Category Archives: History

“Not dark yet, but it’s getting there” — What Can America Learn from the Nazi Occupation of Paris?

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Police clear demonstrators from a freeway during the right wing occupation of Los Angeles in June 2025.

Survivors of the twentieth century, we are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems to be no way back. — Svetlana Boym

In the Second World War, Paris was spared the physical destruction suffered by so many other cities. It surrendered without a fight to the Germans, some of whom cherished fond memories of living there as students before the war. And the Nazi government, believing itself to be the future of Europe, had no desire to smash such a cultural icon into rubble. It coveted the prestige of the City of Light for itself.

Hitler’s entourage in Paris (June 28, 1940). He was gone the next day, and never saw the city again.

The example of a city physically unchanged while suffering the invasive presence of a hostile power may have something to teach Americans, whose own cities face threats of military occupation by the dictatorial regime in Washington, D.C.. When I read Ronald C. Rosbottom’s riveting study, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, I could not help noticing some striking parallels to our own “les annes noires” (the dark years).

The radical right in the United States likes to dismiss any comparisons between Nazis and themselves as hyperbolic and slanderous, and it is fair to argue that their own movement may never go as far as the Nazis did. It’s too early to tell. But they’ve made a good start: terrorizing the vulnerable with the ICE-capades of masked thugs, demonizing and disappearing “aliens” and “enemies,” attacking the judicial system, vitiating the free press, purging opposition in the military and civil service, compelling the complicity of corporate leaders, seducing gullible and idolatrous evangelicals, and corrupting everything they touch. Fueling it all is their ceaseless stream of lies and propaganda. As Hannah Arendt warned in the aftermath of World War II:

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but, rather, that nobody believes anything any longer. And the 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 people, you can then do what you please.” [1]

Parisians tried to look the other way, but the invaders were everywhere (Photo by André Zucca for Signal, a German propoganda magazine).

Much more could be said about that, but for now our subject is the occupation of Paris. When the Germans entered the French capital in June, 1940, they encountered no resistance. Parisians were disheartened by the swift collapse of the French army and unhappy to see so many German soldiers and officials suddenly walking their streets and filling their cafés, but what could they do? Many fled Paris before the troops arrived, but most of those returned when they saw how “normal” things seemed. Daily life was not radically affected at first, and few thought the occupation would last such a long time. There was shame in defeat, certainly, and resentment of a foreign presence, but for a time passivity and resignation kept the anger of many Parisians’ turned inward.

German soldiers at the Arc de Triomphe. The Occupation produced an invasion of unwanted tourists (Photo by André Zucca for Signal, a German propoganda magazine).

There was a degree of make-believe on both sides. German soldiers were instructed to be polite. If someone drops a package on the sidewalk, pick it up for them. Parisians tried not to reciprocate any such acts of kindness, but to practice what they called Paris sans regard (“Paris without looking”). As much as possible, pretend the Germans don’t exist. Over time, this depersonalization would create a great sense of loneliness among the occupiers. As for Parisians, the make-believe minuet with the occupiers was both wearying and fragile. As one young man wrote in his journal,

“In spite of oneself, one dreams, laughs, and then falls back into reality, or even into excessive pessimism, making the situation more painful.” [2]    

A month after the Germans arrived, “Tips for the Occupied,” a mimeographed flyer, began to appear in apartment mailboxes. “Don’t be fooled,” it warned. “They are not tourists … If one of them addresses you in German, act confused and continue on your way … Show an elegant indifference, but don’t let your anger diminish. It will eventually come in handy …” [3]

The sense of normality didn’t last. The restaurants, cabarets and cinemas remained crowded, but when audiences began to boo and jeer at Nazi newsreels, the houselights would be turned up. People lost their courage when they could be easily spotted. Parisians also learned to be careful about saying the wrong thing in a café. Neighbors began to denounce each other to the authorities. Singing “The Marseillaise” in public became a punishable crime.  

As the Occupation dragged on, the sense of dépaysement (“not feeling at home”) began to wear on the soul. Historian Jean-Paul Cointet describes the condition in his 2001 study of wartime Paris:

“The Parisian now knows the condition of being ‘occupied’ in a city that does not belong to him anymore and that offers him the schizophrenic images of an environment suddenly foreign to his gaze. Constraints and humiliations, restrictions and punishments accompany this disorientation and the upending of daily routine.” [4]

Troops at a federal detention center in Los Angeles (Ted Soqui for Cal Matters, June 8, 2025).

