A reaction to Stephen Miller

Today, I read with ongoing dismay a profile of Stephen Miller, for me one of the most odious and noxious characters of the Trump entourage. I had initially thought that Steve Bannon with his admiration for Julius Evola https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html

would be the flag-bearer of disaster, but Miller has proven far more invidious.

It is so sad for me, as I identify strongly with my Jewish cultural heritage and inspired by its prophetic ideals, to realize and acknowledge that this man has Jewish origins, though he has already repudiated by members of his family and his rabbi. To know he is not fazed by the scenes of forcible family separations and refugees in US detention camps, but rather eager to promote such policies as an alleged deterrent, is mortifying.

Similarly, I am astounded and horrified by the news that members of high school varsity water polo teams in Orange County CA celebrated their victories with the sieg heil and the playing of Wehrmacht songs.

However, I also continue to be surprised at my own naive reaction, since I now recognize there are many millions of my fellow citizens who subscribe to racist nationalist thinking, and with the fecklessness of a degraded, slavish, sycophantic GOP, I no longer wonder how the Weimar Republic succumbed to Nazi control in the 1930s. My nightmare is that I am living through such times.

A few days ago, I saw the following quote, which has been widely circulating, and I imagine that many of you have as well:

“Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come back from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”

Though they describe scenes now tragically familiar to us in the aftermath of the recent ICE raids, these words are not from contemporary ties. They are chillingly an excerpt from the diary of Anne Frank.

Iris and I just saw the film Who Will Write Our History? at the Am HaYam Havurah Film Festival in Wellfleet, documenting the courageous life of Emanuel Ringelblum and other Nazi-resistors in the Warsaw ghetto. It chronicles their effort to record that desperate episode of the Holocaust through documenting their quotidian life in stashes of secret buried archives.

The film has astounding relevance for today, particularly in the manner in which the Nazi propaganda machine portrayed the Jews in despicable racist terms. The role of Jewish police in the roundup and deportation in the Warsaw ghetto is portrayed as a pathetically misguided act of desperation by individuals hoping to save their lives and their families. What horrid choices were presented by the Nazis in such extreme circumstances.

That we now have members of our own Jewish community such as Kushner or Miller is so demoralizing, and calls for strenuous counteraction. “Never Again,” must mean “Never Again to Anyone.”

I think the Mass Association of Social Studies teachers should include this film in their curriculum.

I began my Institute’s Inquiry high school program in 1999 when I was asked by teachers who were affiliated with Educators for Social Responsibility (now Engaging Schools), based in Cambridge, to address a meeting of their membership and the general membership of the MASST about the curriculum I instigated for the 1998 EPIIC Covert Action and Democracy year. We created a curriculum for the Association. It was written by my good friend Professor Steve Cohen, who I soon thereafter hired as Inquiry’s first coordinator. Its researcher was Heather Barry, my EPIIC student in 1998 , who is currently the Institute’s Associate Director.

Trump, Rabin, and the Danger of Indecency

My first public “debut” as the director of the Trebuchet occurred when I published this Boston Globe op-eded, decrying the dangerous tone and warning of the impact of Roy Cohn and Trump’s candidacy.

OUR FRAUGHT ELECTORAL contest with its vicious personalized attacks is devoid of decency.

This reached a fever pitch recently at the Republican National Convention where Hillary Clinton was condemned as a murderer and a traitor, deserving of execution. Supporters of Donald Trump, recently joined by elements of Bernie Sanders’ supporters in Philadelphia, insisted that Clinton be “locked up.” This month, Trump abandoned any pretense: “She’s the devil,” he told a crowd in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, a video of Trump supporters spewing violent profanities has raced across the internet.

As the final 100 days tick away, it’s important to appreciate the possible consequences of this type of toxic discourse. It’s sobering and instructive to look to another pivotal political moment, in another fractious and imperfect democracy, Israel.

In September 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government announced its intention to fulfill the Oslo II agreements with the Palestinian Authority, giving the Palestinian Authority control of West Bank cities. It provoked vehement protests over whether this would compromise Israeli security and whether the ceding of territory many considered sacred betrayed core religious imperatives. The protests were marked by a drum beat of venomous personal attacks directed at Rabin. Zealous and frenzied protesters chanted “Death to Rabin” and brandished posters of him in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. They called Rabin a murderer and depicted him in a Nazi uniform.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition Likud party and Rabin’s main political rival, vigorously denounced the Oslo initiatives at a series of large rallies, which some warned him would lead to violence.

On Nov. 4, Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Orthodox Jewish Israeli law student, shot and killed Rabin in a Tel Aviv parking lot. Rabin had just finished addressing a rally. Inspired by his extreme religious beliefs, and reinforced by a zeitgeist of hatred and personal denigration, Amir was convinced that Rabin’s extrajudicial killing was justified.

Before his death, Rabin accused Netanyahu of incitement, but Netanyahu rejected appeals to restrain his supporters. Fearing he’d lose their support, Netanyahu refused to repudiate their invective and offered no denunciation of their violent speech and actions. He never distanced himself directly and only offered a mild rebuke of just “let’s defeat” him.

Trump’s comments, in the face of his supporters charging Clinton with treason and shouts to “lock her up,” are eerily reminiscent of Netanyahu’s pallid arm’s length comments in the face of his supporters’ rage. Trump, too, said in response, “let’s defeat” her, but he never denounced the extreme language, including the comments to execute his political opponent.

Incendiary language cannot only provoke and provide rationalization for extreme outcomes, but it also has less dramatic, long-term deleterious impact. It diminishes respect and trust, destroying efforts at compromise. It fosters deep resentments and separates us, subverting the search for common ground and any hope of consensus.

We are currently witnessing the cynical stoking of an ugly environment of hatred and fear. Dog whistle disavowals of the Ku Klux Klan and white power endorsements, the refusal to reject anti-Semitic symbols, and enduring calls for expulsions of millions of people, that at minimum would demand extraordinary invasive methods.

During the anti-Communist hunts of the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious chief counsel was Roy Cohn. He later became Trump’s valued personal counsel for many years. Trump has said of Cohn, “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy.” He also praised Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” he told journalist Timothy O’Brien. “He brutalized for you.” Trump seems to have absorbed Cohn’s methods.

In 1954, during a heated exchange with Senator McCarthy, Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief counsel, effectively confronted the senator and exposed his nature as a demagogic bully when he famously asked, “Have you no sense of decency?”

Today, we urgently need to honor that concept, to control the crudeness, cruelty, and reckless language of the extremists in our midst. We need to deny the politics of fear-mongering that banishes reason and civility for political advantage.

And we may need to ask again and again, “Have you no sense of decency?” And then, insist on it.