New Year's Resolutions

Yesterday I read Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free. It is a study of 10 German Nazis that Mayer published in 1955. Mayer, a Jew of German descent who did not tell the people he writes about that he was a Jew, called these men friends. They were decent men, most of them. And they were Nazis.

I do not want to get into the argument here about whether our country is becoming fascist, about if things are really as bad as they sometimes seem. It's a new year, after all, and we must hope that it will be better than the old one. But I've been reading Mayer and thinking a lot about how we can learn from history how not to do terrible things. What must we do now, today, to reduce the chance that we will become Nazis? From Mayer's book, I have come up with some preliminary rules. All the relevant parts of the book on which I base these rules can be read here, except for some that I quote in an earlier post, here.

So then:

Where Do We Go From Here?

1. First, and most importantly, we cannot wait to be certain before acting, and acting in a way that does put our own selves at risk.We must put our faith neither in certainty, nor in uncertainty. If we believe that we are certain to face a fascist future, then what are we to do but conserve our energies, wait it out, save who and what we can? If we put our faith in uncertainty, we will have an excuse to wait before acting. We will wait for certainty, and until there is certainty we console ourselves that things may not happen the way we think. Then, once there is certainty, we conserve our energies. What else is there to do, once we are certain.

So the trap of certainty and uncertainty is a circular one. We are uncertain, so why act now, when we may not need to act at all? We are now certain, so it is too late to act.

We must act now, with neither certainty nor uncertainty, or rather, with the certainty that we will remain uncertain. Will what we do prevent what we think is coming, or, if it does not come, was what we did irrelevant and needlessly hysterical? We will not know.

For Mayer writes:

By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure. When they are sure, they still may not take any form of action...; but that is another point. What you hear of individual instances, second- or thirdhand, what you guess as to general conditions, having put half-a-dozen instances together, what someone tells you he believes is the case -- these may, all together, be convincing. You may be "morally certain," satisfied in your own mind. But moral certainty and mental satisfaction are less than binding knowledge. What you and your neighbors don't expect you to know, your neighbors do not expect you to act on, in matters of this sort, and neither do you.

Therefore, we must expect one another to act on our uncertain knowledge. If I do not expect you to act, you will not expect me to act -- we will not act. The expectation should be that we talk about politics, that we take stances about politics, that we go to protests and write letters and give money. There must be none of this "oh, I admire you so much for this-or-that" -- but only -- We are all going to the protest on the Common, what time shall we meet? We must act publicly, and together. We must not confine our protests to the dinner table, or to furtive discussions at work with other people who have the defeated, hunted look that we do. We cannot take up this burden by ourselves, we must expect it of each other.

2. We must not waste our time trying to convert those who now support this administration.
Those who support the administration are not likely, now, to be brought around to seeing it otherwise. They must deny it -- to admit that Bush is wrong is to admit that they are wrong, and no one does this, about such enormous things, and survives. We will have to wait for their children. To have seen Abu Ghraib and to support this administration is to be unable to see the facts. The men who were Nazis in 1935 were still Nazis in 1955; they could not be 're-educated'. It was their children and grandchildren who understood that what was done was wrong. So it will be here, as it is everywhere.

For Mayer writes:

None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategic mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers -- a backhanded tribute to the Leader's virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil..

"The schemers, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Bormann -- they built him up into a man of destiny," said Salesman Damm, the Party office manager in Kronenberg. "They did it so skilfully [sic] that he finally believed it himself. From then on, he lived in a world of delusion. And this happened, mind you, to a man who was good and great."

"Hitler was a man, one like ourselves, a little man, who, by doing what he did, was a testament to the democracy "you Americans" talk about, the ability of us little men to become great and to rule the whole world. A little man, like ourselves."

3. Though we need not bother to try to convert the believers, we must tell everyone we meet that we are enemies of this Administration.
Even when it is not 'done'. Especially when it is not 'done.' We may have no effect other than to make others see that not everyone they come into contact with is 'not worried', that people, ordinary citizens, take this threat seriously, and expect them to take it seriously too. We must not fear to speak because politics is irrelevant to the issue at hand, because we do not politicize work, or commerce, or our hobbies. We must be unseemly. If enough of us are, then it will no longer seem so strange. The point here is not to convert, as I said, but to prevent not just the conversion of others, but their acqueiscence. The people who did not vote, or who voted for Kerry, but did not understand this election to be, as we did, so crucial, the people who gave money but did not make calls, and we ourselves, who could have done more but did not (we could always have done more, after all), need to be reminded, all the time, everywhere, that we cannot acquiesce. We should not assume that we are safe because we oppose now, what is happening. We cannot be sure that we would continue to oppose it. Many people became Nazis who were not in their hearts Nazis -- who were in their hearts anti-Nazis, but they were Nazis all the same. People may have very good reasons for not "joining the party" and still join the party. They may speak reasonably of many things and still join the party, believing that they will prevent the party from doing those things, or that the party will not, after all, do them, or that their presence in the party will moderate the extremist elements, or that they won't be driven out by the extremists who have hijacked the party, or that the things they disagree with about the party are not, after all important. So, we should have no truck with the moderates, those willing to deal, those who think they can reform from within, or will serve as a bulwark against the extremists. Moderate Nazis did not save the Nazi party, and moderate Republicans will not save the Republican party.

"Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. it is so much easier to 'oppose the excesses,' about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day."

4. We must not believe that education, that facts, will save us. Education did not save Germany. The truth will not set us free, but without the truth, we cannot set ourselves free. We must have the truth, we must have education, we must have facts, and reality, but we must not believe that this is all we need.

"How might your faith of that first day have been sustained?"
"I don't know, I don't know," he said. "Do you?"
"I am an American," I said.
My friend smiled. "Therefore you believe in education."
"Yes," I said.
"My education did not help me," he said, "and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men's."

This administration is not burdened with reality.

Who has ever reached for the stars like the Germans, breaking asunder the bindings of reality that constrict the human heart and restrain that teetering creature, the reasonable man? Reality's ambivalence makes Hamlets -- cowards, say Hamlet and Hitler, who burned Hamlet -- of us all. Hitler cut all the knots that freemen fumble with. He did not resolve the problems that immobilized his people; he smashed them. He was the grand romantic.

We, on the other hand, must find a way to both be burdened by reality and not trapped by it. We must be reasonable and unreasonable, at once.

5. We must have the capacity for "calm, consistent insubordination."
It is not enough to simply oppose the excesses; we must oppose the whole program. We must have a program to oppose it with, but that is secondary to being opposed. Our "no" must not be a "three-quarters-yes" as it was said of the Social Democrats in Germany, as it is, I am sorry to say, of the Democrats now.It is this that Wes Boyd talks about, here: "If you believe your society needs to undergo fundamental change, as Boyd does, and you understand that such change is not a short-term proposition, you fight your war as a series of battles, and you don't fret over every loss, because it's the fighting, not the winning, that makes you stronger."

We must find a way to take up this burden. We cannot see it and refuse to carry it -- we will in that way soon lose the capacity to see it. We must share it together, and see it together. Or else none of us will see it, and none of us will share it.

Mayer writes: " A member of the pre-Hitler Prussian cabinet, asked what caused Nazism, said "What caused Nazism was the clubman in Berlin, who, when he was asked about the Nazi menace in 1930, looked up from his after-lunch game of Skat and replied,'That's what the government's there for.'"

And:

It was this, I think -- they had their own troubles -- that in the end explained my friends' failure to "do something" or even to know something. A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal times, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good. My friends carried their normal responsibilities well enough...But they were unaccustomed to assume public responsibility.

The public responsibilities which Nazism forced upon them -- they didn't choose to assume them when they chose to be Nazis -- exceeded their capacities. They didn't know, or think, at the beginning, that they were going to have to carry a guilty knowledge or a guilty conscience. Anti-Nazism of any sort, in thought or in feeling (not to say action), would have required them, as isolated individuals, already more heavily burdened than they were accustomed to being, to choose to burden themselves beyond their limit.

Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with. Their denial compels their detachment.

And I read the last entry of a liberal blog named Tristero dated November 3rd, 2004:

It's become much too hard to be an American.

In my case, I took a break from the middle of a pretty decent career, to add my dissenting voice during what was -and remains- a national emergency. Although my career hit some major snags as a result, I will never regret what I've done. How could I be a decent father to my daughter, let alone a responsible citizen, and not have tried to do at least something to prevent the madness of the Bush/Iraq war?

While the past year and a half has been in some ways enjoyable, and I've learned a great deal, constant exposure to the toxic nature of George W. Bush and his world has taken a serious toll. In more ways than I care to remember, my health has suffered, as has my emotional well-being. In a nutshell, America is now asking too much of its citizens in order to save it from heading over a cliff. That is why we elect representatives, so that we can do our work and not have to run a government. We're supposed to have a responsible and free press, so that normal folks need not work 24/7 exposing the lies and crimes of our leaders. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to do my bit, but I've already done more than I reasonably could. Politics, political writing is not my field, never was, never will be. There is a limit to how much I can do, how much basic research I'm qualified to undertake. I tried to exceed that, but I am simply not capable of continuing to do more.

It's time to get back to work. I have too much music I need to write. I had a lot of fun writing this blog, learned a lot, met many fascinating people who are far more intelligent than I, always a pleasure, and who I wish I could thank properly not only for their hard work, but for the pleasure and comfort it's given me. I may drop a line or two on this blog every once in a while. And I'll never stop caring about the issues that got me started in the blogosphere in the first place. But this is the time, as the great poet of the "old weird America" once sang, to keep on keepin' on. Thanks, all of you, for reading. I wish all of us luck.

It's true. Our country is asking too much of us. But neverthless, we must take up that burden. The alternative is worse.