A Liberal Dose, December 14, 2023 "Understanding the Past is the Key to the Present AND the Future"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 30, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Understanding the Past Is the Key to the Present AND the Future”

Recently my friend John Gottlied complained that I had spent two columns in a row talking about how bad Trump and the Republicans are rather than being balanced and talking about what I am for, instead of what I am against. In both his recent columns, he has zeroed in on one of the many points I made (such as arguing semantics on whether Trump’s claims of election fraud were thrown out of court 60+ times disproves them) and ignored all the others. This is like if I wrote a column saying that Trump kicks children, eats people’s pets, and runs rabbits, and John responded in-depth about how technically Trump doesn’t run rabbits he just walks them very fast, plus Democrats often frighten rabbits as well. He also said that my specialty is history but I, and other historians, don’t understand the present very well. I’m going to address those points.

First, and foremost, the reason I spent two weeks in a row talking about the “badness” of Trump and what he has turned the Republican Party into is that it has become an existential threat to democracy and we all need to sound the alarm. I don’t say that lightly. Both George Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney -all those guys were normal politicians. I disagreed with them, vehemently on some things, but I did not have a legitimate fear that they might destroy America, nor had that idea ever entered my mind about anyone. Joe Biden, too, like Obama and the Clintons, is just a normal politician. You might not like his policies, and you might wax poetic about how he is wrecking the country (like I did with George W.), but everyone understands that nothing he or any other politician does cannot be undone when the next party inevitably comes to power.

Trump is different. He has shown us what he is, and what he wants to be, and the only thing that stood in his way last time was that many of his own people had a conscience and a sense of duty to the Constitution (though it took them an awful long time to find it), which he would correct if he got back into office. It is precisely my understanding of the past that enables me to recognize this and compels me to cry it from the rooftops. Consider:

A cartoonish rabble-rouser comes along who has the power to sway a significant minority of the population by appealing to the racism of some, to their base and violent passions, and their outrage at the establishment for “selling them out.” He gives them groups to blame all their woes on, and encourages them to do so. His every word is hung onto by thugs, many of them mentally disturbed, who are eager to go into violent action to win his approval. He is underestimated by opponents who think he is too buffoonish for anyone to take seriously, and by the conservative establishment who believe they can use his popularity to gain/maintain political power for themselves and control him (but they can’t). He uses his often-imaginary enemies and conspiracy theories to justify terminating the rule of law, and using it instead as a cudgel against his opponents. He does all this by insisting only he can make his country great again. Most of his countrymen ignore his antics and just go along, even as it gets worse and worse, and later claim they had no idea it would get so bad, oops.

Am I talking about Hitler, Trump, or any number of past wannabe dictators? I guess it depends on whether enough people pay attention. I can tell you this, though, what I describe is the very sort of tyrant the Founding Fathers warned us about and tried to circumvent in the very Constitution Trump said we should terminate to return him to power. BECAUSE THEY KNEW HISTORY.

Note: this column was scheduled for November 30. In the two weeks since then, Trump has announced he will only be “a dictator on Day One.” That’s like a fox saying he will only eat chickens on the first day you let him into the henhouse. Meanwhile, all the conservative Republican leaders I mentioned by name above, and others, have sounded a warning that America needs to take him at his word and recognize the threat he poses to democracy.

Bear in mind -returning to history -everyone who supported Hitler was not a racist or a violent thug. Most were just normal people who went along because they liked some things about him and ignored the rest. But history does not give them a pass, because it was all right there in front of their eyes and they refused to see it.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

 A  Liberal Dose, April 15, 2021 "Defining Terms: What Is Fascism?"

Troy D. Smith

I have been using the first several columns in this series to define terms, and I am going to continue that today with a word that is seriously misunderstood and frequently misused: fascist.

Fascist, like socialist, communist, and terrorist, has devolved among the general public into an insult to use on whoever you don’t like, without understanding the meaning of the word. It is usually linked to brutality and suppression, which is accurate, but has basically become a synonym for “meanie.” That simplistic understanding is dangerous on several levels. For one thing, a government (or a person) can use brutality and suppression without being fascist; the brutality and suppression are tools, it is the ideology those tools enforce that makes someone fascist or not. Merriam-Webster says that fascism “exalts nation and often race above the individual,” and that’s a good place to start unpacking.

