America’s Zombie Democracy: Its trappings remain, but authoritarianism and AI are hollowing out our humanity. By George Packer in The Atlantic magazine

 

America’s Zombie Democracy

By George Packer in The Atlantic magazine

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We are living in an authoritarian state.

It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing. Yet it’s true.

We have in our heads specific images of authoritarianism that come from the 20th century: uniformed men goose-stepping in jackboots, masses of people chanting party slogans, streets lined with giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements, interrogations under naked light bulbs, executions by firing squad. Similar things still happen—in China, North Korea, Iran. But I’d be surprised if this essay got me hauled off to prison in America. 

Authoritarianism in the 21st century looks different, because it is different. Political scientists have tried to find a new term for it: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism. In countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and India, democracies aren’t overthrown, nor do they collapse all at once. Instead, they erode. Opposition parties, the judiciary, the press, and civil-society groups aren’t destroyed, but over time they lose their life, staggering on like zombie institutions, giving the impression that democracy is still alive.

The blurred line between democracy and autocracy is an important feature of modern authoritarianism. How do we know when we’ve crossed it? These sorts of regimes have constitutions, but the teeth are missing. Elections take place, but they’re no longer truly fair or free—the party in power controls the electoral machinery, and if the results aren’t desirable, they’ll be challenged and likely overturned. To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. 

Independent government officers—prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers—are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. 

Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise, and their opinions, cloaked in neutral-sounding legal terms, predictably give the leader what he wants, endorsing his most illiberal policies and immunizing him from accountability. The rule of law amounts to favors for friends and persecution for enemies. The separation of powers turns out to be a paper-thin gentleman’s agreement. There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.

Does an ideology drive these regimes? Would they sacrifice everything for the survival of some almighty ism? Doubtful. Instead of ideologies, they have slogans without much content. Fascism, like communism, was a serious ideology—one that mobilized populations in some of the most advanced countries of the 20th century to throw away their freedoms, go hungry and work themselves to the bone, give their lives in struggle and war. Fascism was serious enough to produce a mountain of corpses.

Today’s authoritarianism doesn’t move people to heroic feats on behalf of the Fatherland. The leader and his cronies, in and out of government, use their positions to hold on to power and enrich themselves. Corruption becomes so routine that it’s expected; the public grows desensitized, and violations of ethical norms that would have caused outrage in any other time go barely noticed. The regime has no utopian visions of a classless or hierarchical society in a purified state. It doesn’t thrive on war. In fact, it asks very little of the people. 

At important political moments it mobilizes its core supporters with frenzies of hatred, but its overriding goal is to render most citizens passive. If the leader’s speech gets boring, you can even leave early (no one left Nuremberg early). Twenty-first-century authoritarianism keeps the public content with abundant calories and dazzling entertainment. Its dominant emotions aren’t euphoria and rage, but indifference and cynicism. Because most people still expect to have certain rights respected, blatant totalitarian mechanisms of repression are avoided. The most effective tools of control are distraction, confusion, and division.

These regimes thrive on polarizing the electorate into us and them. Us is defined as the “real” people—often working-class, rural, less educated—who think of themselves as the traditional backbone of the country and the victims of rapid economic and social change: globalization, immigration, technology, new ideas about race and gender identity. 

Them are the elites who benefit from these changes, who have no loyalty to the country and its traditions, along with the aliens and minorities whom the elites use to undermine the national way of life. The leader speaks directly for the people and embodies their will against the people’s enemies. As defender of the nation, he claims the right to override any obstacles, legal or otherwise. Whatever he does is the rule of law.

Over time, society is hollowed out. Civic organizations that engage in public affairs hesitate to get too political for fear of drawing unwanted attention. Universities, churches, NGOs, and law firms mute themselves to stay in the good graces of the state, which has tremendous financial and regulatory power over them. The press isn’t silenced, but it is intimidated by demagogic rhetoric, investigations, and lawsuits, so that journalists are constantly asking themselves what the negative consequences of a particular story or opinion will be. Over time, the major media fall under the control of the leader’s friends, leaving a few independent outlets to struggle on in pursuit of the truth.

Authoritarian regimes and their allies flood the internet and social media with such a tide of falsehoods, so much uncertainty about what is true, so much distrust in traditional sources of information, that the public throws up its hands and checks out. While partisans on both sides use incendiary language in the endless battle for algorithmic attention, normal people who aren’t particularly engaged or informed grow numb and exhausted. And this social context allows authoritarians to exert control without resorting to terror. 

Unable to know the truth, we risk losing our liberty. “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt said near the end of her life. “And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

These are the features of the modern authoritarian state. Every one of them exists today in this country. Checks on President Donald Trump’s power, whether in the framework of law and constitutional government or in the broader society, have grown so weak that he can do pretty much what he wants. He sends masked police to pick people off the streets without probable cause for arrest, disappear them into secret prisons, and ship them off to random countries. He fires experienced, patriotic civil servants and replaces them with unqualified toadies. He takes open bribes from foreign countries and American business interests in the form of a luxury jet or a meme coin. He tells media companies to stop criticizing him, or else—and many of them do.

Some of these acts have been temporarily blocked by lower-court judges, but in case after case the Supreme Court has made itself the firewall against presidential accountability, while the Republican-led Congress embraces its own impotence. It sometimes seems as if the only check on Trump’s power is his own attention span.

A small incident can reveal a larger truth about a country’s real condition. Last week I was in Ohio to give a talk, and at dinner a professor mentioned a recent letter from the Department of Education announcing that federal work-study funds will no longer cover nonpartisan civic jobs, such as voter registration, because they are “political activity.” The government rationalized the ban by stating that work-study jobs should provide “real-world work experience related to a student’s course of study whenever possible.” But as the professor put it to me: “Nonpartisan voter engagement is ‘real-world work experience related to the course of study’ of someone majoring in political science—or anyone studying to be an active citizen in a free society.” The Trump administration isn’t just withholding federal money to blackmail institutions of higher education into suppressing ideas and policies it doesn’t like. It also wants to discourage any civic activism it doesn’t control.

