Trump betrays Ukraine

I find myself thinking about my mother as I contemplate Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine. During the 1930s, my mother was a conventional, youngish, white, upper middle class, Republican woman living in a mid-American cultural backwater; that would be her Buffalo, New York. But before the Depression brought her home to help manage the collapsing family finances, she'd graduated from Smith College and traveled in Europe, "on the continent." 

And somehow, unlike most of her social class, she'd become aware that the ascendancy of Nazism in Germany, embodied by Adolf Hitler, was a threat to human decency and life. After World War II when I came along, she had both German refugee and European-origin Jewish friends, though I don't know if they came into her life later, or whether those connections dated from the 1930s. I do know that she spoke of hearing Ambassador William Dodd explain the horrors of Hitlerism to the highly respectable English Speaking Union in the late 1930s.

In particular, in describing those days, she pointed to the British capitulation at Munich in 1938 when the United Kingdom acquiesced in Hitler's dismemberment of the helpless country of Czechoslovakia. Rather than the "peace in our time" which the English prime minister called this betrayal, she assessed the events differently: "I just knew Munich would mean war for Europe and us all eventually," she told me. I believe this was not entirely hindsight bias; there were people in the 1930's who saw war coming.

Mother followed, with horror and terror, newsreports of Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland (alongside Stalin's Soviet Union) and then, in 1940, the collapse of western Europe before Hitler's armies. My parents had vacuum tube radios through which they listened to reports from the Battle of Britain, the German aerial assault on London when the UK was the last European hold-out. And then Hitler turned on his former ally, invading Stalin's Russia in June 1941. Mother remembered suddenly feeling sure she was seeing the turning point in the war. 

In December 1941, Germany's Japanese ally attacked the US base at Pearl Harbor; Germany declared war on the US; and the war spread worldwide. Mother remembered being confident in eventual Allied victory. She spent the war years rolling bandages for the Red Cross and acting as a volunteer ground spotter for the Air Force which was testing a newfangled devise called radar.

She was proud of her war work and proud of her country which she credited with defeating fascism.

• • •

Like me, Donald Trump was born just after that war. Maybe he didn't have good parents. Apparently none of what the world had just gone through was any part of his upbringing.

Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine communicates to Putin -- and Xi Jinping -- that he will do nothing to defend not only Ukraine, but also his own country. He's only interested in stealing whatever he can for himself; the tech bros who prop him up are cut from the same flawed cloth. 

I seldom think much of New York Times editorials, but their response to Trump's willingness of help Russia sell its oil and bombard Ukrainian cities drew an unusually clear denunciation: 

... Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has taken a sharp turn toward appeasement. Desperate to reduce gas prices before the midterms, he is now helping Mr. Putin wage war.

On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced he would lift sanctions on Russian diesel exports to the United States, a step that will help Russia’s economy and war production. On Friday, he went further, signing an executive order that waived other sanctions. He has also taken steps that do not have a clear economic rationale and instead seem designed simply to please Mr. Putin. Among them are new service restrictions for Starshield, the Elon Musk-run satellite network that Ukrainian forces use to defend against Russian airstrikes. ...

Let us be clear about the scope of Mr. Trump’s cynicism. He is aiding an autocratic leader and dangerous adversary of the United States who is waging a brutal war against a democratic neighbor. Mr. Trump is doing so partly in the faint hope that gas prices, which have jumped because of his reckless war in Iran, will fall over the next two weeks and help Republicans avoid big losses in the midterm elections. He is damaging America’s national interest, and likely sacrificing Ukrainian lives, for his own political interests.

The stakes in Ukraine are much larger than the fate of one nation. The war is a test of whether authoritarian expansion can succeed by military force in the 21st century — or whether the West can rally to protect democracy and innocent lives. 

Trump's perfidy is not unique to our time. There were plenty of Americans in the 1930s who looked at Hitler's Germany and thought "none of our business and maybe I can make a buck ..."  

But there were also plenty who came together, across race and class, who organized and fought in the hope of a better country and a better world. There are lots of us still who want better than Trump's ugly plutocracy. Let's keep working together to get there. Vote and protect the vote in our time. 

Reality bites

What I appreciate about Paul Krugman is that the Nobel Prize winner in economics is willing to go out ahead of the consensus of the wise and important. Today's contribution is a humdinger:

Reality is a Communist Plot: Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset 

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election. ...

Such is the wisdom of Trump, MAGA, and dimwits like Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley. If you want to control people, keep 'em stupid and uninformed as all good authoritarians have attempted to do.

... What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

... I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

... Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.  ... If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

... [Republican pols] behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. ...

Read it all.  

What I would add that Krugman does not: he instinctively believes that knowing the truth of difficult things -- like why masses of New Yorkers were dying of an unknown illness in spring of 2020 -- requires intellectual work. He also believes that there are people who are equipped by training to figure mysteries out. And that those people work for all of us.

MAGA is for people who want or maybe need answers for life's mysteries without work. For many, perhaps there is no space in their lives for the intellectual work of discerning what's true. But for some, there's a comfortable indolence which outsources judgment to glitzy influencers and charlatans like the Orange Toddler.

By the way, this isn't about educational attainment. Lots of people without fancy degrees can see what is in front of their faces. They looked at things.

Historically, the mass cure for this debilitated condition occurs when unanticipated realities intrude on daily life -- kind of like when you bark your shins on a low end table you didn't notice. Oops, there's a hazard. Maybe I ought to move it out of here? Maybe I should figure out why ICE wants to kidnap my nanny? Maybe bombing Iran without a plan might lead to more war?

If representative democracy withstands the Trump onslaught, maybe we can bring some of these willing know-nothings back to consensus reality. On to November ...

Does the character of leaders matter?

Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War approaches the history of what Americans call World War II from an angle that I found counter-intuitive. Studying history, I've absorbed the lesson that most of what happened in human societies had less of its origins in the foibles of individuals than in wide economic and intellectual forces which shaped the possible. But, of course, people with power play out their times in the terrain which those forces make possible. This book is O'Brien's whack at how five strong leaders shaped their European war.

And it's a delicious volume, human stories smoothly recounted and convincingly deconstructed on the landscape observed by a student of military history and international relations. I had been reading O'Brien's indispensable substack on the Ukraine war and wanted to explore his scholarship. This makes an easy introduction.

