The Good Germans

This Gaslit Nation podcast is from a week ago. I think the transcript was posted later than usual. The hosts are the usual Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled The Good Germans. The header defines the phrase this way.

The phrase “good Germans” refers to the Germans living in the Third Reich who enabled Hitler and his Nazi regime yet remained in denial that they were doing so. Or they did know, but they put on a show of respectability. They were “just following orders,” they’ll say, or they’ll claim they didn’t have a choice. The good Germans were liars: you always have a choice. And the “good Germans” of Trump’s America are no different.

Kendzior starts off by saying that the nasty guy has been a public figure for 40 years. There have been countless studies of his psychology. We know he views other humans as disposable. His actions are easy to predict (and Kendzior has been doing so rather accurately for at least five years).

This is well known and understood. What we don't understand is how people sit by and watch, and why people who could have stopped him and his crime cult and can slow it down right now have refused to do so. These people are the Good Germans of America, and you will find them in big tech, big business, the military industrial complex, the mainstream media, the intelligence community, the Vichy Democrats who refuse to use the full powers of the House, and in the GOP.

...

Fascism is about the limitation of choices. The way to prevent fascism is early, before you run out of options. Unbelievably, the US is still on the early side of fascism, though it is much farther along than we were even a year ago. That means people with power still have a choice and they are choosing cowardice, complicity and cruelty. This is a choice that they are making. They made their choice and we at Gaslit Nation made ours.

Chalupa quoted a bit from the documentary Final Account by Luke Holland. It opens with a quote from Holocaust survivor Primo Levy.

Monsters exist. But there are too few to be truly dangerous. Ordinary men are more dangerous.

Chalupa and Kendzior aren’t reading tea leaves, they study authoritarians in history. The authoritarian playbook

doesn’t change. And authoritarians depend on complicit actors, authoritarians depend on good Germans in order to come to power, consolidate power and stay in power.

Chalupa proposed a parlor game: Who Goes Nazi? She’s

asking the question in regard to specific personalities; kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. … But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success, they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don't go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven't anything in them to tell them what they like, and what they don't, whether it is breeding or happiness or wisdom or a code, however old fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.

Kendzior and Chalupa start naming the Good Germans in America. Reporters covering up dictatorial regimes is common. There’s obviously Fox News, though their intention was obvious from the start. More dangerous are the ones who pretend to be objective or accountable while printing propaganda. Kendzior says the worst of these is the New York Times.

Other reporters act more like court stenographers, simply repeating what the regime says without analysis or context – or whether the regime is lying. The worst of these is Maggie Haberman (of NYT). She takes after her mother, Nancy Haberman, who was part of the PR firm of Howard Rubenstein, whose clients, back in the 1980s, included the Trump and Kushner families, plus Jeffrey Epstein. Maggie’s father, Clyde Haberman had also been at the NYT and his columns also whitewashed the nasty guy.

There are also the non-scandals, such as Hillary Clinton’s emails and the non-investigation reported in the NYT a week before the 2016 election saying the FBI saw no ties between the nasty guy and Russia.

They also say the NYT has been printing fluff pieces on far-right militia groups, climate deniers, and racists while attacking investigative journalists. Chalupa says of the media:

If you're wondering, how did it get so bad? It's because of the hyper capitalism of major media corporations like the New York Times profiting off of the decline of our democracy in real time.

People say it’s just about money and ratings. Kendzior said:

I wish that were true. I wish it were that simple, but it's about something much darker, because the thing is, you get ratings and money for reporting about crimes just like you would if you are covering it up.

With Trump and his cohort, you really have it all. You have the mafia, you have spies, you have sex crimes, you have treason. These are the classic topics that bring in mass audiences, and obviously, there's a deep hunger for this information, but you will not see them reporting it. You see them skirting the topics, fluttering around it, or revealing it only after it's too late.