The narrowing of space—both physical and psychological—became increasingly oppressive, as Rosbottom notes:

“Whether because of the sight of German uniforms, the closed-off streets, the insufficient nourishment, the cold winters, crowded transportation, long lines—or just the suffocating feeling of being suspicious of one’s acquaintances, neighbors, or even family—the city seemed to be contracting, closing in on Parisian lives, as the Occupation dragged on.” [5]

By the bitterly cold winter of 1941, life just got harder. Shortages of food and coal brought malnutrition and sickness, especially among the lower classes. French police, willing agents of Nazi oppression, started to raid neighborhoods known for Jewish or immigrant populations. At first, Parisians in uninvaded neighborhoods could close their eyes and swallow the lie that the authorities were simply trying to control immigration and prevent terrorism.

“Leave us in peace!” A German propaganda poster show Vichy France threatened by its perceived enemies: Freemasons, Jews, de Gaulle, and “lies.”

However, by mid-1942, rumors of the “final solution” began to reach Paris, and the mass roundups of Jews in France became impossible to ignore. “[Most Parisians] certainly did not know of the plans to deport them to their deaths,” writes Rosbottom, “but to their deaths they went: the last, sad convoy to carry children, three hundred of them, left Drancy for Auschwitz on July 31, 1944 … The final transport of adult deportees left on August 17, a week before Paris would be liberated.” [6]  

Ernst Jünger, a cultured writer serving as a captain in the occupying Wehrmacht, kept a journal of the Occupation. In July 1942 he wrote:

“Yesterday some Jews were arrested here in order to be deported—first they separated parents from their children, so firmly that one could hear their distressed cries in the streets. At no moment must I forget that I am surrounded by unhappy people, humans experiencing the most profound suffering. If I forgot, what sort of man or soldier would I be?” [7]  

Jünger may have shed a tear, but he continued to serve as a loyal employee of the Nazi death industry, whose business, as Hannah Arendt so bluntly noted, was “the mass production of corpses.” [8]

Hélène Berr also kept a diary, from Spring, 1942 until Spring, 1944. As a young Jewish woman, she tried to keep terror at bay by imagining herself in a Paris magically untouched by the darkness. A student at the Sorbonne, she copied out verses of Keats to calm her soul, and took refuge in her friendships. She made frequent walking tours of the city she loved, as if to reclaim possession of Paris from the occupiers who made her wear a yellow star, the mark of social exile.  

In April of 1943, Hélène wrote:

“I’ve a mad desire to throw it all over. I am fed up with not being normal. I am fed up with no longer feeling free as air, as I did last year. It seems that I have become attached to something invisible and that I cannot move away from it as I wish to, and it makes me hate this thing and deform it … I am obliged to act a part … As time passes, the gulf between inside and outside grows ever deeper.” [9]   

As Rosbottom notes, personal accounts of the period recall “the sound of police—French police—beating on the door” as their “most vivid aural memory.” [10]  In March 1944, that percussive death knell sounded in the Berr’s apartment. Hélène, along with her parents, was arrested, but she managed to slip her journal to their cook before the police barged in. Three weeks later the Berrs were on a train to Auschwitz. They never returned. Hélène’s beloved Paris would be liberated five months later.

Illustration for a collection of French Resistance poetry.

There were many forms of active resistance to the Nazis in France, but the number of French patriots who risked their own lives was relatively small—less than 2% of the population. The threat of death and brutal reprisals was too daunting for most. For a visceral immersion in the anxious milieu of the French Resistance, watch Jean-Pierre Melville’s haunting film, Army of Shadows. Critic Amy Taubin’s summary of the film feels descriptive of wartime Paris: “Elegant, brutal, anxiety-provoking, and overwhelmingly sad.” [11] One resister recounted his experience in an interview decades after the war:

“Fear never abated; fear for oneself; fear of being denounced, fear of being followed without knowing it, fear that it will be ‘them’ when, at dawn, one hears, or thinks one hears, a door slam shut or someone coming up the stairs. Fear, too, for one’s family, from whom, having no address, we received no news and who perhaps had been betrayed and were taken hostage. Fear, finally, of being afraid and of not being able to surmount it.” [12] 

A prewar fresco of modern martyrs who refused to bow to anyone but Christ (Église du Saint-Esprit, Paris, 1930s).

