History: The Shadow of Life

Here is an uncomfortable truth: History repeats itself — as surely as night follows day and Spring follows Winter.

What makes it “uncomfortable” is that failing to know or understand history means we are doomed to repeat it. Moreover, we are unable to use history as a beacon, a compass, a guide to help us avoid the inevitable and steer us to better outcomes.

As we look at the utter devastation in Ukraine, it’s important to realize that tens of millions of Americans know nothing at all about European history during the past one hundred years… the entire 20th Century. They may know of two World Wars but they don’t know why those occurred or why the present day has significant echoes of those War years.

That “ignorance” prevents us from recognizing that the European Union’s failure to put sanctions on Russia’s oil, gas and wheat fearing the problems that would cause their own economies, might become the key to Russia’s attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union. Russia, emboldened by Europe’s restraint, could find a path through the crushed remains of Ukraine that leads them right to the sea, to the borders of countries that were once part of the Soviet bloc and are now part of NATO…and most importantly perhaps to the richest oil and gas reserves in the area second only to Norway.

In a way NATO and the European Union’s restraint now might be seen as a parallel to the actions taken in the years before the beginning of the Second World War in the 1930’s. Then, Europe seemed to look away at the actions of Hitler’s Germany in what was called ‘appeasement’. After a meeting with Germany’s leaders, the Englishman representing Europe, Neville Chamberlain promised “Peace in our Time”. Months later Hitler invaded Belgium and started his march to conquer all of Europe.

But our national ignorance of history means something much more sinister here at home. It means that Americans do not recognize what is happening to our own way of life – a life we have all known and after 300 years take for granted even as events reveal the rotting foundation of our democratic system and those leading that effort.

We cannot here retell the history of Europe in the 20th Century. But we can take just a tiny piece of it to show that history not only repeats itself but is the very shadow of life itself.

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

Why should Germany’s first attempt at a democratic government in the earliest years of the 20th Century matter to Americans in the first quarter of the 21st Century?

Because the attempt failed…lasting barely 15 years…and the reasons for its short life are a mirror for America today.

Yes, to compare 15 years of a democracy to 330 years may seem ludicrous. Yet it is possible to look at what existed in Germany and failed and see the shadow of history staring right at us… daring us to risk ignoring what exists today in America.

In 1918, the victors of that first World War – France, England and the United States, took a major step to destroy what was once that Germany. In the Treaty of Versailles, they sought financial payments from Germany designed to keep it broken and powerless for years to come.

Germany itself was in total disarray. It’s King, Kaiser Wilhelm 11 had abdicated. The German government was a hodge-podge of German states seeking to hold themselves together and maintain independent power.

But in 1919, there was a decision to form a Republic, a democracy based on the Constitution of the United States. At a meeting held in the city of Weimar, because Berlin was too dangerous a place at that moment, the Weimar Republic was formed with an elected President, and a parliamentary approach for its freely elected legislators.

All of this took place in a country torn by financial disaster…with the military seeking to remain intact and influential; workers striking to maintain the ability to live; various political beliefs…socialists, communists and others… seeking to gain power in various sections of the country.

And then came the Great Depression here and everywhere and 70% of Germans were out of work.

The Germans were furious, humiliated…hating the stunning payments that had to be made to the victors but hating – despising –even more, the very government which they felt had weakened them, reduced them to this pitiful state of affairs.

Watching the unity they had known disappear in endless regional struggles for power, watching the weakening of their Fatherland without any government to stop the internal chaos, their attitudes were driven by conspiracy theories which attempted to locate the blame for all their economic and social troubles: it was the communists, it was the rich Jews who ended the War that most Germans believed they could win. These people had to be driven from power and influence because then Germany could regain its power and pride.

The scapegoating became a national movement and riding that movement was the then small but growing National Socialist Party under the control of Adolph Hitler.

In the mid- 1930’s, then President Paul Von Hindenburg was convinced to allow Hitler to become Chancellor…and giving in, he made that appointment.

Hindenburg was convinced that Hitler’s ability to speak and lead, to tell the German people what he knew they needed to hear, would be a unifying force.

Hitler had been building a political party based on a youth movement, symbols, marches and massive meetings where he would speak for hours, castigating the Jews and communists and all other lesser human-beings like homosexuals and gypsies who preyed on the community, taking what they wanted, living free of any government which could control them. Hitler said the Fatherland would never be great again with these people involved and they had to be removed, eliminated, exterminated.

And so undeterred by the government beneath him, he began to make the Germany Great Again by any means necessary. And the Nazis were loose and any hint of what had been a democracy was gone.

STOP THE STEAL

Today 34 States led by Republican Governors and State Legislatures are designing a new approach to the election process – a process which is the true heart of our democracy.

The point of these efforts is to name Election Commissions which would by themselves decide whether every election had been legal and without fraud. Its decision would be enough to change the result of an election – State or National – and reverse the outcome as these commissions see fit.

There is no secret to this effort…it is being done openly and is being reported on accordingly. There is as yet no national outcry but there is an awareness that the US Supreme Court might very well decide that these commissions are within the law – all done in an effort to prevent fraudulent elections – whether such elections exist or not.

The not-so-simple but agonizing truth is that a country which does not defend its freedoms by being watchful and aggressive, can easily lose them with just a little change here or there.

When 40 million people still believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by fraud despite the reality that no court in the nation has supported that claim, something had already been lost.

Conspiracy theories explain it all on social media platforms freely open to every opinion, every truth and every lie. Is it farfetched to believe that the government is run by pedophiles whose only real purpose is to be able to find and control their prey? Can we respect such a government? Believe in it?

To have a salesman who never understood government nor respected it nor the people in it, become the President because “he’s not a politician like the others” says something about a country which may no longer believe in itself and certainly its government.

All kinds of activities can go on within a democratic system – which makes it challenging and chaotic and sometimes messy and awful – but there is a freedom involved which does not go away.

The shadow of history is looming behind a World pandemic, changes in the society because of it and now a worldwide inflation which is complicating an attempt to restore large swaths of the World’s economy.

These aberrations from normalcy make things more difficult but cannot become a veil which hides what is happening beneath. History casts its shadow to help us see the picture that exists. Ignoring it because we do not see it, or do not want to see it, will take us to places we do not want to go.