Uncertainty is Guaranteed, Liberty Isn’t

Will You Resist Tyranny?

Dear Substack readers and subscribers. I apologize for not writing the past few days but all that Trump and Reichsführer Musk are doing has been triggering my PTSD and wearing me out. I have even had to limit my reading and intake of articles and commentary by people here on Substack who I follow because I was being overwhelmed.

I have not had a good and peaceful nights sleep since he fired General C.Q. Brown, Admiral Lisa Franschetti, General James Slife and the heads of the Judge Advocate Generals Corps of the Army, Navy and Air Force and his betrayal of Ukraine. As a retired career military officer who served nearly 40 years I still follow my sacred oath to the Constitution not any political party or President, who also served two combat tours in harms way, these attacks on our military more troubling than most of Trump’s unconstitutional acts.

Of course the hits keep coming so fast that they are difficult to prepare for, especially when they begin to effect the lives of friends who are losing jobs, having their jobs, careers and lives threatened by the brutal and sadistic techniques of Elon Musk and his unconstitutional organization called DOGE.

A German professor colleague of Milton Mayer told him after the war about life in the Third Reich: “Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows.” In our country today the only certainty is that things will grow more uncertain as the Trump regime tramples the last guardrails of liberty and democracy.

The choice we have is to stand up and resist or slink back from conflict because we might be standing alone, but waiting for others to join you doesn’t change anything. It takes people standing up at the beginning to encourage others to stand with them. Mayer’s friend recounted:

“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. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.”

The problem is just that. People who refuse to resist hoping despite all evidence to the contrary that they can survive? I ask, SURVIVAL AS WHAT?

As the young martyr of the German resistance, Sophie Scholl wrote:

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”

In one of my articles last week, before I it the wall I quoted Commandant le Baron Phillipe de Vomécourt who despite his age went the Britain to help lead French resistance as a member of the Special Operations Executive, well before most Frenchmen joined the Resistance or DeGaulle’s Free French government. He said something that I want do emulate despite nearing the age of 65 after serving nearing 40 years in the United States military:

“Had all of us in France meekly, lawfully carried out the orders of the German master, no Frenchman could have ever looked another man in the face. Such submission would have saved the lives of many, some very dear to me. But, France would have lost its soul.”

Resistance begins now, not next week, next month or next year. As the great Holocaust survivor and Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal said:

“Where does the duty to resist begin? [...] It begins wherever injury to human beings begins through the violation of their rights. If people resist from the very beginning, then they later have no need for a heroic struggle. For those who violate human rights are always a minority and one must show them in good time, before it is too late, the limits of their power.”

If anyone says that they value political power and privilege over the Constitution and our liberty, or say they cannot stand by those sacred words of American scripture “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” then I say, may God, whoever he or she may be have mercy on your soul. I have no use for them, or you if you are willing to sacrifice those basic American values.

For those who claim to be defending Christianity I challenge them to oppose the words Jesus, as racism and nationalism are not the Christian message. That message is to love our neighbors as ourselves, regardless of race, gender, religion or lack thereof. When I see supposedly Christian people use their religion as an instrument of power politics and allying themselves with the most unchristian President who has ever lived in order to destroy the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all who dare oppose their twisted, Nazi type of Christianity embodied in Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and others, I cannot help but think of of the words of General Henning von Tresckow who said, “I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.” Of course I would substitute Trump for Hitler in the quote.

What else can I say? Trump, Musk and Putin are threats to the United States, Europe, and most of the planet. They are only concerned with power, riches and dominance over others. If many Americans cannot figure that out by now, we need to resist without them for they are so foolish that they have let liberty die in their hearts.

As the eminent Judge Learned Hand remarked to new Americans swearing allegiance to our country just before D-Day:

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.”

What is liberty to you and are you to willing to resist the tyranny of a dictatorship to stand for it?

Resistance against tyranny is now essentially. We cannot wait if we are to survive as a free people and country.