“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.    The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they’re bound to assert themselves in the long run.  Mass leaders in power have one concern, which overrules all utilitarian considerations– to make their predictions come true.”

                                               – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

You can call this unending need to be unendingly infallible the hallmark of every overbearingly toxic type: the blowhard, petty tyrants of all stripes, bullies, unrepentant jackasses, stern overseers, vengeful teachers, viciously demanding bosses, bullied weaklings who grow up to get — and abuse– any measure of authority over others, small time authoritarians of every kind.    The rule for infallibility is simple: never admit an error.

It is not that hard to insist on your own infallibility, if you are prepared to pay the cost to be the boss.   For one thing, there is always somebody to blame: a liar who has it in for you, a thousand liars, a million liars, petty, mean bastards, the corrupt, the jealous, the weak, losers, insubordinate subordinates, traitors, leakers, blabber mouths, disloyal assholes, elites who claim they’re better than you are– hah!   The list is limited only by your own infallible imagination.

Hannah Arendt makes this observation about mass leaders like Hitler and Stalin, the main subjects of part three of her treatise on totalitarianism.  It is obvious, once pointed out, that every tyrant insists on his infallibility.   Hitler was a great case– if Germany lost the war of aggression he started, and imbecilically prosecuted, overruling his generals and shouting that he was the smartest man in every room, until German defeat was a certainty, well– it only fulfilled his prediction that if the German Volk was weak that they deserved, every last one of them, to die.  In the end he ordered German boys to man the barricades as the vengeful, brutal Red Army closed in on his bunker in Berlin.   Every last German must die, because they had let their infallible selfless Fuhrer down.  Nothing more he could do, he poisoned his idiot girlfriend, after hastily marrying her, shot his beloved dog and turned the gun on himself.

Which brings to mind the same thought I have every time some sick fuck kills a bunch of people and then “turns the gun on himself.”  The thought: why didn’t he fucking turn the gun on himself BEFORE he murdered all those people?   Makes me want to holler, although, of course, hollering doesn’t help much.

Another example Arendt gives of this infallibility/prophecy pathology is Hitler thundering to the Reichstag in 1939 that if international Jewry insists on forcing Germany into another world war, it will result in the annihilation of the “Jewish race”.   You see how this prophecy business works among the infallible?

I’ve really got nothing more to add on this note, except to say that it appears those who most desperately claim to be to infallible are weak, vain, stupid, insecure, resentful, entitled, incompetent, jealous, petty, vindictive, hopelessly inferior feeling, empty, blindly hating, shallow, incurious, uninformed (yet supremely opinionated), envious, grasping, self-ignorant, desperate, persecuted, vicious types.  Very fine people, fine people, no doubt, the finest people, if you know what I’m saying, but heaven help the nation that falls under the power of one of these headstrong, never wrong creatures.

One point I didn’t hammer home in the post I wrote the other day is the ease with which false equivalencies are made.   I didn’t mean to imply that there is equal validity to both sides of our current political impasse or that everything can be made better by polite compromise.  Is there room to compromise over who is right, climate scientists who link the catastrophic climate events now very common to the warming of the oceans due to man-made pollution and the oil industry think tanks who insist we must be skeptical of these claims because unprecedented wild fires, hundred year storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, deadly heat waves etc. sometimes just happen, by sheer coincidence, many times a year?

There is a lucrative advertising-driven industry based on false equivalencies that makes it virtually impossible for most people to get past their bitter partisan differences for the sake of seriously analyzing a larger problem.  Partisanship drives commerce, whether it’s the sports team you root for or the political team.  The CEO of the company that owns CBS made some comment mildly critical of the bully, then one of a dozen Republican presidential candidates, who went on to become our current president, then he smiled and said how good this stirrer of shit was for the corporate bottom line: viewer eyeballs and advertising dollars. 

Only people of good will and good faith can sit down together and have a larger discussion that doesn’t degenerate into the dogmatic defense of their personal and political biases.   People of good will and good faith are out there in significant numbers, but our commercialized political system has made such individuals rare in the public sphere.  The public debate we get to see is conducted by hard-nosed partisans who fight each other in a way that makes powerless viewers tune in to fume.    It is much easier to put on a blue hat, or a red one, and chant.  It is everybody’s right to chant, but not all chants are created equal.

My mother asked me, when I was ten or so, something that struck me as a profound question.   “Can you admire a great artist if you find out he’s a Nazi?”  In other words, can you separate the art work from the deep personal beliefs of the person who created it?    To my ten year-old mind this was a puzzler.   Being a great artist was very important to me at ten, I had a grandmother who convinced me it was crucial for me to become a world famous artist.  Her first cousin was world famous plaster casting sculptor George Segal.   Somewhere I have a letter from Georgik, received shortly after my lone visit to his farm studio, seething, in tiny controlled handwriting, at my monstrous attitude toward the fucking rich, people he called the most generous in the world.  They’d certainly been most generous to him.

