This Is It

Obedience and Support are the Same

If you were writing a hackneyed novel or film about an authoritarian America, it would go exactly like this: a figure close to the regime is assassinated, a massive shrill and sanctimonious hue and cry rises over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder, leaders in the regime and movement promise vengeance, private citizens are mobbed and lose their jobs for expressing anti-regime sentiments at the encouragement of regime officials and regime-aligned demagogues, and, then, the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.

This is exactly what’s happening now. The FCC used the threat of its regulatory powers to push Jimmy Kimmel off the air, and it worked. Any explanation other than this one, any account that prevaricates about this reality or points out this or that technicality is a dishonest avoidance of the situation. There will always be some justification that’s minimally persuasive and encourages people to overlook or rationalize what’s going on. That’s how this works: Little exceptions, little reasons to look the other way, little reasons to think, “In this case, what’s the big deal?” They will offer people alibis. And many people will take them. People will say, “Well, what he said was bad.” Or, “Well, they did get the facts wrong.” Then the chill sets in, and people start to become ever more careful about what they say.

“This is all feeling awfully like home,” a friend of mine from Russia texted me yesterday evening. And so it is. This combination of public and private pressure is the hallmark of the modern dictatorship. Why use thugs in the street when you can just threaten people’s livelihoods? Why make a bloody mess when you can just shatter an individual’s life? The lack of overt violence will make people say, “Thank God they aren’t violent at least,” and keep their heads down. “I can make it through if I keep a low profile.”

I recognize the situation is growing quite frightening, but it is also important to keep in mind that fear is a weapon. Fear is a force multiplier. If you strike terror into people’s hearts, they will obey, far beyond their actual exposure to danger. And the modern dictatorship does not need to rely on bloodcurdling terror of torture and death so much as the fear of nuisance, the fear of trouble, the fear of harassment. I know I have often used the analogy to fascism, and I think it remains relevant, but there are important differences. In those regimes, especially in their early days, thugs in the streets quite literally threatened the opposition, beat, or killed them.

Three years ago, I wrote about Giacomo Matteotti, the heroic Italian socialist deputy who stood up to Mussolini and paid for it with his life. Like all political events, the situation was ambiguous and complicated: did Mussolini instruct his blackshirts to go out and get him, or did they act on their own? There was a backlash to the murder that threatened to bring down the fascist government: their conservative allies were shaken in their support. “Moderate fascists” burned their membership cards. Even with the ability to directly apply violence to their opponents, the fascists were not some invincible juggernaut. Not everything they did was part of some genius playbook that had no counter. They made mistakes, overstepped, and feared a restive public. They were a political force like any other, which needed support, consent, and cooperation. They won it partially with the stick and partially with the carrot: conservatives in the end decided that supporting Mussolini was the smarter way to go for their own priorities. He was preferable to the frightening left. The opposition made vain symbolic gestures that failed to have their intended effect.

So too, in Germany, brownshirts roved the streets and attacked opposition figures, intimidated judges, and ransacked newspapers. To continue to practice politics in the face of the cudgel and castor oil requires a great amount of courage. Few can be faulted for preferring their safety and that of their family to a cause that seemed increasingly hopeless. But let’s be frank: Practicing politics in the face of angry people on the internet, or the idiotic spokesmen of a failing presidency, as frightening or annoying as it can be, requires somewhat less courage. Even if your personal circumstances make it difficult for you, where and when you can, do not obey. Find ways to be intransigent; a pain in the ass. “…[P]olitics is not like the nursery, in politics obedience and support are the same,” Hannah Arendt wrote. She was passing judgment on Adolf Eichmann. Think to yourself: “What am I really supporting with this action or non-action?” No one can behave in a perfectly principled way in the confused reality of life, with all its fears and temptations, but with that as a guide, I believe one can do fairly well.

Last night, I was reading the memoirs of the American diplomat George Kennan. He was working in the U.S. embassy in Berlin as the Second World War began, and I was struck by his description of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, a staff officer in the German Army and a descendant of a distinguished line of Prussian soldiers:

A tall handsome, sophisticated aristocrat, in every sense a man of the world. Moltke was also, at the same time, everything that by the logic of his oficial environment he might have been expected not to be: a man of profound religious faith and outstanding moral courage, an idealist, and a firm believer in democratic ideals. I found him on that first occasion, immersed in a study of the Federalist Papers — to get ideas for the constitution of a future democratic Germany; and the picture of this scion of a famous Prussian military family, himself employed by the German general staff in the midst of a great world war, hiding himself away and turning, in all humility, to the works of some of the founding fathers of our own democracy for ideas as to how Germany might be led out of its existing corruption and bewilderment has never left me. I consider him, in fact, to have been the greatest person, morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts, that I met on either side of the battle lines in the Second World War. Even at that time — in 1940 and 1941 — he had looked beyond the whole sordid arrogance and the apparent triumphs of the Hitler regime; he had seen through to the ultimate catastrophe and had put himself to the anguish of accepting it and accommodating himself to it inwardly, preparing himself — as he would eventually have liked to help prepare his people — for the necessity of starting all over again, albeit in defeat and humiliation, to erect a new national edifice on a new and better moral foundation.

I was particularly impressed by the extent to which Moltke had risen, in his agony, above the pettiness and primitivism of later-day nationalism. "My own homeland of Silesia [where he had his estates] will go," he once told me, "to the Czechs or the Poles." (It did.) This was sad for him, he admitted, but it was not important. "For us," he was to write shortly thereafter to a friend in England, "Europe after the war is less a problem of frontiers and soldiers, of top-heavy organizations or grand plans. . . . Europe after the war is a question of how the picture of man can be reestablished in the breast of our fellow citizens.”

Moltke was not destined to survive the war. It was scarcely to be expected that he should. His opposition to the Nazi regime, never exactly a secret, became more flagrant and more irritating to the authorities as the war ran its course. Himself a Protestant, he defied the regime, for example, by giving refuge in his own home in Silesia to the local Catholic school and permitting it to carry on there after its own premises had been closed by the Gestapo. He was is imprisoned, on relatively minor charges, before the aborted putsch of July 20, 1944. He was thus not formally involved in the putsch, being already in confinement when it occurred, but certain of those arrested in the July 20 affair were brought, under torture as I understand it, to reveal more about him than the Gestapo had previously known. He was then tried by a Volksgericht and hung. at the Ploetzensee prison, in early 1945. With his death, to which he went bravely and movingly, the future Germany lost a great moral force.

I record all this because the image of this lonely, struggling man, one of the few genuine Protestant-Christian martyrs of our time, has remained for me over the intervening years a pillar of moral conscience and an unfailing source of political and intellectual inspiration.

There’s a ton of bullshit on the Right now about “protecting Western Civilization.” We’re hearing a lot of noise about martyrdom for a good cause. There will be deliberate attempts to confuse all our moral categories and judgments. There will be endless efforts to pervert our ideas of heroism and honor. Like few others, von Moltke lived up to his title of nobility. Reading about him, I thought to myself, “This was a truly civilized man.” And also a true martyr. Here was someone worth remembering. Not all of us are destined to be von Moltkes, and thank God. But we can all strive to be someone worth remembering. That’s sort of the best we can ever hope to be in this life.