Will the ‘base’ be thrown under the bus in a permanent Trump administration?
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” - Mark Twain.
-Thomas Mahon
The crowd that stormed the Capitol on January 6 might want to review the first years of Hitler’s Third Reich to see if history is about to rhyme again.
The SA, or the Storm Detachment, or the Brownshirts were the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing, led by Ernst Rohm. After Hitler’s election in 1933, they were street thugs and enforcers, given leave to beat average Germans up in public for any reason (or no reason at all), so the population would come to understand there is a new sheriff in town.
The SA played their role superbly, making themselves hated by the public but effective enough to quell public opposition.
There was another group that had been with Hitler from the beginning, the Schutzstffel, or Protection Squads or the SS, or the black shirts, an elite group that took a loyalty oath to Hitler personally. They were not street goons, looking for the chance to work off some agro, their membership was made up of true believers fixated on blood and soil, nationalism and racial purity.
Their leader was Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and in time they would run the concentration and extermination camps. The insignia on their uniforms was a skull and crossbones.
The SA had served its purpose and was clearly not up to the task ahead, murdering people in the millions. That takes a level of racial hatred, organizational skill, and psychotic fury the street mob did not have.
So on June 30, 1934, and for the next three nights, Hitler and Himmler orchestrated The Night of Long Knives, or the Röhm Putsch, carried out by the SS and the Gestapo. Rohm and 150 of the top SA leaders were murdered, and hundreds of other members were arrested.
Now why do I bring up this ancient history? Because many of Trump’s base are rightly upset that the country they knew is vanishing, or so they have been told repeatedly for several decades.
They can show bare knuckle strength on the streets and roam the halls of congress and leave little brown poopies behind and even keep the riffraff from voting on election day. But for most, there is no murderous intent. After all, there are good people on all sides.
It’s possible that should Trump or one of his minions win, by hook or crook, in 2024 the unruly base itself will have to done away with, having served its purpose. Just as in Russia in 1917, once the Tsar was overthrown, the Bolsheviks had no qualms about eradicating their former partners, now a minority, the Mensheviks.
No head of state, whether winning office by a legitimate or rigged election, wants to send a delegation of mobsters and fools to the World Economic Conference at Davos who don’t know how to ski or distinguish between canapés and crudites.
My point, and I have one, is that individual members of the Trump base may soon have to make a very important decision: is it enough to own the libtards and shout them down? Or will they have what it takes to actually shoot someone at close range, perhaps someone in their own family as sometimes happens in a civil war.
This is not a far-fetched possibility anymore. The next two years and two elections will test whether this nation or any nation so divided can long endure.
The Washington Post, the paper that led us out of the miasma of Nixon’s treachery a half-century ago, ran a story last week acknowledging that a Trump-fueled constitutional crisis is already upon us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/?
Lincoln’s magisterial Second Inaugural Address reviewing the recent past sums up the situation that is before us now: ‘Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.’
And in fact if an authoritarian regime took hold here, there would be much less need for something as crude as the Gestapo spying on the citizens with binoculars and clipboards.
After all, we have for several decades now been quite happily opening the totality of our lives to systems we barely understand, owned by centibillionaires with agenda we cannot imagine. And these systems are getting so good they can not only track our internal and our external lives, but soon even the thoughts in our heads and hearts we may not even be aware of.
And by merging genetic-electronic-software engineering it may be possible to program a race of super-humans with no racial impurities, and gene lines that endure for generations. This would prefect what authoritarians have always wanted, creating a master race. The more genteel name in the past was ‘breeding.’
We were so naïve at the beginning of the digital revolution in the 1980s, that we could not imagine all this coming upon us so soon.
© 2021 Thomas Mahon