Anyway, after living in the world long enough I no longer have any doubt about the correct answer to that now obvious question:  if a Nazi produces great art work he’s still a Nazi and fuck him and his fucking art work.   My friend and mentor Florence, a great artist and a lifelong political activist, told me the same thing the last time I saw her.  It’s kind of obvious, really.   Art is personal and also political. Picture the curator or gallery owner:

“Look at the unmatched delicacy of these watercolors, the subtle gradations in shade and color, the beautiful control of the brush, the bravura treatment of the sky, the sea.  The way the pigment is deployed perfectly for the luminous effect…”

You say:  and look at the great artist in his SS uniform, impeccable, looking so self-possessed as he points to the right and the left, sending people to slave labor or the gas chamber.  Also done with great style and an almost unmatched delicacy.  You can tell the man is an artist.  A great Nazi artist.  As for these breathtaking watercolors, they should be neatly, respectfully rolled and delicately shoved up his war criminal ass, along with the brushes and his other painting supplies. 

Harsh?   Perhaps.  The point is that, although we routinely deny it here, our life choices are both personal and political.   Compromise is not possible on certain matters.   At one time most Americans thought it proper to tolerate the institution of slavery.  It was unthinkable to imagine dismantling that great money-making machine that had created so much wealth, prosperity, that charmingly genteel way of life.  The Abolitionists were often thought of as extremists, maniacs, hysterics.   History now takes another view of them, since they now seem to have clearly been on the right moral side of the terrible issue.  The issue, racially based human slavery, and chattel slavery at that, was a  great controversy at one time.

I dare say even those who cheer and chant for our current overbearer-in-chief would hesitate to scream their approval of a proposal to reintroduce race-based chattel slavery in America, no matter how enthusiastically they love the school-to-prison pipeline, privatized for-profit prisons, free enterprise, freedom, the free market, no matter how passionately they believe in the vague goal of Making America Great Again.  Maybe I am giving the crowd at a shallow, adulation-craving celebrity megalomaniac’s rally too much credit, but I feel it would only be a few, at least at first, chanting:  Chain them up!   Chain them up!!!!!

Which is not to say, of course, that many of them might not feel that choking anger, and fear, and in some shameful place in their angry, frightened hearts they might not wish for the good old days when those contentious matters were simply settled law.

Now we have right-wing partisans, salivating at the prospect of a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime, calling the famous Roe v. Wade ruling, making the right to choose abortion a Constitutional right for women,  the modern Dred Scott case,  a ruling that held that a black person, once a slave, was always a fucking slave anywhere in the U.S.A. for purposes of the Fugitive Slave Act.  Within a few years of Dred Scott Americans would be spilling each other’s blood in rivers to settle the question once and for all.

Another Civil War over the question of a twelve year-old rape victim’s right not to be forced to carry the rapist’s baby to term?  I don’t imagine so, but I also have no doubt that the merciless application of the abstract principle that “life begins at conception” does not quite cover the entire moral landscape of the argument over a woman’s right to choose an abortion, if she must.   Those who believe that abortion is murder, period, will not be convinced that mercy is ever involved in the issue, since it would be condoning murder, something no moral person would ever do.

Ronald Reagan, either quipping or already demented, said “the right to life ends at birth”.   Funny, Ronnie.   Also true.   The proponents of banning abortion seldom provide for the lives of the sacred, unwanted little souls they are insisting have every right to be born.   Once born, of course, you’re on your own, motherfucker, this is America, bitch, nobody owes you jack shit.

 Oversimplification?   Take the question of a medically complicated pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother.  If the fetus continues to grow in the womb the mother will die.    Still murder to spare the mother’s life by terminating the pregnancy?

Let’s ask God.   Isn’t it true, God, that there is no justice without mercy? 

God informs me that He was driven to despair by man’s misuse of free will.  Broke His heart, He said He’s done with these motherfuckers, particularly the ones who insist they are righteously killing in His name.  We’re on our own down here.

I thought this article was a pretty good discussion of the dilemma we citizens face in an increasingly tribal nation, presided over by a blustering, supremely entitled imbecile who has only one trick: attacking people who make him feel stupid or inadequate.  Wait, he has two other tricks: shameless self-promotion and doubling down.  If you make a bad bet, double it.  The alternative, admitting error, is unthinkable.  How can your brand be infallible if you admit making a mistake?  It is important to be the most important and the very best person in the world.  Period.  End of story.  Make America Great Again, bitches. 