For the purposes of this book, the strategic decision is the choice by the leader, with or without the opinions of advisers, of the strategic plan that the state should follow. The implementation is the translation of that plan into action. ... One of the great tests of grand-strategic leadership is learning what not to do as well as what to do.

O'Brien's subjects were two men born in the 1870s (Stalin, Churchill) and three in the 1880s (Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler). They were all, in some sense, survivors. 

Stalin clawed his way through prison under the Tsar, civil war, and Bolshevik revolution to make himself the unchallengable ruler of the Soviet Union by 1930. He was something of an unlikely successor to that more complex and brilliant revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin:

Stalin’s fundamental problem was that he was not competent enough to fulfill the purposes of his command. ... You can work very hard to create the reality you want, and with enough power you can often succeed. ... Playing up the idea of a vast conspiracy of traitors in their midst ... helped Stalin appeal to Lenin. He might not have been terribly competent, but he would take extreme measures to protect the Leninist line against all possible enemies—even those who were not enemies yet. Lenin approved of Stalin’s willingness to use the most brutal means against possible enemies, even when he was aware Stalin was making things up. ...

Churchill traveled around the British empire as a young privileged adventurer, then took up political party politics, and got himself appointed in 1914 as First Lord of the Admiralty in time to be held responsible for the British/Australian landing in Turkey which ended in a massacre. More to his credit, he also used his position to inspect the trench warfare in France and took enduring lessons:

Churchill now understood that modern weapons had made a mockery of bravery. Machines would determine the outcome of this war, and exposing oneself was more likely to lead to injury or death than anything else. ... If he had retained many boyish traits when the war started, the man that returned to London was more sober, cautious and methodical in his strategic outlook. He now had a holistic war strategy that stretched from the production of weapons to the deployment of forces in the field, all underlined by a coherent geopolitical vision.

O'Brien skims only lightly over the personal crisis of which Roosevelt was a survivor. During World War I he worked for the Wilson administration in the Department of the Navy and came away with an understanding of how controlling the oceans might be America's great strength. He was a political up-and-comer, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on a losing 1920 ticket. And then he barely survived polio and emerged with paralyzed legs. Despite this seemingly insurmountable setback, he won the governorship of New York State in 1928 and then the presidency in 1932, in time to confront the Depression depths of bank failures and mass unemployment. But he also repudiated his non-militarist foreign policy positions.

During a time of financial hardship and growing military threats in both Europe and Asia, Roosevelt’s agenda strengthened the US Navy while providing desperately needed industrial jobs in shipyards up and down the country. It would be the start of Roosevelt’s military preparations for World War II, and would reveal the enduring legacy of his earlier experiences.

The three who became the leaders of the Allied powers had held responsible, although subordinate, positions during World War I; the two Axis dictators had been ordinary soldiers in the Great War. 

O'Brien manages no respect at all for Mussolini. Of these five men, I had known the least about the Italian fascist, so will quote at some length.

Making Italy great, and himself even greater, would be his foundational strategic mindset—even if he had as of yet no clear idea [in 1918] how to achieve it. ...

... Much of the time within the narrative of World War I, the Italian experience is overlooked in favour of the great battles of the Western and even Eastern Fronts. Yet by Western Front standards, the Italian soldier made an equal, and in some ways greater, sacrifice to that of his British and French comrades. By the end of the war, five million Italians had served in the armed forces, and 650,000 of them had died (or would soon perish because of war-received wounds) 

... trincerocrazia (rule by those who had served in the trenches) would form the core of a “new and better elite” which [Mussolini] claimed should rule Italy after the war. Of course, he was too modest to point out that a prominent newspaper editor who had served in the army would be ideally suited to lead this new trench-ocracy. Mussolini was coming closer and closer to arguing for an overthrow of the Italian state. The journey to a personal dictatorship was shortening. ...

Mussolini had a prescription for regaining Italy's imagined former military greatness.

He said the Germans had made a terrible mistake going on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917, as this was actually “more expensive” than going on the offensive. How anyone who had witnessed how machine guns and modern artillery could devastate attacking infantrymen could still think the defensive was more expensive boggles the mind. However, instilling the right values remained to Mussolini the key to preparing soldiers to advance. 

... In the balance between morale and equipment, willpower always triumphed over steel. Mussolini was “certain that thousands of cannons and machine guns are not enough for victory, if the spirit of the soldiers is lacking.”

Having posed the question of Italian "greatness," he made himself the answer for attaining it after that war.

If the Allies had unfairly thwarted Italy at Paris [in the Versailles Treaty], Mussolini would be the man to make Italy great again. He created his own political movement in the midst of this supposed humiliation ... In November 1921 the Fascist Party itself was founded with Mussolini as its leader, and in 1922 he seized power over all of Italy. It was the culmination of his wartime learning. 

Mussolini viewed the Italian state, not insensibly, as too weak and chaotic to save itself. He thus threatened a march on Rome more as an act of bluster than any widespread violent action. Indeed, he was prepared to call the whole thing off if the government reacted with force. Luckily for him they didn’t, and the indecisive King was only too happy to invite Mussolini to take power to end the chaos. Il Duce was made. 

World War I had taught Mussolini how to seize and manipulate power, and the value of acting like a great power even if you were not one. The only trouble with this strategic outlook would come if someone called Mussolini’s bluff.

The rest of O'Brien's account of Mussolini's role in World War II amounts to how Churchill and then Hitler did indeed call the Italian's bluff. Italian fighters executed their deposed dictator in 1945.

Despite having been born in Austria, Adolf Hitler volunteered as a lowly dispatch courier for the Germans in the Great War. And according to to O'Brien, Hitler got lucky, suffering a minor wound that kept him out of the worst of the German rout and killing fields, while leaving some indelible impressions. 

Hitler’s wound, in the thigh, was relatively light, but he was pulled off the line and sent to a military hospital near Berlin. Once there, due to the vagaries of military bureaucracy as much as anything, he would wait approximately six months before returning to the Western Front. Hitler was shocked by what he discovered in Germany. Instead of a people united in support for the war, he came face to face with widespread dissatisfaction, even defeatism, in both the army and the general public. 

