Taking the Extremists Seriously

Back in 1975, I was a new student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I wandered through the library, enthralled by the huge number of books. Guided by my interest in Japan, I ended up in the World War Two history section. I found a book by Otto D. Tolischus, Through Japanese Eyes. Written during the war, the book used the words of the leaders of the Japanese Empire to show that they were every bit as bad as the Nazis and deserved no better treatment from us after their inevitable defeat.

But I also found a book entitled, Are Germans Human? I am quite sure I saw this book, though I can find no online record of it. The author answered his own question: “Are Germans human? Probably not.” His reasoning was that Nazi leaders could spend the day committing mass killings, then go home at night and speak lovingly to their caged birds. Could a single human contain such different feelings at the same time?

The frightening thing is that, yes, people can be good at one time and bad another. Germans today are very peaceful and polite, and even during Nazi times most Germans were not true, converted Nazis. But enough of them were that they produced the greatest evil in history. Moreover, the same individual human being can be loving at one moment and bloodthirsty the next.

The brief conclusion I want to draw, following on the last two entries, is that we should not assume that extreme right-wing people are, despite what they say, actually very nice people and could not possibly rise up and damage or destroy society. Paul Harvey would not have been violent, nor would James Miller. But today, thousands of right-wingers openly display threats of violence. We see them wear camouflage, mask their faces, and bring their weapons to protests. We think they could not possibly turn their guns against the rest of us. While this may be true, we must remember that the slightest perceived insult might cause otherwise nice rednecks to take the actions that they say they are ready to take. Even if only, say, ten percent of right-wing extremists become violent, America might be so severely disrupted that it cannot survive in a hostile world.

My point is simple. We should not dismiss the extremists by saying, “Oh, they wouldn’t actually use those weapons.”

Christians Worship Trump

In America today, Christianity consists entirely of the worship of Donald Trump. Christians believe that everything Trump says is correct and must be believed, is good and must be obeyed. The Bible, and Jesus, are totally irrelevant to modern American Christianity.

Of course, you will immediately say that there are millions of Christians regarding whom this statement is incorrect. And you would be right, of course. I happen to know a few and so do you. But there are many other millions of Christians who loudly proclaim the near-divinity of Donald Trump.

What I have chosen to do, for the sake of simplicity, is to assume that all Christians are worshipers of Trump. I will then make individual exceptions for those Christians who make a public denunciation of Trump in some way or other. If you are a Christian who does not worship Trump, your denunciation must be public, as on Facebook, or a blog. Something that is searchable on the internet. You cannot secretly worship Jesus while publicly worshiping Trump.

I realize that it is something of a risk to identify yourself as a Christian who denounces Trump. His followers have guns and love them. But the danger is not nearly as great now as it will be later, once Trump’s worshipers have more power. And your public denunciation is likely to have more of an effect now than later.

The German churches largely went along with Hitler. If they had stood up to him in 1933, history might have been different. But by 1939 it was no longer possible for the churches to change anything. By then, not just Germans but Vichy French and other sympathizers were committing acts of unspeakable cruelty—acts that they might sincerely have not wanted to commit—while claiming that they were just following orders.

Some possible places to post your opposition to Trump:

• The whitehouse.gov website (keep a copy)
• On Facebook
• Your blog

So if you identify yourself to me as a Christian, I will assume that you worship Trump and wish Him to be the great spiritual leader of America. But I will ask you if you have publicly denounced Trump, and where you posted your statement. If you can answer that question, then I will concede that you are a Christian. Otherwise I can only assume that you are a worshiper of Trump, with whom for my own personal safety I must communicate as little as possible.

Thoughtful Quotes from All the Light We Cannot See

One of the best books I have recently read is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which was a best-seller last year. It is so well-written and thoughtful that it was compelling despite an adventurously fragmented arrangement of short chapters. A blind French girl and a young Nazi radio operator were both very aware that the universe is full of photons that we must perceive with something other than our eyes.

“Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger?”

“...she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never see a photon sent from the sun.”

“But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking as the city is gradually pounded to dust.”

Respecting our Heritage

After those emails from Hell, anything I write as a straight essay has got to be a let-down. But get used to it! It’s time to get back to having a reg’lar blog.

I respect my heritage. My great-great grandfather fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. I respect him. But that doesn’t mean I have to celebrate that particular aspect of his life. I don’t know much else about him, except that he was one of six husbands of Minerva Pettit, who cheated on him. He was a farmer in Indian Territory. I don’t think he owned slaves. I think I can respect his memory for other reasons. Even as recently as the generation just before mine, nearly all the members of my family on both sides were racists, sometimes to an alarming extent (although their abuse of blacks was only verbal, as far as I know). I can hate this part of my heritage, even while respecting the many good aspects of their characters.

But in Oklahoma, where I live—especially in the town of Tushka, a few miles north of where I work, a town that has two Confederate flag roadside stands, and where they proudly declare themselves to be Confederates rather than Americans—hundreds of thousands of people (a significant minority of our population of three million) worship the Confederate flag.