The next morning, a local librarian told me of a disturbing change at work. The town library was generally a noisy place, but in the days following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, people had suddenly begun speaking in whispers. 

Across the country, Republican elected officials and online enforcers were creating blacklists of speech criminals. Vice President J. D. Vance suggested that the First Amendment should be suspended for academic wrong-thinkers. Trump threatened journalists and comedians for insufficiently respecting Kirk and him. A palpable chill set in, and even the patrons of a small-town Ohio library worried about being overheard.

This mental atmosphere reveals as much as anything happening in Washington. You can feel the onset of authoritarianism in your central nervous system: shock, disbelief, fear, paralysis. Familiar norms and rules disintegrate every day, but the ultimate consequences remain unclear, and Americans don’t know how to assess the danger. We haven’t lived under authoritarianism. We haven’t experienced this level of sustained polarization and vitriol since the run-up to the Civil War. During the McCarthy era, careers and lives were ruined, but the White House didn’t lead the pursuing hounds.

In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln said that the republic would never be overthrown from abroad: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Yet the Founding Fathers warned over and over about the arrival of an authoritarian demagogue. They wrote a Constitution that they thought would be the best defense against one. In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln said that the republic would never be overthrown from abroad: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” How did it come to this? How have we let it come to this? Because it’s not just being done to us. We are doing it to ourselves.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who came here in the 1830s to study this new form of government, wrote that the key to maintaining democracy in America, beyond the country’s physical advantages and wealth, beyond the wisdom of its Constitution and laws, was the “mores” of its people: their customs and ideas; their choices; their active participation in civic life; their emotional capacity for restraint, responsibility, and tolerance—what Tocqueville called their “habits of the heart.” 

These habits have to be acquired and practiced, and they’re just as easily lost as learned. In many ways democracy is not a natural form of government. Throughout human history it’s been the exception. Most societies have been ruled, have allowed themselves to be ruled, by a single class, faction, or person. Self-government by the whole people is counterintuitive, just like freedom of speech for repellent ideas, and it’s hard. Walter Lippmann once wrote: “Men will do almost anything but govern themselves. They don’t want the responsibility.”

Today, in public life, and especially in the hellscape of social media, our habits of the heart tend to be unrestrained, intolerant, contemptuous. With the help of Big Tech’s addictive algorithms, we’ve lost the art of self-government—the ability to think and judge; the skills of dialogue, argument, and compromise; the belief in basic liberal values. Five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, I helped write a rather anodyne statement in defense of open inquiry, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, and intellectuals. Without using the phrase, it criticized cancel culture. 

Almost immediately upon its publication in Harper’s, the statement became the “notorious” Harper’s Letter—the object of furious condemnation by journalists and academics as the pearl-clutching of elites and an excuse for bigotry. This torrent of abuse came from the left, which no longer believed in open inquiry. Those on the right raged against left-wing puritans and declared themselves militants for free speech, even—especially—hatred and lies.

Since Trump’s return to office, and with Kirk’s murder, the roles have completely reversed. The left, which not long ago perfected mob-sponsored silencing, is (rightly) outraged at the Trump administration’s top-down cancel culture. Meanwhile, those former free-speech absolutists Trump, Vance, and Stephen Miller have become lord high executioners of thought crime. If a new Harper’s Letter defending the value of open inquiry were written today, many of the original letter’s fiercest critics would rush to sign it. Free-speech hypocrisy is a symptom of the democratic decay that makes authoritarianism possible.

At the same time, political violence is rising like a dark storm around the country—in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, in Washington and San Francisco and Atlanta, and now in Utah. The shot that killed Charlie Kirk as he debated a crowd of college students represented the worst kind of failure in a democracy—a bullet silencing speech. Only the shooter bears the guilt. In a text to his roommate and partner, the suspect wrote about Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” So he erased the line between word and deed that keeps us from destroying ourselves.

The relation between our degraded discourse and this epidemic of attacks is not simple or direct. A public square in which a minority of Americans, separated into mutually hateful camps under the malign spell of power-hungry leaders and profit-seeking influencers, routinely dehumanize one another is an obvious setting for a few lost souls to cross the line into murder. But most Americans still know the difference between words and violence. Most responded to Kirk’s assassination with horror and grief, along with the dread of an impending downward spiral. Most people are still sane, still decent, don’t want to see their opponents killed, don’t want a civil war.

Yet the logic of algorithmic polarization seems inescapable. Within hours of the assassination, some individuals predictably justified, even celebrated, Kirk’s death online. Then the Trump administration did what never happened after JFK and Martin Luther King were killed or Reagan was shot. It used a terrible crime as a pretext to silence dissent and crush the opposition—exactly what you would expect from an authoritarian regime. 

Last Sunday, when tens of thousands of people from around the country gathered in Arizona to remember Kirk, a religious service turned into a state-sponsored rally for hard-edged Christian nationalism. Kirk’s tearful widow, Erika, forgave his killer—but Miller, the president’s senior adviser, snarling and flexing his neck, promised revenge against nameless evil “enemies,” and Trump himself proudly declared his hatred for his opponents. Whose words mattered more? Was it all just an ugly show, or the start of a campaign of widespread repression?

Perhaps what we’re seeing, in this country and around the world, is a return to the norm. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that, after two and a half centuries—about the length of the Roman republic in its glory—American democracy is disappearing. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, the universal ideas of the founding documents no longer seem to have their hold on many Americans, especially younger ones.