As I read Paris in the Dark, I had to wonder: Is this America’s future? For many of us (to borrow a line from Bob Dylan), “It’s not dark yet—but it’s getting there.” Daily life —for now, at least—goes on pretty much as usual. But for some of our neighbors, the darkness has definitely arrived. The military occupation of cities. The terrifying knock on the door. The roundups, disappearances, and concentration camps. The shamelessly gleeful cruelty. Demonization, bigotry and hate. The repression of customary freedoms. The criminalization of dissent. The collapse of legal safeguards. The willing complicity of the powerful with the enemies of life.

Citizens try to block an ICE roundup of immigrants at the Ambiance Apparel factory, downtown Los Angeles (J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters, June 6, 2025).

I am not without hope. Seven million protesters took to the streets on No Kings Day. Then large majorities voted against America’s reign of madness. And regardless of any political swings of the pendulum, I believe that resurrection continues to plant its seeds among the blind sufferings of history. But the oligarchs and fascists won’t go quietly. On the day after the recent election, the Episcopal Daily Office included this timely verse from the Book of Revelation:

Woe to the earth and the sea,
for the devil has come down to you
in a great rage,
because he knows that his time is short. (Rev. 12:12)

The Beast and Satan rage, but their time is short (Apocalypse Tapestries, Angers, France, 1373-1382).

This Scripture feels ripped from the headlines. We know that satanic rage all too well. It has sickened our country, and we struggle to keep it out of our own hearts. May its time be short. In the meantime, the woes are not done. God’s friends have their work cut out for them. Believe. Resist. Endure.

And guard your heart against the demons of dejection and despair. After Trump’s election in 2016, I suggested seven spiritual practices for the time of trial: pray, fast, repent, prophesy, love, serve, hope. Click the link for the details. Nine years later, these practices are more necessary than ever, and I encourage you to share the link as a small act of resistance.

Pharoah sent his troops to round up the Israelites, but the forces of violence ended up sleeping with the fishes (13th-century window, Sainte-Chappelle, Paris).

Finally, don’t be in love with outcomes. Divine intention takes mysterious forms, and should not be confused with our own plans. Let us heed the counsel of two twentieth-century saints who were deeply committed to holy resistance and well acquainted with its challenges and ambiguities. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred in a Nazi prison in 1945, believed that we must always act with deep humility, shedding our presumptions about the part we play or the difference we make. Don’t fret about your success. Just be faithful to Love’s command:

“No one has the responsibility of turning the world into the kingdom of God … The task is not to turn the world upside down but in a given place to do what, from the perspective of reality, is necessary objectively, and to really carry it out.” [13]

And Thomas Merton, who forged a delicate balance between contemplation and activism, taught that right action is not a tactic but a persistent way of being, grounded in something deeper and more enduring than any of our consequences:

“The message of Christians is not that the kingdom ‘might come, that peace might be established, but that the kingdom is come, and that there will be peace for those who seek it.’” [14]

No Kings Day on Bainbridge Island, Washington (Photo by the author, October 18, 2025).

[1] Hannah Arendt, quoted in the PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny (American Masters, 2025).

[2] Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014), 106.

[3] Ibid., 196-197. The flyer was produced by Jean Texcier.

[4] Ibid., 160.

[5] Ibid., 161.

[6] Ibid., 286.

[7] Ibid., 154.

[8] Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny.

[9] Rosbottom, 256.

[10] Ibid., 160.

[11] Amy Taubin, ”Out of the Shadows,” Criterion booklet for their 2010 Blu-ray release of Melville’s 1969 film.

[12] Rosbottom, 223, quoted from interviews with WWII resisters published in 2012.

[13] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, q. in Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press), 121.

[14] Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Four, 1960-1963 (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 188.

Thinking About America on Bastille Day

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Eugène Delacroix, LIberty Leading the People (1830).

“Nothing collapses more quickly than civilization during crises like this one [the French Revolution of June 1848]; lost in three weeks is the accomplishment of centuries. Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented … After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as soon as one stumbles.”

— Sainte-Beuve [i]

When an inflamed crowd of Parisian citizens stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the obsolete medieval fortress had long outlived its usefulness as an instrument of royal tyranny. It was destined for demolition, and a mere seven prisoners inhabited its dungeons when the crowd broke through the gates. A year later, Lafayette presented the key for the Bastille to President George Washington, honoring the quest for liberty by both countries. The key still resides at Washington’s Mount Vernon home.

Historians have suggested that the king’s capitulation to the political power of commoners (the ‘Third Estate’) on July 9 marks the true beginning of the French Revolution, but the bloody drama of Bastille Day proved a more potent symbol than the parliamentary negotiations being conducted at the king’s palace of Versailles. In any case, the once unthinkable destruction of the Ancien Régime had been decades in the making.