Though his doubts about the true resilience of the German people remained, he did not want to admit that Germans might honestly doubt that this miserable war, which had already killed hundreds of thousands and brought misery and famine to their doorstep, was a mistake. No, the real culprit had to be the Jews. In his fact-free world, the Jews had used the war to embed their domination throughout the production process and to stoke animosity between Bavaria and Prussia, all the while skillfully avoiding military service themselves.

He did take one practical if over-blown lesson from his war experience:

Hitler had a much greater focus on the importance of military equipment in determining the outcome of modern battles. ... Hitler’s fascination with the largest, heaviest firepower reveals something common in dictators: a stress on strength, without a corresponding ability to understand rational trade-offs. ...

Hitler's wartime service convinced him that he had found his destiny:

... To answer the question of why [the 1918 German] disaster had occurred, Hitler fell back on the conspiracy theories he had been nursing for years and magnified them to enormous proportions. An internal, criminal enemy had poisoned the mind of the German people, leading them to betray the valiant troops at the front and transforming a possible war-winning situation into a humiliating defeat. 

This is the crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding Hitler as a war leader in World War II. It combined his grasp of how to win wars (heavy equipment based on German technology which carried the biggest punch possible) with how Germany lost this one (home front weakened and then betrayed by evil influences—particularly Jews). 

The combination of these ideas also seems to have been the motivation he needed to change professions. If Hitler went into the army in 1914 still thinking he would become a great artist or architect, by 1918 he had decided to immerse himself in politics. 

Having explored the life lessons these five men brought to World War II, O'Brien's actual recounting of the events of that war is more sparse. Pretty much all of them acted in accord with pre-existing character. 

Hitler, whose ego was already massive, started telling people that everything now depended on him and him alone, and that he needed to act in case he died early and Germany was deprived of his historic leadership. ...

Hitler's war became a parade of strategic failures for Germany. 

On the other hand --

After December 7, 1941, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Winston Churchill had any doubts about the outcome of World War II. They were both convinced that Germany, Italy and Japan would all be crushed. ... Their earlier experiences with war had taught both Roosevelt and Churchill the vital importance of controlling the air-sea super-battlefield—and in that way they had a massive advantage over Adolf Hitler, with his more parochial war and life experiences.

The Russian ruler was the one who learned and adapted most over the course of the war. Because Stalin enjoyed the material support of Britain and the United States and led a country where war had evoked patriotic nationalism, he had time and opportunity to learn to be a successful war leader. 

Stalin’s meeting with [Roosevelt's envoy] Harry Hopkins was just one example of how he reacted to adversity not by doubling down on his own brilliance, but by trying to cultivate and benefit from the support of others. This was not because of any change of personality; it was because he had calculated, accurately, that the chances of his personal survival and that of the USSR (and then later of their further successes) would be better assured by taking help where he could get it, even if this showed him doing things that ideologically or personally he had not done before. ... Stalin had the capacity to learn. In 1941 and early 1942, Hitler and Stalin were quite similar as military commanders. ... 

When Stalin let his generals lead, with Allied materiel arriving, the immense size and valor of the Russian army came into play and turned the tide against Germany. Stalin learned.

O'Brien faults Roosevelt for not being willing to face his own mortality and for failing to prepare his vice president Harry Truman. From having been an anchor of stability, Roosevelt risked the final success of the alliance. 

Though one does not want to analyse Roosevelt’s psyche too much, part of him seemed to believe that, as long as he was president, he could not really die. ... in 1944, Roosevelt would make one of the most selfish choices in international relations history, something so profoundly self-centred that historians still shy away from addressing it. He not only decided to run for office while dying; he decided to change vice president to someone he did not like, would not confide in and would not prepare in any way to be president. ... 

... In refusing to provide the US government with an idea of concrete war aims and purposes, Roosevelt was making a mockery of the Clausewitzian notion of strategy being a connection between ends, ways and means. Roosevelt, more than any war leader, had a clear idea of ways and means—fighting the war with air-sea power and many machines over soldiers, etc.—but [these] seemed disconnected from the ends. The ends were what he wanted at any given moment. 

... By the end of the war, three of the five were dead: Hitler by suicide, Mussolini gunned down on a street corner and Roosevelt whose body failed after all his exertions. Even the two survivors, Churchill and Stalin, had aged greatly because of the stress of war leadership. Neither was the same forceful figure after the war that he had been when it started.

O'Brien concludes by arguing in favor of greater focus in historical accounts on the character and capacities of leaders. (Yes, now as then, that seems forever to mean all men.) I greatly enjoyed this book; it rounded my understanding of massive events which I've studied through other lenses. But I wonder -- is this truly the best way to greater understanding?

... grand strategy in World War II was far more personal than we might believe. ... then, now and in the future—we have to try to understand the minds of the individual leaders who make the crucial choices. Though we use phrases like “national interest” or “greater good,” these are abstract concepts in grand-strategy-making. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt had very personal notions of what national interest was; in some cases, notions that led to the lives of their fellow citizens being made far worse. All of them also believed that they were personally indispensable in terms of making their countries greater, and all imposed their own visions on their states during the course of the war. As such, they regularly acted like their personal views of the world were in the national interest of their countries, when they were decidedly not. If we want to understand strategy, we must also understand the strategist.

Perhaps. Certainly any contemporary American is forced to see what horrors a leader with no moral character at all can lead to.

"Both performative and substantial" -- after No Kings

There's plenty of punditry going around in the backwash of the big day. For what it is worth, here's mine.

This was big; there are critics, as has historically been the case when the underlying upsurge toward equality and justice erupts in all its flavors from frivolity to ideological zealotry. Somebody feels left out; somebody else feels the action should have been done differently. Leaders are blithely lionized or viciously and even falsely reviled. In my (too) long experience of these moments, these kerfuffles are just symptoms that something genuine is happening. Let us be glad -- for the moment calls on us each to find a role in the struggle for a better country. There are many roles.