People sometimes call those they disagree with fascist communists. That’s where the problem comes in. Fascists and Communists are opposites, you can’t be both at once. Fascism is the extreme far right, Communism is the extreme far left. Taken to their ultimate extremes, both can be authoritarian and use similar tactics to control their citizens. I like to say that if you go all the way to the left or all the way to the right, you circle around and they start to look like the same thing. The majority of citizens in fascist countries did not make a conscious decision to be fascist- it sneaks up on them, usually because they don’t understand what it is or how to identify it, and they fall for its propaganda (this is another way in which not understanding the meaning of fascism is dangerous.)

I am now going to give you the detailed explanation of fascism that I have been giving in class for 15 years. Starting in 2017, I sometimes got angry looks from students as I gave this definition. I know it was because they thought I was picking on Donald Trump, and twisting things to make it seem like they applied to him. But again, in reality, it was the same definition I had been giving for years.

We get the term fascist from the Fascist Party that formed in Italy in the 1920s and was led by Mussolini, who eventually ruled the whole country. This was closely followed by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Control of the Japanese government at that time was seized by the military, and –while they may not have espoused the exact same views as Italy and Germany –they qualified as fascistic.

Fascists are far-right. Fascism equals hyper-nationalism –our country and our way is the best and all others are inferior. Fascists will say that other countries have taken advantage of theirs, because their leaders have been too weak to stand up for themselves. This weakness, they say, is a form of betrayal. The country and its leaders must be strong as steel. Fascists call for authoritarian leaders who will restore their country to the glory it had in the past. Fascists strongly emphasize their country’s mythology, especially the idealized, mythologized stories about how and why it was founded (it was always founded in perfection). Perhaps most importantly, in a fascist state everyone must conform to the norm. People whose ideas differ, or whose ethnicity, race, religion, etc. differ from the majority, are not to be tolerated. Their very existence threatens the unity and strength of the whole. This is a perfect description of Hitler, Mussolini, and the militarized rulers of Japan in WWII. And, I don’t know, maybe some other people.

The Italian term “fascist” comes from the Latin word fasces, which literally means “bundles.” You can google the word and see a picture of fasces, but I will describe it for you here as well. It was made from a dozen or more slender wooden rods tied up in a bundle, with one rod longer than the others holding an axe head that protrudes out of the top. It was a symbol of governmental authority in Republican Rome. The idea was that each slender rod could easily be broken on its own –but when placed in a bundle, they were invulnerable. Add an axe head to them, and they were dangerous. On its own, this is not a bad image. It demonstrates strength in unity. 150 years before Mussolini, fasces were used in the iconography of the new U.S. government, appearing on various official seals. U Pluribus Unum, after all –out of many, one. United we stand, divided we fall.

But it meant much more to the hyper-nationalist government of Mussolini, who dreamed of creating a new Roman Empire. Think of that image in terms of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The whole is more important than the individual –except that one individual, the leader (or Duce, or Fuhrer), the rod with the axe, around which everything is built. All the other rods must be uniform, exactly the same. If you have some one length and some another, or different widths or shapes, the bundle will be uneven and weakened. Think of this in context of Nazis. Everyone in Nazi society had to be “Aryans” of Germanic descent, conform to dominant social mores, be healthy and productive, and submit to Nazi ideology. Anyone who did not “fit the bundle” was pruned out of it. This included “inferior races,” foreigners, LGBT people, members of certain religions, people with disabilities, and people who did not conform to Nazism: socialists, communists, intellectuals, and political protesters. This is the essence of fascism. There is one way, the national way, and dissidents and outsiders must be purged in order to strengthen the nation.

Nowadays, I hear many people insisting that Nazis were left-wing, and were in fact socialists. On one hand, it’s easy to understand the confusion, due to the Nazi Party’s official name: the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Or, in English, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. It sounds socialist, and even has the word right in there. On the other hand, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is not democratic nor is it really a people’s republic, so titles don’t always mean anything. The fact is –and, let me stress, this is a historical fact –socialists and communists were the arch-enemies of Nazis, and were among the first groups (along with labor unions) that they went after. If you know your history, you know that four weeks after Hitler took office a fire was set at the Parliament building (Reichstag) in Berlin, which Hitler blamed on the communists and used as an excuse to suspend their civil rights and give himself emergency powers. The key word in the party’s name was Nationalist, not Socialist (Nazi is short for Nazional).

So if you hear someone blame the nation’s woes on foreigners or lazy, shiftless racial minorities, or on academics and intellectuals, or on the weakness of more liberal leaders, or on our own allies who stabbed us in the back, or on socialism, and that only they are strong enough to save us and make the nation great again… it’s been said before.

And again, more recently.

 

--Troy D. Smith, an Upper Cumberland native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.