In The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, American historian Robert Darnton traces the growth of revolutionary sentiment as it was expressed in the Paris street: café conversations (often transcribed by police spies), underground gazettes and pamphlets, street songs, sidewalk speeches, public demonstrations and processions, and personal diaries. Eighteenth-century Paris had its own version of an information society, where “the ebb and flow of information among ordinary Parisians” was shared widely in cafés, marketplaces, wineshops, street corners and salons. [ii]

When the 72-year reign of Louis XIV ended in 1715, it was hard to imagine an alternative to absolute monarchy. His successor, Louis XV, would still be claiming dictatorial authority as late as 1766:

“In my person alone resides the sovereign power: from me alone my courts derive their existence and their authority, without any dependence and any division.” [iii]

In 1781, Louis XVI would tell his judiciary, “It is legal because I want it.” [iv] That’s the authoritarian creed. But by then, the game was up, and he was just whistling in the dark. A record of financial mismanagement, economic hardship, abuse of power, political corruption, and the ravages of poverty and hunger had by then called into question not only the effectiveness of the king and his government, but the legitimacy of the monarchy itself. Murmures (vocal grumbling about the regime) became part of daily life in Paris, and fed the printed complaints of the pamphleteers.

“Although the words were printed on paper, the messages of pamphlets flew through the air and mixed in the cacophony known as bruits publics [‘public rumors’]. Pamphlets were bruited about. They were read aloud, performed, applauded, rebutted, and assimilated in the talk that filled lieux publics [“public places”]. Readers also pondered tracts in the quiet of their studies, but when they went outside they encountered other Parisians, in marketplaces, along the quais, in the courtyard of the Louvre, on benches in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, the Tuileries, and the Luxembourg palace. Like smoke from thousands of chimneys gathering over the city, a climate of opinion gradually took shape.” [v]

It took half of the eighteenth-century to produce such a climate of opinion in France, a ”revolutionary temper” which was perfected, like tempered steel, through repeated heating and cooling. People would complain about this tax or that scandal, this outrage or that cruelty, but the tectonic shift from specific complaints to general discontent and clamor for change was a process of decades. Only when the climate of opinion attained sufficient density was it possible to imagine the impossible. Once revolution became conceivable, the leaps from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy to no monarchy at all were breathtakingly swift.

Revolution doesn’t necessarily require the refinements of political theory. By 1788, the high cost of bread by itself (like our egg or gas prices) was enough to elicit calls for radical change. One angry woman in a boulangerie was heard to say, “They should march on Versailles and burn the place down.” [vi]  She was not alone, and by then the people of Paris were beginning to conceive of themselves as part of a movement, and act accordingly.

“Whether or not they followed the arguments of the theoreticians, Parisians were swept up in the conviction of becoming a nation, a sovereign body that would defy privileged orders and take charge of its own destiny. This way of constructing reality—the drawing of lines, the identification of a common enemy, the creation of a collective self-awareness—can be understood as a process of radical simplification. Although it had origins that went far back in the past, it came together with unprecedented force in 1788 and underlay a revolutionary view of the world: us against them, the people against the grands, the nation against the aristocracy.” [vii]

I could not read Darnton’s illuminating account without thinking of my own deeply troubled country. Although there are of course countless dissimilarities between 18th-century France and 21st-century America, some parallels got me thinking.

First of all, I found the accounts of a Paris alive with ardent conversations about public life to be inspirational. There was an urgency and a passion which feels lacking in America’s current collective consciousness. “Everyone writes, everyone reads,” said one of those pre-revolutionary Parisians. “Even the coachman reads the latest work on his perch,” said another. “Every person down to domestic servants and water carriers is involved in the debating.” [viii] But in America, 2025, while we may consume volumes of news in private, most of us carry on as if life is pretty much normal, even as our would-be dictator dispatches masked thugs to terrorize our communities, trains the military to act as his personal army, and builds concentration camps to torture and disappear his “enemies.”

Like 18th-century Paris, we need to converse with one another in earnest, employing a reliable flow of factual information and strategic thought to shape a collective consciousness for the common good. The forces of tyranny and greed have worked for decades to create its opposite, a seductive web of lies and rage to poison and incapacitate the consciences of millions of Americans. Those who care about the common good are still, I believe, in the majority, but that means nothing if we lack the means and the will to be connected with one another in public truth-telling, mutual encouragement, and collective action. As long as we feel isolated, alone and discouraged, tyranny will flourish.