For many years prominent figures on the left, especially in colleges and universities, have dedicated themselves to revealing all the ways in which those ideals were never universal: The abstract truths of the Declaration were falsehoods, covers for structures of oppression that endure to this day. On the populist-nationalist right, the greatest words in political history—“all men are created equal”—are now qualified with so many reservations that they might as well be deleted. 

Vance wants to “redefine American citizenship” as a hierarchy in which the universal ideas of the Declaration count for less than the number of dead generations lying in your family plot. This makes me want to say, as Lincoln said of the reactionaries of his time: “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The philosopher John Dewey believed that democracy is not just a system of government but a way of life, one that allows for the fullest realization of every human being’s potential. I was granted more than half a century to benefit from it in the country that practically invented democracy. It makes me heartsick that my children might not have the same chance. What can we do to prevent authoritarianism from becoming our way of life? How can we change the habits of our heart and our society?

Foreigners are baffled that Americans are allowing an authoritarian to rob them of their precious birthright. I’m baffled, too—but I also recognize that we have no experience resisting this kind of government. So we can study what ordinary people living under other modern authoritarian regimes have done. Witness, protest, speak out, and mock in creative ways that catch the popular imagination. Politicians can run for office, lawyers can sue, journalists can investigate, artists can dramatize, scholars can analyze. Americans are already doing these things, but so far none of it has made much difference because the public isn’t engaged, and without the public on their side opponents of authoritarianism are too weak to win.

The greatest temptation and danger is to withdraw into some private world of your own and wait it out.

Sam Altman, a co-founder and the CEO of OpenAI, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. When Rogan floated the idea of an AI president, Altman envisioned a system that would be able to talk to everyone, understand them deeply, and then “optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S. That’s awesome.”

I’m suspicious of anyone who suggests being governed by a machine that’s made him a multibillionaire. I remember Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian dream of a platform that would create a more open and connected world, uniting humanity across tribal lines, perhaps even ending wars in the Middle East. The unforeseen damage that social media has caused democracy seems likely to be dwarfed by that of artificial intelligence. It won’t just substitute an algorithm for our ability to make decisions. It’s coming to replace us—to be our therapist, our doctor, our teacher, our friend, our lover, our president. But if one day a chatbot writes a poem better than Frost or Bishop, it will still be worthless—because it’s only the human intention, the search for meaning and effort to reach others, that give a poem its value. There’s no art without us.

Chatbots feed on some longing we must have to be relieved of our humanity, as if being human is too hard, too much trouble to have to think and judge for ourselves, to define who we are and what we believe, to suffer the inevitable pain of consciousness and love for another human being. This longing seems especially acute today.

So artificial intelligence promises to do what an authoritarian regime does: take our place. They’re two sides of the same coin—one political, the other technological—both forfeitures of human possibility. We’re surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we’re building machines that take away our ability to think and feel.

The Declaration of Independence and the other founding documents were based on a philosophical faith in human reason and freedom. Near the end of his life, Jefferson wrote in a letter, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

What does it mean to be educated for a free society? This used to be the mission of American schools—to produce a special kind of person, a democratic citizen. In many ways our colleges and universities have failed at this task. They’ve become prohibitively expensive, while creating a new aristocracy of the credentialed that has worsened economic inequality and political polarization. 

They’ve spent their money on administrators and fitness centers while cutting whole programs in the humanities and social sciences. Those programs share some of the blame for their own demise. They grew so opaque and politicized that they seemed irrelevant, if not hostile, to the larger society. Some things are true even though the Trump administration says they’re true—the academy has become inhospitable to conservative views. When more than half of your classmates are afraid to say what they think, there’s too much orthodoxy and not enough free expression.

To be educated for democracy means hearing different, even disturbing views—seeking them out, engaging and arguing with them, learning from them, maybe letting them change your mind, without giving an inch of ground to democracy’s erosion. It takes practice, and I believe it’s likeliest to happen when we come face-to-face with friends, strangers, and even enemies. There’s no getting away from our phones, just as AI will soon seep into every fold of our lives, no doubt doing both good and harm. But we have to resist their tyranny, which threatens our freedom as much as the authoritarian regime now taking hold.

Evolution: Israelis and American Jews Grow Apart

Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon 

in the Sinai during the Six-Day War in 1967

I love Evolution. Not only is it one of the most brilliant theories in the history of science, fundamentalists of every kind just hate it and Charles Darwin is not Jewish, not even a little!!

As a Jew, I have heard the sub-text of criticism of science all my life. Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, brilliant Jews without number have been disparaged for their work by people who hate Jews. But the man fundamentalists hate the most is as thoroughly English as Windsor Castle and the family that lives there.

Darwin, the reclusive English gentleman, developed a theory of life so sweeping that critics, especially religious conservatives, are still trashing his theory 150+ years later: a theory that has proven as tough and durable and resistant to flame as cast iron frying pans. 

Most of all, I am delighted at examples of Evolution working right in front of our eyes. The way to see Evolution work is to take a population of any living thing, separate it into two or more parts as far away from each other as possible, a water barrier is especially good, and watch the two populations change.

Darwin famously illustrated his theory with Galapagos finches.  Gil Hoffman, politics reporter at the Jerusalem Post, showed me how evolution occurred with Jews living in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland and Russia and nearby countries, for hundreds of years before the 20th Century, when everything changed.

At the end of the 19^th Century, that population began to divide into two parts.  Zionists left to restore Israel as a nation. Others, like my own grandparents, left for America. 

You could say there were three groups: those who left for America, those who left for the land that would become Israel, and those who stayed.  In 1939, those who stayed were the largest group. By 1945, millions were slaughtered and many survivors fled Europe for the Middle East or North America.  Beginning in the 1970s, more than a million Russian Jews would flee to Israel and America, continuing the trend. 

But the early Zionists and my grandparents in America were the populations that separated and evolved.