I’m listening to Wanda McCaddon’s superb reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem again.  I’d missed a lot in my first listening.   It is a fascinating book, particularly if you feel any urgency to  learn about the progression and functioning of a totalitarian regime.  Arendt’s 1964 book is as good a single volume history of the Nazi period as any I’ve seen.  I’m looking forward to hearing Wanda McCaddon’s reading of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, on hold at the library.

Arendt provides, among other things, a wealth of detail about the structure and day to day functioning of the Thousand Year Reich.   I just heard a bit that sent me dashing to the book, (also on loan from the library) and finding page 148, where Arendt discusses the role of Nazi lawyers in crafting laws that made all kinds of cruel and murderous practices perfectly legal and provided a sturdy  legal defense to any post-war charges.    When I say Nazi lawyers [1] I mean that all lawyers in the Third Reich were required to be Nazi party members in good standing,   I am also talking about Nazi judges, of course, every single one of them, up to supremely loyal Nazi Supreme Court judges, accountable only to the Fuhrer’s will.

As every self-respecting dictator demands: the supreme leader’s word is law.  In Nazi Germany Hitler’s every command had the force of law, Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft (Arendt, 148).   Even so, in certain cases, like codifying his command for the Final Solution, teams of expert Nazi lawyers got to work.  That particular secretly spoken order for the physical destruction of European Jews and other undesirables, “was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisers, not by mere administrators.” (Arendt, 149). 

Under Nazi law as crafted by the most learned Nazi lawyers (and it is now known that the Nazis studied the racial laws and practices of the American south [2] ), there was a strong “state action” defense Nazi state actors could raise if they were prosecuted, in the event the Nazis lost the war, for things like mass-murder.  The old Nuremberg Defense was heard over and over during those trials: “I was only following orders.”  This “state action” defense argument contends that any act done in one’s official state duty cannot be prosecuted as a crime.   Blood curdling capital crimes would have to be excused, under this theory, if executed under this principle of international law.  

American  law often grants the same exemptions to Americans acting under command of the United States of America, particularly in time of war.  Think of the second Bush administration’s secret torture memos that preemptively legalized illegal acts and  the immunizing of private mercenaries for all acts committed in liberating Iraq from a modern-day Hitler, etc.   Certain unspeakable acts, like machine gunning civilians from a helicopter, and then strafing the rescue van, or prying American bullets out of civilians accidentally killed in a raid, might be hard to justify under any theory.  These were the kinds of hard cases shrewd Nazi lawyers were prepared to defend under the “state actor” theory, a potentially useful defense for war criminals or those who may, arguably, have committed “crimes against humanity”.  

The idea of a novel legal concept like a “crime against humanity” was sneered at by Nazi lawmakers when they worked in a legal system that made the systematic murder of certain “stateless” civilians fully  lawful  (enemies of the state were commonly branded “stateless” for purposes of avoiding liability for hostile state action.)

Gassing a room full of naked men, women and children, for example.  You’d think that would be a cut and dried murder qualifying you for a death sentence if convicted.   Premeditated murder like that would likely be a tough rap to beat in virtually any courtroom in the world.   But the Nazis rewrote the legal norms of Germany, turning them upside down [3] and writing new laws to circumvent all existing law, and after the war, allowing defense lawyers to argue matters of post-Hitler international law at the Nuremberg Trails and later during the Eichmann Trail.   Eichmann’s lawyer argued unsuccessfully that since Eichmann was a German citizen only a German court had the jurisdiction to prosecute him.  The West German government in 1961 wanted nothing to do with a trial against a Nazi (for one thing, other prominent former Nazis were in high positions in that government.  The Germans were only too happy to let the Jewish State have the headache of trying Eichmann.    Eichmann’s defense, beyond his state actor status, is that he himself was no murderer, let alone a mass-murder, but a minor functionary who simply did lawful things under lawful orders from his lawful superiors.   A point Arendt does not dismiss — his being personally squeamish– though she ends her book stating that she would hang him based purely on the conviction that we should not have to share the earth with somebody like Eichmann.

The Nazis performed this revolution in law with an army of the best, brightest and most ambitious Nazi lawyers, without ever abolishing the liberal Weimar Constitution.  All that was needed to make that blueprint for democratic document work perfectly for the Nazis was a terrifying national emergency that required the immediate activation of special powers, and a quick yes/no vote in the Reichstag for an Enabling Act.   The emergency powers the Nazis seized were all legal and perfectly constitutional under the Weimar Constitution, leaving aside the troubling fact that the Nazis themselves almost undoubtedly arranged for the terrifying national emergency, the torching of Reichstag, the German Parliament.     Everything the Nazis did during the endless twelve year national emergency had been done with a brazen Nazi veneer of perfect legality under existing democratic law in Germany.   The early years in power were spent crafting timeless laws for the Thousand Year Reich.  