I was also struck by the importance of imagining alternatives to consensus reality in our public life. A sense of inevitability is the mother of inaction. In France under Louis XIV, the monarchy seemed inevitable—until it didn’t. In America, at least until Trump, democracy and the rule of law were assumed to be inevitable. And while many of us have come to realize how fragile and conditional our democracy actually is, the press, along with many Democratic politicians, continue to play the game of “Let’s Pretend.”

Let’s pretend that everyone is playing by the same rules. Let’s pretend the president is not fascist, childish, ignorant, cruel, and increasingly incoherent and nonsensical. Let’s pretend that normal protocols are the best way to engage with him. Let’s pretend we don’t have an American gestapo, or a White House dominated by racists, white nationalists and shameless liars. Let’s pretend our government isn’t supporting genocide in Gaza, or robbing millions of their health care. Let’s pretend that climate change is nothing to worry about. Let’s pretend it’s all just politics as usual and both sides do the same thing, so there’s no cause for alarm.

Finally, I was intrigued by the theatricality of what the French called emotions populaires [mass protests]. Straw effigies of unpopular or disgraced officials were mocked, paraded through the streets, and forced to kneel before statues of honored officials and beg divine pardon. On one occasion, the crowd seized a passing priest, demanding that he hear the dummy’s confession. Eyed with suspicion as a symbol of the Ancien Régime, the priest was careful not to anger the crowd by refusing to play. He put his ear to the effigy’s mouth for a few moments, then declared to all that it had so many sins to confess that it would take all night! The people laughed, applauded the priest’s wit, and let him go. As for the dummy official, he “was pitched into a giant feu de foie [‘fire of joy’].” [ix]

I suspect that setting fire to effigies of our American tyrants would not be a safe practice these days, and I am aware that the emotions populaires in revolutionary Paris often led to serious violence. But I wonder if there might be, in our own acts of resistance and witness, creative theatrical ways to engage with flanks of armed soldiers or gangs of ICE agents using guerilla theater, humor, song, ritual, and even clowning and mime—anything to subvert, disarm, or transcend the deadly Punch and Judy face-off of venomous gazes. Is there any way to make the other laugh, or wonder, or think, if only for a moment? Send in the clowns! Could you still want to shoot someone who made you laugh—or cry?

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not (I hope) the only one.

[i] Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), a French literary critic, is quoted by George Eliot in Impressions of Theophrastus Such; cited in Frederick Brown, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), 3.

[ii] Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), xix.

[iii] Ibid., 131.

[iv] Ibid., 333.

[v] Ibid., 390.

[vi] Ibid., 366.

[vii] Ibid., 400.

[viii] Ibid., 391.

[ix] Ibid., 371.

“No faith, no truth, no trust”—The Cost of Lies in American Politics

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Magnus Zeller, The Orator (c. 1920). The German painter foresaw the danger of authoritarians who prey on the emotions of the mindless mob.

The problem is, when you marry intelligence
To ill will and brute force,
People are helpless against it.

— Dante, Inferno xxxi [1]

On November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day, the citizens of Great Britain will celebrate the defeat of a conspiracy to overthrow the political order in 1605. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder hidden beneath the House of Lords were discovered before they could blow King and Parliament to kingdom come, and the plotters were brought to justice.

Also on November 5th, the citizens of the United States will vote whether to thwart or assist the overthrow of their own political order. Democracy itself is on the ballot, and the party of insurrection is determined to blow it up. If the latest polls are accurate, they have a fair chance of success.

Seventeenth-century England and twenty-first century America are dissimilar in countless ways, but the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Presidential election of 2024 have one crucial thing in common: the toxic social effect of equivocation.

When the seventeenth century began, “equivocation” was a neutral, rarely used term for statements deemed ambiguous. But in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, it became a widespread byword for deceitful speech. The term’s sudden prominence was triggered by the discovery of the plotters’ handbook, A Treatise of Equivocation, which detailed various ways for persecuted Roman Catholics to lie under oath without endangering their conscience.

When Catholic worship and practice were being suppressed after the English Reformation, the Roman faithful needed to conceal from the authorities the presence of priests and the saying of masses in their private homes. If asked, they could equivocate: give ambiguous or incomplete answers, or practice “mental reservation”—speaking aloud partial truths, while retaining in their minds any bits which might get them into trouble. As long as you speak the whole truth in your mind, where God can hear it, leaving your inquisitor in the dark is not a sin. In other words, the Treatise argued, it is possible to lie without guilt.