Jews who fled for America largely assimilated. The tailors and shopkeepers and laborers had children who became doctors, lawyers and the writers who shaped American literature, Broadway and Hollywood.  They were American success stories. The Zionists became pioneers, making the desert green, fighting for survival, eventually gaining independence and becoming one of the fiercest Armies in the world. 

One culture produces Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon. The other gives the world Jerry Seinfeld and Philip Roth.  All four brilliant in their own way, but no doubt who you would call if you were under attack. 

American and Israeli Jews speak a different language, eat different food, celebrate the same religious festivals in different ways and in this century are increasingly separate on politics. 

Gil Hoffman travels regularly between Israel and America.  He spoke at my Synagogue this year.  He worries about the increasing divide between Israel and American Jews.  He did an excellent episode on the subject on his podcast “Inside IsraelToday” on the Land of Israel Network.

In America, three of four Jews identify as Liberal and/or Democrat and in the same numbers, loathe President Trump.  Israel, in sharp contrast, is one of just three countries in the world that have a positive opinion of Trump: nearly 70% of Israelis have a favorable view of Trump.  The other two countries positive about Trump are the Philippines and Nigeria. Apart form those three nations, the 192 member countries of the United Nations have a negative opinion of America’s chief executive, including America.

As more anti-Semitic incidents happen in America, the gulf between the two communities continues to grow.  Over the last century, American Jews have become much more American: rich, largely insulated from the virulent anti-Semitism of the rest of the world, and driven by personal ambition.

Trump made the alt-right and white supremacists his base, infamously saying there were “fine people on both sides” at an event with one side waving Nazi flags and chanting “Blood and Soil.” Anti-Semitism in America increased rapidly as Trump ran and won his racism-centered campaign.

In Israeli society, universal conscription means the path to power and influence is through the Army.  Israel is under constant threat and defines itself by its readiness to fight with enemies on every side. For Israel, surrounded by enemies, Trump is an ally who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and pulled out of the Iran treaty that was so unpopular in Israel.  

The political differences between American and Israeli Jews are likely to get worse no matter what the future holds for the two countries.

When groups split and grow apart, the usual trajectory is to grow further apart.  When Gil Hoffman speaks on this topic, he hopes to be a small part of bringing the two groups closer together, even as he reports the news that shows Jews separated by six thousand miles in distance are separating even further in politics and practice. 

I am going to try to live part of my life on both sides of the divide. I am planning to spend the first three months of 2020 traveling in Israel.  For Jews, anti-Semitism is a question of if, not when. Israel is a place of refuge for all Jews everywhere. So I want to know and experience more of the Land of Israel.  We’ll see how my thinking evolves.

My New Breakfast Club--Jewish Draft-Era Veterans

In November of last year, I started going to the Wednesday morning Minyan prayer group at a synagogue in Lancaster City--Congregation Shaarai Shomayim. After Minyan, several of the men in the group meet at a local restaurant north of the city, Olde Hickory Grille. I joined them.

The month before, I met with the Rabbi of the Synagogue, Jack Paskoff. In the wake of the White Supremacist and Nazi rally that ended in murder, I feared anti-Semitism getting worse, especially after the President said these racists were "fine people."

One friend said, "You should see a Rabbi."

Another said, "You should see my Rabbi."

I met with Rabbi Paskoff. He invited me to come to services and hoped it would help me find peace.

The next week I went to Friday evening Sabbath service. When I got up to leave a man named Rick walked up to me and introduced himself. He asked, "Are you a cop or a soldier?" I said soldier. He was both. A retired police officer and a retired Army Command Sergeant's Major. His wife Kathy is also former military, serving as a Medic in the 80s and 90s.

Rick invited me to Minyan the following Wednesday.  At the breakfast, Rick introduced me to the other four men at the table. During breakfast, I realized that four of us served during the draft.  Rick was too young for the draft but was a Gulf War veteran and had served in many conflicts from the early 80s to the Iraq War.  The only guy who did not serve was in ROTC after the draft and decided he did not want to complete the program. Five of the six of us are veterans. I did not expect that.

The oldest veteran, Herb, had served before the Vietnam War as a cook, roughly the same time that Elvis Pressley was in the Army.  The other two were reservists who served during the Vietnam War, but were not sent to the war.

Over the last several months of going to the breakfast every other week or so, I have met a few more veterans who are members of the congregation.

I did not go to the prayer group expecting to find a veteran's group.  All of my work experience after the Vietnam War said that middle class men from the northeast did not serve.  I met one veteran in fifty in the white collar jobs I held from the mid-80s to my retirement three years ago.

Each of the men in the Breakfast Club told a funny story about how strange the Army was for them and how glad they were to be discharged.  Which is how most people feel about the Army. Rick and I are the only members of the group who ever wear an Army t-shirt.

This week three of the veterans--Rick, David and Harvey--were at one end of the table talking intensely about congregational business. Jim and I at the other end of the table talked about documentaries and podcasts. Jim said he was nearly out of memory on his phone.  I showed him how to free up some storage on his 5-year-old iPhone so he would have room for podcasts.

At this weekly breakfast, I almost felt as if I entered a time machine.  I was sitting with a group who meets every week because they have faith in common and they are nearly all veterans.  My Dad's generation had that experience. If a dozen men got together to go bowling or to coach football, the majority would be veterans. And like the men who served during World War II, we seldom talk about the Army, except to make jokes.

The German Evangelical Church Backed the Nazis in 1932 Then Turned on Their Jewish Members

In Charlottesville in 2017 Nazi flags and Rebel flags

flew together. Jim Crow laws in the American South 

inspired the German race laws that led to the Holocaust.

In 2016, the Evangelical Church in America voted overwhelmingly for a President who is openly racist and has bragged about breaking all the Commandments.  Depending on how you count Evangelicals they are one quarter of the U.S. population. The same people who, less than 50 years ago, did not smoke, drink, dance or watch movies and called on their followers to separate themselves from the world, now grasp for money and power as ruthlessly as the worst Medieval Popes and Cardinals. 