I joined the walk from the Embarcadero to City Hall in San Francisco. By comparison with lots of previous marches, this was not a huge crowd. Maybe somewhere in the five to eight thousand range? It's hard to tell in a narrow corridor. But the wonderful Brad Newsham who pioneered organizing human protest messages on Ocean Beach reports that Saturday's crowd there, the same morning was some seven thousand participants! That's San Francisco too.

And, quite intentionally, these No Kings events were meant to show our faces everywhere, totaling over 3,000 locations nationwide and probably 8 million people overall.

Who came out to Market Street? 

• Sure, there were lots of white-haired old timers. The Bay has a good supply of us. But my observation (and my hundreds of photos) show that as many as half were "middle generation," 30-65, sometimes with kids, workers who get Saturday off, the kind of folks whose jobs usually don't require them to get dirty. They may earn more than the national median income, but in this town, that doesn't mean they are affluent. 

• There were many people from visibly Asian origins. More than the white folks, these people seemed quite likely to come from the class of workers who do jobs that do require them to get dirty.

• A lot of people appeared to be what I call "Californian," folks who don't look exactly "white" but whose ethnicity is not obvious. 

• There were plenty of gay men, slightly unusual for a broad spectrum San Francisco march. Perhaps some were government employees who sniff out bad times ahead?

• There were NOT many high school and college youth marchers that I saw. Those I did see appeared more serious than some of the old timers. Are the young appropriately scared of the world we are offering them?

• There were very few visible Black marchers. Of course, gentrification has ensured that there are very few Black San Franciscans ...

• • • 

Andrea Pitzer, author of a study of concentration camps, asks Does No Kings Matter? 

She too has participant observations:

My sense is that, more and more, people aren’t showing up in some generic self-congratulatory way, but with the understanding that we need one another, that we are reliant on each other, and that policies of cruelty and exclusion will only lead the country into a cul de sac of fascism.

This is an idea that protesters are helping to shape as they expand the movement. It’s a profound realization to know that millions of other humans have enough desire for a different world that they’ll make an effort on behalf of something better, even in the tiniest, reddest towns. ...

... The No Kings movement is a bottom-up force that is creating pressure for a different kind of politics locally and nationally. That process is bound to be messy and take time to sort out. But the protesters understand the assignment: the most important place they can be is right where they are. No Kings is binding together the core movements we’ve seen for a while on the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

We’re seeing a massive shift in favor of the abolition of ICE, deep support for trans folks, and fury over the Iran War. Though we see the effects of public pressure on actions like the recent DHS shutdown, Democratic politicians have, by and large, had a hard time keeping up, because the movement is still evolving and moving faster than institutions can respond....

... first-time protesters are practicing for the harder tests that may be coming. In the wake of the murders of Porter, Good, and Pretti, the risks are clearer now. They’re girding themselves to help because we know where authoritarianism goes and how far it will stoop to acquire more power, even after having seized so much. The greater the number who stand up now, the fewer the number who will have to pay with their lives later.

So many individuals have become atomized, isolated, and lonely. Protesting is an antidote for all that. And is also how to pull people into realizing they can play a role in building the future. No Kings is both performative and substantial. Showing up with a sign is in and of itself a powerful action to take in this moment, but it’s also a path to doing more.

She's caught on to something I agree is real. 

• • •

Want to know WHAT'S NEXT? Click this link. 

Minneapolis: on seeing for themselves

As the seige of Minneapolis continues (and I won't believe DHS head-crook Tom Homan's claim of withdrawal until the locals confirm it), there's mainstream media coverage of the murders of observers, of the arbitrary and violent cruelty of the ICE paramilitary against immigrants and others, of complaints from clergy and some politicians. But unsurprisingly, the media finds it harder to get at what ordinary citizens of the Twin Cities are feeling.

And then, every once in a while, at the end of a long story, there are tantalizing tidbits from the folks on the ground. The experience if being under seige by goons has been life-changing for at least a few:

Lindsey Gruttadaurio, 62, an insurance claims adjuster, had never been to a protest before. A centrist Democrat, she grew up in a military family, and often disagrees with progressives. But watching the ICE raids on the news motivated her, so on Jan. 23, she bundled up and went.

She immediately felt comfortable.

“It’s like a Lutheran potluck — just go and you’ll be fine,” she said.

“It was thrilling. There was a lot of cussing. It was fantastic, actually.”

The thrill, she said, came from being together with all those people and the power in that.

 “We’ve found our voice and it’s never going away now.

Owen Deneen, a nurse who was walking downtown in hospital scrubs at lunchtime on Friday, said it was as if “a natural disaster happened and it’s neighbor helping neighbor.”

He and his wife also went to the Jan. 23 protest, also his first. He said he felt “a mix of anger and resolution” during the demonstration.

When the couple broke away from the crowd to walk back toward their car, he said the temperature felt like it dropped by 15 degrees. They looked at each other and realized that it was because they had left “the closeness” of the crowd.

“It’s much colder when you’re alone,” he said. 

If it comes to this, I hope my neighbors will respond so bravely and openly. I think we might.

• • •

This clip is only a preview of a podcast behind a paywall, but Beinart's interview with Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, lead rabbi of Shir Tikvah, a “justice-seeking, song-filled” congregation in South Minneapolis is a granular account of what it is like to live under occupation. She finds herself in immediate proximity to where Renee Good and Alex Pritti were killed. 

From Ocean Beach: Abolish ICE

Thanks to Brad Newsham -- performance art maestro, travel writer, and once upon a time cab driver -- we've been creating these beach protests for over 20 years here in the San Francisco Bay when events warranted. We've denounced the country's wars and sought the impeachment of two Republican presidents. Thousands of us have been willing to arrange ourselves to spell out the message of the moment under volunteer direction. The vibe is determined but happy, a pleasant echo of simpler days when San Francisco catered more to hip young adventurers than to earnest aspiring techies. 

 

We made protest art again Saturday; here is the official overhead image. Drones sure make the project easier; I remember a time when the small plane with the photographer was late and we stood in formation, and stood, and stood.

 

Today I was down there in the area of the period in the exclamation point [!]. Here are some images of people I met. Click on any to enlarge.

 Down the ramp we go ...

A beach protest allows for bringing the dog and for meeting new friends.

Once we'd formed up in our letters, the photographic drone flew over head and we shouted our messages.

The ocean seems to join our cries against the horror of this moment ...