An example was the deeply flawed Mueller Probe, and the NYT didn’t say so until the report was released. There are several reporters who say the NYT wouldn’t publish their articles about the nasty guy and authoritarianism.

Kendzior:

So, what's in it for them? What's in it for them for the long run? That's what I wonder about is the psychology of that choice. Because with Trump, it's very obvious; he's evil, he's a psychopath, he's greedy, he wants money, he wants power, he wants immunity from prosecution after being a career criminal all his life. This isn't complicated. The rest of them, when you're handed that, you're handed this life, you're born into wealth and privilege, and this is the avenue that you are choosing. And again, it's not everyone. You brought Ronan Farrow who also was born in wealth and privilege and chose a different avenue, chose a moral avenue. But I just... I don't understand it. There's just such a depth of heartlessness to it. The bad explanation of ratings and greed isn't even the worst of what they are willing to do and what they are willing to abet, because with coronavirus, they are willing to abet mass death, and they absolutely know it, and they are fine with it. And that is why they are the Good Germans.

Chalupa poses an answer:

Yeah, well, it's just simple power. When you're on the side of power, that protects your own power. It's access journalism. It's not just profiteering in real time, but it's access. They're protecting their access to all these stories.

Chalupa wrote the film Mr. Jones (out now) that is a tale of the dangers of access journalism.

I also pose an answer. Yes, it is power, though I think more precisely, it is supremacy. What’s in it for the media people is the same supremacy that the nasty guy is selling. And supremacy is the only thing the nasty guy has been selling.

Kendzior then turned to the military. The nasty guy called the “losers and suckers” yet many in the military remained silent. The big question is: When the election is being stolen will the military serve the constitution or the nasty guy? Chalupa is a bit vague on this, but I think she is saying the military might sit it out.

The police are another matter. It already has a Good German mentality where officers are discouraged from speaking out against the brutality in their ranks. Also there is documentation of links between police officers and far-right militias where their violence is ignored (while police attack peaceful demonstrators). These are the kinds of people for whom police brutality is a recruitment tool. Racist sadists join the police to have a cover for their sadism. Chalupa talked about an FBI bulletin that said white nationalists have been infiltrating police to disrupt investigations into fellow members and to recruit other supremacists.

Kendzior adds that white supremacy and vigilante culture is a big business and part of the dark money crisis of the transnational organized crime syndicate that is pretending to be our government. The media likes to portray these militias as salt of the earth, as rugged individuals. But it’s a culture of violence backed by the far-right and the GOP and it dates back decades.

Chalupa turned to the next category of Good Germans, which is Big Tech. She quoted April Glaser of NBC News:

Google has drastically rolled back its diversity work due to fears of being perceived as anti-conservative. Sources say employees have been pushed out, programs cut and workers have been discouraged from even using the word diversity anymore.

I wonder why they feel the need to avoid being perceived as anti-conservative?

Facebook has been allowing posts and accounts for far-right militias for over a year. This includes groups that called for violence in Kenosha after protests against its police shootings. Facebook is doing some things, and doing them publicly for praise, but it isn’t enough compared to all of the far-right and Russian bot stuff on their site. Big Tech is playing, “I see nothing.” And this blindness is deadly because several shooters, most recently the one in Kenosha, have been radicalized based on what is on Big Tech sites. Media sources demonize victims and sanctify the white perpetrators.

Chalupa quoted Shannon Martinez, program director of the Free Radicals Project, which helps people leave extremist groups:

The digital world gives white supremacists a safe space to explore extreme ideologies and intensify their hate without consequences. Their rage can grow under their radar until the moment when it explodes in the real world.

Kendzior said:

When I talked about everyone has a choice in the beginning of the episode, that is what I mean, because they can take everything else from you. They can take your material possessions, they can try to destroy your career, your livelihood, what have you, but they can't take who you are as a human being. They can't take how you treat people and they can't take away what you will stand up for and what you will stand up against. That's up to you, no matter how difficult that process is, and it's not easy at all, though it is easier when you find a good friend, which is why we have the show and why we have worked together and encouraged other people to kind of do some soul searching, figure out what they stand for and then fight for what they see as the side of good.