By backing Trump, the Evangelical Church in America abandoned faith for political power. The Evangelical Church in Germany did the same thing in the 1930s.

In 1932 Germany’s state church—the German Evangelical Church—was by far the largest Church in Germany with 40 million members. Another 22 million Germans were Catholic. Jews numbered fewer than a million and about ten percent of them were converts who were members of German Churches. 

Throughout the 1920s, the Evangelical Church was increasingly influenced by German nationalist ideologies. German Evangelicals voted for the openly racist Hitler because they feared communism more than Hitler's rabid racism. Nazis stoked fears of communism and said Hitler would Make Germany Great Again.

With Hitler’s rise to power 1933, most Protestant clergy willingly accepted Hitler’s racist views. The Nazi regime issued the Edict of April 1933 called the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Many Protestant clergy consequently agreed with the Nazi policy and chose to eject all pastors who had Jewish parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The Church voluntarily “Aryanized” itself, immediately firing all pastors of Jewish descent in 1933; by 1935, all congregants of Jewish descent were expelled.

Nazis used Luther’s anti-Semitic writings “with scarcely a word of protest or contradiction" from the leaders of the Protestant Church.

Theologically and politically, the fates of Christians and Jews should have been bound together. But most Germans, including those within the church, put an even greater distance between themselves and the Jews. The Church turned its back on its own Jewish believers, which made it easy for Nazi leaders to segregate them, and then kill them.

Theresienstadt, a small city in the German-occupied part of the Czech Republic, was a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp during World War II.

One witness said:

From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, more than 140,000 Jews were sent to this ghetto, which for many, about 88,000, became a transit camp to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 33,000 died in this ghetto. When it was all over and the ghetto had been liberated on May 8, 1945, there were about 19,000 survivors.

Among those who died in Theresienstadt, or were deported from Theresienstadt to the death camp Auschwitz or survived the horrors in Theresienstadt, were individuals who were Christians of Jewish descent. It is tempting today to call them “Messianic Jews”, but this would not correspond with their self-perception. Like most other Jews in Germany they saw themselves as Germans; unlike most other German Jews they were Jews who had embraced the Christian faith, some by conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. But in Theresienstadt they shared the fate of “Mosaic” Jews. In the eyes of the Nazis, their Christian faith did not obliterate their Jewishness.

Theresienstadt is a window into what happened to Christians of Jewish descent during the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as ten percent of the half million Jews in Nazi Germany were Christians. They suffered and died along with their fellow Jews. For Nazis, blood not belief defines a person, or a non-person.

The path Germany followed from civilized nation to Nazi domination went from prosperity, to defeat in war, to racism and slaughter.

In 1913, Germany was by many measures the most powerful and civilized nation on earth, the world leader in education and manufacturing. It was the country where Jews were most integrated into the life of the nation, many of whom considered themselves German citizens who were Jewish.

By 1923, Germany was defeated in war and crushed by the terms of peace.  Anti-Semitism was on the rise and Germany turned inward.  In 1933, Hitler was in power and German Jews would suffer increasing attacks.  By 1943 nearly all German Jews were dead or enslaved and soon would die.  Thirty years and an immoral leader completely changed the fate of Jews in Germany and every nation the German Army conquered.  

The Evangelical Church in Germany backed Hitler early and strongly, blessing his war machines and abandoning Jews in their own congregations and their Jewish neighbors to be tormented, deported and murdered.  The Church sold out for power.

Beginning in 2015, the Evangelical Church in America has backed the vilest human being ever to be elected President and backs him more enthusiastically than any other group of his followers.  I know many Evangelicals who say that naming conservative judges to the court and defunding Planned Parenthood prove he is a Pro-Life champion.  I could understand their position before Charlottesville, but after Trump called Nazis “fine people” there is no way to label him Pro-Life. Nazis, White Supremacists and all who support them are Pro-Death, Pro-Genocide but not Pro-Life, unless they mean Pro White Life.

Jerry Falwell Sr. was the first prominent sellout for political power. He created the Moral Majority to create voting bloc for all those who wanted the restoration of White Power. The Moral Majority was clearly the White Majority in America. Brown people, Liberals, Gay people and others who were not white conservatives were not true Americans.

When the Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, it spawned a dozen other organizations with Christian labels grasping for secular power. By 2016, Evangelical leaders flushed doctrine, covenants and commandments down a cosmic toilet and showered blessing on an entitled racist who despises everyone mentioned in the Beatitudes.

But this is not new territory for Evangelicals. Before the Civil War, Evangelical Churches in the America South blessed the especially vile form of slavery practiced in slave states. When the South was defeated, the same Churches supported Jim Crow laws creating American apartheid. Churches were just as segregated as voting booths, schools and drinking fountains.

Since World War II, American Evangelical leaders have blamed the reclusive biologist Charles Darwin for inspiring Nazi leaders with the theory of evolution. They assume Darwin is responsible for Social Darwinism, which is akin to believing Albert Einstein developed the philosophy of moral relativism.

Do I think Trump will turn on the 5 million American Jews? Maybe. But it’s more likely that a national crisis will let a worse racist than him grab power. Trump, unlike Hitler, is a coward and a bully who dodged the draft and attacks men who actually have courage.  He is more sleazy than Nazi.

But I am quite sure the Evangelical Church will corrode further and faster as it receives power and privilege from its new god in the Oval Office. Its millionaire preachers will abandon all traditional faith for its orange-ish golden calf.

Russia and America: Destined to Conflict, Religion

Russia and America cooperated in World War II because both were threatened by a common enemy. But like our alliances with other wretched dictatorships, it was an alliance of purpose, not based on any fundamental agreement. The Cold War immediately following World War II is proof enough that the Soviet Russian empire and America had little in common but a mutual desire to beat the Nazis, then to beat each other at every turn.