What are other people around the world to make of this? They can be excused for thinking that a significant number of Americans still yearn for the days of slavery.

Of course the Confederates were not as evil as the Nazis. But today in Germany you seldom if ever see a swastika or Nazi flag. As a matter of fact, such insignia virtually disappeared right after the War. The Third Reich is part of German history, and they preserve its memory, but they do not celebrate it. They have, collectively as a nation, repented of their evil past. What would you think if, all over rural Germany, you saw Nazi flags waving?

If anything, the Imperial Japanese were worse than the Nazis. But today you almost never see—perhaps never; I don’t know—the Imperial Japanese flag with red rays coming out of the red sun. The Empire of the Sun, the mythic land of Hakkō Ichiyū, is part of the historical heritage of Japan, but they do not celebrate it. They have, collectively as a nation, repented of their evil past. Just recently the prime minister of Japan apologized to South Korea for some events during what they called the Greater East Asian Conflict, which began with the Japanese annexation of Korea. What would you think if, all over rural Japan, you saw Imperial flags waving?

I stopped at a Confederate museum north of Tushka. It had old stuff in it like most museums. But it did not celebrate the Confederacy. It simply preserved its memory. Unlike my stressful visit with a Confederate flag salesman (described in an earlier entry), to whom the Confederacy was an important part of the present, this museum considered the Confederacy to be part of the past. I enjoyed this museum. I have to agree with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (see, I sometimes agree with Southern Republicans) that the Confederate flag belongs in a museum.

Germany and Japan have repented. The Confederate States of America has not. The former Confederacy is defiant. That is our shame in the eyes of the world.

Emails from Hell, part eight.

Here is another email I received from our correspondent in Hell. Guess whom he meets this time!

{beginning of email}

            “HUT, two, three, four, HUT, two, three, four…” The man, wearing what appeared to be a World War Two American Army uniform, marched along. As he drew closer, I saw that his simple uniform bore a lot of insignia. He turned and saluted us—me and John and Joe and some others—and kept marching.

            Curious, I called out to the man. He stopped, at attention, then turned in military style toward me. “At ease,” he commanded himself. Then he slouched a little and sauntered over to us. He sat down.

            “You wouldn’t mind telling me who you are, would you?” I asked.

            “MacArthur, Douglas, General, serial number 3-point-14159.”

            “A nice round number,” John whispered to me.

            “If captured, we can only tell the enemy our name, rank, and serial number, which they can read off of our dog tags,” said General McArthur.

            “I would say I was surprised to see you here, General, but I just finished speaking with the pope. You were one of the most famous men in American history, but coming right after His Holiness…”

            “Right.”

            “Well, sir, might you tell me why you are down here in Hell?”

            “I served at the command of a socialist president, for one thing,” the general said.

            “Ah, yes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, author of Social Security, the New Deal, and lots of social services. I assume I will meet him sooner or later. Socialist as he was, he was so popular that he had to die to get out of office, and Americans had to add an amendment to the constitution to keep it from happening again. Four terms! You said, for one thing. What other reason?”

            “I was the Supreme Allied Commander in Asia,” he said. “Eisenhower’s counterpart.”

            “Yes. Go on.”

            “In August of 1945, the Empire of Japan surrendered unconditionally.”

            “Yes, they did. Soon afterwards, the Japanese people heard the voice of an Emperor, for the first time in history, telling them they had to accept this defeat. Go on.”

            “Unconditionally,” said the General.

            “Your point?”

            “That means that our troops could have run all over the place raping and pillaging to their hearts’ content.”

            “But,” I said, “they didn’t. Two reasons. First, they were for the most part humanitarians, and they did not want to act like madmen. Second, you commanded them not to. At first, some of the American soldiers consorted with Japanese women, but not, as I understand, by force. But then even that stopped. But what I don’t get is how that landed you in Hell.”

            “Well, I disobeyed the Bible,” said the general. “In Deuteronomy 7:2, God commanded the Israelites to show no mercy to the inhabitants of the conquered land, to utterly slaughter them, and to make no treaties with them. I disobeyed all of those commands. We showed mercy to the Japanese, and even helped them start their economy back up. We made treaties with them and even wrote their constitution for them. This constitution included a provision that they would not have an army capable of fighting outside of Japan itself, a provision that persisted until the year 2016.”

            “But, sir!” exclaimed I. “That was a brilliant move! Japan grew rapidly and became one of America’s best allies, which was important for our security and for world peace! Why, sir! They loved you! When you said you wanted to run for president, some of them put up campaign banners for you! The banners said…”

            “Yes, I know,” said the General. “They said, we play for your erection.” John started laughing but the General said, “No, seriously, they did. But great idea or no, it was a direct violation of God’s command.”

            “In the Old Testament, not the New,” I said.

            “The fundamentalists who get to choose who goes to Heaven and who doesn’t use Old Testament rules,” the general reminded me.

{end of email}