Chalupa added:

Yeah, I want to say, use your power of free will, because you are always free even under fascism. Under tyranny, your mind remains free. There's a lot of beautiful stories of resistance from the Soviet Union. People smuggling art and novels and that exists, of course, under the Nazi regime. No matter what happens in America, it's going to exist here. Your mind will always be free, and never forget that, and always fight to remind yourself of that.

Next on the Good German tour, though when they’re so proudly evil they don’t fit the profile, are the families that have supported the GOP’s gutting of America for 40 years: Koch, DeVos, Prince, Mercer, Adelson, and others. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling made their influence bigger. See the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer for details.

On to the donors of the Democratic Party, such as Michael Bloomberg. His goal is to make sure the Dems can’t hold others accountable and can’t enact the wealth tax (he would barely notice the money that would go for this tax). Alas, many Dems excuse him while he takes up time that should go to actual champions of the poor.

Billionaires, starting with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, qualify as Good Germans. They made big bucks in the pandemic and recession. We’re now at the point that income inequality is a human rights crisis. Bezos has been threatened by the transnational crimes syndicate. If he, the richest man in the world, had trouble holding them off what chance do the rest of us have? So don’t say anything about the syndicate being incompetent or stupid.

Kendzior and Chalupa add another category: the people who write to them and say “I thought you were nuts. Turns out you’re correct.”

Both women talk a bit about their backgrounds. They didn’t study authoritarian regimes because they thought they could get rich (they haven’t). They did it because they care. So when the nasty guy began his rise back in 2016 they knew what it was. They were doubted because media outlets put out a barrage of hit pieces against them.

Kendzior is a white woman with a PhD is denigrated by the power brokers.

If it's that hard for me, how hard is it for Muslims and Latinos and Black Americans and Native Americans, these direct targets of the Trump administration who from the very beginning, just like we were, were screaming about what was coming and that their lives were at risk, their families were at direct risk, and again, not taken seriously?

Their warnings, which were founded on knowledge, on personal knowledge and history, but also on research, were dismissed. It was like, "Oh, you're being emotional because Trump's a racist." It's like, well, yeah, you're fucking emotional! He encourages white supremacists to murder people. You get emotional about that. But that's also, this is knowledge. This is wisdom that should have been utilized by people in power. They also were not taken seriously.

…

We did not want to be right. We very much wanted to be wrong.

And on to actual Democrats. Kendzior said:

There's a difference between knowing about an atrocity, whether ongoing or impending, and acting to protect people and to save people from suffering. And those who had a choice, whether it was Comey or Mueller, or the court system, or Nancy Pelosi, the head of the Vichy Democrats, they all had that choice and they all chose wrong. This was not necessarily a straight line to autocracy. There are all sorts of bumps in the road that could have been put in place, all sorts of side paths we could have gone down and possibly a U-turn that we could have made had people acted early.

...

But when I see people like good Democrats, Democrats who are actually trying to solve these problems, who are trying to enforce accountability, tweeting that they would like to use some power of the House–say inherent contempt, but they're blocked–not naming Pelosi as the individual blocking them from this power, not explaining how this directly impacts the public and how the public could be protected to a greater extent if this power were allowed to be used, because they fear her, and they fear the donor network behind her, and they fear these billionaires.

But, you know, we don't have time for timidity anymore. All we need right now is just brutal honesty. So for God's sake, if you feel like you can't do anything else, tell the truth and stand up for the vulnerable. If you can do nothing else, at least try to do those two things.

Another Good German: John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court. He led the court when it gutted the Voting Rights Act. And Southern states have closed 1,200 polling places.

But don’t forget the Bush Crime Family who appointed Roberts. George’s grandfather Prescott Bush was a financial backer of Nazi Germany.

Definitely a Good German.