Now influential people in our government, led by Steve Bannon, dream of a white empire that will stand against the Muslim world. They assume that being a white Christian means some sort of common political goal and heritage.  Even in the West you would be wrong to say this. From the late Roman Empire until the 19th Century, Christianity was a state religion in much of the west and in direct conflict with religious freedom for nearly all of that time. The Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion all the way to the terrorism in Ireland in the 20th Century show that unity is not Christian political virtue.

And Russia throughout its history has very little in common with the west except a Christian label. Even the way that Russia became a Christian nation is utterly different than in the West.  In Rome, Christianity was accepted over time after waves of persecution.  The sheer number of Christians eventually led the government to accept the followers of Jesus. The Christian label on the Roman Empire came as that Empire collapsed.

In Russia, Vladimir the Great interviewed representatives of the leading religions in the world around the year 988: Islam, Western Christianity, Judaism and Eastern Christianity all made a presentation. Vladimir picked Eastern Christianity because the head of the Church was the head of the state. The monarch and the head of the Church were the same person for nearly half a millennia, but even after the prelate was separated from the monarchy, the Church was an organ of the Russian state.

In Russia, half the population was effectively in slavery until 1863. Russia never had an Enlightenment. It never had a Reformation.  From 1863 until 1917, Russia had a Jim Crow sort of freedom for its serfs, but then the Communist Revolution enslaved most of Russia more deeply than the Tsars. The state Church was abolished, but Anti-Religion became as much required as the former state religion.  Now under Putin, religion is fashionable again, but it is state religion, with rising repression of other faiths.

The Founding Fathers of America were unified in their commitment to Enlightenment principles and in their disdain for state religion. America has stood for religious freedom since well before it became a nation.  The idea that we are natural allies with a repressive regime with a state religion because it is white and has a Christian label is ludicrous.

Russia is in a slow, grinding process of becoming a fully authoritarian state with a state Church. America is still the favored destination in the world for people who want to practice their religion freely, or to be free to not practice religion at all.

In World War II America and Russia made an alliance to stop the Nazis, but were in a global fight for dominance as soon as that war ended.  The white supremacist dream of a global white alliance is simply a sick vision that will turn into a nightmare, especially for those who treasure freedom.

Photos from Boalsburg 2015 Memorial Ceremony

Here are some of my favorite photos from the annual 28th Division Memorial Ceremony on the site of the Pennsylvania Military History Museum in Boalsburg PA.

Big Day for Russia--Bad Date for Me

The biggest holiday on the calendar in Russia and many other former Soviet States is May 9.  These countries celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on the day the Nazis surrendered to the Russians, May 9, 1945.

The soldiers in the photo above are fighting at the Battle of Kursk in 1943.  This was and is the largest armored battle ever fought and the Soviet Army won, turning the the tide against Germany.

While this day is great for the Soviet Union, Russia and the free world, it is a bad date for me.  Eight years ago today, I had the most and worst injuries I have had on one day in my life.  If you don't know the story it is here and here.

Because there are only 365 days in a year, many days will have multiple meanings.  So the coincidence that my worst wreck and the greatest Russian victory are on the same day is just a coincidence.

So in the spirit of this day, I will practice my recently learned Russian language skills and race my bicycle at Smoketown Airport this morning.  What else would someone do on a sunny Spring Saturday morning?

Who Fights Our Wars? Southern Men

I don't know the soldiers in this photo, but I do know that if we could find the home address of every one of them, two out of three would be from the eleven states of the Old South or from the West--between the Rockies and the Sierras.

At the reunion dinner of the 1-70th Armor last Saturday night, those who attended were mostly officers plus a few senior enlisted men.  We served together from 1975 to 1979, the first years of the all-volunteer Army following the end of the draft.

Military service has always been more honored in the South than in the rest of our country, but until the Vietnam War, the draft meant that soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came from all over the country.  I enlisted in 1972, during the last year of the draft.  Already, anti-war sentiment was so strong in the Northeast where I am from, that I seldom heard a Boston accent on a military base.

By the time the draft was over and I was a tank commander in the 1-70th Armor, the military had become a very Southern organization.  More so among the officers than among the enlisted men.

In 1980, 1407 students graduated from Harvard University.  Two of them joined the military.  Five of them took blue collar jobs.  One of them was an apprentice to a some who hand-built chairs.

But in the same year, more than 40% of the male graduates of Baylor were in ROTC and joining a branch of the military.  I served with guys from Alabama and Georgia who said almost half the boys in their graduating class joined the military.

A total of 371 students graduated with me from Stoneham High School near Boston in 1971.  A total of 12 of us ever served in the military.  Two of us enlisted during the Vietnam War.

As I met and reconnected with people at the 1-70th Armor reunion on Saturday night, everyone I spoke to was from the South or the West.  Many of them served in Vietnam.  All of them began their training to become military officers during the Vietnam War even if the war ended by the time they were commissioned.

On Sunday morning when the reunion ended, I rode northeast from Gettysburg back home to Lancaster.  As far as I know, I was the only one who would be North of the Mason-Dixon Line by the next day.  Many of the men at that reunion survived jungle warfare in Vietnam, then we all waited together for the Soviet tanks just over the East-West German border to fire the first shots of World War 3 right at us.  Some of them went on to serve in the Gulf War.  A few of us even went to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But as much as I am Yankee and would live in New York or Paris if I could live anywhere, I have spent more than 40 years admiring the way the American South has supplied our nation with soldiers and leaders, especially since the end of the draft.

I have even developed a taste for grits and gravy--but I am NOT going to go as far as eating chitterlings, trotters or listeners.  To me, pigs are ham and bacon--that's it!