In a time when Roman priests were being hunted down and threatened with prison or the gallows, such equivocation was understandable. We do not fault the Dutch family who lied about Anne Frank hiding in their secret annex. But as the Gunpowder Plot made clear, social stability was not a given in the early days of King James’s reign. However, neither factions, plots, religious difference or the clash of ideas seemed the greatest threat to common life in Britain.  The greatest threat was thought to be equivocation, the solvent of bad faith which dissolves communal trust. As an English court put it a few years after the insurrection was foiled:

“The commonwealth cannot possibly stand if this wicked doctrine be not beaten down and suppressed, for if it once take root in the hearts of people, in a short time there will be no faith, no truth, no trust … and all civil societies will break and be dissolved.” [2]

The Earl of Salisbury, responding to A Treatise of Equivocation with a book of his own, An Answer to Certain Scandalous Papers, warned against “that most strange and gross doctrine of equivocation,” which would “tear in sunder all the bonds of human conversation.” [3]

A similar anathema was issued from a London pulpit:

“He that lyeth doth deprive himself of all credit among men (for they will also suspect him to be a liar), so that he that once deceiveth his neighbor by equivocation, shall always be suspected to equivocate … If deceit by equivocation be used, then all covenants and contracts between man and man must cease, and have an end, because all men will be suspicious of one another … So, no commonwealth can stand, no civil society can be maintained.” [4] 

 The nightmarish world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written just after the Gunpowder Plot, dramatizes the dread of social disintegration, as even the more admirable characters find themselves “unspeaking” truth. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” cry the weird sisters at their cauldron of deconstruction. Once language begins to mean anything and nothing, civil discourse is mortally wounded, and it is not just Macbeth who begins “to doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth.” [5]

Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro notes that the moral chaos of the play is draining not just for the characters but for the audience as well:

“Equivocation makes following Macbeth’s dialogue a mentally exhausting experience, for playgoers—much like those conversing with equivocators—must decide whether a claim should be accepted at face value, and, if not, must struggle to construct what may be suppressed through mental reservation. But with equivocators, one never knows what, if anything, is left unspoken.” [6] 

In the American election of 2024, we are well acquainted with the fiend that lies like truth. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” cry the weird brothers Trump and Vance, poisoning our national speech and our common life like there’s no tomorrow. The lying is in their natures—it’s who they are: hollow men without principles, shapeless hulks of impulse and ambition. But their lying, a weapon as destructive as gunpowder, is also an instrument of power. If truth and trust can be blown to bits, the weird brothers will be free to soar beyond accountability into a realm of naked, unfettered tyranny.

It will not go well for them. As Dante assures us, the lowest place in Hell is reserved for the fraudulent, because fraud is the polar opposite of love. Love nurtures community. Fraud disintegrates it. Dorothy Sayers’ eloquent notes on Dante’s Inferno describe the bleak endgame for the ones who are only in it for themselves:

“Beneath the clamor, beneath the monotonous circlings, beneath the fires of Hell, here at the center of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence and the rigidity and the eternal frozen cold. It is perhaps the greatest image in the whole Inferno … A cold and cruel egotism, gradually striking inward till even the lingering passion of hatred and destruction are frozen into immobility—that is the final state of sin.” [7]

Gustave Doré, Dis frozen in the lake of ice (1861). Immobilized in the pit of hell, the prince of lies is trapped in wordless solitude, dis-connected from every form of relation.

The evils of Trumpworld have multiplied ceaselessly over the years: tens of thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths, families torn apart at the border, political violence, the abuse of immigrants and women, the corruption of the Supreme Court, the stoking of anger, racism and hate, the relentless erosion of social bonds, the corrosive degradation of the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera. And so much lying. J. D. Vance’s gleeful admission that he invented the terrible stories about immigrants eating pets is just the latest example of a shamelessly destructive addiction to untruth. These people don’t care how many people they hurt.

It’s exhausting. That too is part of the Trump/Vance strategy. We’re supposed to grow weary and discouraged in the face of their unrelenting and senseless chaos. I find an apt metaphor for this moment of American politics in Washington Irving’s account of a transatlantic voyage in the early nineteenth century. Traveling by land, he said, keeps us connected with a sense of where we are and where we’ve come from.

“But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf not entirely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes—a gulf subjected to tempest and fear and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious.” [8]

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899/1906).