In this protest, there's space for the whole family -- as there should be.

Confirmation they should be scared of their own workers

Last October, it looked as if the San Francisco Bay Area was to be next target of Donald Trump's Rambo/ICE thugs.

And then we weren't. And the thugs were redirected to such unfortunate locations as Memphis and eventually Minnesota's Twin Cities.

Why did Trump/Miller/Noem back off then? San Francisco's mayor, Daniel Lurie, whose promise is to eradicate any vestiges of the historically weird and anti-corporate character of the City by the Bay, claimed to have talked Trump out of it. It may have helped that the federal forces had located on an isolated Coast Guard island where they might have been expected to shoot their way out when protesters inevitably blocked their way.

But I've always suspected that the tech barons who support both Lurie and Trump were the deciders. They don't mind beating up on poor Central American and East Asian migrants, but they didn't want their work force seeing the carnage. And some of their companies depend on immigrants. Lots of tech jobs have moved on from the Bay, partially because the pandemic encouraged remote work, but there are still legions of ambitious, not-yet billionaire techies who locate here for the promise of natural beauty, each other, and hope for start-up riches. 

And if the Bay were a fascist target, these might be confronted by the ugly violence of the state for themselves. They are part of labor; their work still matters to their bosses -- hence our (momentary?) reprieve. 

WIRED has confirmed stirrings among the lower and mid-level tech workers and the response of their oligarch employers. Notably, the rustlings of dissent are within the company what seems to be the fascist Dark Star -- Peter Thiel's Palantir.

After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed for answers from leadership on the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and many questioned whether Palantir should be involved with the agency at all. Leadership defended its work as in part improving “ICE’s operational effectiveness.” 

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED reveal growing frustration within Palantir over its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in particular, ICE’s enforcement and investigations teams. In response, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team published an update to the company’s internal wiki detailing its work on federal immigration enforcement, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes.” 

In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE. 

“Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here,” one person wrote. 

“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote another. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?” 

The discussion was held in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to general world news coverage. ... 

... [A corporate] wiki acknowledges “increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some U.S. Citizens,” but argues that Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding the unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. Citizens wherever and however possible.”

Yeah -- and where's the evidence for that? Dead civilians?

Here too, among tech workers, is where resistance will rise and must be welcomed by those of us with a more skeptical response to their world. Working techies are people too and they don't like ugly.

We're in this together, trying to save the aspirations of the country from the monsters currently in power.

Another murder in Minneapolis -- say a prayer and speak the truth

We gathered at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, memorializing Alex Pretti's murder in Minneapolis -- and finding comradeship with each other. The crowd was large, not so much militant as determined.

There was anger -- yes!

Apparently a good nurse, from the accounts of Pretti's life that are coming out. There were many in the San Francisco crowd who looked to be nurses themselves.

This crowd was determined ...

• • •

The Rev. Angela Denker pastors at an Evangelical Lutheran Church not far from the murder site in Minneapolis. She writes:

I write to you so sad - I feel like I cry every few hours - and also so, so mad. At the many who prepared the way for this gratuitous violence and hatred. At the Christians, Christian leaders, and politicians who stubbornly dig in their heels, who refuse to repent, who insist upon more and more bloodshed, sacrifices poured out to the gods of violence, war, and money.

Pray for Minneapolis, for Minnesota. For Alex’s loved ones. For the eyewitnesses. For the press who were teargassed and pepper sprayed. For the children who see it all and wonder, how they can ever possibly become adults in a world like this. For America. For our churches, embattled and exhausted. For neighborhood leaders who again host vigils and light candles. For brave observers. For the VA Hospital, where I served my chaplaincy internship, and where Alex worked in the ICU. For the woman whom Alex tried to help, who was being assaulted by ICE agents, who then turned their attention to Alex. For the ecosystem of lies and those who profit from them. For justice. For truth. For courage. For love.

Amen. 

Amen indeed on this third Sunday in the Christian season of Epiphany -- the season when we repeat stories of the Living God calling forth improbable followers from among the workers of his time and place to witness the Love he spoke.  

• • •

For a more secular reflection, here's the often lucid Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

What Can We Do?

For starters, be grateful to the people of Minneapolis. Bearing witness today in America requires physical courage. Every single person who steps out their front door in Minneapolis to observe, document, and protest the actions of our government is taking their lives in their hands.

These men and women are the kind of patriots you would have seen at Lexington and Concord. I am in awe of their valor. They started this resistance to protect their neighbors, but what is happening in Minneapolis now is bigger than that. They are standing against the might of the Trump regime not just for themselves, but for all of us.

 Second, don’t look away. Don’t forget what is happening. Don’t give in to despair or exhaustion.

Third, do not tolerate false equivalence from responsible quarters. Anyone in public life who cannot call things by their right names here should be shamed, swept aside, and ultimately ignored.

Fourth, understand that this moment requires new structures and new thinking. The resistance in Minneapolis is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American history. The political opposition must think anew as well. And any part of the political opposition that continues to act as though these are still ordinary times should be swept aside, too. ...

Fifth, as we identify ways to give material support to the Minneapolis resistance, be ready to offer whatever you can.

... They want us confused. They want us too exhausted to fight back. You don’t have to go into the streets of Minnesota to fight back. You can simply state plainly that our government is lying to us. Say it somewhere. Online. To a friend or family member. But do not let their lies go unanswered by truth.

Not a time to be quiet

It's hard to stop feeling shattered amid both fear and fury watching what is happening in Minneapolis right now. Americans are finding out what it is like to be occupied by an invading army of unconstrained goons -- sent by our own government. All over social media, you can see the thugs in their pretend military garb, roughing up people who question their authority. They sure seem to like being the Big Guys with Guns.

And you can see your fellow citizens rejecting the invaders, at known risk.

A sociologist who studies sexual violence, Nicole Bedera, has some thoughts about resisting if this invasion comes to your neighborhood.

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence.

Among perpetrators of violence, there is a very small share who are independently motivated to violence. But the vast majority of perpetrators commit violence to seek approval and status from others. This is particularly true among men who use violence to affirm their masculinity.