One Year at a Time--Now I'm in till 2016

My friend Barry Free joined me for what turned out to be a 100-mile re-enlistment ride.  Barry enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1968 and served till 1975.  He decided to accompany a younger guy on the trip to stay in the Army one more year.

We rode together from Mt. Gretna on some back roads onto Fort Indiantown Gap, then to the Aviation Armory where I signed the re-enlistment paperwork.  Sgt. 1st Class Dale Shade, who got the paperwork ready, was in charge of Public Affairs for 28th CAB when I was in Iraq.  He said he will help me to submit the paperwork for yet another extension next year.

As we rode west on Range Road, we passed several rifle and pistol ranges.  We were talking about how the rifle ranges and the weapons we use are the same as when he was in during the Viet Nam War.  Back then, Barry and I fired the M16 or M16A2.  Now my weapon is the M16A4.  Not a big difference.

We then rode to the Public Affairs Office on Fort Indiantown Gap where I introduced Barry to the folks who do the same work I do.  He met SSG Matt Jones, who I worked with for most of the time I was in Iraq, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Ted Nichols, and Majors Ed Shank and Angela King-Sweigart.

It was a great way to celebrate signing up for another year.

One More Year! In the Army Till I'm 63!

Today at 2pm I got a voice mail from SSG Steinmetz in the Admin section of 28th CAB to call her.  When I called she read me a line from a message from National Guard Bureau in the Pentagon saying that "SGT Gussman's request for extension for one year has been approved."  

With that I am staying one more year.  The journey that began January 31, 1972, with the guy in the picture below getting drunk in a bar in Kenmore Square, Boston. . . 

Saw the same guy straighten up, make sergeant and become an Army tank commander.  In the photo below I am on a field training exercise in Germany in 1977.

The guy in the photo above left the Army and went to college in 1980, then re-enlisted in 2007 and in 2009 deployed to Iraq--with a bicycle.

 And ended that tour with the guys below and "The best job I ever had."

One more year.  Thirteen more weekend drills.  I am hoping to do Annual Training twice this summer. 

Who Fights Our Wars? Pamela Allen Bleuel

On the left in this photo is the subject of a blog post I wrote in 2009 in Iraq.  She is Pamela Allen Bleuel, a tough, funny woman who ran convoy training at Camp Adder.  She is shown here in Afghanistan in 2012.  Follow this link to the 2009 post.  I changed her name at the time, so you will see Sgt. Beaufort.

Enjoy!  

No Answer--What Goes Up Must Come Down the Same Way

No answer yet on whether I can re-enlist or not.  I thought that meant no answer at all.  The administrative NCO in my unit thinks the decision is made but it is held up at the state headquarters in Harrisburg.  She reminded me that things which go up the chain of command also come down that same chain of command.

So I will keep waiting.

A Soldier When I'm 64? I am Supposed to Get the Answer Today

Wednesday I talked to the Admin. Sergeant who submitted the paperwork for me to stay in the Army two more years.  She said we are supposed to get an answer today about whether I will will be allowed to extend my enlistment again, or not.

Last week I got an email from our training NCO asking for volunteers with my job skill to go to the Baltic Republics in the next few months.  Whether I can go or not of course depends on whether I can stay in.  I was supposed to go to one of the Baltic republics last fall, but we had a problem to solve with the boy we tried to adopt in Haiti and I had to un-volunteer myself.

For now, I will go back to work doing my homework for Russian class.  If I do get answer, I will post right away!

Keeping Up With Conspiracies in Space

I just read the book Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin.  This tragic and very funny book says Russia also faked a moon landing.  Before reading this book I did not know there is a documentary that accuses Stanley Kubrik of faking the moon landings for the US government.

The documentary says Kubrik felt guilty about deceiving the world and confessed in the movie "The Shining."

Both times I was in Army, the 1970s and now, I have heard earnest young soldiers tell me how President Obama is going to take away their guns, the FBI introduced AIDS and crack into inner city America, 9-11 was an inside job, fluoride is a Commie plot, and many others.

So how did I miss this one?  I knew from several sources that the moon landings were faked, but the confession, Wow!!

'Murica!!

Baby Killers, Climate Change and Conspiracy Theories

In the past week, I spoke with people who remember the Viet Nam War and what many Americans thought of soldiers back then.  Many soldiers serving now don't like being thanked for their service.  They think of it as insincere or shallow.  They take for granted that the public loves us.  That just shows how fast public opinion can change.  When the young men in the photo below came home, they might have been greeted with "Baby Killer" instead of "Thank you for your service."  I have heard both.  I like the Thank You.

I enlisted in 1972, during Viet Nam, but never got closer to Viet Nam than Nevada.  Even though I never went to Viet Nam, I was part of the military, so I was a "Baby Killer" in the eyes of many.  It is certainly true that Lt. Cali and some others killed civilians, but the people who thought of the military as "Baby Killers" had to believe that more than two million Americans enlisted and suddenly became murderers of children.  And they had to accept the word of Jane Fonda and others who were not soldiers about the character of soldiers.  

In retrospect, it seems crazy that millions of Americans could have believed that about soldiers from their own towns and neighborhoods and that anyone could have accepted the word of Jane Fonda on military matters.  But they did.  Could anything be more ridiculous than thinking the children of World War 2 veterans were suddenly transformed to monsters?

As a matter of fact, yes.  

People who deny man-made climate change must believe that more than a million people with advanced degrees in science are involved in a conspiracy to defraud America and the world.  And on top of that, they have to accept the word of Senator James Inhofe, who knows as much about science as Jane Fonda knows about the military, on the science of climate change.   

The other expert climate science deniers on Fox News are lawyers, not scientists.  Like Inhofe they receive millions from oil-industry-backed groups, most notably Koch-brothers-sponored organizations.