Irving’s harrowing journey took about as many weeks as we have left until the election. Sail on, friends, sail on. It is my hope that come November 5th, we will anchor once again in safe harbor, put the chaos behind us, and begin to mend the torn fabric of our common life.

In the meantime, citizens, we all have some serious work to do.

[1] Dante Alighieri, Inferno xxxi, 55-57, translated by Mary Jo Bang. Dante is explaining why the Creator made large creatures like elephants and whales, but abandoned the making of giants. Intelligence, granted too much size and power, could do great damage if corrupted.

[2] James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 158.

[3] Ibid., 173.

[4] Ibid., 177-178. John Dove, sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, June 1, 1606.

[5] William Shakespeare, Macbeth 5.5, 41-42.

[6] Shapiro, 185-186.

[7] Dorothy Sayers, commentary on her translation of Inferno, quoted in Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (New York, Parabola Books, 1989), 41.

[8] Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-1820), quoted in David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 12.

Tyranny is on the Ballot

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It’s a scary time. Vote as if your life depends on it.

“Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with the good.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the end of World War II, there were 8 million Nazis in Germany, about 10 percent of the population. Millions more, whether from fear, ignorance, or true belief, had also given their consent to the evils of the Third Reich. Of those who had chosen noncooperation, most were either dead or gone, and the occupying Allied authorities believed that a program of “denazification” was necessary to awaken Germany from Hitler’s bad dream.

One of the Allied strategies was to make people attend documentary films before they could receive their food ration cards. The hope was to reshape indoctrinated minds with the facts. Years later, a German writer recalled the experience of sitting through death camp footage in a Frankfurt cinema:

“In the half-light of the projector, I could see that most people turned their faces away after the beginning of the film and stayed that way until the film was over. Today I think that that turned-away face was indeed the attitude of many millions; … The unfortunate people to which I belonged was … not interested in being shaken by events, in any ‘know thyself.’” [i]

That postwar Frankfurt screening could be a sad parable for my own country, where tens of millions continue to turn their faces away from reality. Forty percent of Americans still approve of Donald Trump. Sixty percent of Republicans believe his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. And 345 Republican candidates for federal or statewide office continue to push the big lie despite zero evidence. At least 58% of them are expected to win.[ii]

In his absolutely indispensable handbook, On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder notes that many of the democracies founded in the wake of two world wars collapsed when authoritarians (mis)used the electoral system to seize power and eliminate opposition. The relatively long history of American democracy suggests stability, but the future of our democracy suddenly seems terribly uncertain. As Snyder observes:

“Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningful free election for some time, but most did not.… No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.” [iii]

Democracy is on the ballot next week, they say. But since it is hard for most Americans to conceive an absence before it happens, or grasp the immensity of the threat, I would state the emergency in more urgent terms: Tyranny is on the ballot! The barbarians are at our gates! Democracy is burning! The end is near.

If we act as if this were a normal election, where we choose between ordinary political parties based on habit, tribal preference, or the issue of the moment, then I tremble for my country. The GOP is no longer a mainstream party. It has become the vehicle of choice for racists, white supremacists, liars, thugs and criminals. It is trying to dismantle democracy by any means necessary. 

Many traditional Republicans who have not yet left the party are surely uncomfortable with where the far-right has taken them, but the voices of conscience and truth remain disappointingly silent. Adam Kinzinger, one of the few Congressional Republicans to speak out, says it’s simply his duty to put country over party: 

“By the way,” he said recently, “Liz [Cheney] and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards.”

I know we must be careful about throwing the word “Nazi” around. Although American neo-Nazis have a love affair with Trump, and some 50 current Republican candidates have been advertising on a website frequented by Nazi sympathizers, it would be inaccurate, unhistorical, and inflammatory to apply the term directly to Republicans.[iv] However, I do find some chilling affinities, which in a sane world would disqualify the GOP, in its current state, from any voter’s serious consideration. Let me offer a florilegium of various sources to make my point.

Charismatic leader

For those who wonder why people surrender their wills to charismatic leaders, Stephen Jaeger describes the “mindset of the followers that enables them to dream the master’s dreams, to create or acknowledge a higher world in which he lives, to be deaf to criticism, resist with aggression any attempt to undermine the idol, and long to live in that world themselves. It is a condition in which the mind is under a spell and in the grip of an uncritical awe that extends to selfless devotion and beyond, to self-sacrifice.” 