The goal of ICE watch is to surround that second type of perpetrator with people who *disapprove* of their actions. It will make them less likely to be violent and we’ve seen that, in some cases, that includes rethinking their original plan to tear a family apart too.

The success of ICE watch interfering with ICE’s mission is almost certainly why DHS keeps sending more agents to Minneapolis. They used to execute their raids with just a few agents. Now they need 6-12 to even begin to disrupt the social pressure to be nonviolent. 

I’m just echoing others who have already said this, but it’s a good thing that it takes so many ICE agents to make a single arrest. It makes the whole operation slower and more resource-intensive.

It can be hard to see the success of prevention efforts because we can’t see inside the minds of the people who changed their behavior because of those efforts. But there are a lot of reasons to believe ICE watch is working. And it’s also part of why ICE watch is generally safer than it sounds. 

Let's hope she's right. My city is full of people who are determined to protect our neighbors when/if the goons arrive. 

Everybody go get those whistles! 

Not going back!

Erudite Partner's latest essay for TomDispatch looks back on "a low dishonest decade." It's her 99th piece for this lively opinion site which brings experts to attempt “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” She first came on as someone equipped to write engagingly and informatively about torture and abuse by the American government. What a vocation!

Her title comes from a phrase in the poem by W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939. Given that analogy, her reflections on the last 20 years of American hubris are pretty dire.

But she's still kicking. 

... A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”

I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me — or any of us — back in that bottle.”

I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle. ...

You can read it all here. 

Five years on from Trump's coup attempt ...

... we should be clear about what is happening. American fascism is on the march, and anyone who balks at saying that clearly, who makes excuses and pretends that Trump and the people he brought in aren’t monsters, is deeply unpatriotic. If we are to have a chance at saving democracy, our first duty must be clarity. No sanewashing, no bothsidesing. Only facing the horrible truth can set us free. -- Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman

That's Krugman's substack reflection on the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump's attempted coup in 2021 and the current Trump regime. I have no beef with this formulation. I do have a beef with fancy pundits who haven't dared or won't see so as to speak so plainly.

But I am interested also in this from the comments on Krugman's post; a reader writes:

American voters voted for this [in 2024]. 77 million of them looked at Donald Trump and decided they wanted someone who was a convicted felon, greedy narcissist, sex pest, insurrectionist, profoundly stupid, massively ignorant, racist imbecile, and dedicated to destroying the United States government. 77 million Americans voted for this.

And now the country is getting what it deserves. 

It's easy to be disgusted by our fellow/sister citizens. 

The reflexive, easy response is to think: No -- that's not what they voted for. They wanted cheaper eggs. Or, to be more respectful, lower costs for higher ed or to buy a house. Less respectfully -- Yes, they wanted the old white guy, even a criminal old white guy, in preference to any accomplished Black/South Asian-origin woman. 

The commenter has a point; the dimwits who casually put Trump in office do perhaps deserve what they are getting. 

Much of it will fall on other people, who didn't vote for him or didn't vote at all. The Trump/Musk tantrum at USAID is estimated to have already killed 600,000 people, mostly children in Africa.

But Trump voters will catch some of it when they can't afford increases in the price of health insurance or when there's nobody answering calls for rescue when flood waters rise. 

But then I reflect: none of us really get what we deserve in life -- for ill of course, but also even more for good. What we think of as our desserts is not how it works. 

We just have to forge on, trying to fix what we can and passing on something at least as good and perhaps something a little better to the humans who come after us. As I usually say to people who ask why I do what I do -- my activism -- "Nothing else to do..."

• • • 

Historian Diana Butler Bass offered a thoughtful reflection on January 6 in 2022 and reposted it today. 

...Some of my earliest memories are political ones — mostly of John F. Kennedy and of the Civil Rights Movement. Between the two, I learned that democracy was a hope-filled possibility and that it wasn’t perfect. Indeed, it wasn’t complete. It was a project. There were people who couldn’t vote because of the color of their skin. There were people who didn’t have certain rights because they weren’t men. There were people who couldn’t publicly proclaim who they loved because others considered them deviant. There were those with no access to democracy because they were poor or marginalized or went unnoticed.

How to fix these things, make the project work?

Democratic shortcomings were addressed by better democracy. In the middle of the twentieth century, people fought to widen democracy’s reach, to establish the dignified participation of everyone in voting, and to guarantee equity under the law. The federal government must stand as a protector of democracy for all citizens, no matter an individual’s political party, class, or creed. Indeed, many Americans shared a sense of democratic responsibility for people across the globe who were seeking a fairer, more just, and humane existence. Democracy was a worthy project, and it was a bright birthright, our political North Star.

... Democracy, the rule of the people, is a political system based on us. The rule of the people can be as inspiring as the greatest human impulses, as fickle as human nature, and as devious and deluded as human beings can be. In this way, “democracy” isn’t an ideology. You can’t put an “ism” on the end of democracy. Indeed, it is a practice of being a person in community, a polity based more on faith in the commons than a systematized doctrine. You can’t really believe in democracy. Instead, democracy asks us to trust that we belong to one another — all of us — and that together we can behave more justly and learn that liberty and happiness are possible.

... The cruel facts of history came home when armed Americans, deceived by an American president, destroyed a proud tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and attempted a coup to overturn the results of an election — all in a corrupted notion of actually saving democracy.

... January 6 was backlash on steroids. Backlash to a Black president. Backlash to marriage equality. Backlash to women’s rights. Backlash to the widening of democracy over most of our lifetimes — a widening that saw democracy reaching to include all sorts of people who had been excluded, a democratic correction of the flaws and misuses and mistakes of democracy past. January 6 wasn’t just about Donald Trump or the Big Lie. It was backlash to four decades of democratic progress that had been, by any historical account, extraordinary. 

... We can neither diminish nor deny January 6 — its memory — and how we remember it — is foundational for whatever happens next. So, don’t give up on the truth. Let’s practice the future of democracy. Starting from today. Starting wherever and however we can start. We’ve got work to do repairing and saving this messy, ironic, and imperfect project of government by all the people and for all the people.

Diana's consciousness of long-expanding democracy is common in my generation, most especially among comfortable-class white women. Look at all those white heads at No Kings. But we're not alone in this; it's the core American myth and it still has some life.