Sadly, when you think of justice as basic fairness, there is often a law, even in non-totalitarian societies, specifically created to allow things neither just nor fair, that can be cited in defense of terrible acts [4].   The best lawyer will make the strongest possible case for a particular section of that particular law prevailing over all other laws, all squishy moral considerations.   Eichmann was accused of mass murder.  Eichmann insisted that he had never murdered even a single person, hated bloodshed, so how could he possibly be culpable for jack shit under any law,  since he was simply lawfully doing his lawful job the whole time?  

Nazi lawyers were busy in those final days destroying incriminating legal documents and tightening up laws with an eye toward shoring up arguments that that arguably criminal acts done under state law could only be prosecuted by state officials.   This is the same practice racist Americans used for generations, under the doctrine of States’ Rights,  to ensure that local lynchings remained basically lawful activities, to be decided by local juries of people who knew the murderers to be damned good people who wouldn’t have done that kind of thing without a damned good reason.   Under almost any law you can cite, there are grotesque specifics the lawyer can argue to try to get the client off the hook.   It’s no mystery, really, that in Nazi Germany Nazi lawyers supervised the drafting of every important law.  

Or course, law is not the only way people are kept in line.   Controversial laws often come last, after the groundwork has been laid by the behaviors and attitudes tolerated and eventually applauded by the citizens.  This is the reason propaganda is so important, to sew the seeds of the beliefs necessary to promulgate laws that, in other situations, may not seem just, fair or humane.   The Nazis understood this keenly and taught future generations of politicians exactly how it should be done. The lessons have been well-learned and the battle for hearts and minds is being constantly waged by monied partisans on every side of every issue.  Life for the person on the street often changes long before the new laws are put into effect, or even drafted.

You live in a place where people who are too loud in their dissent will be politely asked to shut the fuck up.    Many times people get the hint, pick up the social cues and move someplace where they don’t have to argue politics all the time. Particularly after a few people who won’t shut up are made examples of.  

But say you have the odd, perverse partisan, living in the same place for many years, unwilling or unable to relocate.   His new neighbors all support the candidate he hates, and that candidate wins the national election.  The loud-mouthed opinionated fellow simply won’t shut up about his stinking opinion that the new leader is a Nazi.

There are ways to make this person shut up.  Perfectly legal ones, or at least perfectly reasonable, acceptable ones.  And if they are not strictly legal at the moment, but everybody involved goes along with current, extra-legal methods until better laws can be passed that will make complete assholes like this shut the hell up under penalty of law, well… call us pishers!

[1]  The lawyers in Germany were the first profession to fully and voluntarily Nazify, followed closely, if memory serves, by German doctors.     (Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors)

The requirement that every lawyer must be a loyal Nazi was essential to the creation and administration of the Nazi State.  In programmer parlance:  Nazi in, Nazi out.

[2]  The States’ Rights argument here is based largely on the right of a sovereign state to make and prosecute its own civil and criminal laws.   If an American state decides it is illegal for blacks and whites to marry each other, end of story.  If a state decides that sometimes an uppity black person needs to be taught a violent lesson to keep the others in line, so be it.    Those two racist state laws were later abolished, the first by a Supreme Court decision finding the law unconstitutional, the second by a series of Supreme Court decisions and the enforcement of a longstanding federal law to punish racially motivated terrorism, but it took more than a century.   A dark century of vicious racism at law, state law.  

[3]  Think of the cunning, lawyerly rebranding of commonly understood tortures as mere methods of “enhanced interrogation”.   Imagine John Yoo, the Korean-American Bush-Cheney loyalist who drafted the secret torture memo (along with a fuck named Bybee, later promoted to federal judge for life), not as a tenured professor of Constitutional Law at Berkeley, but as a perp on a water-board, being forced, under enhanced interrogation, to explain his actual thought process while writing that infernal legal justification for acts we had signed treaties to prevent, acts illegal under American law, the Nazi motherfucker.

[4]  The current, highly controversial, American policy  is to have U.S. border agents pluck the children of asylum seekers from their parents’ arms and throw the kids into prisons for children.  About 2,000 so far, under this balls-to-the-walls administration.  All perfectly legal, to hear the supporters of this policy tell it.   It is a form of brutal deterrence calculated to slow down the flood of people coming to our borders seeking asylum.  Sanctioned by Jesus Christ himself, as spoken by Paul (commanding all of Christ’s followers to never question the law, apparently– obedience to government authority being the highest spiritual calling of righteous Christians), according to our pious, God-fearing, scripture quoting  racist Attorney General.  Another guy I’d pay to watch sputtering on a water-board any time he refuses to honestly answer a simple question.