You Have Fewer Friends Now: Fear, Isolation, Disbelief and Demoralization

Do Not Stop Resisting

Donald Trump began governing as a dictator when he was inaugurated. He promised that he would do that and he did. He has steamrolled his opposition with a slew Executive Orders, and decisions that have effectively steamroll the Constitution too. His nominees have met little opposition so far, even the remarkably unqualified Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense, and the equally unqualified Kristi “Puppy Killer” Noem was confirmed with a half dozen Democratic senator votes to boot. A lower court put a temporary hold on part of his Impounding order which is blatantly unconstitutional, but he has a contempt for the rule of law and the courts, so don’t expect that to matter much to him or his Republican partners in crime in the House and Senate.

Likewise, he controls much of what we have traditionally understood to be the free press, but since the oligarchs that own much of the corporate media, and social media companies have sworn their allegiance to Trump, most are in effect Trump’s government controlled propaganda. William Shirer, an American print and radio journalist in Germany wrote of the effects of the propaganda were, even on a man like him who had access to a wide variety of foreign newspapers:

“I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”

His fast and furious actions have not stopped and while quite a few of his Executive Orders will be challenged, he won’t stop issuing them, violating the civil rights of Americans or bullying allies and small countries in his way. His actions are designed to overwhelm and demoralize the many Americans who oppose his policies. Many of the actions are designed to provoke outrage while diverting the opposition from his most egregious actions like pardoning the violent 6 January 2021 criminals who attacked the Capitol, including the heads of violent antigovernment Fascist militia groups who are now at his beck and call to target his political enemies.

His methods are like those of Adolf Hitler, though faster because Hitler did not did not control most of the levers of power, including the legislature, executive agencies, state governments, or appointed so many judges. In fact, it took Hitler far longer to gain that kind of control, even over dissidents in the Nazi Party, however, the effect on those who did not support Hitler was similar to what Trump has done in less than a week and a half.

In his book, They Thought they Were Free: the Germans 1933-1945, Milton Mayer wrote words spoken by to him by a colleague at a German university following the war. His colleague described what it was to be a non-Nazi in the academic community:

“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…

“In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

“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…”

The result ends up in a collapse of morale, a sense of hopelessness that leaves opponents staggering as the hits continue as the hits continue. But we cannot give up. Resistance will be difficult and very possibly dangerous, and opposition certain. But Trump and his allies want the opposition to give up without a fight. But we must fight. One of my heroes is the German General Henning von Tresckow who lost his life after the failure of Operation Valkyrie, the attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. He wrote:

“We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”

If we don’t resist this will always be Trump’s America. I for one will not be silent and continue to resist.