I know many Americans accept the most idiotic conspiracies.  They believe that the same government that lost the Iraq War by saying we "Would be greeted as liberators" and the war would "Pay for itself" is somehow involved in staging 9-11.  Some Americans think fluoride is a Soviet Plot and have not noticed the fall of the Soviet Union.  Others fight vaccination.  

And in the late 60s and early 70s they accepted Jane Fonda's evaluation of our military.  

James Inhofe believes he is smarter than all those striving, high achieving people who earn doctorate degrees in chemistry, physics, math, geology and related sciences.  

Many members of my family have advanced degrees in physics, math and other fields.  They all accept the work of people who work in climate science.  

In the Army, I serve with many people who think Fox News is credible.  

When Jane Fonda called American Soldiers Baby Killers, I was in High School and my Uncle Jack was on his second of three tours flying close air support in Viet Nam.  Anyone who believed her was talking shit about a man I admired more than anyone else in the world except my Dad.

When someone says sincerely that all scientists are involved in a conspiracy, they are talking about my wife, my in-laws, one of my daughters and many of my friends.  

I despise conspiracy theories for that reason.  They are an excuse to dismiss or hate an entire groups.  And like prejudice, they are an excuse to lump people together instead of dealing with them as they are.   

Photos of 28th Combat Aviation Brigade for Fort Rucker

During the February drill weekend, our Command Sergeant Major asked for a disc of 200 or so phots to send to the Army Aviation Training Facility at Fort Rucker, Alabama.  We regularly send pilots and other aircrew there for training and the flight school asked for photos of 28th CAB.

Here are some I picked out of the 10,000 or so photos I have taken over the last six years.  Now that I have actually looked through then, a large percentage are of ceremonies, mostly changes of command.  None of those photos are included:

Gun Trucks in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars: Why Lessons Aren't Learned

Yesterday I went to a presentation at Franklin and Marshall College about Gun Trucks in Vietnam and in Iraq.  I knew about the many variations of gun trucks assembled by soldiers in the Iraq War, especially before up-armor kits were available for Humvees and other vehicles.

But I had no idea of the extent of the Gun Truck culture during the Vietnam War.  Nina Kollars, Assistant Professor of Government at F&M, talked for about 40 minutes about the origin of the gun trucks in Vietnam and how they grew and spread among transport units until there were hundred of 5-ton and "Deuce-and-a-Half" trucks rolling on the roads in Vietnam with various kinds of armor plate and heavy machine guns.

In Iraq, the chaos after Saddam was defeated left American soldiers vulnerable to IEDs and snipers--just like their brothers from the Vietnam war 40 years earlier.  In both wars, soldiers welded armor on the vehicles they and mounted heavy machine guns.

One of my favorite images from the presentation was the truck above with a palletized gun platform made from a Conex box.  It has shade, armor and if the M1074 PLS truck breaks down, the gun platform can be dropped and picked up on another PLS.

One big difference between the two wars was that during Iraq, the Army centralized training and upgrading vehicles with armor.  In that way, the lessons learned in Iraq were not lost as in Vietnam, but passed along to soldiers as they arrived.  I never got to see the Skunk Werks at Camp Anaconda, but I went through convoy training at Camp Udairi in Kuwait before going to Iraq.  By the time I went, the lessons learned had become a curriculum with classes and manuals and a lot of on-the-road training.

Nina will be presenting her research at a meeting of military historians in the UK in a couple of weeks.

One question that came up in the research was why the lessons learned in Vietnam had to be re-learned in Iraq.  that question I had an answer for.  The U.S. Army was only too happy to turn its back on everything Vietnam after that war ended.  We trained to fight the big war in Europe against the Soviets.  No more un-winnable wars for us!!

So when we got in another un-winnable war, we had to learn the up-armor lessons all over again.

Who Fights Our Wars: Carrie Davis Jackson

When we went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 2009, I was reluctant to use soldiers names in my blog.  So the unnamed soldier in the post below is the soldier in the photos above: SGT Carrie Davis Jackson.  While me and most of the other soldiers struggled to Zero our weapons,  Carrie walked off the range after firing the minimum 12 rounds.  Then she went to the qualification range and fired expert.

That's what a soldier looks like.

---------------------

Today I had the biggest anxiety attack since this whole deployment started. It was first of two days of live fire with the M-16. Although I spent 11 years in the military back in the 70s and 80s, I have not fired an M-16 on a qualification range since Air Force basic training in February in 1972. Worse, in AF basic we did not go through the whole qualification process: zeroing the weapons, pop-up targets, night fire, firing in gas masks. In the Air Force, they handed us a weapon, we shot at some targets, they took the weapons and that was the one and only day in my Air Force career I handled a personal weapon.

When I joined the Army, I went straight to tank training. For the next eight years my personal weapon was a 45 cal. pistol. So this morning we boarded a bus to go to the range wearing our new bulletproof vests and helmets.

On the first range we zeroed the weapon. To zero, you shoot three rounds at a paper target at 25 meters. To zero the weapon, you must put 5 rounds in a 4 cm square. Since the M16A4 we use has both traditional iron sights and the new close quarters optical device, we have to zero the weapon twice, once with each sight.

So to zero the weapon with both sights, you have to shoot at least 12 rounds--six with each sight--and hit at least five out of six. Most of the 25 of us who were shooting fired 36 to 48 rounds. I fired 60. A few soldiers fired more. One soldier, a female sergeant, fired 12 rounds and was done.

We fire side by side in 8-foot-wide "lanes" with very prominent numbers. When the safety NCO told the tower the woman in Lane 6 zeroed with 12 rounds, the tower told her to walk down the embankment we shoot from and clear her weapon. As she walked toward the ammo point to turn in her unused ammunition, the tower told all the rest of us to turn around and look at the female sergeant walking to the ammo point.

The sergeant in the tower said on the PA system, "Take a look ladies and gentlemen, that's what a soldier looks like. Now turn around." 

Congratulations again Carrie!