Will we allow second rate, greedy mobsters to kill it?

When we fight, we win!

My friends in the hospitality union UniteHERE routinely end their meetings with the chant that serves as the title for this post. 

It seems a good day, a week after our huge election victories, to pass along the words of a veteran fighter.

Sherilyn Ifill, civil rights lawyer and the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, has been in the trenches for freedom and wider democracy all her life. Her evaluation of where we sit after the recent election is both heartening and bracing.

Opponents of the Trump regime won just about everywhere as all observers note. But along with that happy outcome, we are seeing the rapid decline of the fascist project.

... As exhausted and overwhelmed as we feel, we should remember that they likely feel the same. They have taken on the extraordinary project of destroying one of the most powerful nations in the world – a nation with a national government, fifty state governments, tens of thousands of cities and local governments, a Supreme Court, hundreds of federal trial and appellate courts, fifty state court systems, and tens of thousands of courts within those systems. And they are attempting to do this with a skeleton crew - well-trained in harsh rhetoric, insults, petulance, and cruelty -- but almost entirely inexperienced in running anything of substance. 

They are destroying the apparatus of government because they know they cannot manage it. The ranks of those with even marginal competence available to work at a high level in this Administration are severely diminished. This is why embarrassingly subpar attorneys like Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba are put in charge of key U.S. attorneys’ offices to prosecute Trump’s enemies, where they and their assistants stumble through the choreography of litigation, garnering ever-increasing impatience from federal district court judges. The Trump administration fires thousands of workers, and then hires back those same workers as agency heads realize that they’ve left no one sufficiently competent to log on to manage critical functions.

It's not as if the electorate finds these clowns inspiring.

... Trump is deeply unpopular. His poll ratings remain underwater. He has even lost podcast king Joe Rogan. ... Moreover, Trump is looking even more enfeebled than usual. He is mocked and sub-tweeted on the world stage by leaders who play to his vanity in the place of trying to negotiate with the erratic and unserious U.S. leader. 

Yes, J.D. Vance is waiting in the wings. But as a graduate of the Peter Thiel School of Charm and Deportment, he has neither the charisma nor the people instincts needed to garner the kind of support that Trump has enjoyed. ... 

... Trump’s lack of vigor has forced the egos that surround him to the top. No longer satisfied with being the ghoul behind the scenes, Stephen Miller wants everyone to know that he is in charge and that the plans being advanced are his. That is why we are seeing and hearing him more frequently, as he pauses for interviews outside the White House as though he is the President, shows up on news programs with regularity and even dispatches his wife as a (very uninformed and ineffective) talking head. 

But Miller is repulsive by any impartial standard. Watching him spew bile at endlessly increasing levels of manic zeal – has the effect of holding up a mirror to the worst of MAGA. It cannot be pleasant to look in the mirror when the image looking back at you is Stephen Miller. 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a disaster. ... 

... The Supreme Court has handed Trump some big wins. And there are more likely to come. But even members of the Court must be feeling the pressure of association with the images we are all seeing every day of masked ICE agents patrolling suburbs while dressed for battle in Fallujah. ...

Ifill suggests it is time to focus our resistance on Congress. (And how much more is this true when we've watched the Democratic Party leaders of the Senate fumble a potentially winning hand on health care and other issues.) Ifill focuses on the House. 

... And as I have often said, the abiding obsession of Republican House members is keeping their jobs. [Last Tuesday's] election was a wake-up call. Next year every seat in the House is on the ballot. No matter what they say before the cameras today, Republicans in the House are seeing the writing on the wall this week and they are feeling queasy. We should be prepared to challenge Republican incumbents. Show up and out at town halls. Democrats living in Republican districts should apply pressure to their Republican representatives. ... 

... [The November] election outcomes provided some critical lessons for Democratic leadership and donors. The Party’s base is not an optional constituency. Black women continue to power Democratic wins around the country. Democrats who stand by their convictions and the constituencies in our “big tent” do better than those who run on being “Republican-light” and who sacrifice inclusion to chase the white whale of “centrist voters.” The wins came in California and in New York City, but also in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

She prescribes hope to the resistant:

None of this guarantees that we will be saved from the abyss. But these are all encouraging signs that the fight is not finished. In the words of Yogi Berra, “it’s not over ‘til it’s over.” And even then, we fight.

Democratic Party leadership -- nothing to write home about. People rising -- a better power being born! 

No Kings was food for my soul

I'm still living in the backwash of what we did on Saturday. NO KINGS was a fine denunciation of the MAGA regime's atrocities against immigrants, against workers, against truth, against our democracy. But it was also a gushing release of emotions that the Trump emergency constrains. We risk missing out on feeling some of what keeps us human, perhaps because we can't afford to bare or bear those feelings in this awful time.

So on Saturday, some of us expressed emotions which living in Trump's America has repressed.

That's long been a San Francisco sentiment. This city knows that.

We're not asking for a life of emotional ease.

Though it hurts, we don't give in.

We make the choice to celebrate what matters, even if we dress as clowns to do it.

We trust we can get to the other side ... most of us anyway. Yes! 

Libertarian rule-of-law guy Radley Balko is not at all an habitual protester. Often, more a cranky critic. But he found emotional sustenance in Saturday's marches.   

What I saw at Saturday’s protest was a celebration of the values that truly make us great, even as we haven’t always lived up to them — the rule of law, constitutionalism, skepticism of power, empathy and compassion, civil liberties, and — yes — diversity. ...

If I had to sum up my own feelings about the protest in Nashville in a word, I’d go with nourishing. It felt good. It felt good to stand with neighbors who understand what we’re up against.

MAGA's nihilism of grievance has been defeated before

It's almost a throwaway line in a post by European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, a post mostly calling out the failings of the New York Times. But I think it's critically important for understanding much of the behavior of much of MAGA:

Key to understanding [Office of Budget and Management director Russell] Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order - and with it the “natural” order itself - has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more.

Vought is correct, to a substantial extent. Twentieth century America undermined, eroded, and finally largely tore down the unchallenged power of white supremacy and patriarchy (of which homophobia and gender absolutism are features.) Much of MAGA hates the America the majority of us have made. So they call us "the Left." Some of us may identify with some "Left"; but most of us are just ordinary Americans who have moved on from habitual white supremacy and woman hatred. The country is not perfected, but it has moved on from MAGA's cultural grievances. 

