and convicted in a show trial conducted by a tribunal of the infamous People’s Court headed by the fanatical Nazi jurist, Roland Freisler. They were executed at Five that evening.

The sixth pamphlet was smuggled out of Germany to British intelligence by Helmuth von Moltke, a jurist who had been drafted into German military intelligence at the beginning of the war. He was the great grandnephew of Field Marshal Helmuth von Molke the younger, and the great-great grandnephew of Field Marshal Helmuth von Molke the Elder, who defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. That pamphlet was air dropped by the Royal Air Force in the millions over German cities in 1943, spreading their message further than would have been possible.

I say all of this because I see many people, good and decent people, deciding to be silent despite all that Trump did in the past and what he promises to do now. He has not backed down and his threats now mean more because the Supreme Court has given him full immunity from prosecution for any act done in his “official duties” as President. In short, the have given him the freedom to do anything he now pleases, even if it is illegal or violates the Constitution. In in a speech he gave on 14 March, 2020, Trump gave a hint of what would happen if he faced real opposition.

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,”

Since then he tried to overturn the 2020 in a violent insurrection on 6 January, 2021, and during his 2024 he has constantly made threats against opponents, including top General who worked directly for him. He has threatened to empty the Federal Government as well as the military of anyone not completely loyal to him, He has promised to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of revenge, and threatened millions of people with incarceration and deportation.

He won reelection and will return to the White House on January 20th, 2025. If we do not take him at his word, we are fools.

Peaceful resistance under the law is all we have left. We can only hope that enough political resistance remains to forestall the worst possible outcomes. However, I doubt that enough members of the Republican Party have the moral courage to resist since almost all have pledged their loyalty to Trump in the years since 2017. I also fear that many elected Democrats will fall in line in order to preserve themselves and remain in office. The same is true about many if not most journalists who will want to not only keep their jobs, but be welcome in Trump’s circles. In light of Trump’s promise to take vengeance on his critics, I doubt if they will guaranteed of safety.

The fact is, that those who are committed to upholding the Constitution, saving our democracy and preserving freedom cannot give up. History shows us the path of compliance with a man who campaigned as a Fascist, uses Nazi language, admires Hitler, and promises to be a dictator on day one, but only for a day… right. He has absolute immunity from any criminal charges or prosecution once in office according to Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court majority. He doesn’t have to worry about anything unless one of his inner circle caps his ass.

We we think about Trump in the days leading up to his inauguration, we must remember the words of Russian dissident Gary Kasparov:

“dictators & would be autocrats do not ask “Why?” when it comes to using power for their advantage. They ask “why not?”

We have to do our best to resist knowing that any criticism of Trump from now on, including speaking or writing, very well can and might be used against us. But we cannot remain silent. If we do we will be as guilty as anyone who supported or enabled Trump is in the long eye of history, and if you believe in a supreme being, maybe even God.

There will be tremendous pressure to conform, and pressure to obey, maybe even career or financial incentives to do just that.

But we must resist the temptation to obey in advance. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote:

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

British Historian Laurence Rees wrote:

“human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice.” 

The pressure and temptation to obey will come from friends, relatives, colleagues, and the government itself. Milton Mayer, an American professor of German Jewish ancestry taught at a university in Germany after World War II. He wrote a book, They Thought they were Free: the Germans, 1933-1945. In it one of his German friends, a colleague at the University explained what it was like to live under the Nazis.

“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?“

I suppose that is true of many Americans after nine years of Trump and his diversions from reality.

Mayer’s friend also noted:

“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes…

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

But, how many of us will understand until we confront that reality, when mass numbers of people are rounded up and put in private prisons or hastily constructed concentration camps prior to being deported. When friends, neighbors or relatives are suddenly arrested and jailed under spurious charges, mostly that would have been protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

However, the Supremes, having given immunity for actions done as part of his “official duties” have basically given him the power to do whatever he desires regardless of our Constitution and laws. Andrew Jackson didn’t even need immunity when he disobeyed the Supreme Court to order the Army to drive the Cherokee and other Native American nations off their lands in the dead of winter in something we know as the Trail of Tears.

We have to remember, that despite being elected by a majority of voters that such is no guarantee that Trump will obey the laws or Constitution. Timothy Snyder wrote in his book On Tyranny: “The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.”

Major General Henning von Tresckow

I will close with words directed to my fellow Christians, including some of the most powerful religious leaders in the country, including Evangelicals and even Roman Catholic prelates. They are from the German General, Henning von Tresckow who was a Christian who gave his after taking part in the planning of several attempts on Hitler’s life, including Operation Valkyrie on July 20th, 1944. Tresckow said this about his fellow German Christians who supported Hitler, “I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.”

I have to compare them with the over 80% of Evangelicals who voted for Trump in three straight elections. That is not harsh, that is reality.

That is enough for tonight. I am tired, but I will not stop speaking out.

* The White Rose was a German resistance movement led by Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and other students at the University of Munich. They published and distributed six pamphlets exposing the crimes of the Nazi regime. They were discovered and tried during a show trial by the Nazi People’s Court and executed that evening. Their legacy survived their deaths. Their pamphlets are available online at https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/the-leaflets

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