We may be puzzled by the ardent devotion that attaches itself to demagogues and tyrants—even the repulsive ones—but Jaeger says the rewards seem worth it to their uncritical followers:

“Through him the troubles of the world will end; he will redeem from its dreariness a world threatened by disenchantment. He embodies renewal. He awakens extravagant hopes in the devotee, visions of happiness, heroism, divinity, the restoration of the spirit, and the realization of fantasies. The charismatic and the followers create and share a world in which the boundaries of reality become unclear. Dreams and impossible or unlikely enterprises appear realizable, the deepest hopes and desires appear attainable.” [v]

The Big Lie

Trump and his enablers have shown the effectiveness of the shameless lie told over and over. Say it enough times, and people will come to believe it. Hitler provided the cynical playbook for all his successors: 

“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.… The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on those in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” (Mein Kampf, 1925) [vi]

“Above all one must get rid of the idea that ideological concepts can satisfy the crowd. For the masses, knowledge is an unstable basis. What is stable is feeling, hatred.… What the masses need to feel is triumph in their own vigor.” (1926 speech) [vii]

Imagine what Hitler could have done with Twitter.

Contempt for Democracy

Once the Nazis were in power, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels explained how easy it was to use “the stupidity of democracy” for undemocratic ends. “It will always remain one of democracy’s best jokes,” he said, “that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed.” [viii]

Republicans hope to seize total control of the voting process across the United States, through gerrymandering, limited eligibility and access for voters, partisan supervision of vote counts, and the empowering of state legislatures to override unfavorable results. The Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin said it out loud last week: “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.” [ix]

Political Violence

Authoritarian movements need to amputate dissenters from the body. This can be done through rhetorical dehumanization of opponents, physical intimidation of critics, imprisonment, or even murder. Right-wing violence in America is nowhere near its heyday under the Nazis, but it is real and it is growing. Threats against political office-holders and anyone “not like us” has increased alarmingly since Trump took control of the Republican party. Timothy Snyder says that this is a matter of cause and effect:

“What was novel in 2016 was a candidate who ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies and encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of ‘USA,’ and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, ‘There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.’ The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying ‘USA.’ The candidate interjected, ‘Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.’ This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.” [x]

In January, 1933, a German girl named Melita Maschmann was taken by her parents to watch a Nazi torchlight parade. Suddenly one of the marchers attacked a bystander, who apparently had shouted a criticism of the Nazis. The man fell to the ground, where his bloody face turned the snow red. Maschmann later recalled her excited reaction: 

“The horror it inspired in me was almost imperceptibly spiced with an intoxicating joy. ‘We want to die for the flag,’ the torch-bearers had sung.… I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of death and life.… I wanted to escape from my childish, narrow life and I wanted to attach myself to something that was great and fundamental.” [xi]

In 1933, the Nazi leaders were still making some effort to appear respectable, stoking political violence with their rhetoric while distancing themselves from the consequences. They needed to consolidate their power before showing their darkest colors. We have seen that in America as well, most recently in the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, the third person in line for the Presidency. After years of dehumanizing and sometimes violent rhetoric against Speaker Pelosi, most Republicans have indignantly denied any responsibility for the consequences of their words. A deplorable few found the violence to be humorous.

Kari Lake, Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, joked about the attack in a campaign appearance while 82-year-old Paul Pelosi was lying in the hospital with a skull fractured by his assailant’s hammer. Lake’s audience burst into laughter, and she did nothing to stop them in the name of human decency. When criticized for her tasteless insensitivity (I’m being kind here), she doubled down, claiming that her remark was taken out of context by “creative editing” which ignored her other remarks about security blah blah blah. “I never made light of the attack,” she insisted. 

Well, you can judge for yourself. The following clip isolates her remark and the laughter it provoked. Whatever was said before and after cannot disguise the callousness of what she said, or the inhuman, howling amusement of her crowd. And yes, I did some “creative editing,” repeating, and finally slowing, the clip, giving us sufficient time, as the political mask slips for an instant, to contemplate the true face of democracy’s destroyers.

[i] Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 57.

[ii] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/10/07/democracy-on-the-ballot-how-many-election-deniers-are-on-the-ballot-in-november-and-what-is-their-likelihood-of-success/

[iii] Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017), 28-29. This little book is a must-read for our times!

[iv] https://www.milescitystar.com/content/republicans-have-nazi-infestation-0

[v] Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West, C. Stephen Jaeger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 23-24.

[vi] Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 168.

[vii] Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 23. Emphasis mine.

[viii] Evans, 451.

[ix] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a41843910/wisconsin-republicans-tim-michel-never-lose-another-election/

[x] Snyder, 45.

[xi] Evans, 313.