And Trumpism is wildly unpopular and getting more so with every price increase and raid on Black and brown neighbors.

So, because MAGA lost the culture, its supporters lost hope for the future. To replace an imperfect democracy, they think they've found their king. MAGA attracts losers, whose only unifying idea is to tear it all down. 

Paul Krugman catches this reality when he digs into the material and consequential stupidity of MAGA's war on science:

... Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want. ... A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. ... 

... Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over.

Historian of fascism John Ganz calls out MAGA as embodying the nationalism of losers. 

... MAGA’s base of support comes from those parts of the country and those social classes and regions that actually did lose out or never gained from the international system. Its bourgeoisie is mostly from the heartland, not from the coasts.  

Its intellectual class, or clerisy, is drawn from those who could not achieve the first rank under the old “meritocratic” system, who couldn’t fully enter the cosmopolitan elite, or decided to defect from its ranks opportunistically to gain pride of place in the new movement. ... 

This fear, hatred, and envy of the cosmopolitan elite, this anti-Atlanticist, anti-globalist current, sometimes called “isolationism,” but more correctly called sovereigntism or even just nationalism, is a longstanding constellation of ideas in American politics ...

Dorothy Thompson recognized these second-raters in her classic 1941 essay, Who Goes Nazi? 

For that matter, so did my mother, who, though a Republican housewife, recognized and participated in warning against European fascism during its rise in the mid-1930s.

This country has always attracted the world's desperate who hoped to become winners. Are we going to let the MAGA losers kill off that hope? NO KINGS! 

Doing what could be done when the worst came

At a mass meeting in San Francisco working on responses to the Trump presidency last March, I was hanging about in the back of what felt like a repetitive session. A man who I recognized from many such gatherings and demonstrations, but had never spoken with, approached me to chat. He turned out to be Bruce Neuburger; he handed me a card about his recently released book Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew's Defiance in a Time of Terror, published by Monthly Review Press. This is a small press book very much worth searching out. 

A print copy can be found from Powells, an audiobook (that's what I read) from Audible. The San Francisco Public Library was also my source for a copy. 

Bruce Neuburger has created a vivid history of the life and fates of his grandparents. Benno and Anna were prosperous middle class Jews living in Munich. Benno had served honorably, if without enthusiasm, as an over-age draftee in the German army in World War I. After that war, he built a business and invested in land. The family lived through the terrible postwar inflation of the 1920s and the political instability of the Weimar Republic. Times were sometimes bad -- and sometimes better -- for Germany's Jews and for Germans at large. When Hitler's Nazi movement came to power in 1933, the family could hope this was just another turn in twenty years of both prosperity and sporadic insecurity. 

Nazi rule proved enduring and lethal for Jews. Jewish life -- both business and family -- was forced into smaller and smaller crevices of the society. Some of the younger generation quite rapidly decided to flee the looming catastrophe. Benno and Anna's children were among the very few who escaped to real security in America -- the U.S. in the 1930s was not a welcoming destination for Jewish refugees. 

Benno held out a long time before listening to the entreaties of his children to join them across the Atlantic. By the time he was ready to uproot himself in 1939, German Jews had been forced into ghettos. Germany then invaded Poland, western Europe, and eventually Russia. Benno expressed his secret confidence to his friend that Germany would lose the war -- but he had lost all chance of escape.

And so he performed the one solitary act of resistance he could imagine: he wrote postcards denouncing Hitler and the Nazis and dropped them in the postal stream. This wasn't effectual, or even meant to be -- there were no addressees. But Benno had found a tiny way to speak his necessary truth. The book offers an imagined account to the first time he dared to do this:

At the corner, a young woman appeared. Benno looked down. He had an urge to turn away but thought that would look suspicious. The woman looked at him as she passed the corner. 

Did she see the star? [the mandatory star of David sewn on his jacket] All he was sure of was that the mark was doing what it was meant to do -- rob him, rob Jews, of their last remnant of dignity. ... 

[Benno Neuburger] looked down at the words he'd written in large letters where an address would normally be: "THE ETERNAL MASS MURDERER, HITLER, I SPIT ON YOU!" He put the card in the mailbox, turned, and walked back to his apartment. 

It took nearly a year for the Nazi postal service to figure out who was carrying on this treacherous practice. But he was caught, imprisoned, tortured, and, perhaps because of his veteran status, brought to trial rather than being summarily shot. A full judicial record survived which formed some of the raw material for his grandson's book.

The Nazi judicial records from the Berlin People's Court concluded:

Benno Israel Neuburger has been executed on Sept. 18th, 1942. The convicted offender denigrated the Fuhrer, and the National Socialist government and committed high treason against the German Reich.

The Reich Ministry of Justice ordered fifty bright red posters announcing the execution of Benno Neuburger to be put up at visible locations in Munich. 

Anna was killed the next day at the death camp at Treblinka, Poland. Bruce Neuburger makes no suggestion that the date of her murder had anything to do with the date of Benno's. The machinery of extermination just ground on for them both.

• • •

The author/grandson, Bruce Neuburger, makes no pretense of writing a conventional academic history. He certainly consulted as many sources as he could find. The reunification of Germany after the 1990 collapse of the East German Soviet-aligned state led to release of the judicial and other records which enabled him to discover particulars about his grandparents' murders in 1942. Neuburger canvassed surviving family members. Recent German historians have also found many lost details of German Jewish resistance to Hitler. 

On this information, Bruce Neuburger wrote a novelistic account of life and tragedy that honors the experience of his family and so many like them. He explains his aim and defends telling his family story his way:

In my effort to bring to life the people whose stories are told here and the social environment in which they lived, I have necessarily imagined situations and relationships beyond the facts that I acquired directly [through historical sources.] I have sought to use the knowledge I gained through extensive historical research and travel to reconstruct the drama of those times. I can promise you, the reader, that I have taken care to reflect the historical moments recounted here as accurately and truthfully as I can.

Ever wonder what it was like to live under, stand against, and die under Nazi rule? This is a book to be read, experienced, and pondered.